Essay: Man, Know Thyself

[Lou Gold]

Elaine Pagels offers some interesting views on Apocalypse/Revelation.

[Cleric K]

What I was attempting to convey on another thread is that the above conclusion stems from a particular mode of perceiving and conceiving of Nature and Culture, i.e. cyclical and circular. Once that mode is adopted, yes, it makes sense that the dual-aspects of the world that we are all too familiar with will not simply "end". Another mode of perception-conception, which is characteristic of Western 'Faustian' civilization, concludes that the dual-aspects we are familiar with will transform through their tensions into some 'higher' Unity. We can see this conception clearly in the scripture which underlies Western civilization:

Here's a symbol for meditation:


In ancient times the "I" was not yet fully incarnated. For example, the ancient Indians still felt very strongly that in their essential being they belong to timelessness. That's why in certain sense the cyclical (time) and beyond death (timeless) domains were unreconcilable. They saw the world as Maya, the illusion. This would correspond to the top-view of the helix - the soul feels time as something external and sees it only from the perspective of timelessness, as circle, cycle, Mary-go-around that should finally be escaped.
On the other hand, after the "I" was fully incarnated in the temporal, for the first time in the Christ event, consciousness gradually finds itself as embedded within time. Cycles turn out to be more like spirals. They don't repeat indefinitely but every cycle brings something new - it does not end where it started. Now time and timelessness should be gradually integrated through evolution, not by escaping after death but by finding the timeless Spirit within the physical.

[Lou Gold]

[Cleric K]

Elaine Pagels offers some interesting views on Apocalypse/Revelation.

Such views emerge when spirituality doesn't go very deep.

We've spoken elsewhere that humanity is currently in great danger of falling into the illusion that just because it can think about the duality of good and evil, it means that it has transcended it. It is true that from the highest Absolute point of view all dualities are reconciled but if we think that we have transcended good and evil just because we can in meditation smear out our thoughts about them, we are practically blinding ourselves for our own soul depths. And this smearing out of dualities is incredibly tempting today - people are impatient to attain a bird-eye view of reality, to imagine themselves free from any entanglement.

It is from such insight that Goethe says in Faust:

Mephistopheles: (To Faust.)

These folk wouldn’t feel the devil, even
If he’d got them dangling by the neck.

In other words, the devil is most powerful when people think that he doesn't exist or when they expect him somewhere else, or that they have already befriended him, or transcended him. It is exactly in these cases that people become blind for the hidden motives in their own soul life. And they become blind for the simple reason that they don't think there's anything hidden, they don't think there's soul depth to be investigated - it seems to them everything is already clear in front of them. Then people become tools in the hands of various forces that have their own goals quite sideways of the upward spiral, while they think they are already One with the Universe and everything they do is 'good'.

It's not about hating the forces of evil but we need knowledge of what's working in the soul. It's an objective fact of higher perception that there are forces working in quite different directions, pursuing quite different goals, and the souls of men are of particular interest to these forces. Once these forces are known, man can consciously guide his conduct, depending on what he would Love to align with.

[Lou Gold]

Elaine Pagels offers some interesting views on Apocalypse/Revelation.

Such views emerge when spirituality doesn't go very deep.

That's her point.

[David_Sundaram]

On the other hand, after the "I" was fully incarnated in the temporal, for the first time in the Christ event, consciousness gradually finds itself as embedded within time. Cycles turn out to be more like spirals. They don't repeat indefinitely but every cycle brings something new - it does not end where it started. Now time and timelessness should be gradually integrated through evolution, not by escaping after death but by finding the timeless Spirit within the physical.

You 'nailed' * it (IMO), Cleric! Xeptin' I would say "in time" instead of "within the physical", albeit I think we are talkin' about the same thang.

* (Copied from http://lovebound.org/thecross.html :

"Many people might associate the cross with Christianity, as a symbol of Jesus'
crucifixion. However, the cross (as a symbol) is much older than that.

It might have more meaning than just one, but the main meaning is as follows:

The horizontal line symbolises the flow of time as we know it here on Earth.
Actually, the line should be a circle, a ring (see the explanation below).

The vertical line symbolises the evolution of the spirit. Symbolically, at
the bottom of the vertical line is a very low energy state (" hell ") and at the top
is the highest energy state (" Godhood ").

Where the two lines intersect, there is the Now, the present moment (this
particular cross shows the symbol of heart there).

Along the horizontal line is the flow of " Earth " time: past to the left of the
heart; present in the middle, where the heart is; future to the right of the heart.
In other words, the horizontal line symbolises the flow of material existence.

Along the vertical line is the flow of the spirit's evolution. For the spirit there
is no past-present-future flow of time: there is only the Now. In other words,
the vertical line symbolises your spiritual evolution.

Our goal is to evolve spiritually (as the spirits we actually are).

Every moment you make choices. In a very simplified way, when you make
material choices (like buying stuff, making money, playing cards, etc) you
move along the horizontal (time) line; when you make spiritual choices (like
healing, meditating, loving, etc) you move up the vertical line.
People, whose intent is to evolve spiritually, want to move up along
the vertical line as much as possible. People, who forgot their true nature
and imprisoned themselves in hogging material possession, move along
the horizontal " time " line in an endless circle, without moving up along
the vertical line.

Because we live in a material world, and need to buy material stuff and make
money, as well, our " Earth life path " resembles more of an upward spiral.

Of course, those that take the material possession hogging too far and
trample on people, may move down the vertical " spiritual evolution " line;
in other words, they may devolve spiritually."

[David_Sundaram]

Elaine Pagels offers some interesting views on Apocalypse/Revelation.

Such views emerge when spirituality doesn't go very deep.

That's her point.

So what's yours about hers, dodgy man?

[AshvinP]

Elaine Pagels offers some interesting views on Apocalypse/Revelation.

Such views emerge when spirituality doesn't go very deep.

That's her point.

It is helpful to apply all of these Revelations to the individual psyche, not only because that is a true meaning of the symbolism employed, but it then also allows a smoother transition of conceptions up through the fractally-nested human structures of family, community, nation and world. I simply don't see commentators like Pagels doing anything like that, but she is far from being a minority in that regard. Everything in scripture, including Gnostic and apocryphal writings, is flattened out into rigid theistic dogma or vacuous "liberation theology", or perhaps some toxic mixture of the two.

From the individual perspective, we can at least say the Book of Revelation (from John) is emphasizing the discernment and judgment required by the Spirit of the individual to navigate the various 'under-souls' at work in their lives, a judgmental nature which is not emphasized very much in the Gospels. It is truly a battle of Good and Evil, as Cleric pointed out, even if it takes much patience and effort to discern who or what is Good and Evil in this unfolding epic.

[Cleric K]

Thank you, David, for the cross symbol.

Xeptin' I would say "in time" instead of "within the physical"

Yeah, I understand your concern.
This is a vast topic but let's just say that by physical I mean something more 'neutral'. Actually the physical body is not the source of evil but it has become what it is (and the whole environment) in the process of the Fall. In spiritual sense, the physical body can be thought of from the inner side, as the 'screen' of the senses and sensory-like imagination, as pure experiences, without looking for something 'behind' them. In another type of evolution, this physicality may have never reached the level of fragmentation that we witness. To use an analogy from the quantum world, it can probably be said that physical existence would live on the borderline, where it barely collapses to more complex particles, maybe just photons, physical light. I'm using these terms loosely. So the higher human parts - the etheric, astral and the "I" - would still experience the screen of imagination and senses but that screen would be more like a Cosmic mirror. Man would never succumb into the error that he's seeing external reality in that mirror (in the same sense that man today doesn't confuse the image in a mirror for some other world). Instead, he would slowly gain his own self-consciousness, by recognizing his own activity within the mirror - just as we now recognize ourselves in thoughts - and then he would be aware that everything he experiences in that mirror of physicality is reflecting the doings of all kinds of beings, just as he himself is one of these beings. The need for a picture of some external world would never emerge. The senses would not at all be used to look 'outside'. Actually we should think of the senses only through their inner experiences of tone, light, smell, taste, etc., without imagining some physical organs. These sensory experiences would reflect the spectrum of spiritual life. There's simply no 'outside' world - everything that explains reality is within the spiritual. The physical world is just a barely manifested inner experience of light and warmth, where Cosmic life projects its image.

Through the Fall, man becomes tempted to dive into the mirror images themselves. This is the moment in Genesis where it's said for Adam and Eve "And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked". This signifies the moment where human beings begin to experience the images on the mirror screen as things in themselves, they no longer understand them as reflections of the Spirit. Luciferic beings didn't lie to Adam and Eve when they said "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." It's just that they told only half of the truth. The other half was that this knowledge of good and evil would not be attained immediately but only through experiences of death, pain and suffering. Man had to learn good and evil from own experience. But the fruit of that is freedom. We can experience the freedom to choose good over evil because of our own understanding.

Through the desires implanted in the hearts of people by the Luciferic beings, they were drawn more and more toward the images on the sensory mirror. This can be imagined as a process of continual decoherence - in the higher realm everything is fluid, adaptive, plastic, there's always a way to move through experiences without friction, as in superfluidity. But as the human being fixates on concrete things, other probabilities become filtered out and things become more and more rigid, things that one man wants begin to cause 'friction' with things that other man wants. In this way the world picture is gradually reduced more and more. The human light-body itself becomes more and more decoherent. The whole biological life emerges only at this stage. If it hasn't, the physical archetype would turn into 'dust', it would simply decohere and dissolve. Through the efforts of beings from on all stages of evolution, the complicated biological gradient has become possible which allows the Spirit to experience itself within the fragmented mirror while the mineral body isn't allowed to dissolute (this happens only after death). Only at this stage it becomes meaningful to speak of external world. This world can be thought as existing only as potential within the Heavenly condition but as men began to progressively decohere the spiritual world picture, the mineral body and its environment began to take shape. The mineral body as we see it today can be thought of as a lifeboat that takes shape as the Spirit is engulfed by the dissolution of the mirror.

So after all this, when I say 'within the physical' I actually envision the moment when man becomes clearly conscious of the screen of the senses and imagination, as reduced and rigidified reality of purely spiritual experience. This is the first step towards reclaiming the physical body to its non-decohered state. Next we realize that everything in the external world is shattered, decohered Spirit that we have collectively led to this state through our desires towards the sensory, leading to further and further decoherence. Now the Spirit locked in all these mineral, plant, animal and human forms will have to be redempted to its non-decohered state. So when the "I" becomes conscious of its own physicality in the Heavenly sense, the work for the gradual work of redemption and spiritualization of the Earthly realm also begins.

[Lou Gold]

Such views emerge when spirituality doesn't go very deep.

That's her point.

So what's yours about hers, dodgy man?

My point is that use, abuse and the need for discernment exist at all levels, in all directions in a great mysteriousness in which everything is connected.