Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Sep 01, 2024 12:05 pm
There is no question that we can and should develop our cognition while in the physical form and attain to higher levels of cognition. However, that by itself is not sufficient. It is not only the level of cognition that determines whether a being moves toward God or away from God, but it is also whether the development is moving toward the realization of oneness or away from it into the dualistic state of consciousness. Note that in the dualistic state the cognition can also be highly developed and sophisticated and integrated into a hierarchical structure of (fallen) spiritual beings.
OK. Stated like this, I think we can safely say that the way you use 'oneness' here, is identical to what we often refer to as the 'high ideal'. In other words, it's about our inner self-determination which is an absolutely free act (that is, creation out of nothing, it can't be seen as caused by something else) and we must affirm it at every instant (that is, it's not something that we put in place once and then we can leave it to manage our flow from the background).
Stranger wrote: ↑Mon Sep 02, 2024 1:31 am
Anyone who has enough experience with lucid dreaming or OBE should also be familiar with it. It is somewhat similar to the interplay of intuitive and imaginative cognition: we can have an intuitive idea (say, of a sphere), and then apply our willing intention to imagine it, and then boom - an imagination of a sphere appears in the space of our imagination. With the sensory manifestation the process is very similar, but in this case we would get a sensory appearance of a sphere instead of imaginative one.
Here I actually wrote a much more expanded response with more context but in the end I was worried that seeing so much text will make the reader simply skim over in frustration. I'll try now to be more direct even if it turns out less clear.
In short, the described Creation process holds a very dangerous lure. Even though we are aware that these descriptions are simplified and not to be taken literally, they still make it such that the intellect
inflates into Cosmic proportions.
When we imagine that the Divine creates the World in the described by KM way, we habitually translate our mode of consciousness to the Cosmic. More concretely, we imagine that the Divine
premeditates the World, he develops the idea of the World into a Cosmic mental picture and then impresses it into the matter-light. This description is very convenient because it is really a description of what
our inner process looks like (thus we need not develop any new skills). For example, in a lucid dream or a OOB we still feel that we have this premeditative space where we can develop certain mental images and then impress them into the dream environment.
If we cling to this view, however, we stumble on something very peculiar when we try to investigate how the mental images themselves are summoned. We are tempted to again translate the whole process and we are led to the idea that we pre-premeditate our thoughts, and boom - we have a mental image. By the same logic, however, we'll have to imagine pre-pre-premeditative activity two booms away from the mental image, and so on. This, of course, doesn't stand to the facts of experience. We can't find such a pre-premeditative process. All we have is dim weaving in intuitive movements which gets impressed in mental images receding as memory (what I tried to illustrate in the video feedback exercise). There's simply no such pre-premeditative space where we design our thoughts with pre-thinking and only then decide to let them become normal thoughts. (anywhere I use the term 'intuitive movements' obviously I don't imply some externally observed movements but rather the unseen inner activity that we can approach by asking: "What do I innerly do in order to think? (or simply add two numbers)")
This lack of premeditative space is beautifully expressed in the first pages of Genesis, where it is described how the Elohim first created the World and
then saw it was good. We have given this example many times (it's also in the first pages of PoF). The Elohim do not have premeditative space where they build mental pictures of the World. They don't build an inner vision of the yet non-existent World, then condense that vision in denser spiritual substance and say "It is good - the impression looks just as good as we first imagined it." Instead, the World matrix takes form out of their invisible intuitive movements. It is the same in our thinking process. We can't premeditate what we're gonna think and only then think it. Such a premeditation would
already be thinking that raises the same question about itself. This is why we have always insisted that in meditation we should move toward the experience of the pure thinking flow - in this process, although in miniature, we experience most closely the primal creative process.
Why is this important? Because this premeditative space - as something seemingly loosened from the World flow, in which we weave mental images - is something
very specific to our human condition. This premeditative space is really the space in which the intellectual self finds its be-ing. Even the next higher/more primal stage of consciousness (Angelic) no longer has such ability. The result is that by thus
extrapolating our human condition to the Divine, we give the intellectual self the
false sense that the Divine operates in principally the same way - premeditates in the Divine Intellect and condenses the idea into the matter-light field. This attitude becomes a severe obstacle because it takes this premeditative sphere in which the intellectual self's existence is based, as something fundamental. The intellect says "I have it, the Divine has it. It's an attribute of pure consciousness, this is how it works." However, it is precisely this premeditative intellectual space that we must
sacrifice in meditation if we are to know more intimately the Divine creative process. We sacrifice the space with its specific constraints and ingrained habits, not what flows into it and animates it.
I am sure that if you invoke your scientific scrutiny, you'll agree. It sounds too 'set up' that pure consciousness should be fundamentally constituted such that it has a sphere for premeditation of mental images which are later impressed into the matter-light (not to mention that this raises additional questions about the nature of this matter-light). Doesn't it feel more intuitively right that the primordial existence should have been simpler, more parsimonious, elegant? In science we have the concept of generations. For example, we have the generations of stars, where the first could have been made only of helium and then some heavier elements were formed, the next generations could fuse even heavier elements, etc. Doesn't it make sense that a consciousness that is differentiated into a premeditative sphere and an outer sphere should be a later generation?
KM says how the Creator forms in his mind an image of what kind of world he wants to create and then goes on with its realization. Now you may say that I'm nitpicking, that these are simplified descriptions and shouldn't be taken too literally. But that is exactly the point - it makes a world of difference in
what way we simplify things. If we provide the convenient picture of a Cosmic Intellect that premeditates in mental images and then creates the world, this is the sweetest lure for our intellect. The latter gladly takes the lure in one gulp and inflates to Cosmic proportions. Now it says "Of course, these are simplifications. But the principles are more or less like this. It's only the scale that differs. From this moment on, my geometry is more or less set. It only remains to find within myself the Divine mental images that have been used to create the World." This however completely conflates a later generation consciousness with the primal creative. We can only approach this primal state in the experience of precipitation of pure mental images, as testimonies of invisible intuitive movements. We can't see whether our thoughts are good or bad until we think them. Then they serve as feedback on how to invisibly will our intuitive movements differently, which results in new receding images and so on. It is here that the high ideal plays - our yearning for Love, Wisdom, and Truth.
The main idea to be extracted from all this is that if we really want to approach the primal reality, we need to concentrate on the process of intuitive movements manifesting into perceptible thought images. Here one can object "but this is only part of the story, focusing entirely on premeditation of thoughts loses from sight the outer sphere where the thoughts need to be impressed. We need a more balanced striving for a higher unity where the thinking sphere is only a part of the whole." Yet this takes the differentiation in premeditative and outer spheres for a
fundamental feature of the Essential Being. Isn't it logical that the primal act of the Divine Spirit should be something akin to intuitive will projecting as inner Cosmic Phenomena (not that there's 'outer' but just to make sure the perspective is grasped correctly)? In our limited and manifold condition, isn't it projecting ideal movements into thought images, that seems most identical to this primal activity of the Spirit? If the Intuitive Spirit doesn't project the phenomenal content of the inner Cosmos as something akin to a thought projection, then what's the creative activity like? God uses his mind to think images of the World and then uses his hands and will to create it? And such God with already differentiated mind and body should be conceived as the primal principle of existence? I believe that anyone who has at least some sense for the fundamental Unity that all science, philosophy, art, and religion have been seeking to express, would be deeply dissatisfied with any such view that begins with something so complex at its foundations.
To put that in a simple picture, we can imagine that the Divine thinks the sound 'aaa' continuously and fills the inner Cosmos with it. We should picture that from the first-person perspective. This is not premediation. There's no mental pre-sound and manifested-out-loud world sound. There's only one kind of sound that fills the inner Cosmos as a result of the invisible intuitive will of the Divine. So, it is as if in the experience of this receding as memory sound, the Divine recognizes its existence. The Divine doesn't think by juggling mental images, doesn't philosophize, but his Cosmic consciousness is imbued with the pure meaning which
if it could be expressed in words could be something like "This sound is an image of (it reflects) my willful intent". Now another more limited perspective
concentric with the Divine (remember, there's only One Consciousness) also moves intuitively. It moves in such a way, however, that it interferes and
modulates the intuitive movements of the Divine with its own, and as a result a
wobbling 'aAaAa' sound is experienced. This lesser being doesn't recognize itself to be the producer of the fundamental 'a' sound but recognizes its activity within the wobbles.
If it could express its intuition it might say "I'm not responsible for the resounding 'a' but I can surely recognize how I wobble it. My intuitive intents are perfectly reflected in that wobble. The fundamental sound is a reflection of the intuitive activity of a greater Being in which I'm embedded. I only modulate this activity with my own and the result is experienced in the wobble." Conversely, we can say that the Divine also recognizes the presence of the wobble in its own sound production. In a sense, the Divine has
sacrificed the perfect control over the sound and allowed unknown intuitive movements to wobble it. These movements can eventually reach coherent self-reflection (self-consciousness) within the wobbles they dimly produce through their dreamy intuitive intents.
Now on the surface, one may say that the above is just a different way of conveying what also KM says. The thing however is not so much in the words chosen for the description but how this description urges us to
place ourselves differently in the World Process. We can immediately sense how the above description alleviates a great burden from our shoulders - we don't even need to speak about a created world as some object within Cosmic consciousness. This burden is inherited simply due to the fact that the intellectual consciousness, by virtue of its own existence, grasps reality as inner activity in premeditative space of mental images, and impressions in the denser matter-light spiritual stratum. This stratum already feels as a 'thing', it has been created as some 'object' (Cosmic wax) and now to understand that, the intellect needs to find the mental images (seals) at the scale of the Divine Mind that have been impressed in the amorphous wax to give it its present form. In any case, there's a clear distinction between objectively created denser spiritual machinery (the World, the simulator, etc.) and the less dense Divine Mind that has premeditated the machine in Cosmic mental images.
Contrast this with the above picture. Notice how there's really no created world that exists as some 'object' independent of the Divine premeditations. All there is is the continuous resounding of Cosmic phenomena, continually thought into existence and immediately fading as memory. The World is really this real-time resounding - cross-modulated by the most varied intuitive intents. The lawfulness of the World is not contained in its objective mechanism but in the smoothly varying
phase-relations of the resounding intuitive intents. There's no separate real world and some simulated world existing as an object inside the Cosmic container. There's One resounding phenomenal sphere of experience, that can be experienced from infinite constellations of specific phase-relations, as long as intuitive activity is able to find there a coherent self-reflection. The intellectual self is itself such a perspective. It is not placed in some simulated world away from the real one. It's only a vantage point within the Cosmic sound, portraying a very complicated interference of intuitive intents, where the spirit knows itself in wobbly modulations that it calls thoughts. There are other wobbles of the most varied scales that the intellect doesn't feel responsible for. They feel as a more inert corporeal and Cosmic environment. It is this condition that the intellect erroneously projects back onto the Divine. The intellect turns things upside down by saying "The Divine is similar to me. It weaves in mental wobbles and these wobbles create the Cosmic sound." But this is completely inverted! This is not true even in a lucid dream - we can't say that our thoughts create the raw colors of the dreamscape. We still only modulate it. We create a hard problem for ourselves when we fantasize that our wobbles create out of themselves the raw phenomena that is being wobbled! And we further project this onto the Divine. The Divine is wobbling in premeditative Cosmic mental images and then somehow produces from them a created world that is no longer a mental image. All of these illogisms result from the simple inversion that the intellect has promulgated because it secretly desires to immortalize its later generation existence.
This is not to abominate the intellect. It is perfectly in place. It is only that we need to see its images as modulation produced by our inner intuitive activity, through the feedback of which we seek to get a grip on the complicated ideal phase-relations. The fundamental activity, however, manifesting in thought images is essentially the same as the Divine that manifests in the Cosmic sound. It's only that at our level of coherence the vibrations of our intuitive activity only modulate the resounding flow, while the vibrations of the Divine activity seem to us like producing the raw phenomena that we modulate. The most critical thing to recognize is that we don't modulate the already manifested phenomena. Everything that we perceive is
already in the process of fading as memory. What we modulate is the collective intuitive movements (and conversely, they modulate ours). Think of a clay pot on a turntable. The World is not the pot. What we perceive is only a momentary image of the World process. The Divine intuitive activity is as if defining the main movement of a hand that shapes the picture of the clay. Lesser activities nudge that hand and thus produce modulations in the resounding image. The lesser beings say "I'm not responsible for the general picture of the clay but I can recognize my activity in those wobbly shapes that I have contributed by nudging the hand. Yet I repeat - the image of the pot is not some objective world that is being shaped. Our phenomenal world is only the volumetric image of a collective Cosmic thought process. What is real is the interference of intuitive intents, that slowly morph their phase-relations - every being contributing their modulations according to their high ideal.
Even though I intended to write a short response, I see that it again approached, if not surpassed, the size of the scrapped one
It seems I'm unable to do that in less words. I'm tempted to continue but I'll force myself to stop. I hope that something of value can be extracted.
