Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Sep 18, 2021 8:28 am
And still this
Self-inquiry ultimately reveals only irreducible, uncaused Mind that conceives of none other than Mind being enslaved in some oubliette of Mind-conceived beliefs. What else stands in the way of its freedom, other than such a belief? And
Whose belief is it which once dispelled is rendered as this morning's mist dissipating in the sunrise? And yet Mind conceives anew, as it immanently, imperatively must, but it's no longer a belief in the spell of some locked in slave or overlord master segregated apart from Mind. That Mind-movie is over. Listen, here and now, I-amness is a dove singing at dawn ... No wonder that's a symbol of freedom ... Thou art That.
Here is the point when we must distinguish the
general truth from the
concrete truths. (PS: I now see that Ashvin already addressed this with his amendment metaphor). The Realization is a general truth. If we take this truth with our intellect and begin to apply it all over the World Content we inevitably arrive at misleading ideas. One of the misleading ideas is that our human consciousness is already of the
exact same general form as the Divine Mind. This is what I tried to illustrate with the picture with the sphere and the eye at the periphery. When we say
"Mind being enslaved in some oubliette of Mind-conceived beliefs" we
unlawfully extend something which is purely human into the higher worlds. We practically anthropomorphize the Divine Mind. This makes it look as if the Higher Mind summons imaginary pictures and at some point confuses them for reality and becomes trapped by them. As a matter of fact, man is the only being that possesses what we call fantasy. There are so many things that can be said about this. In Imaginative consciousness, which is the normal state for the beings in the rank of Angels, there's no 'mind' that has thoughts, fantasies, beliefs
about 'reality'. Consciousness
is the reality. In other types of evolution it could have been similar for us too. We would evolve very gradually by fusing the
correct ideas with the World Content. But in our particular scenario the imaginative side has been allowed to inflate and decouple from the given perceptual content, allowing for the possibility of
error. This inflated soul space gives us the feeling of having personal mind, personal fantasies. Fantasy is our ability to hold mental pictures which have nothing to do with the grand order of things. The Angels don't have such personal fantasies. The contents of their consciousness is the
objective Cosmic Imaginative. If we are to relate this in some way to our human state we can say that
correct or
good conscious content for the Angel is like a flourishing growth process, an actual symphony, expanding and reverberating in Cosmic space. It's not a free floating mental model of reality, it is the Imaginative revelation of reality itself. Conversely,
erroneous or
evil content is destructive process where reality decays and falls apart. This is in very broad lines, of course. Obviously even within Angelic consciousness we have rhythms of these processes, yet there's overall trend towards harmony and integration.
If we grasp this, we already understand how misleading it is to speak of the Higher Mind holding
beliefs that it falls for. The most misleading part is that these beliefs are
within the sphere of our consciousness (again the blue sphere). In our human experience there are indeed such beliefs which erroneously lock ourselves in certain loops of consciousness. There are plenty of examples, for instance all kinds of irrational fears which completely rule our conscious conduct. In these cases it is really possible to overcome the fearful belief and it is like we've walked out of an oubliette, as you say. In fact, a large portion of the ideas the keep us locked within the materialistic sensory spectrum are precisely of this character. They are interlocked constellations of ideas, which are further supported with the desires that are dependent on these ideas. This first half of PoF leads the reader precisely outside these kinds of oubliettes. But we go too far if we imagine, for example, that our body is also such kind of belief, that the Mind at some point imagined a body and became so engrossed in it that it forgot how it got there. Such views are very significant obstacles for true knowledge. We simply need to pay attention to what we are doing with our thinking. We should be perfectly clear that when we imagine that the body and everything else are just beliefs of the Higher Mind, we are simply
extrapolating our anthropomorphic experience. We implicitly
assume the position of the blue sphere. We assume that we already are the Divine Mind and we simply need to deidentify with the illusionary beliefs.
It is true that with the Realization we come to know that we share the same essence with the One - this is the
general truth. But in order to know how to relate from our human perspective towards the One, we need other
concrete truths. In order to cut to the core I'll say directly - we can never find our relation to the Higher Self unless we discover the
true nature of prayer. This immediately rises questions like "Prayer? To whom? I am That. This will be like praying to myself. It makes no sense!" It will make sense when we begin to approach the
reality of what lies beyond our
current conscious perspective. It makes no sense only if we imagine that we are the eye at the periphery and all reality consists only of beliefs
in front of us. To get a proper feel of the higher worlds we need to come to the point of realizing that there's a very specific kind of
powerlessness in us. This realization should be reached fully lucidly and clearly, it is a kind of impossibility, such as adding zeros and expecting to get one. If we don't arrive at this lucid realization, we'll still feel it subconsciously, just like we feel that no matter what we do we can't undo the belief of a physical body, but we believe that the power is already in us and we just need some more time (usually after death) to apply it. This is the same archetypal hard problem as everything else. Unfortunately it is even more elusive than the hard problem of consciousness. People today can't see how they create for themselves the latter, what's left for the much finer hard problem of human and higher consciousness.
When we arrive at this finer realization we already know that we can never build the higher consciousness out of the contents (or with deidentifying with the contents) of ordinary consciousness. We need to find the soul disposition which is
polar to that which we use in order to deal with the contents of ordinary consciousness (and eventual deideintifying with them). We can only hint at this polar soul disposition when we fill ourselves with humility, devotion, mood of prayer. The Hermetic principle holds "As above, so below; as below, so above." The thing is that, mainly because of our materialistic age, we don't really know what 'above' means. As long as we stand as Realized Eye at the periphery of the Mind, everything is below, no matter if we speak of conscious contents or beliefs that we have locked into. To understand the above we need to understand (the lucid realization) that there's something that can never be discovered as contents of consciousness and manipulation of beliefs. This something can only come from above. And we can only find that something through the mentioned polar soul disposition. In other age than ours, it would be very strange that we even need to explain these things. Just as we need both poles in electricity to do anything useful, so we need the two soul dispositions in order to stand up on our both legs as true human beings within reality.
I'm not particular fan of Alex Gray (for reasons that will take us too far to elaborate) but I'm nevertheless happy for the kind of art he works on. It already shows a positive tendency which will hopefully spiritualize art once again. True art has always been the natural physical expression of the world of soul and spirit. Again we owe it to the centuries leading to materialism that art has become purely means for amusement of the senses.
In our age art must become even more - it must become also a tool for education, for the expression of higher truths.
(There's description of the painting
here)
Although the painting depicts things in somewhat different sense that what I've drawn, it's still indicative that the Guardian Angel stands
behind the painter's head and sees
through the human consciousness. We can never find the the Angel's consciousness
within our mind sphere, no matter how many false beliefs we dismantle. Even when we dismantle all conscious contents and enter Adur's nothingness or Ramana's pure consciousness, the Angle's consciousness will
still be behind our back. We can only experience the Angel's perspective if we let it flow in us from
above. This can only be achieved through the polar soul disposition. We either open up in humility and prayer to the Angel and follow how it stirs our astral body in Imaginative consciousness, or we do that on even deeper level and we live together with the Angel's Cosmic Thoughts as they pass through us in Inspirative consciousness, or we surrender our Earthly humanity to the greatest extent and merge with the "I" perspective of the Angel in Intuitive consciousness.