Stranger wrote: ↑Sat Feb 25, 2023 3:24 pm
Correct, this is the ideal. but it will never happen until we go through the complete transformative/metamorphic stage of the nondual realization and sacrifice not just some of our egoic preferences/desires, but the whole package of the dualistic perception and the ego-complex. St. Paul did not say "there is a little bit of "me" living in me, and a little bit of Christ living in me", but he said "not I anymore, but Christ lives in me". This is because we are still in the dualistic state and Christ is in nondual state. We will never integrate into a shared state of consciousness with him and the rest of nondual high-order beings until we ourselves transcend from dualistic into nondual state.
But there are two stages or ways to approach this ideal. One is to undertake a complete sacrifice and transcend into the full nondual realization of "not I anymore, but Christ lives in me" in this lifetime. This is quite an extreme undertaking and not for everyone. Or we can do it gradually over many lifetimes and postpone the complete transcendence into the nondual state for some indefinite time and in the meantime just go through a slow evolution and of making small sacrifices of our egoic tendencies until we become ready for the complete metamorphosis, which is still very good and surely better than doing nothing. In other words, Christ is in the "butterfly" spiritual state and we are still in the "worm" state. No matter how much the worm improves its structures and sacrifices its "wormic" tendencies, it can never become the butterfly unless it undergoes the metamorphic phase of chrysalis and transforms into a butterfly. "Butterfly" and "worm" is not about physical form, but about the spiritual state of the psyche)
I think it is getting clearer that in all cases we have to enter into the concrete details of oneness. Otherwise, when we try to place orthogonal demarcation lines, we very easily arrive at the conflicting situations, where we miss the concrete path of development because we imagine that it is enough to surrender our ego to the Christ in order to transcend the Earthly realm after death.
Let’s look at an example through which we can understand in much greater concreteness what the sacrifice of our human-scale personality really involves. Few posts ago you said that the path of spiritual-scientific development is too addicted to the dualistic self and can’t even conceive what it means for the self to be One with everything. Actually, it is precisely through entering into the concrete details that we can really appreciate that in its full significance.
The ancient Hindus knew very well that our temporal existence manifests through rhythmic metamorphoses. There are periods of manifestation, differentiation of the spiritual potential – called Manvantara – and periods of dissolution where the manifested reality sinks in a kind of Cosmic sleep – Pralaya. Of course, in the old times these things were known in a much more dreamlike consciousness, while today we have to understand in all lucidity how our thinking spirit is embedded within these rhythmic unfoldings.
The Hindus also knew that after our Solar environment passes through Pralaya, it will emerge once again yet in a different, more spiritual form. In esoteric science this future aeon is called Jupiter.
Now it is very interesting to trace what this reincarnation of our Solar system means for our individual evolutionary worldlines. If we believe that our souls are some fundamental units of being, we may believe that in the next aeon, after the Cosmic sleep, we’ll continue our soul journey in a similar way. And in certain sense this is true, yet with one major caveat.
Man in the next aeon will be a new being. As the Jupiter stage is re-created from the spiritual potential it is like the evolutionary journey is recapitulated. An interesting example of such recapitulation can be observed in the way the human embryo quickly passes through its evolutionary stages. In the early stages it is difficult to distinguish human embryo from fish embryo, then from amphibian, from mammalian (remember that we have a tail that is then reabsorbed). But while other animal forms stop at a certain stage, the human being continues to its human form.
On Jupiter man evolves once again to his fully conscious state but in a different environment. There is no rigid mineral world, reality is of Imaginative nature. But this new man is now at a different ‘scale’ so to speak. It is similar to what the Angelic beings are today.
Now the critical point, however, is that when we reach self-consciousness again at that stage, we’ll be able to remember the Earthly aeon but there’s something very peculiar. That new man won’t be able to say for example “In the Earthly aeon I went through this and this incarnation. In one particular incarnation I was called Eugene.” This is very significant. There’s no one-to-one ‘mapping’ between the future man in the next aeon and our present man-unit. Instead, the future man feels himself as if he was already present in the Earthly aeon but was not fully conscious. But the interesting thing is that that man lived in whole groups of human beings, very roughly analogously to the way our “I” lives in the group of cells of our body.
This is something very important and very little attention is given to these things in popular spirituality, where it’s often imagined that the soul-atoms are something eternal and that even very far into the future we’ll feel as the same soul-unit and we’ll be able to trace our personal incarnations.
The truth however is that this scale of soul-unit is specific to the Earthly aeon. These things are so interesting and so much can be understood even if we apply normal logic. Let’s try to see what all this means.
Practically, at this moment, everything we do, feel and think has significance not only for our Earthly aeon worldline. Instead, we’re co-creating the man of the future. This is a collective work. As a rough analogy, the different existences of different Earthly ensouled beings, form something like unique spiritual organs of the future man.
It is necessary that we conceive of this higher man, as something that exists even at this moment in its germinal beginnings. But more importantly, we have to conceive of that being as something independent from our human-scale sense of self. It penetrates our being, we share one essence, it secretly attracts our becoming, yet there’s no strict one-to-one correspondence between our sense of “I”-unit and that of the higher man. The reason is that this being lives in other souls too. We can’t simply say “I’m that higher being” because what about the other souls? If everyone claims that they are the higher being, a fight will ensue. For this reason, the proper attitude is to have clear consciousness that that being lives in its germinal beginnings and acts as attractor of our evolutionary worldline and at the same time we’re collectively responsible for that being because after Pralaya it will evolve out of the karma that we have collectively weaved.
There are many more things than can be said but I just wanted to point out this particular thing. I don’t think we have gone in the depth of these questions here on the forum before. It’s not even necessary to believe in this, nor does it require some very deep meditation. It’s enough to start by reflecting on such questions. As said, very much can be understood even by simply thinking about these things.
The reason I decided to go into this was to show that gaining deeper and more concrete understanding about these things not only doesn’t lock us into duality but in fact challenges our conception of a self in ways that no generalized idea of oneness can.
Why is this important? Because it helps us see the true magnitude of the work in which – even without knowing it – each one of us is involved. If we place all our focus on transcending duality, we’re completely oblivious about the fact that we secretly absolutize our Earth aeon soul atom. We completely neglect that our future being is weaved of our collective efforts. Our collective karma will grow into the future human-Angelic forms. When we meditate and reach glimpses of the higher perspective then we don’t feel as if we simply have transcended our dual self and can continue our worldline in the nondual worlds but in our expanding consciousness we cognize precisely the collective work that must be done together with our brothers and sisters.
It is obvious that a much greater degree of sacrifice is needed here. Denying our self in order to surrender into Christ is the easy part. It’s easy because we secretly preserve the scale of our soul. We still can look back and find one-to-one mapping between our transcendent state and the lives we have gone through. But working for our future selves requires a much greater degree of self-denial and humility, simply because we’re working not for our strictly own future form but for one into which the Spirit won’t be able to say “I was Eugene in the previous aeon” but will say “I lived together with Eugene, with Ashvin and many others. The virtues and qualities that we collectively cultivated are now the riverbed through which I flow.”
Thus we see that with deeper understanding we not simply satisfy some curiosity about how reality works but we also understand how interrelated things are and how we should fully consciously work in line with these developments.
