Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L

[AshvinP]

Just as there are objective criteria for healthy and diseased biological life forms, so there are healthy and pathological soul processes. The soul and spirit realm are not made of some abstract energies that we can manipulate with particle accelerators. They are made of ... well, soul and spirit 'material', in other words - environments out of which our thoughts, feelings, will precipitate. The attunement of the latter is not a matter of some mechanical polishing, a kind of soul plastic surgery we can get in exchange of money. It is what we, individually make of ourselves. As far as we are beings with biological life we partake in the Natural order. But with our soul and spirit we partake in the Moral order of the Cosmos. What the physical laws are for the natural world, so are the moral laws for the soul and spirit world. They are not some rigid laws carved in stone as some commandments. They are the living realms within which our spiritual nature flows. They look like laws of social behavior only from our limited Earthly perspective, because we're still as children that need to be told not to poo into and eat from the same plate - that's how unaware we are of the ways reality works. On high there are living spiritual processes that shape the structure of our evolutionary matrix. When we conduct our thoughts, feelings and will in ways incompatible with these strata of reality, we experience the consequences - pain, suffering, torment, hopelessness, fear, death. These are not arbitrary punishments invented by some harsh God. These are natural things, as it is natural than one will bleed to death if his throat is slit. They are the intrinsic dynamics of worlds that people want to know nothing about. Yet this doesn't excuse them from the consequences, in the same way that fire would not excuse those who didn't know its laws. Fire burns without discrimination and says to man "you'll know better next time". The same words are spoken to us from the spiritual world but people don't yet know better.

Cleric,

Is this "Moral order" and "moral laws" subject to evolutionary change? Might a certain right action be deemed morally commendable in one age and not another? If so, what ultimately makes something a morally praiseworthy act apart from aligning with the moral contours of the day? Does it make any sense to speak of a higher-higher morality by which the current "moral order state of play" can be evaluated? Are things evolving in a morally desirable direction?

Is this moral order the outworking of the whims of higher beings or the interplay of gazillion moral agents?

I hope this array of questions is enough the convey to gist of my musings.

Anthony,

Here's also a simple analogy to consider. A teacher will have a math class with students, who are ideally at about the same level of development, but in reality they rarely are. The teacher himself knows the entire lesson plan, the goal which is to be ideally reached by the students by the end of each class session and by the end of the class as a whole. But from the perspective of the children in class, each part of the plan is precipitating into their experience piecemeal. Certainly some of the kids will wonder 'what is the point of all this?', or be confused by how the material is presented. They will first go through arithmetic, then geometry, then algebra, then calculus, etc. It may be difficult for them to remember the math problems or figure out how the different subjects are interconnected. A good teacher would emphasize that the specific content is not so important to memorize but rather it is important to refine and perfect the skills of adding, subtracting, etc., i.e. the skill of mathematical thinking.

The Teachers of humanity are, at root, providing moral lesson plans which are rooted in the skills by which we can become our higher Self through many successive incarnations. Immorality enters when some students learn a skill so thoroughly, with such pride, that they refuse to move on to the next stage, instead desiring to usurp the role of the Teacher. It also enters when Teachers get so engrossed with imparting a specific skill, they want to continue teaching it even when the students are ready for a new skill and a new Teacher, or perhaps to start Teaching themselves. Of course this is overly simplified. There are many complex dynamics going on in these classrooms. The skills are not only related to consciousness and thinking, but the whole spectrum of corporeal life. Once the densest body of a being is perfected in its form by the Teachers - the physical body for the current human - it is given increasingly more responsibility for acquiring the skills necessary to contribute to the perfecting of its own organism, spirit-soul-body, and eventually entire ecologies of less developed organisms.

Most important is that the Teachers are not separate from us, but constitute our lower and higher Self, i.e. if they are 'backward' or 'progressive' teachers, respectively. From our current intellectual perspective, the lessons are unfolding in successive linear time. Yet every incarnation actually embeds all the previous ones and all the influences from 'future' lessons which exist only as 'potential' to be realized (ideally) from our perspective. The moral framework of this entire process only retains its integrity if we ourselves can become the Teachers who are working into our normal waking perspective as students. These vertical Time-integration dynamics really stretch the limits of the intellect. Even if we say we are always learning our lessons from our own 'future' Self, we still try to imagine this relationship in some sort of linear temporal terms, and then it loses much of its otherwise profound significance. This is why one of the most important lessons for the human students today is to learn to Love and have (reasoned) Faith in the higher powers who live within our own consciousness - our higher Self - who has already acquired the necessary skills needed to make sense of the holistic moral structure, in its complex evolutionary dynamics, and who alone can provide us with the living knowledge needed to hone our higher skills during corporeal life.