Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jun 26, 2024 3:24 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jun 14, 2024 7:12 pm We began exploring the technique of imaginative concentration as a means of retracing into an intimate experience of the higher contextual spheres of spiritual activity, i.e. the modes of spiritual activity that project into the conceptual-sensory perspective as its emotional, biological, and physical constraints.
Reading again this sentence, I have wondered why are the ideal constraints projected by the higher spheres into our activity not mentioned, on top of the emotional, biological, and physical ones?
That's a good point, I left out the mental/ideal constraints in this sentence, but those certainly exist. Of course, they are intimately related to the deeper constraints as well, most proximately the emotional/feeling constraints. Many of our modern mental habits are modulated by selfish soul tendencies, in a sense the '7 deadly sins' (pride, envy, gluttony, wrath, lust, greed, sloth).
In a certain sense, the mental/ideal constraints are not projected from the three higher contextual spheres but arise uniquely within the 4th sphere, except to the extent we consider their overlap with the emotional constraints. For much of the higher contextual spheres, we can say the goal of spiritual retracing is not to override them completely but to simply become more conscious of their existence and functions within the evolving flow of experience, to better harmonize with those functions. In the case of the mental constraints and the corresponding lowest emotional constraints, however, the goal is indeed to overcome them so that our spiritual activity is no longer rigidly formatted by their influences.