Theos-Talk Archives (September 1998 Message tt00233)

>
>Spiritual experiences are exemplified by increased sentience,
>awareness, luminosity of consciousness, understanding and
>appreciation of what is before one in life.
>

Not necessarily. I think that what we have here are two possible
processes going on: The one to which I was originally referring to
is to see spirituality directly in the Zen sense of a satori, or
the Hindu sense of samadhi. The one which you seem to be
referring to is the result of spiritual forces emanating downward
into the lower principles or the Self influencing the self. Both
can happen, and are ligitamite. In the one case spirituality
is experienced directly, and in the other indirectly. Often the
second naturally follows from the first, but not necessarily.


>Psychic experiences are exemplified by increased sensory
>perception, of image, color, form, shape, touch, taste, etc.
>of this or some other plane.
>
>It's possible to have heightened spiritual consciousness, like
>in Zazen, with restricted sensory inputs, or heightened
>psychical awareness of astral or higher-plane imagery with
>little or no heightened consciousness, like in mediumship.
>
>-- Eldon


Eldon, I completely agree. Not only is it "possible" but I
suspect that it happens all the time, and the forest is mistook
for the trees, so to speak. I am very familiar with this problem
in magic circles where "mages" have astral experiences
and think that they are spiritual ones. But one can lose a
lot of friends if one speaks up about it.

I am currently writing a column for the OTO folks in a journal
called Conquering Child. In the next issue I will be talking all about
HPB's distinction between psychism and buddhi (or psychic
and noetic). I am real curious to see how this material sets
with magic users (not well, is my guess, but they really need to
be aware of this distinction).

Jerry S.