Meditation exercise on "separate me"

[Federica]

...
The future is not simply a point along the time axis that lies so far away that it's pointless to even think about it. This kind of thinking is influenced by our materialistic world conception which sees reality as a chaotic stage, where small changes today can have great and quite unpredictable consequences in the future (the famous butterfly effect). Thus we imagine the future similarly to weather patterns which are highly chaotic. We can barely forecast the weather for few weeks from now, what's left for millennia from now. Thus from our intellectual-bound perspective we say that it's too early to discuss the future because it's completely unpredictable. This however doesn't take into account what can only higher consciousness perceive - that the Time potential has structure and certain events in the far far future are even more certain than the weather tomorrow. We can only understand this if we conceive of the superimposed rhythmic waves of the spiritual potential, where the higher order archetypal rhythms shape the evolutionary envelope (the telos) for the lower.

Yet the way this envelope will be filled with manifested potential still has lots of degrees of freedom. Everything that we do today already affects the future.
...

Thank you Cleric! This is such a helpful reminder. There's the attractive power of the structured future, and there is also the attractive power of the past and the mind habits, which - not always, but often - still make me think of the future in the materialistic terms you have described. It's not an elaborated train of thoughts, but an imperceptible overall conception that remains there, imprinted in the riverbed.

This reminds me that understanding and intuiting things is important, but equally important is to use effort to recall the new realizations, and actively seal them in the riverbed, so that they can appropriately shape the future flow. That's where most of the work is left to be done. Getting an idea once is no guarantee that it's profoundly understood and integrated. The idea (we) could very well linger at the periphery of our (its) reality for a while, and then evaporate, under the influence of the powerful flow of events streaming through a largely unchanged riverbed. You have used the very telling freight train metaphor as well.

So I am reminded that the rhythmical unfolding applies to everything, including learning. There is a materialistic conception of the future, and there is also a materialistic-inspired idea that grasping a concept happens in one well identified instant, before which we are ignorant, and after which we have acquired knowledge. But that's not how it works. It's necessary to ingrain the evolving understanding through willful layering activity. How these threads unfold is another continuous living demonstration of the same. So snapping back is normal, it only prefigures the conditions for the next bit of progression, provided that we continue to do the work. Thank you for the astronomical levels of patience!

[Stranger]

Neti Neti doesn't claim that there is not existence, only that any positive claim re what reality is, will lead to a contradiction or conflicting data, etc.

That's right. Yet, there is "something" that "knows and experiences" whatever the reality is, even though it eludes any positive claims about itself, except that "there is" and "it knows". The Advaitic position is that the reality knows-experiences itself directly, not through any of its positive attributes or forms. But if we disregard even that direct knowing, then we slip into Kantian agnosticism of "think in itself" unavailable for us to know or experience in any way.

[Federica]

Eckhart Tolle is one in a sequence of 10-15 teachers (for lack of a better name) I had been reading and following over a lapse of around 2 years until I found this forum, through a comment thread in BK's blog. I remember this video, and it is endearing in a sense, but how exceedingly abstract and vague it is! It leads no-where. The spaciousness is empty of content. Surely you get what I'm saying. One can remain imprisoned in the 'beauty' of the words one's whole life, basking in the desirable idea "Oh yeah, I am fulfilling my goal in life by realizing the spaciousness and stillness of no-thought. Now, let's just move to the next inspiring video and let's get some more of that basking."

Let's move on!

[Stranger]

Eckhart Tolle is one in a sequence of 10-15 teachers (for lack of a better name) I had been reading and following over a lapse of around 2 years until I found this forum, through a comment thread in BK's blog. I remember this video, and it is endearing in a sense, but how exceedingly abstract and vague it is! It leads no-where. The spaciousness is empty of content. Surely you get what I'm saying. One can remain imprisoned in the 'beauty' of the words one's whole life, basking in the desirable idea "Oh yeah, I am fulfilling my goal in life by realizing the spaciousness and stillness of no-thought. Now, let's just move to the next inspiring video and let's get some more of that basking."

Let's move on!

Unfortunately you misinterpreted it. It is not a "spaciousness of no though", it is a "spaciousness" that knows all thoughts and in which they arise, but it never rejects the thoughts. The only usefulness of "no thought" exercise is that in the "no thought" state it is possible to actually notice the presence of this "spaciousness", because we usually so much distracted by thoughts that we don't notice the "spaciousness". Once you discover the "spaciousness that knows", then there is no use to be in the "no thought" state anymore (I explained it about ten times on this forum before).

[Federica]

Eckhart Tolle is one in a sequence of 10-15 teachers (for lack of a better name) I had been reading and following over a lapse of around 2 years until I found this forum, through a comment thread in BK's blog. I remember this video, and it is endearing in a sense, but how exceedingly abstract and vague it is! It leads no-where. The spaciousness is empty of content. Surely you get what I'm saying. One can remain imprisoned in the 'beauty' of the words one's whole life, basking in the desirable idea "Oh yeah, I am fulfilling my goal in life by realizing the spaciousness and stillness of no-thought. Now, let's just move to the next inspiring video and let's get some more of that basking."

Let's move on!

Unfortunately you misinterpreted it. It is not a "spaciousness of no though", it is a "spaciousness" that knows all thoughts and in which they arise, but it never rejects the thoughts. The only usefulness of "no thought" exercise is that in the "no thought" state it is possible to actually notice the presence of this "spaciousness", because we usually so much distracted by thoughts that we don't notice the "spaciousness". Once you discover the "spaciousness that knows", then there is no use to be in the "no thought" state anymore (I explained it about ten times on this forum before).

Ok Eugene, maybe not explicitly in this particular video, more focused on how to read "The kingdom of Heaven", but you won't deny (would you?) that Eckhart in general explicitly, unmistakingly, and tirelessly preach the value of no-thought.
He has plenty of examples and he continuously repeats that, how he's able to remain n minutes without the least trace of thinking manifesting in him, and so on and so forth. (I have noticed what you have repeated many times, no worries)

Let's move on

[Stranger]

Ok Eugene, maybe not explicitly in this particular video, more focused on how to read "The kingdom of Heaven", but you won't deny (would you?) that Eckhart in general explicitly, unmistakingly, and tirelessly preach the value of no-thought.
He has plenty of examples and he continuously repeats that, how he's able to remain n minutes without the least trace of thinking manifesting in him, and so on and so forth. (I have noticed what you have repeated many times, no worries)

Let's move on

Again, he does it for two reasons. First, as I said, to encourage people to experience the "no thought" state and discover there the "spaciousness". Second, to point to the state when the quality of thinking changes into a "wisdom" mode. In this context "no thought" means no coarse discursive thoughts lost in the world of objects, but thinking on a higher inward intuitive "wisdom" level. We should not understand the nondual teachings literally. Here is how it is described in the Buddhist tradition and you can see that Longchenpa is referring to the intuitive thinking here:

"The mind has no thoughts, yet it perfectly discerns. The perfect discernment of objects is not incompatible with non-proliferation of thought. Thought is the mind that moves outward toward an object, whereas thought-free wisdom understands an object inwardly and instantly"
Longchenpa

[lorenzop]

re what is the nature of reality, ask me again next year I may have a slightly different answer

Why next year, Lorenzo?

HaHa in this context 'next year' is just an expression, and re the question of the nature of reality, I think the question is mostly a distraction . . . like being in a cimema and wondering what are the images on the screen made of.

[Federica]

re what is the nature of reality, ask me again next year I may have a slightly different answer

Why next year, Lorenzo?

HaHa in this context 'next year' is just an expression, and re the question of the nature of reality, I think the question is mostly a distraction . . . like being in a cimema and wondering what are the images on the screen made of.

Ok, then I prefer to ask you again next year hoping for a different answer then!

[Federica]

One thing I am confused about is whether Cleric's description of the future man:
is the same idea as the one exposed here, to explain what personal perspective means in higher cognition:

Is that 'theory' the future man?

In certain sense yes but we have to find the right relations. First we have to remember that what we do in the 'now' is not absolutely free act but is dependent on the 'riverbed', on our whole past development. We can think today in the way we do only because our brain and subtler organs have reached the state they are now. Both on a larger evolutionary and on smaller current life scale. For example, if we haven't learned language, if we haven't read some books and so on, we wouldn't be thinking and writing here. Similarly, what we do now shapes the potential that we'll be able to realize in the future, like studying today shapes the kind of work we'll be doing years from now.

Second, we have to remember that these developments follow rhythmic patterns. There's no better image for this than the seed. Most difficulties when we reflect on these things come if we imagine monotonically expanding consciousness. Then sooner or later we'll stumble at unsolvable paradoxes when we have to solve the problem of the one and the many. We'll wonder how would it feel like to be a well defined self with personal memory, which then merges into a larger whole, which no longer feels to be only 'me'.

The solution comes easy when we understand that all development happens into rhythmic cycles of growth and dissolution. In this sense, the theory that we develop is like a seed. Not a seed in an external sense but more like the seed of our (collective) Karma. We don't create that seed singlehandedly. In a certain sense the potential for that seed already exists as an archetypal attractor, part of the fractal 'matrix' of our Cosmic context, but we have to lead our becoming towards its realization. Then much like in the Conformal Cycling Universe, the next aeon will emerge from the seed of Karma and the future man will evolve anew but in more spiritual form, from the conditions that we today prepare.

Things are much more interconnected that we're willing to imagine. That's why it's completely erroneous not to consider the future as Eugene suggests. The future is not simply a point along the time axis that lies so far away that it's pointless to even think about it. This kind of thinking is influenced by our materialistic world conception which sees reality as a chaotic stage, where small changes today can have great and quite unpredictable consequences in the future (the famous butterfly effect). Thus we imagine the future similarly to weather patterns which are highly chaotic. We can barely forecast the weather for few weeks from now, what's left for millennia from now. Thus from our intellectual-bound perspective we say that it's too early to discuss the future because it's completely unpredictable. This however doesn't take into account what can only higher consciousness perceive - that the Time potential has structure and certain events in the far far future are even more certain than the weather tomorrow. We can only understand this if we conceive of the superimposed rhythmic waves of the spiritual potential, where the higher order archetypal rhythms shape the evolutionary envelope (the telos) for the lower.

Yet the way this envelope will be filled with manifested potential still has lots of degrees of freedom. Everything that we do today already affects the future. For example, Steiner has described how everything that we have developed as technological thinking today, which seems completely mechanistic and existing only in our minds, in fact is related with elemental forces which also act like seeds and will emerge on future Jupiter in a more spiritual form. In fact, he describes how this whole intellectual web that we weave will form an independent kingdom of spider-like beings. And these things were said way before computers were invented. Today, even in the mechanical intellect we can already see how we have spawned a whole world of connected machines. Today the thoughts that create these machines live only in the human heads and are manifested through the will but the ideas that we manifest have concrete spiritual existence. On Jupiter, where reality will be much more Imaginative, these ideas will manifest as independent kingdoms. This can be sensed even today by programmers like me, who can be haunted by software bugs in dreams

So the key to the question lies in our ability to distinguish between our monotonic becoming and the fact that what we do acts as seeds for the future forms. In this sense it is true that the 'theory' is the future man but on the other hand we won't simply become that future man by directly becoming the theory. We'll first have to die and then be resurrected in the new world, even though, as I wrote previously, at that future state there won't be one-to-one correspondence between an "I" of the future man and the "I" of Federica in our present world.

Cleric,

Will the layers of spiritual hierarchies eternally remain the same or could there be new layers, or could some layers merge?
When the future man will be fully conscious, and when current human conscious individualities will be its organs, will that be transparent for the I-organs? Will the current fully initiated higher selves still be individually conscious, as organs of the future man, at the same time as the future man will be conscious as a larger unit, or will the one who today can realize itself as fully conscious higher self become unconscious, or phased out? Will it, as individuated willed spiritual activity, die into the future man?
In other words, will the waves of expanding consciousness expand and enrich the hierarchies, or is the whole structure ever present, already present, and present-day higher selves will simply dissolve in the same hierarchical layer, transform in collective units, and acquire new expanded consciosuness only as spare parts of that future man? And if so, if the willed individuated activity of present-day higher selves is destined to merge, does such confluence mean the dissolution, or death, of the higher self willed activity? Or is it just that my idea of will, willed spiritual activity, also has to transform and just can’t encompass the future nature of will and freedom?

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

Will the layers of spiritual hierarchies eternally remain the same or could there be new layers, or could some layers merge?
When the future man will be fully conscious, and when current human conscious individualities will be its organs, will that be transparent for the I-organs? Will the current fully initiated higher selves still be individually conscious, as organs of the future man, at the same time as the future man will be conscious as a larger unit, or will the one who today can realize itself as fully conscious higher self become unconscious, or phased out? Will it, as individuated willed spiritual activity, die into the future man?
In other words, will the waves of expanding consciousness expand and enrich the hierarchies, or is the whole structure ever present, already present, and present-day higher selves will simply dissolve in the same hierarchical layer, transform in collective units, and acquire new expanded consciosuness only as spare parts of that future man? And if so, if the willed individuated activity of present-day higher selves is destined to merge, does such confluence mean the dissolution, or death, of the higher self willed activity? Or is it just that my idea of will, willed spiritual activity, also has to transform and just can’t encompass the future nature of will and freedom?

These are all important questions, alas it is not easy to answer in a satisfactory way. I'm still searching for ways to convey these ideas, which in itself means that they are not clear enough in my mind. Basically the root problem is that our intellectual thinking by its very nature corresponds to a certain 'granularity' of the "I", generally matching the granularity of human bodies. It is very difficult to escape this. I tried to give some indications about this here. Please take a look there and see if it throws light on some of the questions, then we can continue with what remains.

As for the static levels - beings evolve in waves, so it's more like overlapping pipelines, similarly to the way we're surrounded with human beings that are at different age. Those older than us will be also older than us an year from now. For example, in our next stage the Angels will once again be above us but they will have evolved further. Whether the stages themselves are fixed, I don't know but logically I think that they are presently specific to our fourfold blueprint of evolution. Maybe there are different possible folding blueprints, which will result in different kinds of hierarchies.