Stranger wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 4:51 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jan 19, 2023 3:40 pm
Hello Eugene,
It seems to me that the trap here is what Jung called 'ego inflation', which we can concretely sense in the narrator of the videos. It is the state in which the intellect feels its own mind-container perspective to have
perfect information on the Wisdom of Earthly happenings and to have perfect moral fiber to evaluate those happenings. Ironically, it feels its
Earthly condition - the condition which it supposedly seeks to permanently escape - to be the yardstick against which all other higher states and encounters should be measured, and then builds up an entire worldview from there. Once we are trapped in this inflated ego, we can seek out any 'evidence' we want to support our own desired conclusions, while ignoring everything which suggests otherwise. Most of all, we can ignore the need to gradually grow out of our Earthly identifications and transform ourselves through inner work, instead settling for a 'quick fix' which gives us the illusion that our intellectual ego can leap beyond the entire archetypal structure of the Cosmos, whenever it so pleases. It's very similar to the bubble solipsistic perspective, which is also a symptom of this inflated ego condition. Such a condition did not really exist in the spiritual traditions of antiquity, since the individuated intellectual ego is a more recent development.
These video clips present an overview, but it's rather shallow. The two article which I put the links to go to more in-depth.
You are right about perceiving the situation
from the perspective of the corrupted ego. Notwithstanding of this fact, the process of the spiritual growth is still severely impeded if we continue staying in this soul recycling system because of the memory wipes and because of the conditions extremely adverse to the spiritual growth both in the Earth and the astral domains of the soul recycling system. This is not to say that the spiritual growth is impossible in these domains, it is actually possible, but it is just slow and impeded (which we can see throughout the long and troubled history of humanity). A better choice for any soul is always to escape this domain and continue the spiritual evolution in other realms (outside of the control of the totalitarian hierarchies) that are more beneficial for the spiritual evolution.
This is also relevant to the Anthroposophy where we ae supposed to evolve through a guidance from and connection to the beings of higher hierarchies. How do we know if these beings are indeed the benevolent ones who they claim they are and not the members of the corrupted hierarchy? In the astral realm beings can take any appearance, project any kind of energy (love, peace etc) and call themselves by any names. Since the human souls are wiped-out of the pre-birth memories, they are usually very ignorant and naive about realities in the nonphysical domains and can be easily deceived and manipulated. So, it's just a warning for the practitioners of Anthroposophy.
Eugene,
You seem to have brushed right past this bold fact which you admitted, even though it's a fact which
prevents us from reasoning logically through the dynamics of spiritual evolution. It is obvious to sound reasoning within the Earthly spectrum that we cannot, through the strength of our mere desires and knowledge, bypass the incarnational rhythm of the day-night, waking-sleeping cycle. A person who made such an assertion would be rightly looked upon as living in complete fantasy-land. Yet when it comes to the supra-sensory rhythm of birth-death-reincarnation, the ego feels that this can be bypassed as it pleases. Why is that? It can only be due to the inflated perspective that I referenced, and which was brushed past. This is what leads to the complete discontinuity between the outer physiognomy - the Earthly spectrum with its lawful rhythms - and the spiritual activity which impresses that physiognomy - the Cosmic incarnational rhythms. The former is simply our decohered thinking-perception of the latter - they are one and the same.
It's interesting that, according to spiritual scientific research across many millennia, from many different streams, the astral realm serves as a 'space' of
purification of our lower desire-nature between birth and death. In Catholic tradition, this stage is called 'purgatory'. If we approach these things with good will and living thinking, then we will discern that we are confronted by
our own demons during this purification stage. Unlike on the physical plane, where the inner life is felt to be enclosed within the boundaries of our skin, these aspects of our own lower nature confront us from
without on the astral plane, as objective forces. So what's happening here is that people are confusing their own lower nature, which confronts them as objective forces from without, sometimes taking on grotesque animal-like forms (it is precisely our animalistic nature which needs to be purified), for other beings who they then conflate with the progressive hierarchies spoken of in the Wisdom traditions. This confusion is inevitable when the intellect demands to interpret all such experiences from its own physical perspective.
How ironic is that? The demons that live within them, within all of us, are projected out onto other beings and this is then used as a justification to avoid the purification stage. It is a complete fantasy that such a stage can be avoided simply because we desire to, but this projective mindset adopted during life will make it that much harder to actually purify our lower nature before reincarnating. In fact, this will ensure that our sojourn in the higher worlds will be short-lived and that we must repeat many more Earth lives than would otherwise be necessary. So their hyper-cynical worldview ends up ensuring the exact
opposite result of what they desire (to bypass the incarnational rhythm). This inflated ego-perspective can deflate itself by simply realizing that its current desire to bypass is within the conditioned context of various attractor forces, i.e. it is
not being desired in freedom, but as a result of compulsion by unconscious soul-forces. This is the only logical possibility. Yet it seems the sense of power gained by the inflated perspective is enough to brush aside all logical reasoning. And then the only option becomes a radical humility through devotion and reverence for the higher worlds, but this is exact thing the inflated ego is cynically projecting as "evil", "demiurge", and so forth. So it is really a quandary and I'm not at all sure how it can be resolved.