The Central Topic

[Cleric K]

Well, by likening it to the post-grad course, I was not suggesting that the P-G course be undertaken in some version after death, but is undertaken here and now in this life, once one has attained and had enough of the mastery of limitations. Then presumably that way one is prepared for the 'after life'.

Yes, that's true. Understanding of these things is really an actual preparation for the after life. And this is not simply understanding of an abstract map. I think I've mentioned this before. At the threshold of death we leave the support of the physical body and with it the ability to experience sense perceptions and sensory-like thoughts (verbal thoughts are sensory-like because they sound like auditory speech). What remains in the first moments is what has been described as thinking gestures. If we have explored our thinking while in the body and have become conscious of the fact that we're performing certain spiritual gestures which are reflected in sensory-like thoughts, then we retain something familiar with us. But if we've spent our life as watching a movie where thoughts just stream along, then we enter a state where we don't know ourselves as a thinking being. We're only used to know ourselves as a being that experiences dim sympathies and antipathies for templated streams of thoughts. When the streams are left behind together with the corpse, our dim sympathies and antipathies remain in the air so to speak - we struggle to find something which we can sympathize with, which could remind us of our previous state. So gradually we come to realize that we are the active spiritual force that has been expressing in the dim sympathies and antipathies in the body, but since we've exercised this force only in a dim way in relation to this or that thought and idea, we feel ourselves as if crippled. We entered a state for which we're not properly prepared.

So we see above that the afterlife is already concealed within our current consciousness. It's not in some other world. We're now living the afterlife too, but it is all time-differentiated and flattened over the bodily sensations, feelings and thoughts. This is the reason why thinking these things through is real preparation. Even if we don't achieve more encompassing seeing in this life, livingly thinking these things, probes what we'll experience after death. It's like we've touched them with our thinking while still blindfolded. Then when the etheric body detaches from the physical, becomes luminous and beings to expand we say "Aha, so this is what my thinking was moving through all the time". We won't say that if we don't know ourselves as a being that was actively moving its thoughts. We can't remember something we never did. Instead we seek to exercise our dim sympathies and antipathies towards images, which however, have now become crushingly overwhelming and we can't discern what we're doing among them.

We are here for mastery over limitations indeed. For modern man it is of utmost importance to understand the limitations within which thinking itself moves. These are our desires, sympathies, antipathies, prejudices, beliefs, etc. We move towards mastery when we understand how we're limited by all these forces and begin to overcome them. And this was the Central Topic.

[Soul_of_Shu]

We are here for mastery over limitations indeed. For modern man it is of utmost importance to understand the limitations within which thinking itself moves. These are our desires, sympathies, antipathies, prejudices, beliefs, etc. We move towards mastery when we understand how we're limited by all these forces and begin to overcome them. And this was the Central Topic.

Thanks ... after a brief misunderstanding, we seem to be back on a similar page

[AshvinP]

Cleric,

Could we perhaps also say here that the individuality of "Ashvin" is a constraint for the spiritual activity of more expansively-embodied agency of the Cosmos, as it can only come to expression through me at my own level of intellectual cognitive development? There is also the much less imprisoning constraint of "Cleric" for this agency (or another agency), but a constraint nonetheless. Perhaps there is also the constraint of the "Meta-Kastrup forum". There are the constraints of families, nations, and cultures for even more expansive agencies. Here I mean "expansive" in an essentially temporal, rather than spatial, sense. All of these constraints of higher order spiritual agencies should inspire us to become less constraining for them, as they also imbue us with the power to make our own spiritual activity less constrained, i.e. more liberated. The fact that I am not able to project my spiritual activity into beautiful medieval music right now should be motivation for me to overcome this limitation which does not belong to the higher agencies or to Reality itself, but is only my own limitation.

And perhaps we also see here how our own spiritual activity can begin to perceive what is higher than itself by the following the inner threads of logic weaving through the Cosmos (or I am just flat out incorrect ). But we should be careful, because I may begin to rest my intellectual thoughts on these ideas which, while they may be formally correct, are quite disconnected from my immanent thinking experience. They have become more and more abstracted from the sphere of my own spiritual activity at this stage. Perhaps I have moved more from Anthropo-Sophia ("Wisdom of Man") to Theo-Sophia ("Wisdom of God") without the corresponding cognitive development to make such a move. I should not expect to go from playing an electronic keyboard to constructing a medieval-style symphony with instruments in one bound. Which is not to say there is anything wrong in thinking about these things, but only in conflating my thoughts about them for their essential reality.

Yes, everything is pretty much on the mark. But as you say, trying to grasp things in completely intellectual way can become quite brain wracking. The question of 'beings' is especially challenging because we can hardly avoid our sensory habits to think of beings as spatially localized loci of spiritual activity. Several people can look at the same sensory object and in certain sense their gazes overlap. Similarly our thoughts, feelings, perceptions are like an elemental spiritual world which is being gazed at by many different beings, just like we're one of the gazing perspectives. We see only that which belongs to the vicinity of our body but other beings see everything that belongs to the conscious phenomena characteristic for certain nation, for example. Probably the greatest hindrance to these things is the idea of private property (much connected with your recent quote from Leviticus). Our inner world is shared property because there's one world. It's just that people today imagine that world to be on the opaque side of their bubble. The world content is a collective painting. Even a single thought of ours is not entirely ours. It's true that we feel fully responsible for the paintbrush stroke but we're not responsible for the brush, the paint, the canvas. We're simply doing our part of the painting. The great painters of the past used to place the main strokes but allowed the apprentices to fill some of the details. We're not consciously responsible for our body, its life, our sympathies and antipathies. These are the constraint within which we paint our part. What are we painting? Someone recently mentioned Asimov's Last Question. It is of course clothed into completely mechanical and quite distorted concepts but there's still twilight of deep Intuition in it. We're painting the answer to the question what the world is. It's not a question that we can answer with the intellect. It's not an answer that after millions of years will come out as 42*. It's an answer by demonstration. We reach the answer when we can create the world out of ourselves. This is what evolution will answer. And in the process of demonstrating the answer we create the seed points for countless other paths that will awaken from the dark sleep, stumble upon that question and set out on their own journey that will reach the answer in unique ways.

That's beautful. The inner logic is so exquisite that it will find its expression in absolutely every dark involuted corner of our intellect, of which there are now infinitely many, IF we view them from a higher spiritual angle which discerns their higher Unities without mystically obscuring their rich content. Practically everything in our experience, even the things we most are disgusted by, afraid of, enraged at, give us a reason to be eternally grateful. Thank you!

[AshvinP]

We are here for mastery over limitations indeed. For modern man it is of utmost importance to understand the limitations within which thinking itself moves. These are our desires, sympathies, antipathies, prejudices, beliefs, etc. We move towards mastery when we understand how we're limited by all these forces and begin to overcome them. And this was the Central Topic.

Thanks ... after a brief misunderstanding, we seem to be back on a similar page

I would also like to point out here how the Divide we are all speaking of manifests at even deeper level with this "spiritual beings choose to incarnate, explore around, learn things like how to love and be kind, etc., and then die, and the process repeats over and over". First we can immediately see this view considers spiritual beings (not just humans, but all such beings) as atomized egos throughout the whole process, never truly evolving and integrating into more a-perspectival beings. Second, it sets up the Divide, i.e. the practically impenetrable veil, between our existence during period of death and rebirth, and incarnation between birth and death. Why? Where did that even come from? With that firmly in place, it is simply assumed the moral lessons during our incarnation are completely cut off from whatever was or is or will be going on "up there" prior to, during, and after incarnation.

We are filling the inner Cosmos with black holes of experience-knowledge all over the place, willy nilly, for no other reason than to avoid the hard work of thinking and re-membering, even though life becomes much harder when we remain atomized, isolated, fragmented, and alienated from the spiritual in this way. How could it be any other way? I have been thinking recently about the connection between falling asleep, dreaming, sleeping, and death and rebirth. What does it mean for our physical body to "fall asleep" or "die"? If there is any connection whatsoever between what happens when physical body separates from etheric-astral and ego-"I" so we fall asleep, and what happens so we die, then the whole "hard veil" theory immediately falls apart (it never had any warrant to begin with, but now it can't even pretend to be a reasonable assumption to maintain).

But that just comes back to the point Cleric has been making so often here - when we have locked ourselves into that Divided frame of mind to begin with, no amount of evidence will convince us otherwise. We could literally perceive our soul-spirit bodies and "I" detaching from the physical during sleep and still proclaim proudly, "this feels kind of heirarchical and totalitarian to me, getting rid of the 'egalitarian' veil I spent so much time putting and keeping in place, so it must be my own fantasy... I refuse to let this liberate my thinking!".


“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell."-CS Lewis

[Jim Cross]

We seem to be back on familiar ground for this forum.

Afterlife, God, NDEs, reincarnation, psi, and the supernatural.

So the TCT really is just a bunch of 19th century spiritualist beliefs. That's what I thought.

[Soul_of_Shu]

We seem to be back on familiar ground for this forum.

Afterlife, God, NDEs, reincarnation, psi, and the supernatural.

So the TCT really is just a bunch of 19th century spiritualist beliefs. That's what I thought.

Good ol' troller Jim is back trailing baited hook in his wake ... I'm shocked

[Jim Cross]

We seem to be back on familiar ground for this forum.

Afterlife, God, NDEs, reincarnation, psi, and the supernatural.

So the TCT really is just a bunch of 19th century spiritualist beliefs. That's what I thought.

Good ol' troller Jim is back trailing baited hook in his wake ... I'm shocked

It's not trolling if it's true.

I don't really have a issue with 19th century spiritualism if that's your thing. It would have been nice for me to have gotten that out of the way in the first post but I guess I should have known better than to bother with this thread from the beginning.

[Soul_of_Shu]

It's not trolling if it's true.

Sure, like this is a true fish

[Jim Cross]

It's not trolling if it's true.

Sure, like this is a true fish

Excellent analogy with the 19th century spiritualist beliefs that hook people and the true fish.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Excellent analogy with the 19th century spiritualist beliefs that hook people and the true fish.

Nah, just perennial spirituality in response to 19th century materialist beliefs which you're still hooked on.