Meditation exercise on "separate me"

[AshvinP]

I hear that you have a high sensitivity to words, which makes it difficult for you to go beyond the unpleasant impression you feel and really focus on what the sentence points to. This can depend on many factors, past experiences, particular feelings etc. I would say that it's a good thing that you noticed that, it's the first step to see that much of the unpleasant feeling you experience is mixed up with your personal history, rather than with supposedly objective meanings present in the words themselves. Can you see that the words by themselves are more neutral than it looked at first reading?

Now you are over the top condescending but I'm a human being and fine I'll just roll with it . . . but no, I find Ashwin's words anything but neutral, regardless of the content of his words, he is saying that no matter who you are or what path you take, you will see things the same way he does.
Re this thread - it's devolved into a battle of semantics, and way too deep in speculative esoteria for my tastes.

Here's another angle to approach what Federica has been saying. Not that I am comparing myself to an occult teacher, but simply to point out that any teaching about objective spiritual structure which helps elucidate our shared living experience, just like objective natural structure, doesn't need to be conflated with 'seeing things the same way' as the one conveying the teachings. None of what we write here about that structure is an 'explanation' to be adopted, but a dim conceptual pointer which, hopefully, can stimulate our interest to undertake an effortful, reverential search for the more complete explanations within ourselves and within the outer living phenomena of the world.

You are not to imagine that those who were occult pupils in this sense became blind followers of their teachers, receiving on authority all that was imparted to them. That was by no means the case. Easy believers in authority are generally also those who in a light kind of way apply at once their perfectly ordinary intelligence to pronounce judgment on what they hear. But those who have first sharpened their power of judgment and then, holding only in remembrance what they have acquired by it, have let occult instruction work upon them through the medium of memory and of fantasy, will most assuredly be no easy believers in authority, rather will they receive what occult instruction imparts in the same way as we receive what Nature tells us. Such will be the attitude of the occult pupil to the instruction that is now given to him, after he has passed through the previous stages.

The teachers themselves also took care that their words should work in the way that Nature works; there was accordingly no need to charge their pupils to have this or that opinion or thought. It was actually so that the pupils, after all they had undergone in the development of their powers of understanding and discrimination, met the words of their teachers as we meet, shall I say, a sunrise, or a wind-swept sea or some other natural phenomenon, which we observe with the desire to learn all we can about it, — not approaching it critically, for then we would never grow really acquainted with it. Those know least of all the inner power and might of a phenomenon in Nature who approach it with sympathy or antipathy. In the very same way in which one observes Nature herself did the occult pupil now observe what was given to him in occult instruction.

[Cleric K]

But I think we are jumping too much ahead here. Before we even consider this questions, we ourselves need to be already in the nondual mode. But if we perceive the world as if we are a "separate subjective experiencer - self" experiencing the "objects" or communication with other "selves - subjective experiencers" with their separate subjectivities, then we still are in the ego-consciousness and dualistic mode. So, the first thing to do for us is to figure out how to transcend this mode into the nondual one. Only then when we can truly communicate with the nondual beings through sharing with them the same experiences of nondual states and meanings.

That's fine. The example with the orbs was intended to point out the same thing. So let's once and for all strike out this from the task list. We don't want to perpetuate the dual self that imagines itself as an orb/self interacting with other orbs/selves (flat MAL). All efforts are towards becoming more and more lucid of the ways our whole consciousness is weaved of this constructive interference of Cosmic beings. Let's put a mark on this and consider it settled.

Now, to your question (assuming that we are indeed in the nondual mode and not in the ego-consciousness mode anymore): "how can we go further than simply acknowledging our oneness with them". This is not simply "acknowledging", if they and we are both in the nondual state of experientially realizing the Oneness with the Divine Essense, then we are sharing with them the same living experiential state of consciousness, we are already in a shared mode and therefore part of their hierarchy and experientially living in their nondual domains. And then, by living-thinking and further developing our higher-cognition spiritual bodies in those domains we become open and sensitive to know/experience all their meanings and curvatures.

This is all good. And the methods of higher cognition pursue precisely this. Disagreement comes when we begin to enter the concreteness of the experiences.

Why is that? Because through the development of higher cognition things begin to attain clarity, things begin to become delaminated and clearly differentiated. This clashes with any superficial idea of oneness.

Without any doubt, our initial steps into the depth of reality are nebulous, everything is blurry, like through obscure glass. Yet there's this element of oneness. It might be blurry but we feel united with that blurriness.

Further development however begins to bring things more and more into focus. I'm not speaking of visual focus - it's about the fact that we begin to understand our being as the interference of living beings that can be clearly differentiated, just like we can differentiate blue from red. Our anger is one Cosmic current, our Love is another, certain philosophical outlook is yet another and so on. We're a specific interference of such Cosmic currents and they can be clearly cognized, just like we can cognize different colors.

This is the critical point. The superficial quest for oneness feels this 'coming to focus' to be quite questionable because it seems that it breaks up the oneness. Beings are grasped with their quite distinct qualities and forces. Here the superficial investigator of the spirit says "But this is duality, this is separation! There are no distinctions in the spiritual world" and he prefers the blurry mixture because it seems more uniform and one.

We have to understand very clearly how we work against our own goals here:
1/ On one hand we conceive that there's a hierarchy of Spirits through which the manifoldness of reality manifests. On paper we strive to gain higher consciousness of this hierarchy, which is also our own Cosmic structure (like the Deep MAL picture)
2/ On the other hand we self-sabotage this development of consciousness because we don't want reality to be cognized as structured, as differentiated. We imagine that this can only be a product of duality.

So there we have it. We say that we want to become conscious of the manifold living Being of the Cosmos /1, yet at the same time we don't want to become conscious of it because we want to preserve our blurry uniformity 2/.

It has to be noted that the manifoldness is already there. If I look at a forest through obscure glass and see green-brown mixture, this doesn't make the forest more 'one' than when I perceive clearly the trees. And even more importantly, this blurry vision doesn't eliminate the fact that the trees are already differentiated. So we shouldn't confuse oneness for general blurriness. Instead, it is only through first perceiving the true manifoldness of reality that we can also trace the true spiritual unity, just like we can never know what the true spiritual being of the forest is if we have never differentiated the trees.

I hope this contradiction is clearly recognized. I'll stop here. Is it clear that higher cognition actually differentiates our consciousness and this differentiation is in fact the delamination of the individual spiritual beings of which we're weaved? Is it clear that this differentiation is only bringing into focus that which is already manifold in the Cosmos and only in the clear consciousness of this manifoldness we're in position to reach also the true unity of the spiritual beings (and not their superficially smeared out appearance)? Is it clear that if we can't let go of the blurry oneness, it is guaranteed that we'll never know the true manifoldness of the Beings and their true unity?

[Stranger]

But I think we are jumping too much ahead here. Before we even consider this questions, we ourselves need to be already in the nondual mode. But if we perceive the world as if we are a "separate subjective experiencer - self" experiencing the "objects" or communication with other "selves - subjective experiencers" with their separate subjectivities, then we still are in the ego-consciousness and dualistic mode. So, the first thing to do for us is to figure out how to transcend this mode into the nondual one. Only then when we can truly communicate with the nondual beings through sharing with them the same experiences of nondual states and meanings.

That's fine. The example with the orbs was intended to point out the same thing. So let's once and for all strike out this from the task list. We don't want to perpetuate the dual self that imagines itself as an orb/self interacting with other orbs/selves (flat MAL). All efforts are towards becoming more and more lucid of the ways our whole consciousness is weaved of this constructive interference of Cosmic beings. Let's put a mark on this and consider it settled.

Cleric, but you did not answer my question: is the process of becoming more lucid unfolds within the state of ego-consciousness, as Ashvin claims? The experiential fact for anyone who ever experienced the nondual state is that such state is already beyond any state of ego-consciousness. It is impossible to become "lucid of the constructive interference with Cosmic beings" while remaining in the ego-consciousness mode, because in order to even be in the constructive interference with the Cosmic nondual beings, we need to be already in the nondual mode shared with them (and not in the ego-consciousness mode). Yours and Ashvin's positions at this point seem to be very incoherent. Please clarify.

I hope this contradiction is clearly recognized. I'll stop here. Is it clear that higher cognition actually differentiates our consciousness and this differentiation is in fact the delamination of the individual spiritual beings of which we're weaved? Is it clear that this differentiation is only bringing into focus that which is already manifold in the Cosmos and only in the clear consciousness of this manifoldness we're in position to reach also the true unity of the spiritual beings (and not their superficially smeared out appearance)? Is it clear that if we can't let go of the blurry oneness, it is guaranteed that we'll never know the true manifoldness of the Beings and their true unity?

Yes. The Oneness in the Divine Essense is not the "blurry oneness " of the soup of phenomena. It is Oneness in experientially knowing who we all are as the spiritual activities of the same One Consciousness, in other words, in each of its semi-autonomous threads of spiritual activity it is Consciousness knowing itself directly as it is in each of its phenomenon and activity. Now, once that is understood and agreed, then, to your next question, the Cosmos is indeed not a "blurry soup" but a structured multidimensional manifold unfolding along certain laws and curvatures, and those laws/curvatures are the ideations of the higher-order beings. This unfolding does not work as a deterministic Cosmic machine, but rather as a process of co-creative "sculpturing" of the reality by all beings that participate in this shared-interconnected process, including down to the lowest-level beings. The guiding laws of these structures allow for wide "windows of opportunities" so that the Free Will of the participating spiritual beings can be enacted.

[AshvinP]

But I think we are jumping too much ahead here. Before we even consider this questions, we ourselves need to be already in the nondual mode. But if we perceive the world as if we are a "separate subjective experiencer - self" experiencing the "objects" or communication with other "selves - subjective experiencers" with their separate subjectivities, then we still are in the ego-consciousness and dualistic mode. So, the first thing to do for us is to figure out how to transcend this mode into the nondual one. Only then when we can truly communicate with the nondual beings through sharing with them the same experiences of nondual states and meanings.

That's fine. The example with the orbs was intended to point out the same thing. So let's once and for all strike out this from the task list. We don't want to perpetuate the dual self that imagines itself as an orb/self interacting with other orbs/selves (flat MAL). All efforts are towards becoming more and more lucid of the ways our whole consciousness is weaved of this constructive interference of Cosmic beings. Let's put a mark on this and consider it settled.

Cleric, but you did not answer my question: is the process of becoming more lucid unfolds within the state of ego-consciousness, as Ashvin claims?

What you are conceiving as ego-consciousness is not at all what I meant by it. Again, you are practically imagining we remain the same as we are now. Without getting into too many abstract definitions, all I meant was maintaining the structural integrity which allows us to differentiate the higher nested "I" perspectives and their activity, light and dark. Above all we should seek an intuitive orientation for what this means, as that generally is something we can always relate to along the gradient. It is the same exact thing Cleric described earlier of the way in which we can speak of "me" along the gradient from normal cognition moving into higher cognition.

Yes, indeed we don’t find ‘me’ within this panoramic experience as some ‘thing’, side by side with other spiritual phenomena that fill our awareness. However we can still use that word in a meaningful way, without needing to postulate or believe in anything.

We can still speak of our true being in the following sense. Think about the fact that you play guitar. Think about the way this has made it possible that you discover a whole aspect of your spiritual being which otherwise would remain completely unknown. This includes aspects of your life of will, all the skills and techniques you have etched into your physical machinery, it includes the aesthetic feelings, it includes the forms of your spiritual activity that explore musical patterns and curvatures through Time and manifest them through your bodily organs.

[Stranger]

What you are conceiving as ego-consciousness is not at all what I meant by it. Again, you are practically imagining we remain the same as we are now. Without getting into too many abstract definitions, all I meant was maintaining the structural integrity which allows us to differentiate the higher nested "I" perspectives and their activity, light and dark. Above all we should seek an intuitive orientation for what this means, as that generally is something we can always relate to along the gradient. It is the same exact thing Cleric described earlier of the way in which we can speak of "me" along the gradient from normal cognition moving into higher cognition.

Yes, indeed we don’t find ‘me’ within this panoramic experience as some ‘thing’, side by side with other spiritual phenomena that fill our awareness. However we can still use that word in a meaningful way, without needing to postulate or believe in anything.

We can still speak of our true being in the following sense. Think about the fact that you play guitar. Think about the way this has made it possible that you discover a whole aspect of your spiritual being which otherwise would remain completely unknown. This includes aspects of your life of will, all the skills and techniques you have etched into your physical machinery, it includes the aesthetic feelings, it includes the forms of your spiritual activity that explore musical patterns and curvatures through Time and manifest them through your bodily organs.

OK, that Cleric's description of the structural integrity of our spiritual activity, that we can call "me", is quite accurate. In other words, it is a structure of our karmic cognitive-behavioral patterns, skills, beliefs and perceptual interpretations of reality etc. But for an average human being most of this ego-consciousness structure consists of entirely dualistic cognitive-behavioral patterns. So, in this "mundane" average human mode, if we maintain the structural integrity of such state of ego-consciousness, we just cannot "tune in" into the higher nested "I" perspectives, because those higher perspectives (if they are indeed the perspectives from the nondual hierarchy) are of the nondual mode of consciousness. We would have no experiential references to share those perspectives with them. In other words, we need to be in the mode that Christ described here in order to become integrated with these nondual beings: "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity (John 17)". The glory he is talking about is the Glory-Love of the nondual state (complete unity), which in the Advaita tradition is called Ananda (nondual bliss).

[AshvinP]

What you are conceiving as ego-consciousness is not at all what I meant by it. Again, you are practically imagining we remain the same as we are now. Without getting into too many abstract definitions, all I meant was maintaining the structural integrity which allows us to differentiate the higher nested "I" perspectives and their activity, light and dark. Above all we should seek an intuitive orientation for what this means, as that generally is something we can always relate to along the gradient. It is the same exact thing Cleric described earlier of the way in which we can speak of "me" along the gradient from normal cognition moving into higher cognition.

Yes, indeed we don’t find ‘me’ within this panoramic experience as some ‘thing’, side by side with other spiritual phenomena that fill our awareness. However we can still use that word in a meaningful way, without needing to postulate or believe in anything.

We can still speak of our true being in the following sense. Think about the fact that you play guitar. Think about the way this has made it possible that you discover a whole aspect of your spiritual being which otherwise would remain completely unknown. This includes aspects of your life of will, all the skills and techniques you have etched into your physical machinery, it includes the aesthetic feelings, it includes the forms of your spiritual activity that explore musical patterns and curvatures through Time and manifest them through your bodily organs.

OK, that Cleric's description of the structural integrity of our spiritual activity, that we can call "me", is quite accurate. In other words, it is a structure of our karmic cognitive-behavioral patterns, skills, beliefs and perceptual interpretations of reality etc. But for an average human being most of this ego-consciousness structure consists of entirely dualistic cognitive-behavioral patterns. So, in this "mundane" average human mode, if we maintain the structural integrity of such state of ego-consciousness, we just cannot "tune in" into the higher nested "I" perspectives, because those higher perspectives (if they are indeed the perspectives from the nondual hierarchy) are of the nondual mode of consciousness. We would have no experiential references to share those perspectives with them. In other words, we need to be in the mode that Christ described here in order to become integrated with these nondual beings: "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity (John 17)". The glory he is talking about is the Glory-Love of the nondual state (complete unity), which in the Advaita tradition is called Ananda (nondual bliss).

Yes, we all agree that we can't remain the exact same and simply access higher worlds at will. With the addition that, we not only need to adapt our structural integrity in the meditative state, but in the non-meditative state as well. We need to gradually work on what Goethe describes,

"One, to the earth with passionate desire,
And closely clinging organs still adheres;"

That Earthly passionate desire, which of course is a whole complex of personal and collective soul entanglements, is what maintains the dualistic cognitive-behavioral patterns to varying degrees. It is what maintains the discontinuities of consciousness during sleep and death-rebirth. Clearly this complex won't be untangled in a snap, leading to complete continuity of consciousness, but we can make significant and tangible progress even in our current incarnation. During this work, we can still speak of subject-object polarity (not duality because they are not reified into separate 'things') in the sense that we have an intuitive orientation of how we are only awakened to our Divine Activity within a limited, yet ever-expanding, aperture of creative responsibility for the Whole spiritual structure.

[Stranger]

That Earthly passionate desire, which of course is a whole complex of personal soul entanglements, is what maintains the dualistic cognitive-behavioral patterns to varying degrees. It is what maintains the discontinuities of consciousness during sleep and death-rebirth. Clearly this complex won't be untangled in a snap, leading to complete continuity of consciousness, but we can make significant and tangible progress even in our current incarnation.

100% agree here, exactly in the current incarnation. But what does it mean in practical terms? This is not simply a process of disentanglement from our egoic personal entanglements, which is also a necessary part, but by far insufficient, because by itself it will not let us transcend into the nondual mode.

For example, sorry Federica for using you as an example , in this message she said:
Yes, this is one and the same meaning: when we say self-reflecting quality of thinking, this only means one thing to me: the sense of "I" is there. Similarly, once there is a sense of being a subject of experience, there is inevitably also a sense of object. They are indissociable. This is a very accurate description of exactly how we humans perceive the world as a duality of subjects and objects (= dualistic mode). But this is not how nondual beings perceive the reality. So, in order to be in the "constructive interference" mode with them, we ourselves need first of all to transcend this subject-object duality.

And also, there is a catch in remaining in such state of subject-object duality: as long as we remain in such state, it is virtually impossible to disentangle from egoic personal desires and preferences, simply because, by perceiving ourselves as separate from objects and other selves, we inevitably unconsciously will entangle into dualistic relations/interferences with them involving all kinds of sympathies, antipathies, fears and all sorts of egoic reactivity ("I like and want this object and don't like that object, I like this "self"-person and don't like that one"). This is again why the meditative exercise in this thread is useful, because it lets us investigate how our egoic reactions and preferences are actually causally related to the subject-object and subject-subject dualities of our perception of reality. So, as long as we perceive the world as separate subjects and objects, we are trapped in the dualistic bubble together with all our egoic preferences and cannot experience the reality nondually, which means, cannot be in the "constructive interference" and shared state mode with the nondual higher beings.

[Cleric K]

OK, that Cleric's description of the structural integrity of our spiritual activity, that we can call "me", is quite accurate. In other words, it is a structure of our karmic cognitive-behavioral patterns, skills, beliefs and perceptual interpretations of reality etc. But for an average human being most of this ego-consciousness structure consists of entirely dualistic cognitive-behavioral patterns. So, in this "mundane" average human mode, if we maintain the structural integrity of such state of ego-consciousness, we just cannot "tune in" into the higher nested "I" perspectives, because those higher perspectives (if they are indeed the perspectives from the nondual hierarchy) are of the nondual mode of consciousness. We would have no experiential references to share those perspectives with them. In other words, we need to be in the mode that Christ described here in order to become integrated with these nondual beings: "I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity (John 17)". The glory he is talking about is the Glory-Love of the nondual state (complete unity), which in the Advaita tradition is called Ananda (nondual bliss).

As Ashvin said, ascent to higher cognition doesn’t happen in the dual state but grows through and out of it. And you agree with this except for the fact that by growing out of the dual state you conceive that we simply leave it behind (even if temporarily). But in a world where everything is interconnected, nothing is really left behind. We learn that even on the physical plane. We thought that we could just leave our garbage behind until it started returning on our plates. Then we understand that what we grow out of becomes our responsibility.

With the soil that we prepared in the previous posts it should be easy to understand this. The higher beings are not some snobby aristocrats, abiding in the clouds. They are the actual structure of reality, they are the carrier waves on which our whole existence is modulated, and which determine the archetypal flow, the telos of our dreamscape. They are the forces of the Zodiac, the tones of the planetary spheres, the fourfold archetypal structure of our present aeon (four elements, four kingdoms, etc.) and so on.

Our ordinary consciousness is like a tasteless cacophony of the qualities of these beings. The Divine spark of our spirit indeed steers through that interference but the vast majority is something of which we have very little creative say (more in the soul body and much less towards the physical).

The key however is that as we ascend towards higher cognition we don’t simply leave the lower being behind. Instead, the lower being becomes the practical display into which we begin to recognize the reality of the higher beings. It’s as if our spiritual core concentrates, shrinks and loosens itself from the rigid sheaths and then we begin to differentiate the forces that work in our ordinary self but now from a higher perspective. For example, when we contemplate ourselves in the higher state and see how we cling to the old (and each one of us does that from time to time), we understand how certain Spirits that we can call Saturnine, are dominant in the interference (the Greeks called Saturn - Chronos, which is connected with Time and Cosmic Memory). When we’re engaged with practical matters, we can recognize the Mercurian Spirit. In the arts, as far as they are related primarily with the feeling element, we live in the Venusian Spirit. When we penetrate this interference with clear Intelligence and try to make the Spiritual currents into a Cosmic harmony that is conductive to the higher evolutionary flow, the Sun Spirit manifests.

The important thing is that we simply can’t discover any of this if we imagine that our Earthly existence is only a temporary illusion and we have to focus on the true reality on high. This makes as little sense as gaining intuition of Number without ever differentiating perceptions and counting them. The perceptions that we count are the soil into which the Idea of Number can incarnate and become inner intuitive reality. It’s the same with the higher beings. We can’t know them in isolation. We can only know them in the field where their activity manifests. And this activity manifests everywhere, in everything of sensory, soul and spiritual nature.

Thus by striking out some part of the spectrum of reality we deny the part of the spiritual world that is responsible for it. We make it impossible to make contact with the spiritual beings because we seek them in a cloud of fantasy. And this doesn't mean that we have to delve into evil. As you have said many times, our Stellar matrix proceeds from the highest beings. Self-seeking spirits only utilize the Divine creation, the Earth is not theirs, they only misuse it, just like we misuse it. This is another differentiation that we must be able to make - to cognize clearly the Divine works that have the development of the whole Cosmos in mind, from the modulation over it by self-seeking spirits.

Please understand that all this doesn’t mean that we have to restrict ourselves in the lower manifestations. It’s the same as with reading. Learning the letters doesn’t in the least mean that we’ll become locked in their forms. It’s quite the opposite. Only through the letters we can come into contact with the meaningful spirit that gives them order. If we reject the letters because we consider them too low level, we condemn ourselves to fantasize some higher meaning and wonder why it never becomes any clearer.

In short, we can only gain consciousness of the higher world if we can see how the manifested world takes form from the higher. Our human experience here is the living palette against which the higher orders of reality can be known. And I repeat the same thing Ashvin says – we’re not supposed to become locked into that palette and intellectually muse some theories of the higher worlds. The palette must be actively worked upon such that it becomes a better and better reflection of the Cosmic harmony. In that way we indeed lift from the dual being – which partially manifests because of the chaotic bouncing in the two-petal head organ – but then in these attuned organs (which are the structure of our consciousness) we begin to cognize how our being precipitates from the Cosmos, from the Beings. For example, in our head there’s a contracted fractal of the Moon sphere, where we live only in reflected light, bouncing between waxing and waning. In the pure heart, the Sun manifests and so on. Even though we speak of planets, in the spiritual experience these are living Spirits. The sensory planets are only mineralized shadows of the spiritual curvatures.

So if we’re to overcome the contradiction mentioned in the previous post, not only that we can’t discard the Earthly existence but it is only against it that our spirit can rise and gain consciousness of the Cosmic forces from which reality is weaved. Without this we remain in nebulous spiritual vacuum and we have no choice but vaguely anticipate that things will become clear after death.

[Stranger]

As Ashvin said, ascent to higher cognition doesn’t happen in the dual state but grows through and out of it. And you agree with this except for the fact that by growing out of the dual state you conceive that we simply leave it behind (even if temporarily). But in a world where everything is interconnected, nothing is really left behind. We learn that even on the physical plane. We thought that we could just leave our garbage behind until it started returning on our plates. Then we understand that what we grow out of becomes our responsibility.

I can compare the dual state with a baby crawling and nondual with walking. When a baby grows they start gradually walking. The walking mode is substantially different from crawling, but there will be a transitional period when the baby at times crawls (because crawling became their habitual pattern) and at times walks (because the baby knows how much more mobile they can be when walking), spending more and more time walking and less crawling. Eventually they just stop crawling, leaving this older mode of moving "behind". The same analogy applies to transition from dual to nondual mode.

So if we’re to overcome the contradiction mentioned in the previous post, not only that we can’t discard the Earthly existence but it is only against it that our spirit can rise and gain consciousness of the Cosmic forces from which reality is weaved. Without this we remain in nebulous spiritual vacuum and we have no choice but vaguely anticipate that things will become clear after death.

As we already discussed and I said many times, there is nothing wrong with the perceptual palette of the Earthly existence and it has nothing to do with the dual mode. So, yes, we do rise into the consciousness of the Cosmic forces through the perception of the field of their manifested activities. However, this is not a smooth linear process by just attuning our high cognition abilities to the ideations of those beings. There is something else needed in order to fully tune-in into their mode of consciousness. And here you deviated from my question and the point I made in the previous posts. We can indeed sense the ideations of Cosmic beings by high-cognitively perceiving the Earthly forms that they manifest. But we cannot share their state of consciousness and be fully in "constructive interference" with their state of consciousness, because they abide in the nondual mode of Oneness with the Divine, and we are not. As long as we perceive the world through a lens/veil of subject-object duality, we are in the dual mode of consciousness and out-of-tune with the nondual mode of the higher beings. And here the tuning process is not linear-smooth-continuous, we need to take a "quantum leap" and turn our perception of reality into a completely different mode where we do not perceive the world as a subject perceiving objects. These two modes do not "blend" with each other, we either see-sense an "apple" as an "object" perceived by "me-a-subject" or we do not, there cannot be both at the same time (that is why I said that these two modes are "orthogonal"). Using the crawling-walking analogy, a baby cannot walk and crawl at the same time. (Well, to be more precise, in the transitional state there is at times a weird mode of "double-vision" where the reality is both perceived dually and nondually as if from two different perspectives, yet these perspectives do not "blend" and remain incompatible). This mode of consciousness without subject-object split is not like a perception of the world as an undifferentiated smeared "soup", all the structures are fully and even more clearly perceived. This is the mode where the Divine Consciousness in every phenomenon experiences and recognizes/realizes itself without a split into subject and object. And so, every spiritual being, when in such mode, is automatically in Oneness with the Divine and cannot even imagine itself being in any way separate from the Divine. With all that being said, the nondual higher order beings still continue their spiritual activities manifesting their ideations that precipitate into percepts of the beings abiding in the Earth and other energetically-dense domains. But again, the Earth domain beings can only fully attune to and share the state of consciousness with the higher beings if they also share their nondual mode of Oneness with the Divine.

So, to be now a bit more esoteric here, we do not pick up the dualistic mode only when we incarnate in our human form, we got "infected" with it from Lucifer and his dualistic-mode angels. They are "dark" beings only in a sense that they do not see/experience the Divine Light of Self-knowing (because they are in the dualistic mode). Lucifer convinced us that we can become "like gods" by starting to perceive the world dualistically. For an immature soul only knowing the innocent nondual state (living in the nondual innocence in the garden of Eden) the dualistic state is indeed a strong temptation because there can be so many strong and emotional experiences and possible scenarios of inter-personal relations and life situations there that are simply not possible to experience in the nondual mode. The dualistic mode is indeed much more rich in its emotional and situational experiences. It can be compared with taking hallucinogenic drugs that put us into a mode of very intense inner hallucinatory experiences, and then we become addicted to them. And (surprise!) these dualistic drug-like experiences quite often turn into "bad trips" and entail with a lot of psychological suffering, there is no free lunch here. So, we fell for those thrilling dualistic experiences, and by doing that for so long we got so deeply immersed into this dualistic mode and addicted to it that we entirely lost our ability to perceive the reality nondualistically, the subject-object split became a perceptual pattern and habit for us deeply ingrained in our subconscious karmic perceptional mechanism. And once we did that, the whole egoic complex of preferences, desires, likes and dislikes, liking "good" objects or subjects and disliking "bad" ones started developing around this dualistic split (I explained already how it happened). This is what the myth of tasting the "apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil" in Eden means in its esoteric sense. Salvation for us means switching back to the nondual mode of the Divine Light of Self-knowing, which is the same as the Oneness with the Father of which Christ spoke. Once we accomplish that, we can continue happily living and further evolving in any elemental-level realms including the Earth as humans while seamlessly integrating with the nondual higher order beings, because now there would be no barrier for us to become attuned with their nondual state of consciousness.

[AshvinP]

So, to be now a bit more esoteric here, we do not pick up the dualistic mode only when we incarnate in our human form, we got "infected" with it from Lucifer and his dualistic-mode angels. They are "dark" beings only in a sense that they do not see/experience the Divine Light of Self-knowing (because they are in the dualistic mode). Lucifer convinced us that we can become "like gods" by starting to perceive the world dualistically.

I will say that it seems the key part of Cleric's post went unaddressed. It is often remarked how we go around in circles here, and perhaps that's because all the critical new points are missed or otherwise ignored for a recapitulation of many previous ones.

The important thing is that we simply can’t discover any of this if we imagine that our Earthly existence is only a temporary illusion and we have to focus on the true reality on high. This makes as little sense as gaining intuition of Number without ever differentiating perceptions and counting them. The perceptions that we count are the soil into which the Idea of Number can incarnate and become inner intuitive reality. It’s the same with the higher beings. We can’t know them in isolation. We can only know them in the field where their activity manifests. And this activity manifests everywhere, in everything of sensory, soul and spiritual nature.

We can take the ex. you raised. Into what exactly did Lucifer incarnate and insinuate his hosts, when did this happen in our stream of evolution, how has that impulse evolved and unfolded itself over the course of many epochs between the Fall and present day? What were the counter-measures intended by the progressive powers working for the health of the whole Cosmic organism and where are those found in our current experience? It's often unimagined and unsuspected how far these living details can go.

Through our living thinking which blossoms into higher cognition, we can more and more freely steer our intuitive becoming by getting detailed feedback of how the spriitual worlds incarnate into all that we desire, feel, think, and do; all that we pay attention to, perceive, consume, etc. I mentioned previously an analogy to a headache throbbing in our surface consciousness and a malignant growth in the unconscious depths. The latter is there working it's influences into our organism, whether we are aware of it or not. If we manage to incarnate that supra-sensory influence into our conscious soul life as pain, discomfort, etc., then we gain the choice whether and how to address it. Otherwise there is no choice at all and it will, at best, remain a blurry spiritual force which rules over us and conditions our becoming.

Some things will be beyond our capacity to address in our current incarnation, but we most assuredly greatly underestimate just how many constraints on our cognitive-perceptual capacity are pliable now and originate within our own soul-life. We have many inattentive gaps in our experience both spatially, as we often go about our day with a fixed downward gaze, lacking attention to the variety of living phenomenology we encounter across the perceptual spectrum, and temporally, in terms of pre-birth experiences, sleep experiences, our daily thought-distractions which divert our holistic reasoning. If we pay careful attention, there are many times we self-sabatoge just when we are beginning to reason our way to more holistic insights. It's like the intellect constantly grasps for an object and just when it's about to reach it, an impulse arrives to retract the inner hand in fear, anxiety, frustration, or desire for some other temptation.

All of this growing of living consciousness and feedback is integral to the path of higher cognition and attaining closer Unity with the Divine currents which make sense of our stream of becoming on Earth and across the threshold. It is not tangential to that journey in the least. All our intuitions and conclusions about the optimal path forward into the Cosmic realms hang on the increasing aperture of our consciousness of these living incarnational details. The higher we ascend, the more responsibility we have to continue unearthing and redeeming these living details, otherwise our Fall back into the lower nature is even steeper. We cannot stop on any step, no matter how high. "Not I, but Christ in me" is our living Ideal, progressively incarnated into our experience, and we should never mistake any stage of our becoming within the Earthly context for the full realization of that Ideal. We should strive to make our lives more and more perfect imitations of the sacrificial Christ nature which brings the Divine potential to concrete manifestation on Earth.