Anthony66 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 2:55 pm
Thanks Cleric. I certainly plan to try, as time permits over the forthcoming weeks, to further understand the list Ashvin provided .
I tried your: "I think the speech" exercise but found myself gravitating to the "I" and not being able to locate it. This is likely due to my Buddhist inspired meditation practices where one is challenged to locate the I/self only to discover it to be a search in vain.
Yeah, this exercise probably runs completely counter to what you've become accustomed to with Buddhist practices. In the latter we really view the activity of the "I" and the soul contents related to it, as a kind of electron-positron pair. As long as they are active, it is like hysteresis process in physics or dog chasing its tail. The solution seems to be to allow the pair to blissfully annihilate back into the quantum foam. I completely understand that exercises in the spiritual scientific sense, where the emphasis is on fully self-conscious, focused spiritual activity, are viewed from the Buddhist perspective as the most basic mistake. The Buddhist looks with compassion on the person, realizing that he willfully perpetuates the electron-positron dance, never realizing that they must annihilate.
This seems as one of those forever unresolvable conflicts. Yet it is resolvable but through inner experience. Outer words can sketch the path to the experience but it can only be walked through the good will of the individual.
Let me approach it thus (one of the possible way to approach the issue). When the Buddhist achieves the annihilation, the world doesn't end. It's only that there's no longer doer and things done. It's only pure existence. Yet existence that doesn't end, we don't eject from the body, leave it behind and enter Nirvana. We're still on Earth. Thus, by necessity one must assume that true annihilation will occur only after physical death.
Now we reach a point where it is really up to the essential character of the individual person, if he'll feel satisfied at that stage. For me, for example, long before I got at all involved with spirituality, there was something missing in that picture. One overcomes the personality in this way, annihilates the ego, but for me there was a dangling question: what's the nature of the World? Who/what is responsible for the stars, the planets, rocks, plants, animals. Why we have two legs and two arms? Why not four or six? Why not two heads? None of this receives any answer in Buddhism or any other school of mysticism.
Here I can refer you to Ashvin's
latest essay where he deals with
polarities. It's not necessary here to consider the 3D cross, the 2D will work. Let's imagine the horizontal bar. We can picture that as the electron-positron pair that when perfectly balanced are annihilated. But as we saw, the World doesn't end with this. This is where Western esoterism continues further and recognizes the
vertical bar. Even though the horizontal is in balance there's still a possibility to work along the vertical axis, as long as we realize that there's still polarity there - spiritual activity and receptivity, masculine and feminine. When consciousness grows along the vertical axis we then recognize also what the mystic state really is. It's a specific configuration of our head and larynx soul organs (chakras). The head organ (the two petal lotus, which unsurprisingly has something to do with the two brain hemispheres) is really in perfect balance (the horizontal bar). Yet our Spirit can still be active along the vertical axis, through the higher forms of consciousness.
Here I would like to say that the above is in no way a critique of Gautama Buddha. The Buddha impulse was completely evolutionary at its time. Cognition along the vertical became possible only after the Christ impulse.
So it is things like these that we must consider and really investigate how they work upon our soul. Intellectual attempts to decide which is 'right' don't lead very far. We must really look into ourselves and determine if we want to go towards the depths of reality, even though this will paint a quite different picture, where we actually have creative responsibilities towards the Whole.
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 2:55 pm
I wonder if I'm cut out for the Steiner style meditations given I think I suffer from aphantasia. Perhaps I can develop the ability to visualize over time.
Your 'suffering' from aphantasia can also be your
greatest advantage. Actually it might be more difficult for someone with very vivid imagination to grasp the essentials of the spiritual scientific meditation. The thing is that people want to 'see' things. They expect that higher worlds press into their souls, similarly to the way visual perceptions do, as something that forces itself upon us. Yet this is not how true higher cognition is developed. And also why people with very vivid imagination (unless they grasp properly the principles of spiritual training) can easily become mere fantasts, where they simply contemplate the vivid shapes that proceed from them (even it not in a fully conscious way).
You can try to draw simple geometric forms in thought. If you don't see visually anything it is in a sense even easier for you! Because the focus should be precisely on the thought-experience itself. It's important to feel that you are moving your thought in the lines of the geometric shape and experience the meaning of what you do. Any visual thought-perception that may accompany this activity is not at all that important.
The goal of this type of development is that gradually we begin to know much more intimately our thinking activity. We find out that we can move thinking in ways that we have never suspected before, and not only hear verbal thoughts. Higher seeing is developed as a result of thinking becoming something altogether different. Imagine an octopus that can mimic shapes and colors. In certain sense our thinking transforms from simple spitting of sequential words into a fluid-like activity which expands, assumes shapes, dynamics, etc. We don't do that as unrestricted fantasy. It's much more like doing mathematics, where this fluid activity is interested into exploring the constraints, forces, processes and beings of reality. We experience these not as something external that we perceive but directly through the way they impress into our thinking. All this is experienced as diversification and increase in resolution in the very fabric of thought. Since thought is immediate meaning, as this meaning becomes more and more comprehensive it becomes a kind of pictorial perception. Except that it is not like a visionary state (for example psychedelics), where we see stuff and must interpret them with the intellect but what we see is an immediate reflection of the higher order meaning that we experience in our transfigured thinking.
So don't worry. Colors and forms will most definitely come but that should happen as the result of diversifying and increasing in resolution, texture of thinking.
As far as the "I" - no, you will never see it, just as the "eye" never sees itself. What I see is only what I bring forth into existence. But I know myself precisely because I live in the activity that brings forth the thoughts. So the goal of the "I think the speech" exercise is not to see ourselves from the outside but to experience ourselves as the active spiritual force which utters the thoughts. Only in the experience of this force we can know ourselves as an "I". As you say, if we find ourselves trying to find the "I", then we should simply realize that the real "I" is the being that is "trying to find the 'I'". We can only
be that being but not step outside of it and contemplate it.
