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2nd November 2014 02:05
Link to Post #1821
Avalon Member
Re: The Higher Self and transcendent experience, including OBEs
In this post I have to go into some abstract philosophical ideas. But before I do, I'd like to focus on the fact that when we take the Witness position in self-watching, or in meditation or OB travel into formless or higher states, we all already experience "nothingness" which will often to the ordinary mind seem like it's "nothing" or "empty", but will in fact be absolutely filled with aliveness and wordless higher intelligence. Initially I experienced this without receiving any conceptualizing about it at all, and in enlightenment experiences one experiences it all even more fully and deeply. But we all already have some direct experience of what the "absence" or "negation" or "nothingness" or "empty space" I'm going to talk about actually means.
Let's begin by looking at the concepts of form and space. Westerners tend to think of space as being in itself just "nothing" -- but as I've already pointed out, there is no such thing as nothing, not in the nihilistic sense that Westerners conceive of it. Form and space are intimately interrelated. That's because the only way the boundaries of a form can even exist is through space being present beyond them. Westerners tend to discount that space. But actually, it's conceptually and existentially prior to form. For a form can't even begin to exist unless there's already a space for the whole of it, existing prior to when that form comes into existence.
Notice also that although form and space are distinct from each other, they're not somehow in conflict with each other. Unfortunately, though, the Western mind in a knee-jerk kind of way leaps to the assumption that any two things that are different must somehow be in conflict. In this case one of the two -- space -- actually makes form possible, enables it to come to be.
I won't talk about ancient Chinese (particularly early Ch'an Buddhist) notions, which were more sophisticated than the ancient Indian ones. But the Indian are closer to Western conceptions. In ancient Indian thought (two thousand or more years ago), absence was considered more primary than presence. This was for reasons very similar to why space is indeed more primary than form, as I've just explained. For instance, instead of saying: "Where there's smoke there's fire," they would say: "Absence-of-smoke implies absence-of-fire." I don't want to go into the details more than this. My whole point is, the Indian masters of the last two centuries all received a very Anglocentric education, and hence were ignorant of, or totally misunderstood, the understanding of "negation" that their ancient Indian predecessors had, and also, to some extent, the true nature of space. The only one I know of who didn't fall into that trap was J. Krishnamurti, who I believe was the most recent reincarnation of the Buddha. Because of the unfortunate dumbing-down of those and other masters in this area, we have seen such things as the notion that nirvana (the second lowest level of enlightenment or universality) means non-being, non-existence. When I happen to know it doesn't. That's an example of the totally nonsensical Western notion of "nothing" infecting Indian thought.
A major problem for Westerners in coming to grips with this is that in our own Western culture there's a certain huge dumbing-down that's at such a basic conceptual level, most Westerners have no idea it's a dumbing-down, but mistakenly assume it's the facts of how things necessarily are in the universe, and in any universe. I'm talking about the underlying assumption that reality reduces top one concept, that of what philosophers call a "substance". Basically, a "substance" is anything that's noun-like or object-like. The assumption that substances are the cornerstone of reality (and that you yourself are a substance) is not only arbitrary. Both mystics and quantum physics have utterly proved that it totally fails to be consistent with the facts, with reality, in their areas of investigation.
Last edited by TraineeHuman; 2nd November 2014 at 02:08.
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3rd November 2014 10:19
Link to Post #1822
Avalon Member
Re: The Higher Self and transcendent experience, including OBEs
One member has asked me for a point of view regarding a certain question about perfection. Perfection is a tough topic to discuss. And yet it's in some ways the most important of all topics, because all our (spiritual) evolution is ultimately about the movement towards greater and greater advances towards perfection in some sense. Seek it we must. And yet words are so shabby and misleading by comparison to it, so judgmental, so limited. Can we even be sure that perfection, or our Infinite true Self, is anything more than a concept existing only in our own mind? And surely the Infinite, or Source, is mostly indefinable. So maybe full perfection is just way beyond the reaches of anything we can ever say or point to? And even if that's not the case, how do we successfully "translate" the Infinite into our own particular individually-blinkered terms? Maybe we are reduced to Silence.
And yet, once we start to become familiar with the inner peace inside us, we gradually notice more and more that that peace is not so much passive as it's highly energised and pregnant, and pregnant with no less than every energy that makes the universe work. We begin to walk in all-seeing silence like the night.
As far as I understand, perfection means doing as Source does, as far as that's possible. Source certainly accepts and creates and supports all levels of existence. So I don't think it's a matter of escaping to some higher level that's then seen as less "imperfect". Rather, it's a matter of perfectly facing and taking whatever gets dished out to you, including, ironically, all the imperfection we see in this world, such as all the conflict and injustice and ignorance and so on.
The member's question was, does perfection require imperfection -- its opposite -- in order to even exist? I would say no, but equally I'd say that perfection can never afford to ignore all the imperfection, not even for a moment. It needs to remain calm in the midst of the imperfection, but it also needs to continually work to transform it.
That's easier said than done, of course. Normally, we make the distinction between perfection and imperfection as ordinary human beings struggling under the pressures of life and the difficulties of how we respond to its continual problems and perplexities. The challenge of perfection, then, or of making small steps towards perfection, is for us to become so stable in the Silence, in the immortal One, that we continually bring that higher form of existence into our everyday world and aren't overcome by this world's problems but instead, through the extraordinary use of our higher faculties such as intuition and imagination, continually transform them and reduce the unhappiness and suffering around us.
The challenge in the end is, can you, can we grasp the essential nature and the essential cause of error, suffering and death? Only then will we have a good chance of truly eliminating them altogether.
Last edited by TraineeHuman; 3rd November 2014 at 10:22.
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5th November 2014 14:17
Link to Post #1823