I still feel uneasy about it but let it stand for what it is - just a fairytale, some food for thought.
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Yes, thinking and feeling. The dry, cold intellectuals and the hot, passionate artistic natures. This is quite natural. These activities lie in different soul domains and their integration is not that easy. For example, not everyone can write computer code and experience aesthetic beauty in it.
As far as higher cognition is concerned, we have no choice but find a path towards integration.
When we feel, thinking is always present, even if not verbalized. When I feel joy, when my whole Universe vibrates on the waves of joy, thinking is also there, even if only as the hidden meaning of my state of being. When I feel joy I'm attending a feeling. But if I attend my "attention to the feeling", I become conscious of "I feel joy" and I can express it as a verbal thought if needed. Now the question is, does my self-consciousness of the fact that "I feel joy", in anyway diminish the experience of joy? Not at all. Not only that it doesn't degrade it but it even enhances it, adds completely new dimension to the experience, which only makes it richer and more profound. After all, if bare feeling of joy was simply floating through the dream of the Universe without any self-consciousness to experience it, who is there to say that this is a more pure and pristine experience?
In a similar way, higher cognition not only doesn't rob us of our feelings but adds whole other dimension to them, they become so much richer and textured in content that they literally speak to us. And it is through our higher cognition that we understand their speech.
Now where people get put off, is that they have to pass through the pinhole of pure thought in order to reach the higher realm. It seems that they are sacrificing the splendor of feeling, for the dryness of pure thought and this clashes very deeply - especially with religious feeling. But this passage is only momentary. Then we find again religious and any other feeling but now as living reality. Why the pinhole of thought? Can't we go through a pinhole of pure feeling of pure will? We can't (or at least not in full consciousness but only as a kind of a trance). And there's very understandable reason why.
The ego has many possessions. We say "my body, my preferences, my opinions, my intellect, my soul, my spirit" and so on. But none of that truly belongs to us. We are as a king that has gotten used to lifting his finger and the whole kingdom follows in order. We say "my kingdom". It is only when the peasants decide to overthrow us that we understand that all we control is our finger. That's what illness - physical and mental - teaches us in the hard way. Think of a genius. He certainly can think brilliantly by is he really in control of the brilliance itself? Not really. There are examples in history where brilliance degrades for unknown reasons and the genius is powerless to prevent it.
We are in control of much, much less than we are comfortable to admit. In this sense Sam Harris and others are objective when saying that we are quite unfree in our soul life. But when they continue to say "... and thus freedom is an illusion" they add something out of themselves. The first part can be confirmed by impartial observation but the second floats in the air.
So what is it that is truly ours? What is the finger of the king? It is the thing from the world content that we feel most creatively, causally involved in - our spiritual activity in thinking. We should get this right. As we already stated above, we are actually not fully free in what and how we think it. For example, if someone says a bad word to me (and if I'm still at that level of emotional maturity), the insult will live in me as a feeling. From all the possible thoughts that I could otherwise think, the feeling will filter only those that are compatible with it. For example, I'll be thinking how to give the guy a good lesson. So it is in this sense that I'm unfree - the feeling forces me to think about it. But nevertheless, in the very experience of thought, ignoring the Cosmic context which led me to its vicinity, I feel causally creative. This is the only thing that is my true possession because I create it. I think it into existence. I can't say the same about the feeling of insult or a color perception, my temperament, my favorite color. I can't say the same for acts of will neither - it is enough to imagine a paralyzed limb to realize that there's much beyond my immediate control. Instead, all these things shape my environment, they form the restricted palette from which I can create my thoughts. Then, if I say "my temperament" as if I have consciously created it, I'm simply being dishonest.
My thought allows me to recognize the boundaries of my authority in relation to the environment. I gain nothing if I simply say "it's all One" and succumb in pleasant dream life, riding on the waves of creation. That's why we start from pure thought. Calm, patient meditation, holding a thought, a symbol full of meaning, at the focus of my consciousness. I aim to experience only what I myself bring forth into existence. This is the only activity that is truly free.
Although we speak of "pure thought", this concentration focuses all forms of my spiritual activity - I will the thought intensely, I feel the thought, I perceive it. I'm simply concentrating all these forces of spiritual life into only one thing that is wholly mine. I want to exclude everything else that I can't account for as proceeding from my free activity. I do this in the utmost humility and devotion. My activity doesn't make me feel proud or special - it's exactly the opposite - it makes me feel small but honest. I know that the whole Cosmos is beyond my control and I'm simply coming to terms with this fact. I want to be true to the facts.
The longer we are able to hold on to the thought, the more it fills our entire field of consciousness and everything else fades into the background. Now we begin to notice something of tremendous importance. Although we ourselves hold the thought into place, we begin to distinguish that we create the form but not the substance of the thought. This substance turns out to have life of its own. We begin to notice patterns, shapes and movements within it. These words have only metaphorical meaning because we don't see the structure of the substance, as we can see waves in the sea or even visions, like in a psychedelic state. Both in sensory and inner vision, our attention is pointed at the perceptions and thoughts are formed against them. But now there's only one thought and its substance fills our whole atmosphere. This substance imprints itself directly as meaning, just as a regular thought imprints its meaning directly.
We continue to experience in full consciousness that we support the thought form in place but now the most varied living processes seem to be weaving and animating the substance. Now we begin to recognize the actual forces that shape our thinking life. We are able to behold them because we have found our stable anchor point within the activity we ourselves create. In normal life we are tossed around on the waves of the living activity but we are not conscious of them because we are merged with them. Now that we have anchored ourselves in our spiritual activity, we acquire such stability that we can experience the living waves flowing and shaping the thought substance but without dragging us along with them - we have differentiated our spiritual activity from them and that's why we are now conscious of them.
So we can say that we now perceive our own ego as if turned "inside-out", like a glove. When one steps into these experiences with the preconceived notions of our scientific era, one would expect to find processes like waves of energy, brainwaves, information and so on. That would be convenient for the intellect, wouldn't it? And it is true that in the very early stages we can really project our experiences in such concepts. But as we progress, the reality of this realm turns out to be much more chilling (at least from the standpoint of modern man). What we have "from distance" called waves and patterns, when experienced up close, turn out to be nothing but fragments, pieces of ourselves. Now they confront us as living and independent beings - they talk like us, think like us, feel and act like us - they are us! Or at least what we normally think of as "us". They are our patterns of thought, ready-made answers, habits, gestures, emotional reflexes, opinions, prejudices, beliefs - not as some abstract concepts but as living pieces of us. We realize how countless such elemental beings, at any moment combine, flow into each other, repel each other and in our ordinary state we stand on the top of this iceberg and say - "mine!".
The concept of "being" is quite problematic for modern man. For quite some centuries we've become accustomed to think about reality with our abstract thoughts. From the higher standpoint we can trace how our ordinary thoughts precipitate from the living spiritual activity as something dead - just as hair and nails precipitate from the living but are themselves already dead mineral substance. Our ordinary thoughts are like mineral chunks separated from a living process. Then, when we look at reality through these mineral prisms we see their character overlaid on everything - we begin to see nature as dead because we think of it with dead thoughts. But in the higher realm we find again life. And the beings we speak of are also there. They are of the same living nature as our inner spiritual activity. We can't think of them as lifeless or mechanical. If we try to do that we simply drop back into our ordinary thinking consciousness and lose sight of them. The greatest difficulty is to prevent ourselves from trying to imagine these beings as something that we can perceive in sensory-like manner. If we imagine them as small creatures with paws and fur, we are succumbing into fantasy. These beings don't have physical form. They have a form of will and idea. In this realm we perceive their will as we perceive heat in the sensory world. The only thing that comes close to sensory-like perception is when we experience how their will shapes the first-person fragments of our own nature.
Although these beings make us who we are, we don't own them. We live in symbiosis with them, just as we live in symbiosis with the cells of our body. If we could live without them, if we were truly able to create the whole soul content ourselves, every moment of our soul life would feel as an eureka moment, everything in our soul would feel as an original act of creativity, as brand new creation for which we are fully responsible. This we cannot do. At least not yet, not at our level of evolution.
But is this real? Couldn't this be some kind of illusion? Isn't there some other explanation? Such question lose their meaning in this state. We can ask these questions in a visionary or psychedelic state. There our ego is more or less intact, we say - "I'm here, the visions are there in front of me, I perceive them". That's the reason why visions can never bring any certainty. As with any perception, in the final run we address it with our thinking and need to interpret it. We may have theories, beliefs about what lies behind, about what's the true source of the visions but with our ego we firmly stay on "our side" of them. Things are radically different when we pass through the portal of our own spiritual activity. What we now experience are not perceptions which we confront with thoughts but the actual "shape" of spiritual activity and how it is being modified by the environment. To ask if the meaning of the thus experienced activity is real, is like asking whether the meaning of my regular thought is real. It is actually the only certain thing. Please note - we're not saying that the application, the combinations of thoughts cannot be wrong. For example, if I think "the sky is green", the meaning of the thought itself is perfectly real. It is wrong only when I place the thought against my sensory perceptions. In this sense, even the meaning of a wrong thought is real. The same holds true for the higher realm - later, when I begin to think about the experiences and relate them to other experiences, it is totally possible to make an error. But the fact that I experience my ordinary ego states coming together from the interactions of the elemental beings is completely certain. As certain as death. It is more real than real. Our ordinary state seems only like a faint dream in comparison. This comes directly from the fact that I can trace in full consciousness how the mould, into which I experience these questions, comes into being. It is when my spiritual activity is restricted within this mould that I identify with the questions. But when I experience the coming together of the mould itself, these questions become only fragments of thought patterns that I perceive within my ordinary ego. These questions are settled for me. Now I have other questions, of completely different character.
When we progress even further, we find out that these elemental beings form three distinguishable colonies. Allegorically, we can call them the three horses that pull the cart of our soul life. These horses are quite wayward initially. Most of the time they pull our cart in quite different directions, while the poor master thinks he's in control and says "my horses!" Yet we are in position to tame these horses and then put them to work for a higher purpose.
As far as the soul seeks to understand itself within our ordinary ego state, the pulls of the horses lead in specific directions. If these directions become one-sided strivings they can be described in the following way:
The soul seeks its essential nature through combinations of thoughts, be it thoughts about neurons, energy, information, fields of awareness, mind at large, etc. The soul intellectualizes its reality. The soul seeks its essential nature in feeling life. It lives in imaginative pictures of art, Heaven, God, after life, etc. The soul dreams of its reality. The soul seeks its essential nature in unconscious will. It conceives itself as non-existence, as picture of nothingness. The soul sleeps away its reality.Of course, in practice we have combinations of these in different proportions, flowing and rhythmically alternating. It's only when they are pursued in one-sided way that they attain the above character. We need all three of them. But we need to find the perspective from which we can balance them. The ego (as the expression of the soul within our ordinary state) attains to reality only when it finds its true possession and from there - its relation to its Cosmic environment. Only then we find the deep meaning of the saying "Man, know thyself".
What we have described as elemental beings, is actually only a very small part of the general life that we can encounter in the higher realm. It is possible, and actually extraordinarily seducing for one, once he has attained to this state, to become intoxicated by his apparent superiority above the lower nature. If there's one thing that we should take out from the higher experiences, it is that freedom is always relative. We're always midway between the lower - that which we can perceive - and the higher - that which moulds our current experience. If we don't grasp this, if we think that we've become the higher and everything else is now below us, we're headed in for tragedy. The ordinary ego is to some extent, so to speak, excused of these things. After all, it doesn't perceive them readily. But when we find ourselves in the higher realm, we are no longer excused. The fact that we have ventured there, in itself means that from that moment on, we take full responsibility for our actions. While we don't know our horses, we are more or less protected from certain dangers. The reason is that there's some innate wisdom implanted in the horses. Think of the human body. What an extraordinarily complex organism! Who of us would be able to keep it running if every little detail was left to our conscious activity? We would destroy it in no time. We are in similar position in relation to our thinking, feeling and willing. In our ordinary life, these soul activities follow certain alternating rhythms that balance them out. But when we reach the point from which we can guide the horses, we immediately become responsible for keeping them in balance - we have now taken on to do, what was otherwise done for us unconsciously by our natural organization. We should do this wisely, otherwise, from this level, we can wreak great havoc - for ourselves and for others.
It is only in a mood of humility and loving devotion that we can find our proper bearings within this world. Only such mood allows us to turn with our eyes open, towards what stands higher than us, what shapes our current state, in the same way that the elemental beings shape our ordinary state. In this way we find other beings at varying stages of consciousness - some far superior than ours, stages that we'll attain only in the far, far future.
Higher cognition does not lead us to some remote, alternative reality. Our immediate experiences already show that. We don't perceive some speculative entities with fantasized relations to our world. The elemental beings throw light on our own soul life. We only understand our normal state of consciousness when experienced from the higher state. The higher contains the causes of the lower. In this sense, the perceptions of the elemental beings don't lead us away from reality but exactly the opposite - they complement and explain reality. This process continues even further with relation to the higher beings. When we experience their activities, we understand not only the forces working in the individual man but also these that shape the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, the nations, the whole humanity and the Cosmos. Every step deeper into the Spiritual World, reveals something of the riddles lying behind its projection within the sensory world.
The lower regions of the Spiritual World are not inhabited with only benevolent beings. There are such beings that are self-seeking. Just as man, they haven't yet found their harmonic relations to their Cosmic environment. In our ignorance we constantly associate with such beings, completely unconsciously. The deeper insight into our spiritual nature puts us in a position to consciously decide what beings we want to associate with - for who we want to work for.
We don't learn something about the higher beings when we experience what we think about them. We only learn something when we experience how they think us.
