Daring Batwinged Girl To Jump At Airshow!
Ego is a maladaptive construct of the psyche that, when left unchecked, becomes the dominant aspect of the person. However, when allowed to play a minimal role, ego serves a valuable purpose: It anchors us in a point of reference and prevents us from blending completely into infinite consciousness.
We didn’t come to this place of relativity to escape back into the infinite, we came here to gather experience and create thus providing a portal for infinite consciousness to manifest in the realm of experienced knowing.
In the spiritual game you have wave people and particle people.
Wave people are the airy fairy new agers who want to transcend the gross material world for an etheric experience.
Particle people are the ones who see spirit in the Earth and animals. They embrace the world as a divine expression of the increate.
But it’s the wave particle duality as a complete system that serves us best. It allows us to transcend but include, to be in the Earth but not of it, to have our feet on the ground and our heads in the stars.
Either approach in one extreme or the other leads to cultural schizophrenic crack ups. It can show up as the Heaven’s Gate cult or the pathologically selfish Illuminati.
June 2, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I like the Gnostics description of consciousness emanating outward like spokes connecting to the outer ring of physical bodies that make up the cosmos. The spokes represent our psyches – individual manifestations of the one undifferentiated whole.
June 3, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Yeah, I think this is precisely right. The great Hindu sage Sri Aurobindo dedicated his life to making a similar point vis a vis the aescetic tradition in India. I hope to read his “Synthesis of Yoga” some time this year. From what I’ve read about it, he maybe slights the importance of asana (posture, or the physical part of yoga emphasized by the hatha tradition) too much, but I think he’s worth reading precisely to see how he theorizes the point you make here.
I like to think that there are three levels of the self: the bodily consciousness, the universal mind, and the atman. The bodily consciousness is conscious of the external world and experiences beliefs and desires. Egoism is when people live as if that is all there is.
Higher consciousness comes from aggregating bodily consciousnesses, the most universal aggregation being something like Vishnu or the Holy Spirit. This kind of consciousness is consciousness of bodily consciousness. When you empathize with others you are tapping into this to get consciousness of their bodily consciousness. Jesus’ and Krishna’s perfection was that they could instantiate the completely aggregated version of this. They were perfect bodily incarnations of the universal higher consciousness (the Holy Ghost/Vishnu). Some forms of yoga perfect this.
Atman is consciousness of higher consciousness. While even universal higher consciousness is a process (that is in time and evolving with the world experienced through bodily consciousness) Atman is entirely outside of time. The Christian mystics’ God and Shiva meditating are images of Atman. Like the universal higher consciousness, there is only one Atman, and part of our life’s goal is to attain the genuine realization (not just in terms of linguistic belief) that each of us is Atman.
So weirdly, the study of yoga has brought me back into believing in the trinity. The Father/Shiva is Atman and paradoxically (given that it exists outside of time) allows us to reach Atman through meditation and yoga. The Holy Ghost/Vishnu is the universal higher consciousness that allow us achieve the perfect love of Jesus/Krishna. And Jesus/Krishna is the incarnation that brings these to us.
Where I agree with you and Aurobindo is that the diversity of bodies and the world experienced by bodily consciousness is a holy thing, and that this diversity evolves into greater beauty and more realization of truth. But part of this evolution is people identifying not just with their bodies and bodily consciousnesses but also with the universal higher consciousnesses and atman.
The central paradox of the trinity is maintained. Each person affirms and glorifies their discreet bodies and the beauty and understanding of multiplicity and diversity they create *while at the same time* affirming that they are the universal higher consciousness and atman.