Eugene I. wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 2:01 pm
The question is, if we look at it from the higher-self perspective: if the higher self already has all the higher-level powers and knowledge, then what is the purpose of its human incarnations and individuation into intellectual sovereign lover-selves? Does the higher self learn anything new or acquire any new perspectives or skills by going through this individuation-incarnation process? Does it further evolve?
To answer this question we need more comprehensive understanding of what the higher being is. If we imagine that it is practically the same as our Earthly perspective, except having access to more data and the ability to compute faster, we'll never be able to approach the facts.
Few posts ago I tried to emphasize that to understand the higher strata of being we need to conceive of activity of different kind - something which is simply beyond the scope the human being's intellect, feelings and bodily will.
For example, in my post to Federica above I speak of the kind of meditation where through active concentration on a thought image, it's like we stabilize a mirror shard which gradually begins to reflect a whole new strata of being, which we completely miss when we live entirely in relations between shards (intellect). The great difficulty is that this new strata has a character which is difficult to convey. Actually the difficulty comes not from the inability to speak of it but from the fact that the intellect immediately tries to conceive everything through its own yardstick and as a result things are always seen as perceptions moved around by some abstract laws.
When the vista of the new strata begins to emerge we behold something which is well known from NDE accounts. It's what is commonly called 'life flashing before one's eyes'. This is related with my many attempts to speak of the structure of Time. The feeling for the life tableau comes from the fact that we actually glimpse at the true nature of Time. General Relativity has been secretly preparing our thinking for this in abstract way but in general today our cognition is still in the clutches of purely sequential flow. In GR we speak of worldlines through 4D spacetime, where we experience flow of 3D slices in linear time. Yet in the life panorama, consciousness really expands and grasps a 'thickness' of Time as something simultaneous. It's like we grasp as a whole a segment of our life path similarly to the way we can see a meandering road from a mountain peak. We understand that Time is not something which disappears in the past and moves towards the unknown future. Instead, Time has a living, organic structure. It's a living reality that we move through 'frame by frame'. It's not 'made of' some abstract energy, spacetime fabric or whatever - things that can exist only as abstract concepts in the intellect. Instead, we can only approach things in truthful way if we imagine that it is all reflection of meaning - that is, of thought nature.
Let's emphasize that when we behold this panorama it's not like we become somehow intellectually conscious of every little detail of our life in clear outlines. It's more like we grasp the organic whole of our time being similarly to the way we can look at a fractal. We see the higher order structure and understand very clearly how all the elements are musically embedded within it, yet it is still an unique experience to go through the elements separately.
The levels of our higher self live in different fractal levels of Time, so to speak. They grasp different levels of the organic structure of the Time Being of the Cosmos. We should immediately say that this structure is not fixed, it is not like GR's block universe, where the worldlines follow completely deterministic paths. The Time Being is under continuous metamorphosis. It is true that the higher order time patterns change much more slowly, and this is seen in the shadows of these patterns in the sensory spectrum - the motion of the planetary bodies.
The incarnational rhythm is like zooming out and in of the Time organism of the Cosmos. Time doesn't feel to flow in the same way after death. The life panorama which is only a momentary experience in NDE and surveyable reality for the scientist of the spirit, becomes the natural time scale for everybody after death and it begins to expand gradually. Needless to say, the kind of "I" that we live in in this state is quite different from our Earthly. The perspective shifts after death and our consciousness gradually expands into a higher order fractal level of Time. In our Earthly life, our 'soil' is the sensory spectrum, against which we unfold our activity. We seek things to eat, where to live, what to do, etc. These are the 'frames' of Time through which we go. After death our soil becomes something different. The Earthly frames (states of being) become 'smaller' so to speak, they become the 'atoms' of the new environment (this is highly symbolically stated). Now we live at the scale of higher order forces which are like the curvature within which the Earthly frames unfold. What are these forces? It's what we call Karma or Destiny. In our Earthly life we can engineer a riverbed such that the water flows in a specific way. After death we live in soul and spiritual forces which shape the Time structure of the Earthly riverbed. Here we live in the interference of many forces which shaped our previous life such that we incarnated in certain gender, in certain nation, that we met certain people, had certain life experiences.
Needless to say, the interests of our "I" at this level are very different from what we usually have on Earth. Instead of grooming our body and feeding it, our body is now the Cosmic Time structure of our being. This body is no longer clearly delineated in the convenient way our skin does. Our body after death is the recognition of the impact our spiritual activity has on the Cosmic Time landscape. This landscape is the interference pattern of countless beings. A being is defined not by the spatially distinct bodily island that we identify with but by the coherency of meaning behind certain perspective within the interference pattern.
Imagine someone like Bill Gates who is responsible for the existence of the Windows OS (of course there are thousands of other people involved but for simplicity let's focus on Gates only). Imagine how these ideas which were condensed into the physical world as arrangements of electric charges (the software), impacts billions of people. So many people had to accommodate concepts as 'window', 'double-click', 'blue screen', etc. After death we live precisely in these waves of impact that we had on the overall Cosmic organism. After death we don't live as a discrete spatially enclosed being among other such beings. Instead we behold an inner perspective of the Cosmic Time organism as an interference of World Karma. Then if we're Bill Gates, we recognize ourselves not as a biological body which reflects to us sensory perceptions but the inner Cosmos is our body and we recognize ourselves within the thoughts and feelings of all beings that we had impact on. If another being wants to find Bill Gates in the disincarnate state, it won't be able to do that by seeking some enclosed body. Instead, it must seek the inner perspective within the Cosmic environment from which various contributions into the World interference are seen as emanating from a coherent center of meaning. This is what it means to know a being - to resonate with its inner perspective and understand how the meaning into which it lives impresses into the Cosmic landscape.
This is what we should understand about our true being. It has no size. It doesn't take space. It's really a perspective within the Time organism of the Cosmos from whence certain interference patterns are seen as meaningfully coherent (gravitating towards the same center of meaning). We can still speak of certain domains where our influence is more clearly recognized than others, yet this doesn't mean that we're somehow enclosed in that domain and everything else is on the 'other side'.
Actually, things are
principally the same even in our incarnated state. We still behold the inner Time Being of the Cosmos and we recognize the impact of our spiritual activity within it. The thing is that we're used to recognize primarily the impact of our will on our bodily perceptions. Our physical body is still an interference pattern, it's not as private as we often imagine it to be. First, it is interference of the heredity stream. Then it is interference of all the elements of nature. Then it is the interference of the activity of all our cells and organs. In all this complex we recognize our coherent center of spiritual activity in the reflections of our will, feelings and thoughts. We don't feel at all directly responsible for the structure and substance of the body. So we recognize that most of our spiritual activity finds its reflections in this bodily aperture of the Cosmic environment and that's why we identify with it. Yet we don't pay attention to the way we influence the world also with our speech, gestures, the ideas and feelings that we impress and which affect others. It is precisely in the distributed effects of these latter, that we find our reflection after death. Our body is the Cosmic interference within which we find the reflection of our spiritual activity.
At this point we also know that our life is inseparable from that of the Cosmos. There's simply no such self-contained ego which can travel somewhere and leave the world behind. If that was to happen, there would no longer be any means for that ego to reflects its existence, just like the Earthly ego would lose consciousness if all sensory organs and nervous system would malfunction. The World Karma is our body after death. There are of course many degrees of understanding of this fact. There many souls today which keep seeking their private island of reflection after death. The course of evolution is such, however, that we become more and more conscious of our true nature and our contribution to the Cosmic landscape.
To return to the question - no, our higher being doesn't have all the powers and knowledge. As a matter of fact, this higher being exists only in germinal beginnings. After death, even though we live in the higher order Time structure, we're not in the least able to shape this structure in any way we want. As a matter of fact, for most people of our age who have remained untouched by any spiritual knowledge, the sojourn through the higher worlds passes in quite instinctive way. It's like they are launched in a certain orbit, determined from their past life, make a circle through the higher Time worlds and with the help of other beings, enter once again the more detailed Time states with the goal of developing further.
I can put that into a metaphor. In our sojourn after death it can be said that we're like on ice. We're sliding through the higher order time curvatures of meaning but we can hardly get a grip. Entering the detailed granularity of time leads us into a much more frictious environment. On one hand this is a much more tedious state of existence because we need special effort at every step. Everything is sticky, everything gets tangled everywhere. This is all a result of the highly decoherent Time states which tend towards chaos. Only through sustained effort we can impress ideal order in the unfoldment of these states. But at the same time this state gives us something else - the chance to use the high friction as means to change the direction of our unfoldment.
Imagine how if we're ice skating, in order to turn we need to gradually change our velocity into an arc. But we know that figure skaters have special toe picks at the front of the blades which they can press into the ice, increasing friction immensely and change direction similarly to the way we can do with our shoes on solid ground. This is the unique character of all evolution actually. Beings coalesce from Cosmic periphery and enter more fritcious states through which they can guide their development towards higher orders, where they get a grip instead of passing helplessly as on ice. Then spiritual activity in the higher worlds shapes the Time structure of the Cosmos in greater freedom. Within these curvatures other waves of beings evolve.
In other words, the levels of our higher being exist only in germinal state now. It is our own evolutionary responsibility to unfold them such that we can begin to art the Cosmic landscape within the higher orders. Currently we need to start doing that by recognizing our shared contribution in the Karmic landscape and seek the coherent Center of Being around which to meaningfully and musically organize it.
I anticipate that it will be once again objected that it's pointless to evolve in this way because all existence will cease if we grow towards the higher fractal levels of the Time organism and instead we should continue endlessly explore the lower states. I've explained numerous times that this objection can only arise if one can't extricate their thinking from the Newtonian clock. The higher Time orders contain both the ends and the beginnings of everything. Thus as we evolve towards the 'end' of time, we actually discover at the same time where time and all life begins.
