Lou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Feb 11, 2021 2:39 pm
OK, I sense that we are again going to start circling the same old wagons but I sincerely believe that you are missing my essential point, which is
NOT that the focus on the mind will obscure the heart but rather that the focus on the 'higher' will obscure the necessity for full integration with the lower. Please consider the brief treatise by Jung I have posted in a new thread. Furthermore, in terms of a core theme of this forum, I assert that both Materialism and Idealism actually-factually function as religious faiths and the move from the former to the latter will require the proverbial leap. Concerning 'divination' one of the simplest offerings I know comes from Ibn 'Arabi:
I saw Divinity with the Eye of the Heart. I said, "Who are You?" It said, "You"
I see. I thought that this was more or less clear, that's why I didn't address it directly.
But this is based on a misconception of what the 'higher' is. That's why I tried to explicitly address it:
Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Feb 10, 2021 9:50 am
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.
Imagine that we are at the center of a sphere. If I understand your concern correctly, you are worried that rising 'higher' (towards the North pole) puts us more and more out of touch with the everything that stands below us. And in fact this could be so, if we pursue spirituality in some one-sided escapist way. But genuine development works in such a way that as we move higher, we are not moving away from our center but we are expanding another sphere - as we strive to increase the radius upwards, the whole sphere expands and we grow with the same radius also downwards below the center. We understand the network of life only when we see how it is build from the higher perspective.
The higher not only doesn't obstruct the view of the lower but it is the only thing that can throw light on the lower and from this to gain the insight of how true harmonization should occur.
This is easily visible (for whoever has the eyes to see it) in modern medicine. Medicine keeps searching for the causes of cancer within DNA, environment, etc. And it is true that these are real factors but supersensible perception shows that the main causes of this disease are of spiritual character. The astral body influences the etheric, the etheric builds up the mineral body. When an individual carries heavily conflicting emotions within the astral body, they can be discerned as an inner war (this has some relation to your Jung quote). Part of the astral body wants to emancipate and extricate itself from the whole. This constant fight within the soul body reflects itself within the etheric where it disrupts the natural growth of tissues. When the process goes far enough, the emancipated astral organism makes for itself part within the physical body that it can feel as its own. Of course, this process in the long run destroys the whole.
I'm not expecting anyone to believe this but it's nevertheless food for thought. Imagine if you can know this from your own experience, if you have observed this, and the compare it to the efforts of medicine - trying to fix the depths - DNA repair, nanorobots, chemotherapy, etc. All this addresses only the end result of a spiritual process and all efforts will be wasted. If the leak is stopped at on place, the pressure will break from another.
It is quite the same with all problems of our world. Everything we see with our senses is only the shadow, the end result of a spiritual process, large part of which is, unfortunately, of diseased character. That's why we need to go 'higher', to address our spiritual structure, and that transforms also the physical world - the 'lower'.