Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 02, 2024 4:23 am
If spiritual science and the views expressed here were dissociated from the religious traditions, particularly Christianity, then these issues that I'm highlighting wouldn't have the same gravity. But tying concentration exercises and the transformation of consciousness to the Christ event is quite a disconnect from 99.99% of what has comprised the various traditions arising out of those events in Palestine 2000 years ago.
I was in discussion with a Jehovah Witness last night trying to present an esoteric take on things and I had the feeling like I was forcing a rectangular plug into a round recess while discussing various biblical passages. The straightforward reading of the text is one of a creator deity, separate from creation, who is interested in obedient followers.
The transformation of our whole mode of being is done by the creator - he takes the initiative and he completes for we are powerless. So goes the traditional Christian story.
Yes I've had my fill of this traditional narrative. And I find it unsatisfactory. What you speak of makes more sense apart from trying the fill the new wine into old wineskins.
Let’s try the following to see if the ‘disconnect’ will make more sense.
When speaking with your JW friend, there’s something that has to be firmly kept in mind. Try to experience as vividly as possible how reality feels for such a person.
We can imagine that we feel as a soul sphere – inner soul space, where all our thoughts, feelings, perceptions are experienced. Outside that sphere we imagine that there’s God and the Earthly world that he has created.
At the cognitive center of this inner soul space is
the Bible. It stands there as a kind of
kernel to which other thoughts can attach as fitting puzzle pieces. Any puzzle piece that doesn’t feel to snap to the Biblical kernel is rejected. We should really try to feel how because of our faith, this Biblical kernel serves as the foundation of our cognitive life. It gives us support in the same way the Earth gives support to our feet.
JWes are not the only ones who have their cognitive Bible-kernel. Each one of us also has one – it’s the support of the senses and all the memories (factual knowledge) we have accumulated so far. We are materialists if we zealously swear by this kernel and insist that every new mental puzzle piece should fit snuggly there. The pieces that feel to be even slightly incompatible are immediately rejected.
But what can we say about such things as inspiration and insight? Of course, the materialist will immediately rationalize any such phenomena as resulting from some lucky combination within the kernel. Yet if we’re a little less fanatical about it we may conceive that thoughts can also coalesce around the kernel from an ideal stratum that feels subconscious, much like a snowflake doesn’t produce its own water crystals but they coalesce from the environment.
We should appreciate how man of our age, no matter if he has a Biblical or physical kernel for his cognitive life, desperately needs such support which feels external, objective. The materialist will feel as if he’s going mad in a sensory deprivation chamber. The JW’s cognitive life will fall apart if his knowledge of the Bible is taken away. We feel secure when our feet are on the floor, the floor rests on the walls, the walls rest on the foundation, the foundation rests on the ground, but what does the Earth rest upon?
The most challenging evolutionary transition for man today is to find this support within his spiritual being. This can only come about when we get the feeling that our cognitive life rests upon an ideal order, the same one from whence conscience, inspiration and insight precipitate into thought-forms. Then we no longer seek the mental puzzle pieces that can fit strictly in the external kernel but we experience thoughts as artistic forms through which we explicate the hidden ideal order (of course, if they are truthful they'll also resonate with the external kernel, probably expanding it from its narrow limits). Our intellectual ego feels as floating on the surface of that hidden order, as if at the boundary where the purely intuitive becomes perceptible. The less certainty we have of the hidden order, the more we need to ground ourselves in external kernels. The more conscious we become of our inner life, of the way we continually explicate thoughts from the hidden order, the more intuitive orientation we attain and the more we find stability in the invisible.
The ancient Greeks called this hidden ideal order the Logos, the Word. And John wrote “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” However, what John wrote about can never be seen as emerging from the kernel of the written glyphs and hitting us in the face.
I believe this is at the true core of the whole ‘disconnect’ topic. It can be useful to distinguish between two kinds of disconnects. One is healthy. It is the same as the disconnect we feel the first time we learn to swim, when we go through that magical moment, where we realize that life doesn’t end when we are no longer supported by the sea floor. Our feet disconnect from the sea floor kernel. The whole historical significance of something like spiritual science amounts to this magical moment – the transition from the intellectual soul to the spiritual, from cognitive life that always needs the support of an external kernel, to inner life that feels supported from all sides by the hidden order of the ideal Cosmos. We know that ideal Cosmos not because we blindly believe in it, nor because we see it as yet another external support but because in our thinking ego we’re clearly conscious that we have lifted our intellectual feet from the rigid kernel below us and we still exist, the world has not ended. We feel that we exist within hidden streams of purely intuitive life and we can artistically express this intuitive world in concepts and images.
The second disconnect – that there’s no connection between the Bible and what has been just described – is only apparent. As said, it is perfectly true that the reality of what we talk about will never bubble out from within the pages of the Gospels. This would defeat the whole purpose! Such bubbles will simply turn into another external kernel! We’ll still feel that our inner life is supported and given shape by something external. But even more interestingly – even the explicit explanations given above do not contain the essence. There are plenty of people here who see such words only as some kind of doctrine, another ideological kernel that is supposed to give us our shape and tell us what we’re allowed to think and what not. And even those who genuinely strive to understand these things may fail to do so as long as, without noticing, they still seek that magical axiom, that special cognitive kernel of all kernels that will finally provide the ultimate feeling of security, that finally our cognitive life rests on the most secure external foundation of all.
Speaking in this way maybe makes it seem like one needs some special Grace in order to find that inner transition. And in a way we can say that, but not in the magnitude that we imagine. For example, isn’t it a kind of grace when we experience the first moments of riding a bicycle? Before that we had all kinds of advices “hold on to the handlebars”, “keep your balance” and so on. But in the end, we can’t say “OK, I know what I need to do, I’ll just do it step by step and at the end I’ll know how to ride.” It might happen like this but it might not. We simply need to keep trying until we get it. Is ‘getting it’ Grace? It can be seen in that way because the first time we get it, we do something that we have never done before (that’s why we couldn’t do it before that – we simply don’t know what inner gesture to perform). So the first time we get it, it’s a kind of Grace but one that we can
very easily earn by simply trying to understand what others say and putting a little effort to try it out.
Finding our inner being as rooted in the ideal order leads us towards the experience of the Logos. Then we understand that the whole Biblical story leads to this moment. That moment doesn’t simply add up as another puzzle piece to the external Biblical kernel, but instead we now feel our whole intellectual ego as a puzzle piece embedded in Cosmic ideal order. The apparent disconnect is really a ‘connect’ because even though the light of intuition that illuminated our inner world doesn’t emerge from the dead ink of the Bible, it is what makes the latter comprehensible. Even if everything that we now say was written word-by-word in the Bible, it would still constitute only an external kernel. One could still object that the spiritual transformation itself is not contained in the words and thus there’s a disconnect.
To understand the nature of the disconnect we need to clearly distinguish between the Logos as yet another mental puzzle piece that simply fits in the external narrative of the Biblical kernel (eventually pointing towards mysterious but unknowable realities out there), and the Logos as the center of harmony of the ideal order, around which our own ego takes form. And if these last words sound as just another handful of mental puzzle pieces that do not even fit nicely in the external kernel – whatever its nature might be – then I’m not sure that adding even more words will help.