xzardozx wrote: ↑Sat Jun 10, 2023 2:06 am
Ashvin, are you a deep AI emulator? No offense intended. You just do a pretty good impression of one. If you are human, would you care to share some humanizing details about your own life and childhood as I did? Presumably you were a little baby at one time.
Not really. We generally try not to make things too personal here, since the spirit worlds are transpersonal and can be objectively explored and understood. In fact, we can't get beyond the threshold of the physical world until we are willing to sacrifice our merely personal opinions, beliefs, interests, concerns, memories, fears, etc., exactly as Federica indicated in her last comment. The layers of our Earthly personality should be undressed. It is not a good sign of progress if we feel inclined to only talk about ourselves and our personal experiences, about what
we think about such and such and what was told to
me.
I'm not saying that to attack you personally. As any person striving for the spirit should know, this tendency is
alive within all of us. Especially on a spiritual path, we are likely to inflate the ego in our seeking to identify with the Absolute. It is not a question of whether this will happen, because it will happen - the result of our spiritual involution (physical evolution) is practically unending
pride, cultivated from a 'survival of the fittest' - but how we react to it when it happens. The only true safeguard is worship and work, in faith and humility, i.e. in the spirit of Christ.
Yes, all these questions fall under the heading of the words of the Master: “I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive.” Why? Because for some the superman has more attraction than the Son of Man, and because he promises them a career of increasing power, whilst the Son of Man offers only a career of “foot washing”.
Dear Unknown Friend, do not interpret what I am saying in the sense that I am opposed or even hostile to the above-mentioned societies, fraternities, and movements of a spiritual and initiatory nature, nor in the sense that I am accusing them of an anti-Christian attitude. Do not attribute me with a lack of respect for the mahatmas and gurus of India. It is a matter here only of the purely psychological tendency (that I have been able to observe something of everywhere) which prefers the ideal of the superman to the ideal of the Son of Man. There is room to add, in order to do justice to the societies and fraternities mentioned, that if this tendency shows up all over the place at the core of these societies and fraternities, it is also so that it is everywhere combatted in a more or less effective way.
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The victory achieved in solitude…what glory and what danger it comprises at one and the same time! It is the only real glory, for it in no way depends on human favour and judgement; it is intrinsic glory—the real radiance of the aura become luminous. It is, however, at the same time the most real and the most serious spiritual danger which exists. “Pride” and “vaingloriousness”, the traditional names which one gives to it, do not suffice to characterise it in an adequate way. It is more than this. It is, rather, a kind of mystical megalomania, where one deifies the regulating centre of one’s own being, one’s ego, and where one sees the divine only within oneself and becomes blind to the divine above and outside of oneself. The “higher Self” is then experienced as the supreme and unique Self of the world, although it is only higher in relation to the ordinary, empirical self, and it is far from the supreme and unique being…far from being God, in other words.
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Now, inflation is the principal risk that attends each person who seeks the experience of depth, the experience of what is occult, which lives and works behind the facade of phenomena of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, inflation constitutes the principal danger and trial for occultists, esotericists, magicians, gnostics and mystics. Monasteries and spiritual orders have always known this, thanks to the immense pillar of experience which they have accumulated over millennia in the domain of the profound life. This is why their whole spiritual practice is based on the cultivation of humility by such means as the practice of obedience, the examination of conscience and the reciprocal brotherly help of members of the community.
Tomberg, Valentin. Meditations on the Tarot (pp. 151-152). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.