Jonathan Österman wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2023 12:02 am
Because to me, the above picture of
spiritual reality does not look right.
Not even close. There is something very wrong with it.
Lorenzo, if you participate in an authentic
Ayahuasca ceremony, then you will see it directly, for yourself, like everyone else has seen and agreed, that
spiritual reality looks like the following.
Jon, there's a simple misconception here. What you call 'spiritual reality' is falling from one experience of Maya into another.
Imagine a population where everyone is blindfolded since birth. Then one persons finds a way to remove the blindfold and is flooded with color experiences. Then he says: "Wow, I now see what reality is in truth!"
Alas, these experiences are just a part of the phenomenal spectrum that the person hasn't been familiar with. Similarly, if a person hears for the first time he may say "Wow, I now hear what reality is in truth!".
The problem is twofold. Not only that these new experiences are still Maya (what makes them Maya is our mistake to take them for the full reality, it's not that the sensations aren't real) but they are also inherently cacophonic. This is something well known in neuroscience. There are instances of people born blind who had sight restoring operations much later in life. However, as we know, when certain abilities are not developed on time, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to make up for them after the brain has lost its initial plasticity. For this reason, people with sight restoring operations in general can integrate the new sensations in a very limited way. Some are only aware of floods of colors, others experience shapes but can't interpret them, others can't grasp depth and so on.
The situation is similar in the case of psychedelics. The greatest folly is to suggest that someone has to take the pill and will be able to see reality. This works in the Matrix because both the virtual and the real world are of the same sensory nature - we just switch from one source of perceptions to another. But things are vastly different when we have to deal with the spiritual depth of the Cosmos.
The psychedelic state loosens the coupling between the physical and the etheric body. What we experience in this way however, is simply whatever our intellectual habits can make out of the subtler sensations. We experience soul imagery, we
feel that it bubbles on the waves of deeper strata of reality, yet our physical habits of cognition continuously collapse the images into visual-like patterns.
Just like the blind person after operation doesn't experience an orderly visual screen but only grasps whatever he can make out of the novel sensations, so the person who has jumped into the etheric streams only grasps whatever his sensory and intellectual capabilities can make out.
Taking the sensory spectrum as the full reality is Maya. But taking the disorganized etheric imagery for reality is Maya squared
2! After all, the first kind of Maya at least has been wisely refined in the course of evolution such that it can give us proper orientation within the implicit order of reality - even if this intuitive orientation is somewhat indirect. But taking the fragmented etheric spectrum for 'what spiritual reality is', is much more problematic because we completely blind ourselves for the fact that the experience has such a nature only because our spiritual organization is not yet musically attuned. In other words, we're like a person who after the operation sees some inexplicable color shapes and takes them for 'what reality is', while being completely ignorant that the experience is entirely an artifact of his brain lacking the proper structures to organize the stimuli.
It is true that when it comes to the development of our subtle organization, things certainly don't get easier with age. If we have lived a completely materialistic life until 50 and then decided to set on a path of inner development, obviously we can't expect the same results as someone who has started in their youth. But nevertheless, things are not as hopeless as they are in regards to our physical organization. As long as we have retained some plasticity and mobility of our thinking and feeling life, it is never too late to set on the path of inner transformation.
As a whole, both the sensory and the etheric spectrums will be Maya as long as we believe that we see 'what reality is' in them. But reality can be known only when we unite with the
spiritual intents that drive the metamorphoses of the phenomenal World state. In that sense, these spectrums are like a script, like symbolic glyphs that reflect the deeper purely ideal life of the spirit - the Word. We fall into Maya when we are mesmerized by the shapes and colors of the glyphs, while being completely oblivious that they are only the precipitation of the ideal life.
So your initial objection is that spiritual reality doesn't 'look like' the crude scheme. But this scheme doesn't aim to replicate the phenomenal shape of our conscious experience. It is meant as a
recipe to set our spiritual being in motion. It is the experience of these self-willed inner movements that the scheme invites us to engage in. In the degrees of freedom that we explore through these movements we awaken to a higher aspect of our spiritual being. And of course, these inner experiences don't 'look like' the scheme. Yet from within them the scheme makes perfect sense. Similarly, the visual shape of the word 'Love' doesn't look anything like the experience of Love. Yet for one who knows how to read the letters are a symbolic pointer to the experience.
