AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 1:36 pm
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 12:21 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Apr 07, 2023 7:25 pm
Anthony,
I think part of the issue here is that the seismic shift in perspective through the higher cognitive path is also vastly under-appreciated. Perhaps it is conceived like reaching up towards Oneness but bouncing back into all sorts of differentiated structures on the way there. But as Cleric has mentioned and illustrated many times, the 'non-dual awakening' is the very
beginning of the higher cognitive path. Imagine you step outside and see the flowers, the trees, the birds, the air irradiated by light, the clouds, the sky, the Sun, and you immediately have a concrete sense of how a symphony of elemental and archetypal spiritual activity has temporally woven this unique holistic perspective through the evolving life of your body, soul and spirit. It is like the 'Eureka' moments we normally have when contemplating something except a few orders of magnitude more powerful, experienced and understood from the inside-out. We have a living, textured sense of where it all came from, where it is heading, why, and what our concrete role is in fulfilling the interweaving intents. I myself am relying on such a crude description from lack of experience and lack of capacity to translate the little experience I have into 'intellectual grunts' on the keyboard, but the overall point is that these are completely unimagined and unsuspected experiences from the intellectual perspective.
I think Cleric has given us very concrete reasoning in the TCT essays and elsewhere why the intellectual cognitive perspective is
maintained on the path of 'nondual awakening' which does not understand its concentrated thought-life as the tip of a temporally extended cascade of inner desires, preferences, interests, character, temperament, familial and cultural context, gender context, etc. It simply views examining and working to trace those influences as beneath its purview, an unnecessary frolic in the 'dual world'. And we already know what sort of work needs to be done due to our familiarity with life and learning new skills - we need to study hard with impeccable dispassionate reasoning, to be persistent, patient, dedicated, to remain wondrous, open and, yes, even deferential to the wisdom of those who have already learned the skills. There is perhaps nothing more resisted by the modern mystics than that last one - just look at the title of this thread. These things go without saying if we are trying to learn how to fly a rocket into space, but are viewed as tyrannical if we are trying to learn to responsibly steer our thinking activity through the inner worlds which are the true Cosmic worlds.
Without that work, the genuine spirit worlds simply don't open to us - we can't unveil the living
tones and speech of differentiated beings within what we experience to be the 'infinite space of awareness'. So where exactly is the seismic shift in perspective if the living and evolving processes of the Earth and Cosmos in which we are embedded are not further elucidated? Does this shift in perspective feedback into and inform the art of healing, the pursuit of science, the teaching of children, or anything similar? All these take on new artistic depths of practical meaning through higher cognitive research in ways we normally can't fathom. So I think the question is, what does it actually mean to 'shift in perspective'? If it simply means we experience new and profound
personal feelings of peace, connectedness, compassion, etc., then yes sure many paths will lead us there. But if it means we begin to understand the destinies of individuals, nations, cultures, and kingdoms, and how to optimally steer our own spiritual stream of becoming within those contexts with ever-greater freedom, then we need to enliven, ennoble, and expand our cognition.
Your response here is illustrative of much of the issue I see at play here in terms of moving the conversation forward. Rather than steel-manning or demonstrating a familiarity with non-dual experience, the virtues of SS path are focused on. My critique here is not demean SS, rather to try to draw out that which I think has not been fully addressed. I'm at a disadvantage here because of my lack of non-dual or SS experiential knowledge. But I'm familiar enough with the non-dual literature and accounts to recognize the writing of someone who has attained to a non-dual state.
A fundamental shift in identity, self-validation, transcendence, ineffability, bliss (ananda), are some of the marks. Do you know any of this?
I appeal for a greater focus on the connection between the non-dual state and the imaginative/inspirative/intuitive states rather than a tit-for-tat that has characterized a lot of the discussion lately. I know Cleric has entered this territory from time to time.
The best way for me to address your appeal is to simply point to Cleric's posts already illustrating that connection, or to wait for him to provide yet another illustration, as he is always more than willing to do.
In the meantime, I will address this question in bold. A lot of implicit things are wrapped up in there.
1) If you lack non-dual or SS experiential knowledge, then what exactly do all those terms mean to you? How do you know whether you are imagining them to be something completely different than what is actually experienced in the non-dual state?
2) Why is it important to experience 'transcendence, ineffability, bliss' for our spiritual growth which progressively integrates us with humanity as a whole? If we only have one single incarnation before we return to a spiritual soup, then we can reasonably say those things are critical to experience while on Earth, but if our individuated lawful becoming continues after death and we work consciously in concert with the hierarchies to advance our evolution and that of the Earthly kingdoms as a whole, and our self-consciousness is rooted in what purely personal enrichments we were willing to
sacrifice during our incarnation, then those experiences could be positively counterproductive to spiritual evolution.
3) How do these experiences feedback into and inform the World and its evolution?
As said often before, the nondual state - which was realized many thousands of years ago -
must be experienced on the path to higher cognition - which was made possible only in the last 150 years. But for the latter to actually unfold, the former must be
sacrificed after it has been attained. These are not parallel paths of approaching to the higher worlds - modern initiation is an evolutionary metamorphosis of the nondual state which adapts to our modern body-soul-spirit constitution, where the "I" is fully awake within the intellectual thinking force. We need to get a concrete sense of the depth we are speaking of here. If we only speak of these things in horizontal abstractions, it will never dawn on us why the higher cognitive path understands and embeds the nondual state, advancing beyond it.
For ex., with respect to #3, the nondual practitioner might say that the experiences give us a sense of love, compassion, etc. for our fellow humans because we know that we are all One. Therefore we are more willing to donate our money to charities, spend some time in a soup kitchen, help an old lady across the street. I am really not trying to demean such outward gestures - they are indeed important. But once we cognitively enter the inner depth of the outer world and our soul-life, the degrees of freedom through which our spiritual activity can positively (or negatively) contribute to the World Process expand greatly. For ex. consider the following:
Steiner wrote:Let us take a particular case: the Mongolian onslaughts of the Middle Ages, when the Mongols came into conflict with the Europeans, spreading among them fear and alarm. Such fear and such alarm are then present in the peoples in question. When one looks at these attacking hordes, of which the Mongolians are the last, placing oneself in the mood of all these mediaeval peoples, one sees how the desperation of the last branches of the Fourth Root-Race and the fear and alarm engendered in the Europeans created spiritual forms. If such an onslaught were to be met with courage and love, then the putrefying substance would be dissolved. But fear, hate and alarm conserve such decaying forms and these provide a source of nourishment for beings such as bacilli. Later they incarnate in those material forms suitable for such an incarnation. Thus the decaying substances embedded themselves in the fear and alarm of the European peoples as seeds of decay. These are minute living beings. In this way arose the mediaeval disease, leprosy. It arose out of the decaying substance of the declining Mongolian peoples.
What then is the origin of those disturbers of human physical nature? They come from earlier spiritual causes, from sinfulness. This is Karma as it manifests in national communities. From this you can estimate how the moral life of a nation conditions the external life of the future. It lies in the power of a nation to care for its physical future through a corresponding moral life in the present.
If we never enter into these details and confirm their validity through higher cognitive practice, then we simply have no idea what sorts of astral forms we are always creating through our spiritual activity. Every thought, feeling, desire, and deed produces such forms and, when this process remains entirely subconscious, we naturally produce all sorts of contradictory and disharmonious forms. At the level of communities and nations, that lack of self-awareness of the depths at which our spiritual activity functions can lead to disastrous consequences, as the astral forms later condense into physical incarnations. Of course a certain amount of higher cognitive development is necessary before we are even able to discern the logical coherence of what is written above - generally it will be written off as fantastical nonsense when we remain with the horizontal intellect unaware of the depths. Most nondual practitioners will write these things off or ignore them precisely for that reason. I am not mentioning this to tout the virtues of SS, but to point to why the higher cognitive path is venturing into the depths of the soul-spirit worlds while nondual practice, as penetrating as it was thousands of years ago, now only remains swimming near the surface. The ignorance of the depths leads to inner dispositions and modes of be-ing which are counterproductive to the spiritual aims which modern man needs to fulfill for his continued evolution and that of the Earth as a whole living organism, whose members need to function in more and more harmonious rhythms.
