Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 3:12 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Apr 20, 2023 3:08 pm
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 19, 2023 4:09 am
Rupert Spira is fond of the metaphor of Mary and Jane. In it, Mary falls asleep and dreams she is Jane in the streets of London. Jane experience herself as a separate self, but when she starts investigating who she really is, she finds out she is not a separate self (Jane) in London, but that she was Mary all the time. Everything was just Mary, including all the objects and other subjects in London. All was just a dream in Mary's mind.
This partly gets at the issue but it does flatten things into "everything was just Mary". The dynamics of Jane's mind in the context of Mary's mind are left largely unaccounted for. The "non-dual awakening" of Jane happens either when Mary awakens from sleep and so destroys Jane or perhaps when a level of lucid-dreaming occurs.
Anthony,
If Jane is to awaken to her existence as Mary, then what does this mean? Mary doesn't only 'destroy' Jane, but comes to understand why and how Jane experienced herself as this separate dream personality (assuming Mary lucidly remembers the dreaming). Everything which occurred within the dream is understood as archetypal symbols for higher-order spiritual activity. Perhaps the dream narrative of wandering through a never-ending maze with weird creatures is understood as the symbol of a Mary's childhood experience of getting lost from her parents in a mall with strangers. Does the nondual awakening result in a similar precise understanding of wandering through the maze of normal Earthly life? I had asked Eugene before for a written example from someone who had so awakened, which could give us more confidence in such a conclusion. Can you provide that?
As the term suggests, non-dual awakening is simply a profound shift in consciousness that involves the realization of the fundamental unity and interconnectedness of all things. It is not an understanding, intellectual or conceptual, rather a direct and immediate experience. It is Jane awakening to her "Mary nature". There is no "precise understanding", no details on offer as far as I can tell.
Exactly, Anthony - so it is not an awakening, in any genuine sense. I think this has been discussed a dozen or more different ways. Recently, Cleric mentioned a person who loads up on doses of LSD and experiences the "awakening" to fundamental 'unity and interconnectedness of all things' in that way. There is no principle difference between that and what you are describing above, is there? That person can also claim direct and immediate experience of profound unity and if you ask him, 'so what did it all mean?', he will tell you to stop worrying about precise understanding and bask in the glow of the experience. Perhaps there are more immediate health risks with LSD, but the non-immediacy of consequences associated with other practices shouldn't convince us they don't exist.
If reality is of idea-nature and thought-nature, as we all agree, then awakening should bring us within the sphere of
cognitive currents which animate the world within us and the world around us. These are
not intellectual or conceptual, but rather the living currents which are only experienced as intellectual concepts after they die within our egoistic soul-life. In their true nature, they are much more alive than the colors, smells, sounds, tastes, textures we bump our way through in the sensory spectrum and can be cognitively experienced as such. At the same time, we come to know exactly how these experiences relate to our body-life, our soul-life, and our overall stream of destiny across multiple incarnations. There is no rolling of the dice and simply hoping it is all working out OK for us.
That is why I remarked earlier, I think much of your dissastisfaction on this front comes from an under-appreciation of how unity and interconnectedness can be experienced via higher cognition, which is true awakening. It is natural for us to under-appreciate such things we have no direct conscious experience with, but the other issue is that we cannot reach such a direct experience unless we remain truly
open to its reality. That is the nature of modern intiation in spiritual freedom. Not just open in our intellectual thought, but in our hearts. We can remain open to how radically transformative these new impulses are, at the level of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, as adaptations of what we already know from ancient traditions. These are actually the same impulses which inspired all of those traditions, but remained only within the sphere of a select few and was experienced in a much less lucid way than we can experience them now.