Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 1:28 am
Ascending in soul life to find a last common ancestor seems to be the wrong way round. Wouldn’t it require some form of retrograde motion to find common ground with a sea slug? In this light, I’m struggling with your concept of the Divine state. From one perspective, it seems to be an undifferentiated, unlaminated, simple state. But from another, a self-similar, all-encompassing, all-integrating, infinitely complex state. Perhaps the alpha and omega “thingy” is what you are getting at.
Yes, Anthony, you’re answering your own questions. It’s only a question whether you want to find the perspective from which these things are not mere abstract words floating in imagination but symbols of something experiential, just like the word ‘pain’ is a symbol for something experiential. The alpha and omega thingy is what we recently commented once again about the Escher’s painting with the white and dark doves. I’m not sure if you grasped the idea of hollowed out intuition then.
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 1:57 am
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what you are asking with respect to Wholeness. I will say that after reading some of "How to Know Higher Worlds", I am challenged by some of the demands of what could loosely be call the pietistic life. There are aspects of my life that I'm not willing to let go of (I like my red wine) which perhaps are hindrances to progress. Having been burnt by former attempts at pietism, I'm hesitant to go there again.
To give some more illustrations, let’s consider the ‘hardened skeptic’ expression. This readily evokes the picture of the Earth:
The arena of our Earthly life is only a thin film where molten rock has cooled down to solid. We’re floating on a sea of magma. All this is a much more literal metaphor for our spiritual existence than one may suppose. It reminds me of the Emperor from one of the Mummy series:
There was a spell cast on him, he became flame-like and his outer crust was continually solidifying. He had to crack it over and over again so that he could move.
Our intellectual being is indeed constantly threatened by such rigidifying. Our spiritual life has been limited to
lateral movements of tectonic plates. Our ideas, our sense of what we are, are very rigid. Trying to move them, rubs the plates against each other, the ground shakes and volcanoes erupt.
In general, people see philosophical, scientific and religious ideas as different arrangements of the tectonic plates. As you say, everyone claims that theirs is the special, true one. So you have painstakingly rearranged the plates several times already but things end up as relative and insecure as ever. So now you say “I’ve had enough. No one really knows anything. It’s just a competition where everyone advertises their tectonic fashion.”
So this is the situation of modern man. We can only rearrange the loose rocks on our hard crust. Few are able to make minor adjustments of the tectonic plates but all in all, we have only rock models of whatever true reality might be. We arrange pebbles on the dusty ground and say “this is God” or “this is MAL”, or “these are the atoms” and so on. After the initial euphoria, people come to their senses and in the end say “well… it’s just a pile of pebbles… no one knows anything else but pebbles”. This is the evolutionary stage of our intellectual consciousness.
Does this mean that we really can’t
know anything else but pebbles? Depends on who you ask. Many people are actually quite comfortable with this situation. They are actually relieved that they don’t have to deal with reality. It’s like they are saved from a great burden. In the world of pebbles one can always say “no one knows” and thus justify any kind of desire and action.
So we live in a world of thought-pebbles rolling over our hardened tectonic plates (our character, temperament, etc.) Even though popular mysticism calls this an illusion, what it really accomplishes is simply to fully relieve any remaining traces of the burden. One says “Even the pebbles aren’t real. The tectonic plates aren’t real. Nothing is real. There’s only the void that dreams all of this.” And this is the great
lure of our age – take a deep breath and endure the dream of unreality until it is over. Then we’re finally free. Or so it’s said. It’s amazing how even in this forum, so many people embrace this philosophy, while forgetting that in the end it is just another arrangement of the tectonic plates. So once again it is really our character, our temperament, our desires, sympathies and antipathies, that lead us to embrace this particular constellation of pebbles. In the end, it is our hardened ego that has embraced this particular tectonic configuration and now awaits its liberation through death. The reason people don’t notice this is because they believe that by calling the pebbles an illusion, their philosophy is no longer dependent on any tectonic configuration. It’s tempting to believe in our liberation at death but it’s still a belief. What if the mystical state is really simply a brain state at the edge of shutting down and interpreted by intellect that has lost all sense of reality?
What can be done then? We can see an unexplored direction. What if we can find consciousness within the mantle? Could it be that we can be lucidly spiritually active within these depths of which our intellectual crust is only a cooled down and hardened layer?
It’s clear that we need a radically different approach here. We can arrange pebbles and speculate about the depths, as Freudian psychology does, but our intellectual self-consciousness still remains on the surface, as the hard crust. Obviously, as long as we arrange pebbles, they will always remain such. We can’t expect that by just arranging pebbles in different configurations, at some point they will turn into lava. We need some unexplored degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity. Degrees of freedom that we have long forgotten, since for decades and decades we have been only moving tectonic plates and pebbles
laterally.
How can we gain some intuition of what is here being spoken of? Every post in this forum tries to do nothing but this – tries to kindle our intuition of the forces that act
perpendicularly to the crust. Here’s one more attempt. I’ll use your red wine example.
Why do people of our age drink alcohol? I’m not speaking of you personally, I’m drawing a general picture. One says “It’s tiring to feel the complexities of life all the time. At every step I’m entangled in the most complicated relations with people and objects. I feel like an elephant in a pharmacy. I have to watch my every move, otherwise just by turning around I bump into shelves, glassware falls down and shatters. I need constant vigilance. This is exhausting. I need some time off. I want to spend some time living only with the final results of my thoughts, feelings and actions. I don’t want to premeditate things, I don’t want to be conscious of the consequences of my actions. I would never be able to approach that hot colleague of mine if I had to be conscious of all the details. True, I often say things that insult people, I disgrace myself, I get into trouble, I make myself sick, but at least for some time I’m relieved from the burden of complexities of existence.”
So in this way sobriety introduces certain
leeway between the final manifestation of our thoughts, feelings and actions and their preparation. For example, sometimes we may feel our anger bubbling up and we feel as if we want to slap someone in the face. While drunk this may happen as certainly as a law of nature. We simply witness the burst of anger and the movement of our arm. When sober we have something like safety time, we feel the anger gaining momentum and the mental image of us slapping the person begins to take shape. But in our thinking also other images can be intuited side by side – we sense the consequences of our action. Then just like a railroad operator, we can switch tracks and channel anger in a different direction.
Now imagine that our present civilization is by default slightly drunk. Our thoughts are swirling out of control, our emotions burst, we keep fidgeting. In certain sense we live in the final stages of manifestation of all these inner phenomena, even though we still have some leeway for last minute adjustments.
To get out of this drunken state we need inner effort which is quite alien to modern man. And is this surprising? One says “Are you crazy? I desperately try to shut down all this burden of premeditation while you suggest that I have to become even more conscious of it? Get lost!” This really points us at the major conflict of our day and culture. The last thing people would like to do is become
more conscious of their inner processes. But there are also those who feel that we can never make a step forward unless we address these depths. Dimly, everyone understands that all the troubles we have are caused by human misconduct. Very little can be blamed upon Nature. Most of the pain and suffering in the world is caused not by Nature but corrupted human activity. And if it is caused by Nature, in most cases it is because humans take the risk to misuse Nature and then simply suffer the consequences of her lawfulness. Yet we’re at loss about how to treat this human corruption. We’re not willing to give up our drunkenness so we have no choice but search for ways to constrain it. We say “it’s OK to be drunk. This is human nature. But let’s at least try to make it safe.” So we have laws, imprisonment, pharmaceuticals, social conditioning – everything that aims to constrain in some way the volcanic eruptions of human nature.
Herein lies the ‘tipping point’ of which we have spoken before. It’s the realization that we can never be free unless we gain consciousness of the currents of our deeper soul life. From this perspective you can grasp the nature of meditation as it should be in our age. Concentrating on a rolling pebble is a beginning. It helps us to gather and focus our inner forces. This already counteracts our default drunken state, where our thinking is all over the place. But we need to go even further. Our point of concentration has to become like an opening in the crust, like an open volcano. In it we gradually begin to gain faint consciousness of our molten nature, the currents of our soul life – that would be the beginning of Imaginative consciousness. In time, we begin to feel ourselves active in these currents. Then our spirit finds new ways of moving the tectonic plates which were inconceivable before.
Now here we go in more advanced topics but I must state this in order to avoid a dangerous one-sidedness. Our Earth is slowly dying. Little by little it cools down. Ultimately it can become only a cold rock like our Moon. This is important to consider in our case. In the Imaginative state we can indeed find our inner nature to be of the Earthly kind. We can feel that our soul has emerged from fire but is now gradually cooling down and at some point will inevitably sink into dark and cold unconsciousness. This is one aspect of the Imaginative world. It is our infernal nature. The other aspect can only come by finding our union with a principle that continually sources new light and warmth. In other words, when we find our ‘upright’ stance in the Imaginative world, we’re a being that has its infernal bowels ‘below’ and its noble spiritual nature 'above'. If left on its own, the life of our lower nature would gradually dissipate its energy (warmth) and solidify. This can only be prevented if the lower is continually being vivified by the light and warmth of the Sun nature – that is the Spirit. Thus it’s not just a matter of attaining Imaginative perception of the bowels. It’s not a matter of giving free reign to our passions and desires – these are our infernal currents of magma. We need to fertilize the magma of our lower nature with the Intelligence of the Spirit. Currently the Spirit is enslaved in the rigidified crust and the currents of magma. It’s not about escaping or destroying the lower nature but organizing it, putting its raw power in service of a higher ideal.
One may still say “But I’m not interested in myself. I want to understand how the world works.” Yet when we begin to grasp the infernal depths and the Cosmic heights of our soul life, we come to realize that we already
are the world. Think of the Deep MAL picture. Self-knowledge and world-knowledge are inseparable. To have self-knowledge is to gradually become the world.
So, Anthony, I hope this really pinpoints the crux of the matter. It’s important to stand face to face with this question. All of SS starts precisely with this realization that our ordinary state of consciousness is like being slightly drunk. Then one begins to seek the leeway of
cognition where the forces which shape our thoughts, feelings and actions are to be found.
Let me put it even more explicitly. You say “There are aspects of my life that I'm not willing to let go of”. If you feel that you have to let go of red wine just because of some pietism, because some modern Moses carved some new moral code on stone, then this completely misses the point.
Previously you asked “What makes spiritual science a science?” You’ll get a taste of what makes spiritual science a science if you’re willing to ask yourself questions like “What is it in me that is not willing to let go of certain things? What are the forces that shape my character?” You see, SS is hard because we ourselves become the subject of investigation. It’s not like taking an x-ray or ECG, or EEG then reading the results and saying “that’s me”. No, we ourselves need to become the living ECG and EEG. Science tries to tear down and see how the world works. In SS we have to do the same but to ourselves
in vivo. It’s easy to investigate that which is already dead. It’s much more difficult to investigate that which is vibrant with life, especially when it clashes with desires. To investigate the living reality of our being we need to continually overcome ourselves.
So in this direction threshold is to be found. It can only be conceived if you find within yourself the spiritual strength to
differentiate your
thinking from the being that doesn’t want to let go of certain pleasures. Thinking is the first place where we can find freedom because thinking is the most immediate expression of the Spirit – our essential Being. We will change whether we like it or not. Time changes us. If we don’t let go of certain things, death will force us to. As Federica said, SS is not about satisfying some tangential curiosity while we enjoy ‘real’ life. It’s about
understanding life itself. To understand what is up, what is down, where time comes from and where it is going. In prior ages such things were stamped upon human beings in the form of religious education. But today we need to be able to reproduce the religions from our own lucid insight into the nature of reality.
I hope this makes it as explicit as possible. Everything that SS speaks of results from a
higher form of sobriety, where we find the hidden forces that shape our dreamy life.
Finally one may still object “Higher form of sobriety? What could be more boring than that?” Our Earthly dream has attained a nightmarish tint. We say “I can’t stand this, give me a remedy” and we plunge ourselves in the senses as if to drug ourselves into forgetfulness of how miserable our existence is. Yes, gaining higher lucidity is not easy. It takes effort and sacrifices. But it’s the
only way in which we can get a grip on the flow of the dreamscape. Like so many things in life, we first have to invest some effort, we need to go through trials and pain but then something beautiful is born. A mother knows this. We’re now collectively in labor. We all go through the pains of birth. If we endure, something beautiful will be born. The Spirit Child in us, which begins its journey of becoming an artisan of the dreamscape. All that the human spirit has ever secretly yearned for is on that side of the birth canal. And this is not simply another lullaby for our after-death existence. This birth happens here and now. It’s a matter of inner transformation. If we ignore our spiritual nature and prefer to drug ourselves into the kaleidoscopic forms of the dim dream life, this life will gradually turn from nightmarish into hellish. It simply can’t be otherwise because we ourselves are doing it by neglecting the essence of our being. If we give up the degrees of freedom through which we're supposed to shape the dreamscape, then other forces will take possession of them and shape our flow from behind the crust of waking consciousness.
Anthony, I know that all written above will sound repulsive, maybe even insulting. But these are all feelings that pull the yoke of our spiritual being. The question is whether with your free thinking you
understand what was described? Do you understand the
direction in which one should go if SS is
not to remain simply the next pile of pebbles? Do you think that those who speak of these depths of reality are simply confused and in truth there's nothing beneath that which is not willing to let go of something? If you conceive that it might be possible to gain that higher sobriety, do you see how this could serve not only for the satisfaction of vain curiosity but as actual transformative force for the individual and the world?