My dear friend Cleric, does Ashvin completely agree with everything that you wrote above?Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2023 5:30 pmOK, let's take it slowly and synchronize our vocabularies.Jonathan Österman wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2023 3:53 pm My dear friend Cleric, with all due respect, there's a simple misconception in what you wrote above.
What you, my dear friend Cleric, call 'spiritual reality' is, with all due respect, an obvious falling from one experience of Maya into another.
Let's start with an analogy. Imagine what reality is for an animal. A stray cat or a bird certainly adapt very well to our city environment and this environment certainly impresses in certain ways in their instinctive consciousness but I guess most will agree that when a the cat stands in front of a courthouse it certainly doesn't experience what man experiences (we put aside that there could be men who don't experience much more than the cat either). A courthouse makes sense in human consciousness only if we grasp the intricacies of human existence - civilization, society, ideologies, religions, morals, norms, laws, enforcement, freedom, architecture and so on. All of these things are part of our thinking life - our life in ideas. We don't simply navigate the stream of existence by instinctively pushing towards pleasure and pulling away from pain, but we live in an intuitive context, we have some form of a World conception. We have some idea about what existence is, what our place in the world is, how we should direct our life and so on. This whole ideal stratum of our existence can be considered to be occult (hidden) from the perspective of the animal. The stray cat moves through the elemental landscape, it climbs the trash bin, finds food scraps there but it doesn't understand the industries that have mined the tin ore, forged the metal sheets, formed them into a bin, it doesn't understand the business of waste management, it doesn't understand the complicated food market, it doesn't understand the inner reasoning of the human that led him to throw the food away. Yet we as humans know very well that the bin and the food scraps are there only because all these things are facts in the stratum of our ideal life.
Now what you call spiritual reality is really the impression taken from an altered state of consciousness. Think about it: in what ways your intuition of existence has expanded after you beheld the etheric landscape? Do you understand better how life originated? Did you see why there are stars and planets? Why there are mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms? Did you see what the place of man is within the Cosmic mystery? What is the direction worth pursuing? Did you see what happens with the soul after death? Whether it returns back in the sensory spectrum?
And before listing the insights you have received, ask yourself if they were really given to you by the altered state or they were things that in one way or another you had already heard or read about, but the psychedelic experience made them much more graphic, much more convincing and worth taking more seriously.
In order to synchronize our vocabularies, it has to be clear that when I speak about spiritual reality, I mean it in the sense that what our human condition is towards that reality, is what the stray cat's condition is towards the world of human ideal life. In other words, what we perceive and think about - including the psychedelic landscape - is only what we can make out of existence through our present human scale intuition.
If the stray cat finds a new fancy trash bin with LED lights and subwoofers, it can go to its pals and say "You know nothing, I've seen the real stuff. Come with me and I'll show you." Yet in the end these trash bins serve the same old purpose - to find food scraps there. No matter how shiny they are, it will never occur to the cat that there's a whole world of ideas without which that trash bin would never exist.
I hope that it is clearer now what I mean by 'spiritual reality'. It is the higher order experiences of the human spirit which unites with the ideal flow of the Cosmos and can comprehend the occult reasons for the picture of the World being what it is. This understanding is not simply to satisfy our curiosity but the only way in which we can find a proper direction for our existence.
Is this explanation clear? Is it conceivable that there could a whole Cosmic World of meaningful intents, which constitute the 'curvature' through which our existence flows, so to speak, and that without any effort on our side, this World remains just as occult as the human world is for the cat?
If this is understood and you still dislike the term 'spiritual reality' maybe simply propose another term and say why you find it better suited. Maybe you disliked my previous explanations because they looked too intellectual, too schematic and dry compared to the mindboggling intensity of the psychedelic state. Probably I look like those poor old academics that spend their lifetime in shadowy concepts chasing each other in a cold lonely mind-void with cobwebs and age old dust. It is conceivable that from this perspective it looks like one has wasted their life if they have never experienced the intensity, the infinite fractal resolution of the psychedelic state.
But let me state that just as human understanding doesn't diminish the perception of the flashy garbage bin - instead it makes the experience even more deep and meaningful - so the spiritual reality we're talking about doesn't diminish the intensity of the inner spectrum but organizes it and makes it much more meaningful through the higher order intuition. The intensity of the states the we reach through proper inner development far surpasses anything that we can achieve through tweaking of brain chemistry.
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