Whirlpool's core/first motion

[Soul_of_Shu]

You make it very clear, your dreamscape retreat could start feeling exceedingly tight any moment...

True that ... as surely the chrysalis must feel when the time is ripe to emerge

[AshvinP]

'If I had known your answer in advance I wouldn't have spent my words'. Can it really work this way. Everything can change at every turn. I may be fine with where I am today only to realize tomorrow that a new call is there and I feel ready to cover new ground. Then what will I do with my lazy-thinker label?

I will spare you the history of our exchanges with various people on the forum over the last two years, since that's not really important to rehash. Suffice to say, there are telling characteristics of certain worldviews and moods of soul in the modern age. Cleric wrote about this in his very first essay on this forum.

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The soul seeks its essential nature through combinations of thoughts, be it thoughts about neurons, energy, information, fields of awareness, mind at large, etc. The soul intellectualizes its reality.

The soul seeks its essential nature in feeling life. It lives in imaginative pictures of art, Heaven, God, after life, etc. The soul dreams of its reality.

The soul seeks its essential nature in unconscious will. It conceives itself as non-existence, as picture of nothingness. The soul sleeps away its reality.

Of course these are not all-encompassing or separate categories, but the goal is generally to spiral these into harmony, through becoming more conscious of our inner activity and states of being as they ceaselessly transform.

This comes back to the relation between the pole of the ideal/moral to the pole of the perceptual/natural we discussed previously. The materialist says, "you are silly to say that what I desire and intend (ideal/moral) inwardly has something to do with what I can perceive, conceive, and understand outwardly... everyone is perceiving the same world." Actually the materialist familiar with any depth psychology or cognitive science will know the ideal has priority over the perceptual-conceptual, but he, like most others, will forget this relation when moving to more holistic inquiries, and especially when those inquiries involve his own desires and intentions. Unfortunately the same holds when idealism and spiritualism is just another set of abstract concepts. We feel that we can speculate about it in the most general way, but we can't get too precise about the depth structure of these polar relations, certainly not as they exist within our own souls.

I say from personal experience that one simply cannot conceive certain aspects of immanent spiritual processes unless the soul plumbing has been given a recent cleaning, uncovering some of the passions, desires, dislikes, etc. which are obstructing the flow of spirit through its waters. There are ideas found in PoF and spiritual science that I remember reading again and again, but only recently revealed their deeper meaning to me, and I have no doubt there are even deeper layers of meaning which I am incapable of perceiving now, as my soul plumbing cannot be considered fully unclogged by any stretch of the imagination. There is a healthy feeling of intellectual helplessness here which can give way to boldness. We can sense how feeble and limited our conscious intellect is compared to the vast array of forces which weave our inner life. Inward humility and meekness can give birth to spiritual courage and motivation.

Outwardly, if we say "I just haven't been given the proper signs by Divine powers to know I am in the stage where I can proceed and further develop my spiritual capacity", inwardly we feel our entire soul is transparent to the reflective intellect, and that our deepest passions and desires and antipathies have already been unearthed. How else could we be so confident the stage-specific signs haven't been given yet, instead of our own inner soul blockages obscuring the ever-present signs from our view? How could we be sure we aren't confusing the time appropriate for transfiguring within the chrysalis for the time appropriate for hatching into the sensory world? I know this sounds like I am responding to Shu indirectly, but these things are applicable to all humans in our age, in any life circumstances, on any step of any spiritual path.

From a bigger picture perspective, humanity is well past time to begin its rebirth into the spiritual worlds from which it originally descended. Although this evolutionary progression is not tied to any specific exoteric religious tradition, what we are speaking of here can be generally known as the "Christ impulse". Every thinker who has surveyed this progression inevitably discovers that a major shift occured around the time of the Incarnation - that actually Time-experience began to flow in reverse, among other things. Instead of humanity becoming older and older in the sensory world, it started growing younger and younger. Instead of differentiating into more and more fragmented linear time-rhythms, we are integrating into more holistic rhythms. Now we are like the spiritual unborn in the womb of the physical world, except we can't expect our mothers to push us out and the doctors to sever the umbilical chord. We must give birth to our higher Self from within and cut the chord to the sensory world ourselves. This doesn't mean we abandon the sensory world entirely, but we abandon our inner dependence on it so that we may develop spiritually and help liberate and redeem it.

Again, all of this may sound like yet another abstract theory of the spiritual, where I am drawing together various correspondences to make it sound logical, but we should really ask ourselves whether that's the case or whether it sounds that way because we ourselves have not grown the conceptual slots and inner gestures to resonate with its deeper significance. We can, in fact, develop sense-free thinking and ascend into the spiritual. This is not simply going to another more 'subtle' world to visit with higher beings - it feeds back into everything we feel, think, and do in our daily life. Our memory gets stronger and more vivid, our soul connects with the outer processes of nature more effortlessly, and even our physical bodies and inner organs begin 'speaking' to us more clearly. The correspondences often included in our posts here arrive to us as inspiration - we don't need to seek them out from others. Here again, we have an inversion of the modern way of looking at things - when we put the active effort in from the outset, then the Gods see our efforts, our conscious spiritual activity rises to them as incense and sacrificial offerings, and Divine impulses and signs begin to answer in proportion to the conscious and freely sacrificial effort we have undertaken.

"And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." (John 20)

[lorenzop]

We need to confront the fact that we are all under tyranny of the modern dualism - the world as it really is vs. the world as we perceive and think about it. I probably have made this metaphor before, but let me offer it again.

Dualism / Nondualism - - - these terms are a bit of a misnomer, or perhaps should be employed with caution. There can be no life where there is no distinction between a wall and a doorway, or myself and a wall.
We can think conceptually of everything as One, but re perception, in daily life, there is a difference between the flower and the gardner.
Better than the term nonduality is: infinite value of objective life and infinite value of subjectivity.
In order to properly evaluate the world as it is, infinite self needs to be present and perception of full glory of world needs to be present. Then, whatever content one chooses (or presents itself), the apple, cheese and oak trees; or angels, devas and Atlantis.

[Cleric K]

Now of course it can be argued that human creatures are a different case, because they have free will, and thus can resist any given stage-specific work, such that, even as it may be do-or-die, they can choose to die, or at least languish their lives away, avoiding their destiny. However, given the presumed deathlessness of the human psyche, which outlives any given incarnational expression, can they resist indefinitely?

I'm not writing in order to perpetuate the back and forths but only to present a 'fun fact'.

The deathlessness of the human psyche is not guaranteed. I guess I'm sounding as a broken record already but we create a world of hard problems for ourselves when we imagine some spiritual space and atomic deathless and eternal psyches floating there. Things are readily comprehensible when we gain insight into Time and Memory. Alas this proves to be difficult.

If instead of imagining that every being has individual immortal bubble of consciousness which preserves its atomic identity even after the Solar system has perished, we conceive of the One Spirit which manifests simultaneously through all states of being, then we can understand that the feeling for identity is really a function of the integration of the states of being as memory. It is this implosion of states, that seem to trace an individual evolutionary story, which at the same time is the feeling for the particular identity of that story.

Yet it is perfectly possible that this story can degenerate and dissolve. We can picture this in the following way. Evolutionary development normally leads to greater and greater integration, such that the One Spirit practically follows the story of the Cosmos growing out of the fragmentary perspective. Evolution is like the possibility to experience in one of infinite different ways, the becoming of the One. It's like we awaken in a state where the Divine Potential has been spread out as countless living cogs, gears, springs - the Universe has been taken apart - and we begin to put back together this Cosmic organism, which ultimately transforms through many iterations our first-person state into the unbounded first-person Cosmic Imagination of the Divine Spirit, from which Time itself is spread out and experienced bit by bit.

The moment the Divine in us awakens to its free activity, it becomes our choice whether we'll be putting together the Divine Imagination together, whether we'll keep fragmenting it or we'll simply put our Divinity on the opaque side of existence and expect it to rule our flow.

Consciously or not, our memory flow can lead into degeneration, just like it happens on a more specific scale through the various physical ailments - various forms of dementia and so on. Nothing in the Cosmic dynamics excludes the possibility of Cosmic dementia. We can imagine this as if existence from incarnation to incarnation becomes more and more dreamy (instead of lucid), we begin to miss more and more of what is happening around us and it doesn't even strike our attention (as it often happens in dreams), then everything becomes dimmer and dimmer, until it is barely conscious and ultimately succumbs into eternal Cosmic sleep. This last event can never be consciously witnessed, of course, just as we can't witness our falling asleep at night.

Now one can ask "But what happens with the soul that beholds this fate?" The soul is really the worldline of memory integration, or the integration of the Imaginative Time-fragments of the Divine. If it was possible for the Divine Spirit to express about it, it might sound something like "This was a stillborn worldline. I never managed to recognize my full potential in that locus of imploding memory. It disintegrated. That soul vortex, instead of imploding within itself the Eternal, became a black hole which sucked my perspective into eternal sleep."

So only the Divine Spirit is eternal. What we call be-ings, are the various ways through which the Spirit experiences individual memory worldlines within the infinite potential. These worldlines in all cases start and end into the eternal potential but the way they are traversed makes the difference. In one case we can co-create the most marvelous journey of putting Time together bit by bit, gaining higher and higher conscious perspectives of the Cosmic Time Fractal. In the other case we once again reach the eternal potential but by dissolving into it, which from the perspective of the experiencing spirit is like drifting in Cosmic Sleep. Other relative perspectives can witness the dissolution of that worldline of be-ing but the perspective within that worldline can never say to itself "I dissolved". To say this there should be a memory process. The Spirit should be able to witness the state before the dissolution into that after it, which integrates the previous as memory. But it is precisely this integration which is missing. So even if we abstractly imagine a state of being after the dissolution, the Spirit in that perspective wouldn't be able to tell how it arrived there and that it previously has been following the destiny of a dissolving soul line. Actually the word 'previously' no longer has any meaning in that case.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Now of course it can be argued that human creatures are a different case, because they have free will, and thus can resist any given stage-specific work, such that, even as it may be do-or-die, they can choose to die, or at least languish their lives away, avoiding their destiny. However, given the presumed deathlessness of the human psyche, which outlives any given incarnational expression, can they resist indefinitely?

I'm not writing in order to perpetuate the back and forths but only to present a 'fun fact'.

Cleric ... I intuited that you would zero in on that last paragraph, and so glad you did. Kinda busy right now with some work-a-day tasks, but I will delve into your response later, and will probably have some questions. Any chance of an audio book ?

[Cleric K]

PS: So we saw that as soon as we become a more or less self-conscious spiritual being, then it is already within our hands to at least attune our being towards the future we want to experience. It belongs to our essential freedom to make this choice. If the Divine ray in us wants to experience dissolution, who can stop it? So even though much of the journey, the stages of metamorphosis and so on, are currently determined by forces greater than us, it is within our jurisdiction to have clear vision for the path we would Love to experience as evolutionary journey.

There's an interesting self-test with which we can find something about ourselves. There are various wells of attraction within the invisible potential. Even if we feel that it is not yet our time to do anything deliberately, that we still expect things to unfold by Divine ordainment, we can still see where we stand through our inner attitude to prayer.

Let's consider this with the utmost seriousness. We don't know where our destiny drags us. We're not sure within whose gravity well we are. The fact that the free fall feels pleasant says nothing about where it leads us. Many of the things that feel pleasant in our life lead to the bottom.

Prayer is our technique for spiritual attunement. Even if we have accepted our free fall for the moment, we can at least test ourselves to see whether we have made a choice for the direction in which we would like to be falling. We can say something like:

"Oh Great Being, who gives me my life and thinks its unfoldment,
Even though in this moment I've completely let go myself into you,
I beg you - draw me nearer to you and flow into me.
With all my soul I desire to walk the path that leads me stage by stage into the Divine.
Watch over me, pull me towards you, don't allow me to stray and fall into
The wells which lead my soul into oblivion.
Fill my being with your strength so one day I can start walking on my own
In absolute freedom and out of Love
For the Good of all beings."

Of course, it is not at all the goal here to have some spatial image of the Being that we address. It is our whole soul disposition that should express these words. It's the feeling that there are many wells where our world line can take us but we desire to be attracted by the well leading to the abundant Life.

If we feel inner resistance to summon such a soul disposition within ourselves, it simply means one of two things:
1. We're overly confident that other forces are responsible to take our worldline to the green pastures and still waters. We believe that not only we can free fall but we can even let our self-determination free fall, believing that other beings should take care and make sure we don't end up in the abyss.
2. We're simply indifferent whether our worldline will spiral through the fractal levels of Time integration or it will dissolve into the darkness of Cosmic sleep.

If we have determined for ourselves which path we would Love to experience as our unique evolutionary journey, yet we have accepted free fall for the time being, then the least thing we can do is to fill our soul with the mood of prayer and desire to be attracted on the path of Light that we'll tread in full consciousness and freedom.

[Federica]

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I have now read it. I want to understand it more...

Outwardly, if we say "I just haven't been given the proper signs by Divine powers to know I am in the stage where I can proceed and further develop my spiritual capacity", inwardly we feel our entire soul is transparent to the reflective intellect, and that our deepest passions and desires and antipathies have already been unearthed. How else could we be so confident the stage-specific signs haven't been given yet, instead of our own inner soul blockages obscuring the ever-present signs from our view? How could we be sure we aren't confusing the time appropriate for transfiguring within the chrysalis for the time appropriate for hatching into the sensory world? I know this sounds like I am responding to Shu indirectly, but these things are applicable to all humans in our age, in any life circumstances, on any step of any spiritual path.

Yes...

Again, all of this may sound like yet another abstract theory of the spiritual

It doesn't...

[AshvinP]

We need to confront the fact that we are all under tyranny of the modern dualism - the world as it really is vs. the world as we perceive and think about it. I probably have made this metaphor before, but let me offer it again.

Dualism / Nondualism - - - these terms are a bit of a misnomer, or perhaps should be employed with caution. There can be no life where there is no distinction between a wall and a doorway, or myself and a wall.
We can think conceptually of everything as One, but re perception, in daily life, there is a difference between the flower and the gardner.
Better than the term nonduality is: infinite value of objective life and infinite value of subjectivity.
In order to properly evaluate the world as it is, infinite self needs to be present and perception of full glory of world needs to be present. Then, whatever content one chooses (or presents itself), the apple, cheese and oak trees; or angels, devas and Atlantis.

All dualisms are born from tearing asunder a valid experiential distinction, by failing to consciously realize how one pole unfolds into the other. You are absolutely correct - we can't do anything with just one pole. We literally can't walk a few steps and remain upright without rhythmically alternating between the right and left foot-poles. We can't see the depth in front of us without the right and left eye-poles working together in harmony. But when it comes to the world of inner experience, both materialists and idealists polarize themselves because there is apparently no risk of losing one's balance and wiping out on the pavement. Because all these things are known abstractly by most people, as concepts about inner experience, rather than the corresponding inner experiences these concepts symbolize, we cannot discern the lawfulness of the rhythmic inner experience like we discern the lawfulness of walking down the street.  Meanwhile, we don't realize how we are, in fact, losing inner balance and degenerating as Cleric indicated is possible for any given soul in his last post. Standing still is the same as falling away from the streams of progressive evolution. A lack of movement is the image of soul-death i.e. Cosmic sleep.

If we were on a materialist forum, then the arguments and metaphors would be from another perspective - we would be emphasizing the primacy of Consciousness, the Unity of Being, the importance of mystical experience, the eternality of soul, etc. As it happens, we are on a forum where the polar opposite needs to be emphasized, and especially the importance of active, effortful, and creative logical reasoning. All matter, including our concepts, is broken Spirit and it is real from our first-person perspective, the only perspective there is. If we can imagine it in some way, then it's real. By smearing out one or the other pole with abstracting thinking, we avoid the responsibility of actually fixing the brokenness. We declare it "fixed" for our own psyche and leave the 'Gods' to sort out the rest. But we haven't even fixed it for our own psyche, only obscured the inward brokenness from our view. Most of us fear the prospect that our destiny will placed into our own hands - that we are in it for the long haul - so we find hard problems and discontinuities to convince ourselves that it isn't.

The irony is, once we make a voluntary decision to take our destiny into our own hands in good faith and with concrete action towards the high ideal, this fear diminishes greatly and profound spiritual realities begin to unfold immamently within our experience. So what we fear most will happen from taking on that responsibility - that we'll be grinding out our spiritual knowledge for years and lifetimes to come without the corresponding Divine experiences to make the grinding worthwhile - is exactly what reveals itself as Maya of the atomized intellect. We discern the Divine reality of polar relations all throughout our perceptual and conceptual experience, not only as abstract concepts of "spirit-matter" and what not, but as living realities of Nature, Culture, the Cosmos and our own Soul. The great illusion of modern dualism is that one can say, "Spirit and Matter, Idea and Perception, Invisible and Visible, etc... these are all unified and One", and then we have put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. Instead, we need to actively seek the higher thinking vantage point from which Spirit and Matter (Body/Soul) actually reveal themselves as Ten (symbolizing completeness of Being) in our first-person experience.

And when the One unfolds on the physical plane it becomes Ten, the universe. For just as, from the viewpoint of initiatic science, Two is not the sum of One plus One, neither is Ten the sum of ten units. In order to understand the wealth of meaning contained in the number Ten, we have to study both the One and the Zero of which it is composed. This study reveals that each has its own particular nature, its own particular function, and that they have specific work to do together. And in order to understand this work, we have to realize that they are not simply placed side by side, but that the One penetrates the Zero in order to animate it and set it in motion. This notion is also expressed by the symbol of the dot in the centre of a circle.





Genesis begins with these words: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, and a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.’ The wind or spirit of God is the masculine principle which hovers over matter – symbolized by the waters – in order to fertilize it. Water is the circle, and the spirit of God is the dot, the One. Unless it is animated by the spirit, matter remains tohu va-bohu, formless and void. But when it is overshadowed and fashioned by the spirit, all the possibilities it contains begin to be manifested, and it becomes a universe, with suns, constellations and nebulae. Our universe, therefore, represents the Zero, matter which has been fashioned, animated, and organized by the spirit. Everything we see in the universe is produced by the One and the Zero, by the One which penetrates and animates the Zero. It is a principle of mechanics that a piston must move within the cylinder in order to activate a motor. Without this movement nothing would work. And what is a wheel? A Zero, the circle, which rotates around a central axis, the One. A wheel demonstrates the work of the One within the Zero, the spirit that activates matter. And we find this mirrored in the fact that the earth itself has an axis, and in ceaseless rotation around this axis spins its mass, the Zero. 

Those who know how to study numbers see them becoming significant, alive, and active. In order to form the number Ten, the One and the Zero must be both linked and mobile... Every action that contributes to sustaining life corresponds to the number Ten. When you eat, you open your mouth – Zero – and put in some food – One, and the combination of the two produces energy. When you see, it is because light – One – enters the Zero of your eye. In the same way, you hear because a sound strikes your ear. As for your head, its very shape reflects the Zero, and this Zero has to be penetrated by the One. Left to itself, our head, the Zero, can produce nothing worthwhile. But once it is penetrated by a ray of celestial light it gives birth to a divine child, and we become the Ten.

The number Ten means that one who bears light penetrates the obscurity of matter and illuminates it in order to study it. It is the speleologist who penetrates with a lantern into the darkness of a cave. It is the hunter who penetrates the unlit depths of a forest – for hunting symbolizes something other than the pursuit of a deer or a boar. In the spiritual life there are other kinds of game to pursue, other treasures to be discovered.

The number Ten is also within each one of us. The One is the mind, the Zero is the heart. By means of our mind we have to penetrate the heart – our own and that of others – in order to illuminate it and work in collaboration with it. The intellect or mind, like the piston which goes in and out of the cylinder, must go in and out of the heart. Those who fail to use their intellect in this way will be incapable of understanding. Above all they will be incapable of knowing themselves. One might say that the number Ten represents the axiom ‘Know thyself’. By penetrating the deep caverns of the heart, wisdom discovers the treasures it contains, the hidden veins of precious stones, metals, and liquids. The intellect descends into the dark well of the heart in order to find and draw out its precious waters. The Ten, therefore, represents the work of the intellect on the heart, but it also represents the work of the spirit on the soul. In its most sublime significance, the Ten represents a human being whose spirit plunges into the depths of the cosmic soul in order to pierce its mysteries, and returns illuminated.

Aïvanhov, Omraam Mikhaël. Cosmic Balance, The Secret of Polarity

[AshvinP]

Again, all of this may sound like yet another abstract theory of the spiritual

It doesn't...

Thanks. Just in case, I want to offer a tiny concrete example. I hesitate, because, as the theme of my last few posts suggest, I am not confident such things can be understood without the proper experiential (including conceptual) foundation. But I will try this once, anyway. I am so new to this path that all I have are "tiny" examples, but I hope it's clear they are quite significant from the normal waking perspective.

We hear a lot about the "unconscious" or "subconscious". We hear how sensory impressions can sink down into the subconscious, even when we weren't aware of experiencing them. Then they might resurface in dream imagery. All of this is really abstract discussion within academic circles. Remember what follows is a phenomenal first-person perspective experience, and I'm not talking about what any of this represents in its essence.

Let's say I light a candle and focus on the flame a bit. Through this path of developing imaginative thinking, I can then close my eyes and see the after-image of the flame in very vivid outlines and colors. This image floats around awhile and then sinks down the field of inner vision until it disappears. For many minutes afterwards (I haven't tested exactly how long), I can recall the same image as vividly as before and watch the same process inwardly. Even if my eyes are open in a somewhat dark area, I can project this image onto the wall of my room in a very definite form. So I can actually see the process of an impression sinking down into my subconscious to become an accessible memory DoF.

I have no idea what the full significance of this unsuspected DoF is, but it is certainly a significant experience. It really doesn't mean too much in isolation, but only in a broader holistic context of how the human individual is membered, how we came to evolve these members, how these members relate to our inner activity and our desires, feelings, thoughts/memories, etc. Imagine reading about all these things developed through the spiritual scientific research of others, and then finding the exact inner experience which corresponds with those concepts. The process of forming memories specifically involves a subtle (etheric) body which is the counter-pole to the physical body. The physical body is used as an instrument of will to perceive through its senses and the etheric body stores the memories of sensory impressions and accesses them in thinking. All memories until at least the beginning of our current incarnation are embedded there.

Again, this is just one tiny example and may not mean much to those reading. But the point is, none of these things we point to should be taken as abstract theories about how the body-soul-spirit interweaves each other. They are inner experiential facts which can be investigated by each human individual, who is a microcosm of the Macrocosm. All Cosmic processes which have evolved over many aeons of the current human worldline, in their inner meaningful dimension (not physical or spatial, although there can be certain resemblances), are to be found within the individual human organism. By deeply investigating our inner experience and holistically contextualizing our outer experience with what we learn there in a rhythmic and harmonious way, we evolve to increasingly become who we are and, hopefully, lift other humans, living organisms, and lower Nature herself up in the process.

[Soul_of_Shu]

So even though much of the journey, the stages of metamorphosis and so on, are currently determined by forces greater than us, it is within our jurisdiction to have clear vision for the path we would Love to experience as evolutionary journey.

On this we can agree. Putting aside any 'factual' claims, and just taking your musings above as the intriguing possibility of probable timelines, and how anyOne plays a role, whether awaredly or by way of subconscious unquestioned beliefs, in selecting which timeline is realized, while other simultaneous ones remain more nebulous, ones that may be explored and sampled in the sleeping dreamtime. Insofar as intentional prayer may facilitate this 'selection' process (and I take it you're not a fan of the conventional Lord's Prayer), what do we make of the notion of 'like attracts like', such that however much one may vividly envision an intention, one can only ever attract what is a match to one's core frequency, and thus the many references in so-called new-age circles about the need to 'raise our frequency'?