Sunday, March 18, 2018

miracles just for saints or rishis or for all of us?

One of the Vedanta folks presented the views of a yogi who is claimed to do (image?) materialization demonstrations to selected followers, after I suggested opening it up to cameras and such.

First I give my response, addressing the really important issue of human potential for all of us, and then I give some technical details of what astral travel actually is and how it works.

His comment:

The opening of eyes could not be thru the demonstration of psychic or supernatural powers only.  In reality, the opening of eyes implies making the people around aware of their true self which is cosmic consciousness and persuading them and creating adequate motivation in them to regain their true self.

My reply:

How to open the eyes of the people is a very fundamental challenge to all of us, especially to the most capable of us.

Here we are, after thousands of years full of many very serious spiritual teachers, backed up by intelligence far greater than what humans in general seem able to imagine in concrete terms... and yet just look at the state of this planet. After so much effort by so many incredibly capable minds... clearly the challenge is not trivial even with the greatest of intelligence and understanding. It is like what I have been trying to say to Serge, about the relation between aleph zero intelligence, versus aleph one and aleph two. 

Many religions try to come up with contorted explanations for their question: "If God is all powerful, all knowing and all good, why are things so imperfect here and so full of pain and confusion even now?" But those of us who have even a little experience in teaching seventh grade know a little about these kinds of challenges. 

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Many religions have been run  by humans as simple in their thinking as those movie makers twenty years ago who fell into a simple model/theory to maximize sales: "just maximize sex and violence." I am glad that that period has passed! But in religion, the similar simple formula is: "Just make people believe." Or: "Just get them to 'know' (believe) the 17 sacred principles." Strictly speaking, with the CORRECT 17 (?) principles actually applied to life, it might work, but every system promulgated by ANY of the major world religions demonstrates the devastating implications of adhering so much to what was distilled by mulling over the past in the ways which humans have learned so far.

The essence of "opening the eyes" as Jesus meant it was NOT creating loyalty to whatever string of words you choose, whether true and complete or not (almost never both in human history). It was NOT a string of words to be frozen like statues in the verbal ego of the mundane brain (fantasizing that it is more than that). It is, more literally, opening up the whole self, first to full attention to feelings which are nonverbal in nature, and then to the direct input from the spiritual world. BELIEF alone is no good. Total belief in belief is a false belief, a devastating one. 

The problem of false belief in belief... I have discussed with Yeshua, who liked:


When teachers encourage a false belief in belief itself, and focus on propagating the beliefs THEY have come to, without actually creating a realization that this actually connects to reality... when they limit themselves to a narrow circle ... they actually destabilize that narrow circle itself.

It is hard to move forward just one big step in reality, especially in spiritual reality, rather than imagining a thousand steps in one's own mundane fantasies... it requires strain and growth., But that is what we are called to do. Maybe it is a bit oversimplified and silly... but I like Yeshua's phrase, "GOD is an acronym for Grow or Die."  And indeed, this applies to the entire macroscopic Schrodinger cat we think of as "the entire earth." 

Best of luck,

    Paul
P.S. Of course, I know about the walking on water story, as does Yeshua. It is important to have values straight, but equally important to be respectful of the needs of people who need to see.


By the way, at 4AM, just before I saw your message, I had been thinking a bit about Princeton, which has so many interesting connections. In the Princeton thread, I thought first of the woman who took over the Princeton energy program a few years ago, who knows about real material science, including stuff like NEGF. I thought of a friend with similar background who visited SpaceX, which tried to hire him... but he refused, with sadness, because he could see that (1) they were not organized to use his best capability; and (2) their lack of understanding of the real materials issues made them about as promising as the Jonestown cult. Such good intentions... but such strong commitment to things which exclude what actually needs to be done. That is very much entangled with the fate of this Schrodinger cat we live in here. 

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Last night, I thought again about how much I like them metaphor or being fully aware of the ground immediately under one's feet, even as one move a step ahead and looks to the far distance to make sure one is on a path which gets to an interesting place and allows a return home, father than a path which could get you lost or even take you over a cliff. The importance of balance and integration of the three levels one must attend to, the feet, the path immediately ahead, and the far mountains.

I also thought of a real example of this, when I was walking in the great Yellow Mountain in the general area of Xian, in the company of an extremely attractive and vibrant young woman who herself offered a kind of path (attractive but at risk of falling off a cliff). I also remember when she and I reached one of the peaks, where there was a small shrine with a little green statue representing the spirit of the mountain. She stopped to express very serious and even energetic devotion to that statue... even as I breathed in and communed directly with that mountain itself, far more real and powerful than any statue. Opening the eyes entails seeing the mountain, and not just the statue... though I feel sorry for those stuck in places where little statues are all they have, not even good photographs. If only more of humanity could have access to more... essential also to the spiritual and mental ;productivity and survival of this little cat.

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It was curious that as I started drafting this in my mind, Luda pulled me to our balcony, and pointed to the sky.
"See that triangle! Jupiter on the lower left, Spica on the lower right, rising up to Arcturus ever so bright on the top.' Spica? "Yes, your Virgo."  Oh? Are we doing the law of the triangle thing this night? Jupiter like Trump and Putin and such folk? Or? "Yes, but Polaris is on the other side of the house/sky." Arcturus as in Voyage to Arcturus, with its own image of what materialization looks like?

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We had a further discussion of astral travel:

On the subject of lucid dreams versus astral travel, I previously wrote that there is not a distinct line between the two, NOT ONLY in our ability to tell which is which, but in the reality of the experiences themselves.

On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 4:02 AM,  ...  wrote:
But there is one difference between the two. While the experiences of the physical world are 
available universally to everyone without any efforts but the experiences of the astral world
are available to a few may be one in million and that too after a lot of efforts and practice.

In the end, we humans say we have had a lucid dream or an astral experience when we have a memory of a string of images and other experience, a memory which we preserve in our mundane cerebral cortex. 

What we remember is a kind of COMBINATION of inputs deposited into our cortex by our "soul" or "noosphere", and of things we reconstruct in our own mundane  cerebral cortex. I always remember the old story of a dreaming person whose alarm clock starts to ring... who begins to work the alarm clock into the dream, perhaps as a giant dragon... and then finally wakes up. The situation is even a bit more complicated, because the noosphere itself is a kind of mental space, with its own cortex-like reconstruction, provided shared mental spaces analogous to internet chat rooms. (I am reminded of Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow which gives examples of such.) 
it is never 100% perfect input or 100% reconstruction; it is always a mix of the two, and even the input is the mixed bag one can encounter in a mental space. Typical astral travelers tend to get mixed up between what is reconstruction and what is actual input.


But no, it is not just for the one in a million.There was a time in human history when LITERACY was for the "one in a million,"
and many institutions worked hard to keep it that way, declaring that this was a law of nature, not realizing how much was lost by taking it that way. 

One of the reasons I liked Jane Robert's readable little trilogy of Oversoul Seven is her vivid picture of hundreds of people engaged in authentic out of body travel (astral travel) every night... really showing up in the noosphere... but floating there half conscious, and not remembering it later. I have seen much the same myself at times. What they are missing is NOT the training to be able to do astral travel, but the training to be CONSCIOUS enough when they do it, to benefit from the experience, to leave an impact, and to be able to remember it. And also the training to penetrate through the illusions which we and the noosphere itself create as part of the natural healthy process of reconstruction. (By the way, at www.werbos.com/Mind.htm, I have links to a Handbook which gives the basic equations for performing that kind of reconstruction. My paper with Joshua Davis, aka Yeshua ben-David, shows that the model does fit 25KHz real-time unit recording data from the cortex.) 

When **I** use the term cosmic consciousness, I think of a state closer to 100% real input, with full awareness of one's current mundane situation ("wakeful, embodied," like bilocation), with no immersion in chat rooms, with more direct, flexible and explicit addressing of other parts of the noosphere, and more resonance with its emerging more conscious thought (and yes, its own input/output channels).
No astral bodies. More like what Brad Steiger talks about in "In my soul I am free." 

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