Re: Cleric's Responses to Mystical Metaphysics (or How to Make a Logical Argument)
Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2021 9:20 pm
Lou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:25 pmInteresting that you see down-to-earth as an Utopian projection. With respect, I confess that a view that rejects the possibility of an abundant reciprocity seems as a rather dismal science to me. But, yes, indigenous peoples also know the likely failures at the level of the individual soul, which is precisely why they put a lot of energy into teaching better ways.AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 5:10 pmLou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:48 pm
Yes, your bolded comments seem an accurate characterization of the axial religions/civilizations, which emerged in biomes that were transitioning from a fruitful natural abundance into scarcities brought about by population pressure, deforestation and climate change. The result was an adversarial conquest orientation that is still the dominant paradigm amongst the power driven modern heirs of axial times. But, NO, this is not the only way that the human condition has evolved. There are ways that human spiritual traditions have evolved with a focus on maintaining/renewing abundance through their prayers and practices. I've often cited the example of the Kogi people. And thankfully there's a growing awareness among at least some contemporary scientists of the need to embrace the wisdom traditions of indigenous peoples in modern ways.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, is a great read:
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (review by Elizabeth Gilbert).
My point is simple, Ashvin: If one focuses on the spiritual traditions (paradigms) of the power-seeking fallen (and falling) peoples, one will arrive at fallen results. There are other human ways. They do not view nature as "red in tooth and claw" but as a gift-bestowing reciprocity. For some, "higher wisdom" involves being down-to-earth.
Lou,
This is simply incorrect. You are projecting a Utopian state of existence onto the Kogi and other indigenous populations. Their relationship to the surrounding environment may have been much better, but it's not as if they somehow avoided the general human suffering and malevolence that every civilization and every individual has to deal with in the evolutionary course of life. No human culture has "solved" this problem simply by structuring their society one way or another. That is the rationalist and materialist bias creeping into our thinking, which convinces us that these deep spiritual problems, which emanate from the spiritual realms, can be addressed by cosmetic rearrangements of socioeconomic and political orientations on the Earthly plane. The "fallen" nature is first and foremost a failure of each individual human soul, so that is the level at which it needs to be addressed.
Rejoice, indeed!
I find it so much fun to trade youtubes with you Shu:
Eugene, you may try to look at things from another perspective. The above puts it as if there are different planes of existence, separated by veils. In this sense we are complete humans on the physical plane, while angels live in higher planes - also complete in themselves. Try imagining a different scenario: it's like if your feet belong to the physical plane, your intestines to the next higher world, your heart and lungs to the next, your brain to the next higher. Or another example - the solid matter of the body is one plane, the fluid - another, so with air and warmth. It should be noted that the ancients envisioned something quite different in the elements. Modern man practically understands only the mineral element. Even though the physicist speaks about fluids and gases, practically his thinking conceives mineral particles at various levels of kinetic energy. We don't conceive of 'matter-in-itself', we simply have thoughts in the shape of matter. If we are to approach what the ancients felt, for example, the fluid element to be, we should cease thinking with mineral-like concepts (words) and let our spiritual activity become fluid like. Modern man, without some sort of spiritual training, doesn't even know how to imagine that - that's how strongly our spirit is entangled to the mineral element.Eugene I wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 2:27 pm
I guess there are two ways to look at it depending on interpretation, and these two ways can be traced in almost every tradition.
One ways is the escapist: life on Earth is fundamentally immersed in evil and is broken/fallen and unacceptable, and the only way to deal with it is to escape from it into some higher realms, or to completely transform it into something fundamentally different by Divine intervention. This can be seen in the original Buddha's teachings (yes, Buddha was a complete escapist, but later Mahayana Buddhism mostly abandoned his escapism), in Plato (cave), in Gnosticism, in monastic Christianity etc.
Another way to look at the life on Earth is as an evolving situation with certain problems which is a work in progress. There are problems that need to be addressed, resolved and fixed (primarily with human ego), and the help from higher realms and from the Divine is needed for that work. But we are not supposed to break the rules of the Earth realm, but transform and fix it within the framework of the rules. If completely opening the veil between the Earth and the astral domain and merging them together with full-blown intervention of the spiritual beings would be the right solution for the problems, it would be done long ago, but that is not how the life on Earth was intended to evolve. So, as usual, there needs to be the right balance between our work as humans on Earth and certain portions of intervention and help from higher realms. And we don't need to worry about the intervention part, they know what they are doing up there and know exactly what kind of help is needed. We just need to do our part of the job down here.
Fully agree with Eckhart
This is much more than poetic expression. It's quite literal [in the higher sense] when we know how to read.Psalms 44:25 wrote:For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth.
and to find out, "let us go and make our visit."Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:11 pmI suppose, if the S.I.N. of someone in hell isn't also dispelled
Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:23 pm In this sense there's no actual veil between worlds but it is entirely up to the development of consciousness to grow into the relations of all the planes. Our physical body is in the physical plane ('spectral band' of Divine Consciousness, so to speak), our feelings are of the same 'substance' as the astral world - they are part of the astral world, our thoughts are 'made of' intuition and they belong to the higher spiritual world.
We must be quite clear that it is because of our physical habits of mind that we are inclined to imagine things in the simple way. Because of our physical body, we're used to imagine our consciousness as packaged around it and belonging to the physical world. Similarly we imagine, for example, extraterrestrials as belonging with their complete body/consciousness package to other plane/dimension, and eventually they pierce the veil and visit us. It's one of those things that we can overcome only when we investigate ourselves and find out that we imagine things in this way entirely out of convenience. We simply take our understandings as developed through the interaction with the sensory spectrum and abstractly copy-paste them multiple times in different planes/dimensions.