Federica wrote: ↑Thu Aug 17, 2023 7:14 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Aug 17, 2023 7:01 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Thu Aug 17, 2023 6:49 pm
Not to say that I am completely at ease with the bold. However, if I have used the violet (as opposed to "we don't spiritualize it at all") it was precisely to signal that I was not forgetting the CEO.
Alright, Federica, you haven't forgotten anything.
So do you now have a concrete sense of why what we choose to do in "ordering of the mineral elements in our physical body" is not something separate from "developing higher cognition"? In other words, we can't isolate these things as snapshots of existence and say, event X on the physical plane gives me 10% evolution of consciousness while event Y in my thinking-will gives me 90%. They are continual streams of rhythmic feedback across the time-scales of existence that go into our spiritual evolution and
can't be understood apart from one another. That might be even more clear if we consider it in terms of acts of love, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and so forth on the physical plane. That is ultimately what we are speaking of in the context of working through technology or any other forms with our self-aware spiritual activity. The highest strata of cognition will only be developed through such sacrificial acts towards our fellow beings accomplished on the physical plane.
No, as you said, this is still too abstract in me (although I don't think it in terms of 90%-10%). If you hadn't provided the answer here, I would have answered by recalling the "differentiation of experience of our essential being on a consistent basis" as in your earlier post today. Clearly I am missing something essential, because I keep receiving an impression of arbitratiness in what you say across posts (sometimes it's "necessary differentiation" in understanding, sometimes "it can't be understood apart form one another")
Our normal experience is that of all the planes/spaces merged together. In a sense, everything is given to us on a platter as "reality" and "inner life" and we don't need to do much in terms of spiritual development to live. Our thinking-feeling-willing is all mashed together as an indistinct blob of inwardness. As we know, that is quickly changing and now natural development can only take us so far before we are thrown back upon ourselves and need to start creatively managing the streams of thinking, feeling, and willing
separately with the aim of harmonizing them. We then begin to differentiate the various layers/spaces of our soul and body life. Only when this differentiation occurs can we start to become conscious of the spiritual influences that are
always working into us from the manifest and unmanifest Worlds. Before we are like fish in the water, and once we lift our heads above the water, first for a few minutes and then in longer durations with more intensity of experience, we actually become conscious of what the water is (the lower planes) and how it relates to our essential being.
The basic principle is that spiritual evolution is a stream of development of past (actualized) spiritual activity that is embedded in the manifest World meeting future (still potential) spiritual activity which flows in from the unmanifest World through our thinking-will. What is manifest and what remains potential will depend on what stage of evolution we are at and there are many stages of evolution overlapping in our present time, even within humanity, but now we can speak in a very general sense of average people like you and myself. Let's take meditation as an example of how we are working to spiritualize our consciousness. We can't isolate any particular frame of our activity and say
that is responsible for spiritual evolution. Our meditation is only possible because we have a physical body, a physical landscape of physical elements, and cultural institutions that provide us with wealth, health, and safety. All those elements provide the basis for the brain and intellect/imagination that is capable of cultivating certain soul qualities/capacities that allow for spiritual striving, learning about meditation, and then willing certain exercises. And after we have exercised our thinking-will during meditation, we must plunge back into the physical spectrum with our spiritual activity to elaborate the inner forces that were seeded. Scaligero speaks about that in his book on meditation.
After the meditation, the suprasensory force that is evoked tends to become life. Yet, in order to incarnate, it needs the operator's ordinary state of wakefulness, that is, the state of positive unconsciousness proper to the ordinary activity of the soul-physical organism. It demands that we forget the completed operation and immerse ourselves into everyday life with dedication. In the spontaneity of action, the evoked forces are led to flow to the extent that they go unseen. To see them or notice them is their paralysis. This positive forgetting, nonetheless, does not mean that we must forget the responsibility regarding ordinary life that we derive from meditation. Just as the cosmic forces that restore our etheric-physical vitality can operate thanks to sleep, so, too, do the forces evoked in concentration and in meditation need that positive state of sleep of the soul-physical organism, which is its normal spontaneity during the waking life.
Scaligero, Massimo. A Practical Manual of Meditation . Lindisfarne. Kindle Edition.
We could also look at what we are doing now to evolve our consciousness. We are steering our spiritual activity through our technological extensions i.e. the phone or computer. I think it is safe to say that few of us would be on this path of higher development if we did not have consistent access to the spiritual wisdom of others, past and present, through this technology that essentially extends our cognitive-perceptual capacity on the physical plane and to some extent in the higher worlds insofar as we access ideas from individualities who are no longer on the physical plane. We need to get in the habit of keeping all these different aspects of our evolution in mind when contemplating the individual and collective screams of becoming. Eventually, we will no longer only be meditating in our rooms for 30 min. or an hour before we go back to work or some other routine activity on the physical plane. As Cleric once mentioned before, it would be a great accomplishment if many people got to the stage where their entire night became a meditation in communion with the higher worlds, and then during the day, they returned to work on the major domains of cultural life that need to be harmonized with the higher intents experienced. Actually, I will quote his post here, since it is so topical to what we are discussing.
Cleric wrote:This is the process of redemption. Science with all its abstractness will have to be redeemed, spiritualized. We have a long road ahead before the dreamscape begins to become imaginatively pliable. For quite more time we'll still have to work with our hands and walk with our feet. If everything goes well, human life on Earth will transform such that the night and day cycle will be much more integrated.
Our night time should become something like a night-long meditation where we consciously expand in the higher order spaces and work creatively together with departed souls and higher beings. Everything we learn from the sensory spectrum will have to be worked upon in the higher spaces. This is similar to the way how social and political ideas are worked upon and they then steer the will in the perceptual spectrum, except that in that case we're using completely intellectual ideas, while in future we'll be consciously working on the curvatures of the higher order spaces. This will be true artistic engineering of our spacetime flow.
The daytime will be the more 'manual' aspect of life, where the elemental worlds will have to attuned to the higher flow. Needless to say, there will still be animals and human beings at all stages of development, so there'll be a lot of educational work to be done with the beings whose consciousness flows within the more elemental, fragmentary streams.
With all this in mind, everything that we have as our modern civilization should stand before us as a riddle - how will all this be transformed? It is clear that humanity can't change overnight. We can't say "All this modern technology is Ahrimanic so we have to get rid of it in order for the world to become spiritual." But if we're to do such a thing it is not at all clear how the redemption of the sensory spectrum can be achieved. If we swiftly destroy the Internet, transportation, technology and live in small communities with local ashrams where people meditate all day, sing and pray, the Earth will transform into something like a temporary restrictive space (even if very peaceful and pleasant) that one has to endure until death. Needless to say, this can't happen because even if some part of the population would accept such a path, there will always be those who still live in the ambitious mindset of dominating the Earthly realm.
We shouldn't imagine that what lies ahead of us will be easy. Personally, I have no idea how these transformations will be possible. It's so easy to be overwhelmed by pessimism when we see how hopeless everything looks. But the fact that through the cognitive tools developed by spiritual science and even those who instinctively make their way (like Levin), we also begin to see new possibilities. In any case, our present job is to develop the spiritual soul. More and more of our perceptual world has to be grasped from the proper spiritual perspective. We need to learn to read the world with our spiritual eyes. For this reason, we have to be able to find the place of every Earthly phenomenon within the spectrum of reality. We need to understand how the phenomena work, what ideas are invested in them, what desires and so on. This is the raw material that we will work with. Higher spiritual ideas will have to meet this raw material and give it more musical forms. If we seek the spiritual by turning our sight away from the raw material, by saying that there's nothing to learn there, we enter spiritual vacuum. The spiritual has to flow into the raw material and make it pliable and docile.