Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Mar 25, 2023 4:36 pmHi Guney! Thank you for writing. This is really an important part of our own development. It’s not that different from school. Probably we all know how sometimes when we only read the material, especially true when looking at some mathematical solution, we think “I got it.” But then if we try to replicate the solution ourselves it turns out we don’t get it. So it is with PoF too. Everyone has to write their own unique PoF which is not simply a copy of the original book but explication of their own spiritual existence.
I just want to highlight two things which were somewhat touched upon already above by Ashvin and Federica. These are things that we have spoken about many times but I want to remind of them once again because they turn out to be serious stumbling blocks.
The first thing has to do with the nature of our thoughts and imagination. It turns out people today are especially prone to conceive higher consciousness as some kind of more powerful imagination. For example, taking the seed meditation, one can very easily conceive that by imagining the growth from seed to plant they do something similar to what a higher being is doing in order to manifest the real plant. But this would be very misleading. In fact, the human being is the only being in our present hierarchy of beings, which has such an external experience of a plant. Even an angel (the closest higher being to man) doesn’t have physical sight as we do. Thus we should remember that the power of these meditations is that they’re drawing us nearer to the inner forces that constitute the plant. A plant is something much more encompassing, we can only understand it by grasping the inner nature of a particular interplay of macrocosmic and elemental forces. For example, the most important macrocosmic archetype that we have to experience with the seed is the rhythm of growth and decay, and how through death a concentrate remains from which the new growth sprouts. These are patterns that are much more than some forces animating biological things within empty spiritual vacuum. Instead, these rhythms will be found to be like ‘carrier waves’ of our entire Cosmic unfolding.
If we neglect this, we end up in a kind of solipsistic view. It’s of course not explicitly solipsistic but it becomes implicitly so because we assume that our human consciousness (even if ‘non-dually realized’) already coincides with the so-called pure consciousness. This makes us feel that our intuitive sense for what consciousness and reality are, is already the fundamental perspective and all that’s left is expand it and fill the gaps within it. Such a position basically puts the lid on our development. With this attitude we can never find the reality of the plant because we secretly expect that reality to be added to the screen of our consciousness as some more subtle perceptions of thunderbolts or whatever, which shape the picture of the plant. All of this occurs for the sole reason that, consciously or not, we behave as if our consciousness already coincides with the supposed top observer of reality and it’s only that certain phenomena are presently filtered. In other words, we act as someone in a dark room who imagines the furniture and only expects the light to be turned on in order for the anticipated contours to be filled with more colorful perceptions.
The second thing is directly related to the above and it manifests when we try to grasp what meaning, concepts, ideas and intuition are. We more or less know what the experience of red is but what is the concept of red? Through metaphysical thinking we’re inclined to think abstractly about it and conceive concepts and ideas as some elements of reality. For example, today we imagine particles and antiparticles. We don’t perceive them directly yet we imagine some energetic dots zipping around. We can never approach the essence of PoF if we try to build a similar metaphysical picture where reality is made of perceptions and anti-perceptions (concepts/intuition), and we imagine these floating around and interacting within our pure consciousness. When we do that we unknowingly assume the top observer position and once again imagine that all reality can be beheld ‘objectively’ as some elements that float before our Divine gaze.
This turned out to be even more difficult to explain than the first point. People simply can’t help but imagine particles and antiparticles when they hear about perceptions and ideas. It’s just another metaphysical theory for them. This can be pointed out with the pictures that I’ve used so many times:
This is the secret perspective where we imagine that we’re the top experiencer/observer of reality and perceptions and intuition are imagined as things within consciousness. Note that both the mystic and the philosopher/metaphysicist (no matter if materialistic or idealistic) utilize this mode. This has to be contrasted with something like:
The point here is that whatever our state of being is, we’re always so to speak in between the manifested and the unmanifested. The tricky part though is that the unmanifested is not simply something which is as of yet missing from the screen of our consciousness and we expect its contours to be filled with color, as when we expect the furniture to appear with the light. Such an expectation leaves one important aspect completely unexamined. In the example with the furniture we implicitly assume that our spatial intuition of reality is absolute. Whatever we expect to be manifested, is already expected to fill with perceptual phenomena something of the spatial volume. To counterbalance this we have to conceive of something very different. It is as if our conscious experience is the point where consciousness (positive, conscious content) is inverted into negative consciousness (the intuitive spiritual world). This sounds incomprehensible only as long as we try to grasp things intellectually as in the first image, where we abstractly conceive of some consciousness and negative consciousness while secretly feeling as the top container of both of them. To grasp something of the real spiritual world we have to be ready that our whole intuitive sense of what be-ing is, will transform. And this transformation is not a one-shot event.
I know that I’m repeating myself above but it simply seems to me that these two points form the most substantial obstacles on the path to reality for modern man. I just wanted to emphasize them once more.
1. We shouldn’t imagine that our sense of having consciousness with imaginative contents is the same as the state of higher beings/Divine/One Consciousness. Otherwise we naively imagine that everything is created by imagining phenomena in the field of consciousness (for example a plant).
2. We shouldn’t imagine that we can ever find the essence of idea/intuition as some content within our consciousness, side by side with other perceptions. We can only approach this mystery if we’re willing to conceive that the world of meaning is akin to negative consciousness in respect to everything that we conceive as positive conscious phenomena – which includes also our thought perceptions as words, symbols, etc. This makes it challenging because in PoF we constantly have to think about meaning, ideas and concepts, yet we have to learn to feel that our perceptible thoughts are like the iron filings within magnetic field. The latter gives the meaningful dimension of our being, yet it’s not something that we can climb above and contemplate side by side with the filings.
cleric,
Your first point, I understand, is that we tend to anthropomorphize spiritual processes (in the sense that we project our current level of consciousness onto higher levels).
I have nothing to say against this point.
"Thus we should remember that the power of these meditations is that they're drawing us nearer to the inner forces that constitute the plant"
How can seed meditation lead to higher cognition when we end up mimicking a process perceived by our everyday consciousness when, in modern man, everything tends to be anthropophobic?
If we consider the "I think these words" meditation or the "A E I O U" meditation, we are still with thoughts that have already become rigid and fixed perceptions. How can we thereby arrive at perception, our invisible activity, if we create its by-product (thoughts that have already fallen into the realm of perception)?
Or should these exercises serve to give our higher beings (I) more and more control and awareness by sacrificing (concentrating) our everyday unconscious thinking?
In the end, it seems to me, at least, that seed grain meditation and actively producing words are different types of practice.
Words, thoughts and images are different contents of consciousness.
Could man still say that both fall into the realm of the imagination?
Your 2nd point, as I understand it, is that we try to understand things in our consciousness through abstract (dead) thoughts. As in a constant of consciousness in which the content should come to light. Instead, we should realize that many of the things we are trying to understand need to construct this more constant perspective and become conscious rather than thinking about them.
I can observe in myself that there is a need for me to grasp the things discussed in my current state of consciousness, i.e. to mentally understand them. So there is a danger of turning living forces into abstract theories.
It's very difficult for me to let go of that perspective.
Only during meditation can I temporarily surrender perspective, not when trying to understand what someone has written, such as when reading Steiner.