Hedge90 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:43 pm
Actually Cleric this explanation got me. So far I - and forgive me but I must say - wasn't entirely sure that you really did understand what non-dual peak experiences mean. This is a clear-cut and logical explanation, and it's one that I myself thought about, albeit without the empirical basis to support it. My whole anxiety regarding non-dual teachings is that they claim to get back to the foundation of reality, yet they are UNABLE TO EXPLAIN IT. And as I said in the OP, most of my anxiety stems from the seeming impossibility to find a comprehensible basis based on which you can interpret reality.
Hedge, you can actually consider yourself blessed for the kind of anxiety you experience. As strange as it may sound, it is thousand times better that you have it, rather than being completely satisfied with some general principle of non-dual consciousness. There's simply something deep in you which knows that there's more to the whole story and it tries to keep you
awake.
These things can be very well understood as long as one considers seriously that humanity goes through evolutionary process. If we're attentive we'll easily feel that religious life for our ancestors has been something quite different from what it is for contemporary man. The religious life gave the spiritual flesh and blood of human beings. This is difficult for modern man to imagine, but religious life gave men a feeling of what they are.
This was gradually changing in the course of development. It becomes quite obvious towards the end of the Middle Ages and onwards, especially after the scientific revolution sparked by Newton. Gradually the intellectual ego has been growing more and more emancipated from its environment. The age of materialism would have never been possible if the intellectual self had not achieved relative independence from its environment.
What exactly this independence consists of? Once again - modern man needs certain effort to grasp these things because a lot is taken for granted and we imagine that humans have
always felt their inner being in the way we do today. The more man learned to live in thoughts, the more this thinking framework was giving independent support for the "I".
In former times man felt supported by the gods, he felt flowing in them. Modern man feels he's supported by the physical world (the body in particular). For man of the past, the gods where everywhere behind world phenomena. Today we imagine it like if ancient man said "I see world of matter around me but I'll explain it by imagining some supernatural beings behind the appearances". This only shows how biased we are today. The ancients didn't see 'matter', just as we don't see 'matter'. We see colors - we're seeing spiritual phenomena. The experience of color is spiritual phenomenon. It's just that we managed to convince ourselves that behind the spiritual phenomena there's lifeless world of particles and forces. The ancients didn't suffer from such prejudices. They were much more objective by recognizing that they are spiritual beings and that other beings work within the sensory appearances.
For this reason, religion for the ancients was something which gave them their humanness. It was not a set of dogmas that they patched over their materialistic consciousness. It was the very structure of their consciousness. To make a comparison, to take away the religious life of the ancients, would be like taking away the feeling for physical world for modern man - one would remain as if in vacuum, so to speak. Without religion, ancient man would immediately sink into animalism. His consciousness would degenerate into dim instinctive life of feeding and reproducing. There would be no trace of consciousness about the fact that man is having life in enigmatic Cosmos.
Yet things were gradually changing and the thinking ego was becoming more and more self-supporting. From that standpoint we begin to feel as independent thinking self and the religions of old feel only like different clothes we put. In a way, our thinking core is above the religious dogma. The beliefs and rituals are only adornments that we attach to our thinking self.
This should be readily felt by anyone in our current age. Most people today have sufficiently developed thinking egos that even if they feel attached to some religion, they still feel that it is simply their choice, it's the religious garments they have chosen to clothe their ego in. In other words, with some effort (even if it feels deeply unsympathetic) one can imagine being clothed in another religion and there would still be a small spark of the thinking self which would remain the same. The "I" could say "Even though I switch religions, my essential being is still the same. I'm still the same "I"."
This in itself raises many questions - if religious truths are only clothes that we can easily exchange, then how can we ever know which or if any one is true?
The nondual teachings have found interesting solution to the problem. To a large extent it is progressive solution because it really pinpoints a valid point of attack. The logic is that maybe the truth is not in any one religious clothing which embellish the thinking self, but that the thinking self itself must be transcended. And in certain respect this is a very good approach because it recognizes a direction which the religions of old didn't yet have to consider. The nondual teachings say "It's not about which religious garment is the right one. It's about recognizing the thinking self which erroneously seeks the truth in the outer shells. Only if we step back from this desire to identify truth with some particular form, we'll find the peaceful expansion of the spotless mind."
This is good indeed. It really goes 'meta' about the old instinctive religious life. But today we need to go even more 'meta' about it. The solution of the nondual teachings is to put away the thinking self, because with its constant questioning it causes only trouble. But in this way a kind of upper boundary of the Earthly human state was formed. The folding of the intellect indeed gives us the feeling of being above any concrete form. That's why these experiences are so powerful. We really cast off various shells of rigid intellectual and feeling forms. We feel free. Yet by preoccupying with casting off any hint of spiritual
activity, the practitioner also precludes any possibility to experience higher forms of spiritual activity. Not simply purer awareness and 'experiencing' but actual first-person activity.
This is the critical point today, as I wrote in the post to Mike above. As long as the nondualist considers any form of spiritual activity which seems to emanate from a subjective center, as belonging to the world of duality, he precludes any possibility for first-person creative consciousness above the boundary of the folded intellect.
It is a very good sign that people feel anxiety at the prospect that individual spiritual activity ceases together with the folding of the intellect. This protects the soul from falling asleep at the threshold of death and believing that whatever happens can be experienced only after the loss of the physical body.
Today the questioning of the thinking self should resume, although not in the old way. The intellect should ask "What is it that works in me, in my depths, of which my intellectual thoughts are only the surface precipitation?" It's quite obvious that the answer to this question shouldn't not be sought in the abstract way today's science and philosophy do. Whatever answer we receive in this old way, would be just a handful of words, which will continue to float on the surface. We need answers which are at the same time practical methods for inner transformation. The answer should come not as dry intellectual scheme, but as phenomenological description of the actual way our spiritual experience changes, as we seek to awaken to the deeper layers of being.
I'll later try to write something more about this in response to Anthony.