Eugene I wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 12:17 pm
Because we do have an enormous amount of data about the astral realm from yogi and Buddhist meditation evidences, from visions of mystics of all spiritual traditions, from NDE, OBE, regression therapy, psychics etc etc, and they typically non reproducible and contradict each other. To me such contradiction is not an evidence that they are wrong or illusory, but rather an evidence that the astral realm is very flexible and fluid with a lack of solid and reproducible structures, and that is too confirmed by most of those evidences and accounts. Natural science relies on the facts that are reproducible and independent on the observers circumstances. If you can show me the same spiritual realm fact confirmed by multiple people belonging to different cultures and religious backgrounds (if any), then we can reconsider.
The link I posted above to the NDE account is an example of this: it presents a very different perspective on the purpose of our incarnations on Earth. But of course you discard it because it does not align with your views. So we are here facing a "bias" problem: in this spiritual science you only accept facts that align with your paradigm and disregard the facts (as illusions, hallucinations or wrong interpretations) that do not align with your paradigm. But this is not how science works. But in reality both views may be equally right: some souls indeed come to Earth to pursue the "cognitive metamorphosis" just like you described, and other souls may come to Earth to experience limited forms of existence like the NDE account suggested, and yet other souls may come for entirely different purposes.
Many NDE accounts suggest that in the discarnate realm there are many "interest groups" that have different views on reality and different life goals and values. There indeed may be a group of souls that incarnate on Earth to go through the thinking metamorphosis process, and what you are writing in your essays may be entirely applicable to such group. But there are many other groups incarnating into humans and having the same body-mind structures but actually perusing very different goals and having very different interests and views. this is why some people strongly resonate to some religions, values or views (say, to Christianity), and other people resonate to very different ones - that is simply because they belong to different "interest groups" and they intuitively know their goals and values and resonate with religions of philosophies that align with them.
To what Ashvin said I would like to add something. The integration of our metamorphic perspective doesn't simply lead to another set of facts which contradict everything we have from the past. The new facts completely
explain all the previous experiences. I've already spoken about the reasons NDEs are so varied - because they are formatted through the etheric and physical bodies which are instrumental for the incarnate self. All the ancient Hindu wisdom, which was only much later written down in the Vedic literature, was attainted through a
different state of consciousness than what we can do today. At that time the higher worlds were revealed in dream-like imaginations. By dream-like I don't mean dim and vague but as something that simply imprints itself in the soul without any cognitive activity. For example, the chakras were well known at that time but they were experienced differently, they were shining into the soul but the "I" activity was not yet present as it is today. If the soul could reflect on itself at that time it would have to say something like "My environment, the chakras, fill me with content, they unfold my destiny to which I react with my sympathies and antipathies". Today we feel
within the chakras with our spiritual activity. We don't simply accept their shining passively but our cognitive activity
passes through them as through a complicated kaleidoscopic optical system, which not only shapes our spiritual experience but we are reciprocally active in the organs, we modify their structure. For example, our ability to think clearly, logically, consistently depends (among other things) on the structure of the larynx chakra. As we make effort to develop our thinking (and this effort is spiritual activity) we are actually changing the structure of the larynx organ. The more we feel our thinking to be not simply jigsaw pieces bumping into each other but actual transducing of spiritual activity that flows into and away towards us from the world of perceptions, the more the larynx organ assumes its proper structure. The development of this organ, even if we don't yet know it, is responsible for the living comprehension (which gradually becomes so clear to us that we practically
see it) of the depth axis within the metamorphic view. For example, if we are able to livingly experience our whole life in the sense of Ashvin's essays, as a gradual unfoldment from the infant state till today, as a kind of implosion and integration of time-being in a kind of a vortex, our larynx organ is already assuming its proper orientation. Of course this is only one aspect of it. There are so many things that must be in place at the same time.
I'm saying the above to point attention to the fact that everything that we have as spiritual lore of the past we must rediscover today, as if from 'the other side', as if 'inverted'. Before, everything flew towards humans by Grace as Cosmic images towards their souls. Today we attain again to these images but from their cognitive perspective. Before we beheld things as a soul world, Moon reflection, today we align with the rays of the Sun that produced the images in the first place. This has great repercussions for the way everything is being experienced and superficially it seems like there's contradiction. But the contradiction is only at face value. When things are understood properly (and they
can be understood with nothing but unprejudiced thinking) not only that the contradiction is resolved but we can also understand exactly why the experiences took the form they did in the past.
I would like to also mention a common prejudice about the nature of objectivity of the higher worlds. Why can we speak about objective physical world? Because we are endowed by Nature with very consistently and similarly working sensory organs. We take that for granted but it is rarely reflected on the fact that if everyone's sense organs operated differently we could never even reach the agreement on objective sensory world. The prejudice that I talk about is that it's often imagined that the experiences in the higher realms present us some objective world that everyone should see in the same way. This is one of the most stubborn ideas and one of the greatest hinderances to spirituality as a whole. It results from the unconscious transposition of our Earthly state into the supposed spiritual world. We imagine that we are a 'unit' there that moves through that world and perceives the beings and environment. But this is not the case. Our 'unit' is gone together with the physical body. What remains is our spiritual organism which is spread out within the spheres. What we perceive of our environment is directly related to the degree we have developed the correct ideas in our Earthly life. Everyone experiences those things that have relation to their destiny (karma). The more we took interest about the higher worlds while in the body, the more now we are able to orient ourselves. So we see that what we see in the spiritual world is directly related to the development of our spiritual organization. It's like we are to develop our physical sight from scratch. Everyone will see differently until the organs are perfected. How do we know that they are perfected? By testing everything against the whole life. If we see a wall and can pass through it or we don't see a wall but bump into it, obviously there's work to be done on the eye. It's the same with spiritual perception. It's a constant process of refinement and testing.
The accusations for universalism are founded on prejudice. There are two ways to come to terms with the unity of the World. One is to accept everything as it is, as an amalgamation, where everything is fine the way it is. Ultimately this leads to some kind of deconstructivism. The other way is to penetrate into the actual spiritual organism that binds everything together. The reason that this is being seen as dictatorship is because from within the deconstructed perspective it looks like one deconstructed perspective tries to spread its view over all other. This probably fits well for the ambitions of the Church in the past centuries but has nothing to do with what we're speaking of here. We're interested in the true depth from which the deconstructed interest groups can be perceived and their origins explained. The only possible objection to this is that such a deep point of view is not possible, that the interest groups/individuals are the fundamental 'atoms' of the spiritual world and the One consciousness is only a neutral container for them, similarly to the way physical space is considered the container for particles. Clearly, on the purely abstract level, it's not possible to go beyond this conflict. It's one's word against another's. The only thing I can mention again is that the word derived from the higher worlds gives logical explanation for the conflicts between the deconstructed groups. It also gives the means and methods for their resolution and the possibility for the development of the individual's spiritual potential to the fullest, in complete freedom. Whoever wants to oppose these findings can do nothing more but proclaim them to be nothing more than a spiritual communistic ideology (clearly, all explanations about individual freedom and realization of human potential to the fullest have no power to show that such a view has no relation to the facts). Higher knowledge doesn't aim to destroy the interest groups, it just has the duty to indicate how they can make themselves compatible with the higher rhythms of Cosmic development. If nothing changes, shamanism will meet more and more only the inferior spirits. Instead of healing, all kinds of psychic deviations will develop and no one will know why. If nothing changes, nondual traditions will miss more and more the essential spiritual core of the human being. The outer world will fall more and more into decadence and the nondualist will explain this with the Kali Yuga, that he has to simply stay focused and pass through the incarnate dream and so on. There will be larger and larger disconnect between the interests of the souls and the happenings in the outer world, which results in a general mood of apathy. Things are even more clear for materialism, where even at this time, the life dispersed into the senses already leads to all kinds of nervous diseases (even though medicine is still a long way from spotting the connection). So it's not about spreading one ideology over everything else but elucidating the
facts. Politics will continue, science will continue, arts will continue, economics will continue but everything will have to receive the light of the Spirit. The Divine must find its way into every expression of life. The ideas that spiritual life and Earthly happenings are strictly separate things or that spiritual life is the Earthly life, will be one of the greatest hinderances for evolution.
