Theos-Talk Archives (January 2007 Message tt00379)

7 of 7 - Inner Self


VII. PHILOSOPHY AND MYSTICISM


    I used to spend most of my thinking time 
on cosmology.  The whole effort is an attempt 
to escape the truth that life is a madhouse 
from beginning to end.  To be clearly 
conscious of what the world is like is agony.  
I've never seen anyone who got to the point of 
having disdain for life ever reverse their 
attitude.  A process goes on progressively 
from birth to death.  Some call it "wising up," 
but another thing to call it is "accepting 
defeat."  It is defeat.  Your fantasies die one 
at a time.  Most people die physically before 
they get to the point of total rejection.  
Nobody goes the other way.  Nobody gets 
happier and happier.


    Real philosophy is different from scholastic 
philosophy, which, after Plato, is ninety-eight 
percent horse manure.  It is a particular form 
of insanity, delusions of grandeur gone wild 
on a paying basis.  Scholastic philosophers 
make psychologists look like healthy men.  
They put out pure garbage devoid of any 
capacity to experience meaning.  You wind 
up feeling you are chewing cotton.


     I started in Pre-Law in college.  Law has 
absolutely nothing to do with anything.  All 
these cases are decided by manic lawyers 
who are having a good day and sway the 
judges.  It is all theatre.  When I eventually 
saw through it, I had to get out.  In my first five 
minutes of a philosophy class, I knew


    I had discovered where I belonged.  I later 
learned that scholastic philosophers were 
nuttier than psychologists.  Everything but 
philosophy is child's play.  No one could 
settle for dandelions when they know what 
roses are.


    We have the essential assumption that we 
are on a trip from unknowing to all-knowing.  
All religions and cosmologies are different 
versions of this same theme.  It's the 
underlying implication in all conscious effort.  
But how can any being be the absolute 
master of his own destiny, which is what it 
boils dawn to?  Our type of comprehension is 
entirely limited.  If it weren't for habit patterns, 
nothing would get done.  But habit is the 
antithesis of insight.  They block it at every 
turn because it takes time to sift this idea and 
see what it does to that idea.  By saying that 
our comprehension is limited, consider that if 
we had to be attentive to the basic 
operations of Nature, if we had to 
consciously digest our food.  Our 
comprehension is designed in limitation.  If 
we had to be conscious of and control all 
this... which theologians presume to be the 
consciousness of god.


    You've gone as far as our comprehension 
can go when you get to paradox.  You come 
to two equally opposed expressions of the 
situation.  Most any explanation will only 
suffer so much examination.  If you look at 
any explanation too closely, the whole thing 
will fall apart.  We can use the word "infinite," 
for instance, and have it have some meaning 
to us, but only by caparison to the fact that we 
presently aren't infinite.  The main reason for 
the concept's existence is to give dimension.  
You cannot know black without white.  It is 
impossible.  Our structure is such that we 
cannot make a perception in the absence of 
dimension.  We see all reality as patterned 
after our own reality, which is probably 
another tragic mistake in the way our minds 
work.  You can get in trouble going too far, 
because our comprehension is only 
designed to operate in a limited range.  It has 
to be that way or we simply couldn't survive.


    Everything is an extension of the 
questioning process.  This is the point that 
most scientists loose track of.  Why are they 
asking questions in the first place?  Why are 
the questions so insufferably unanswerable 
no matter what they find?  The reason is that 
they are answering the wrong questions.  
They are in the laboratory looking for the 
reason why they can't sleep, and they're 
never going to find the answer in the 
laboratory.  Intellect is a monster when it is 
not connected in comprehension with feeling.


    You may start on the trip that brings you to 
referring only to yourself as the source of your 
answers.  Unknowingly accepting other 
people's answers through books and the like, 
is the trap which we are all born into in our 
system, but there's no alternative.  When 
growing up we have to be taught to tie our 
shoes.  If we had to figure it out ourselves, 
we'd be fourteen before we figured out the 
bow knot.


    The great danger of the written and spoken 
word is that you will ingest conclusions 
without the pain of the growth.  You can't do it.  
It won't work.  You start to read in order to 
learn, but the problem is that we all use the 
written word as an opiate, as an escape from 
thinking, as an escape from the pain.  It is a 
dangerous trap because in time you are 
forced to resolve every issue you ever came 
to in the mental realm.  You create a need to 
answer every question that is generated 
through the interface and interrelatedness of 
all these concepts.


    We get into the trap of thinking that the 
written and spoken word have answers.  
They are only answers of the written and 
spoken word, not the questions of the body, 
which are injected with every word we read.  
When someone writes a book, you have to 
question what his purpose was in writing it.  
No one can do anything but describe 
themselves.  It doesn't do any good to learn 
from a book because it's not your story.  This 
is an entirely individualistic thing.  You may 
listen to someone for hours and only one 
sentence will have a pressing meaning for 
you, one thing you were looking for.  It has to 
have reference to what you are trying to do 
inside, whether you are conscious of it or not.  
You have to find concepts that release your 
gut tensions.  Most of us go through the time 
of being so isolated from our gut experiences 
that we literally don't know that they're there.  
If that were not true, there would never be a 
day's work done.


    You have an accumulated world of 
experience, and in being a man there is a 
part of you that is always trying to see how 
this affects that, and what does this over here 
mean, and how did this get to be like that.  
You can't stop this process and are stuck 
with it.  Women, I don't think, generally have 
the ability to raise mind before the age of 
thirty-five because of the simple chemistry 
involved.


   Every time you break through into a sharp, 
clear realization or imagery in any area, all of 
a sudden you set up a whole new standard 
and everything you've ever thought up has to 
be brought up and compared with it.  It's a 
standard process and you have to start all 
over again.  This occurs until you break 
through and achieve the awareness of THIS I 
KNOW IS ME.  When you achieve that 
realization, you break into the final frontier.  
>From then on, after you've done the massive 
review and reevaluation from breaking into 
that final frontier, everything thereafter is 
done for the rest of time.  You don't have to 
do the massive review any longer, or go over 
everything every time you achieve insight.  I 
spent thirty years doing it.


    I've spent a lot of my life driving.  My doctor 
is the automobile and hundreds of thousands 
of miles. That is where I bought my silence.  
I've driven because it gives the outer mind 
just enough to do to keep it from attacking, 
so that the inner mind has the opportunity to 
come up and smell fresh air.  The best thing 
you can do with inner problems is to get them 
on the surface.  It might be temporary agony, 
but it's endless relief.  It's like the sign by the 
side of the road, "Dig We Must For A Better 
Future."  To be genuinely "clear" is to have 
answered to every question you have had to 
date, and I've been there on a regular basis.  
If that isn't paradise, I don't know what is.  It is 
to have taken every feeling that ever came 
into your comprehension and to have traced 
it all the way back to it's roots.


    We are accustaned to think in the limited 
bag of concepts that we already have and 
there is a fear to try and reach out beyond 
that.  You will try to get something out of the 
bag you already have.  For awhile it will fit, 
and then it won't fit.  It will wind up making you 
more uneasy than you were before.  You wind 
up getting answers that don't fit the 
questions.


   A great problem is the fear involved in 
realizing that you know nothing.  When I first 
came to the place of being able to face the 
unknown, I split the most difficult rock for me 
in my entire life.  Facing the unknown takes a 
lot of personal quiet and divorcement from 
the world around you.  I studied this very 
carefully.  It is the bridge between the inner 
and outer man.


   It takes hundreds of hours of facing the 
unknown to get the unknown to yield one little 
insight, one little piece at a time.  If you are 
going to be any good at it, you have to be 
lucky enough to escape the trap of thinking 
that you can learn anything from books.  You 
can learn anything at all about outside reality 
from a book, but when it canes to describing 
your own inner reality, it cannot by definition 
ever be described by anyone else.  It can 
only be described by you.  No one else has 
access to it.  It is a totally solo and into the 
unknown trip.


   I learned to take things to their logical 
extremes and see what is going on behind 
them.  You have to deal with the problem at 
hand and not get a point in thought ahead of 
yourself.  There is a perfected image behind 
every thought, and until you have every one of 
them honed to a razor edge, you can't 
achieve the comprehension that your soul so 
desperately needs.  You have to get the time 
to develop the frontal mind to keep track of 
the rest of you.  You have to constantly 
answer to questions presented to you from 
the envirornnent.  Everyone has questions 
longing to be answered inside of them, but 
for sane reason in most people the pressure 
of the question isn't that great.


   If you learn to go to sleep slowly, you can 
pick up information from the crossover state 
of images between waking and sleeping.  I 
think numerology first originated from 
information gotten in the crossover state.  
Numerology doesn't have anything to do with 
mathematics.  "O" is the state of unknowing.  
"1" is the state of knowledge.  "2" is the state 
of bringing the knowledge into the practical.  
"3" is the state of completion - spiritual, 
mental, practical.  "4" is dealing with the 
practical. "5" is the number of change.  "6" is 
the number of the Overself or the Christ in 
you.  "7" is the psychic number.  "8" is 
completion as opposed to involvement in the 
earth.  "9" is the last phase of integration of 
new information and completion of a cycle, 
and on and on.  These ideas have been 
generating in men's minds since the 
beginning of time.  It says more about the 
nature of thinking itself than anything else.


     Mysticism is a continuing trend of thought 
and experience brought about by 
contemplating the nature of the organization 
of matter in the universe.  It brings a high and 
sense of fulfillment that no other thinking will 
bring.  The first philosopher I ever identified 
with was Plato, because I felt he had had the 
same experience.


   The source of all this world to me and to the 
extent which our structures allow us to 
understand it, is that there is an energy, of 
which the most physically understandable 
aspect is light.  This energy is slowed down.  
When it is slowed dawn to an extent, there is 
time and space.  In the condition beyond time 
and space, there is only a condition in, and 
not a condition to question in.  Our problem is 
our lack of ability to accelerate our being to 
the absence of time, the absence of motion.



    People that desire a mystic experience 
may actually be preventing it by thinking that 
the urgency they feel may be for that 
experience, when at that point in time it may 
be for something completely different.  You 
have to find a way of knowing what the 
hunger is for inside of you.  If you don't find a 
way of satisfying the hunger, you will be hard 
pressed to pursue anything.  You have to see 
where accidentally you have been making 
efforts against your own best interests.


    In an extreme form of concentration, like in 
motorcycle racing, a person develops 
attention able to be focused on about fifteen 
different factors at once.  All the while the 
person is also maintaining a single 
overriding frame of mind.  If something 
breaks the concentration, he'd better get out 
in a hurry.    Musicians in a band also achieve 
this state of concentration and hear every 
note that is being played.  They may even be 
aware of the state of mind of each person 
they are playing with.  No one can stay in this 
state for very long.  Drugs make it 
impossible.


   When I finally became successful at deep 
meditation, I came to a frame of mind that 
was identical to this type of stream 
consciousness.  I had the ability to be on 
stream totally in all levels of capacity to 
perceive in any sense, from physical things 
right down to the most abstract level of 
comprehension.  I don't know if this would be 
called Cosmic Consciousness because I 
don't know for certain what is meant by the 
term.  I've only had this experience once.  
When I try to talk to someone about the thing, 
I'm strapped for a description.  The only way I 
know how to describe it is that, if you imagine 
your comprehension as a pinpoint in space, 
and from all directions around that point you 
are perceiving totally.  It is the same function 
as the increased concentration in the 
motorcycle racer example, but about a 
thousand times more intense.  It is being at 
the peak of the universe and surveying it all in 
comprehension.


   Illumination is the opposite of the feeling of 
complete worthlessness.  Everybody has 
known a time when they felt completely 
outcast, downtrodden, completely worthless 
and useless.  The other extreme on that 
same line of experience is the feeling of 
being completely at one with yourself, being 
completely informed and capable of handling 
anything that you have to face, of being 
completely serene and beyond the capability 
of doubting your own capabilities and 
capacities. To understand this phenomenom, 
you can see that the concept of focus in 
common consciousness is merely the focal 
point between internal drives and external 
fulfillments.  In the one case where you are 
feeling utterly worthless, the lens of focus has 
fallen slack, is nothing but a pane of glass 
and cannot focus on anything of value either 
on the inside or the outside.  At the other 
extreme, the lens is sharply focused and very 
clear, and able to pick up desires without any 
effort, and with no effort be able to find in the 
world the sources of fulfillment.


   The most overwhelming experience I've 
had was the knowing of my Overself that 
occurred to me in my middle teens.  It 
answered to a whole realm of my being that I 
had no suspicion even existed before the 
experience.  Nothing in my Catholic 
education suggest that such a thing could 
happen to a person.  I had to totally give up 
the sense of any personal being and take a 
chance that there was nothing there that 
would be destructive to me.  Which I was 
able to do and did.  It was a death from 
remorse, from failure.  I literally died from it 
the pressure was so great.  It got me to the 
other side, and the minute I got there, my first 
question was "Did I fail?"  My answer was, 
"You couldn't have failed if you tried to. You 
did a brilliant job.  You went down like a 
valiant sailor."  I haven't been bothered by 
failure again.  I know it is a false concept.  No 
one can fail.


   I feel this experience is what has carried 
me through the rest of my life.  I know that this 
body will pass and I will return to that place.


   The sense that first came to me was that of 
being free of the trap.  It was a relief beyond 
expression here.  There were different 
experiences in the same realm.  To describe 
it I can only point to the wonder of a child the 
night before Christmas, the inability to 
contain your desire to be there before you're 
there.  Strangely, it is the simple experience 
of being there in the full realm of the things 
you experience there.


   The question of returning came up and it 
was similar to that of my other experiences.  
The capacity to do generates the necessity 
to do.  As soon as you have on the other side 
committed yourself, even by a slight 
suggestion to return, then the hunger to return 
is generated.  In my experience, to be 
honest, this world is quite miserable.  We are 
not all here.  We are familiar with physical 
existence and accept it as being here.  When 
I was on the other side, this life was just a 
sad, sad joke.  I'm very unhappy with it.


   You are rooted in this system.  If you stop 
breathing while you're on the other side, you 
won't be back.  It's as simple as that.  I had a 
choice over this the first couple of times I 
went over.  I had complete knowledge and 
there were no blind decisions.  I knew exactly 
what was involved, but for some reason I 
chose to come back.  I was given the 
opportunity to knowingly choose.


    The main reason for coming back was my 
attachment to people.  I was so attached to 
the idea of my death generating a sense of 
loss in them.  Come to the fork in the road, I'll 
go back and see.  I didn't know what was 
going to happen.  In one sense you have 
completely resolved all questions over there.  
You come back out of a sense of duty, which 
is generated out of being here.  It is not 
native to that condition.  I was still alive here, 
so I still would have died here.  Had I ceased 
living here, the sense of duty would have 
evaporated.  It is only generic to this 
condition.  When you are in that condition, 
you are true to it also.  When you are on the 
fence and the life force and health is good, 
you tend to come back.  You think you have a 
choice, you probably don't.  What makes us 
want to come here to physical existence is a 
real question.  All I can tell you is that we are 
incurable nebshits! I can remember with 
some clarity one experience in this lifetime of 
being on the other side.  It was very... all 
encompassing.  I could talk about aspects of 
it for hours.  It only contained about fourteen 
hours.  It was an experience of our being to 
experience that has been uncommon to me, 
so I often return to it in my wondering.  When I 
was there I was at peace.  At first, to say that 
I couldn't believe it only suggests the force 
that it had.  It was peace.  Now I knew a man, 
now here's a switch,he had a scratch for 
every itch - and that was me.  But I was there, 
so in time I believed it, remembering that the 
time experience on that side is totally 
different. 


   Once you've had this experience, you cane 
back with one apparently unreducable 
experience.  You realize that all you are here, 
is made by being here, and it is to answer to 
this dimension alone.  When you come to this 
experience, you will recoil in fear.  If you are 
forced into it many times, you will come to a 
condition of being unfrightened by the 
unanswered.  You come to a state where you 
accept the fact that this is the limit of your 
present capacity to know, and are not 
threatened by what you know is knowable, 
but not by you now.


   I wouldn't object to success in the world if it 
wasn't at the cost of inner accomplishment.  
My answer is to know the Self.  You see 
people chasing cars and status and money 
and all the rest of it, and the more they get the 
more they want, and there's no end to it.  It 
means they have mislabelled their urges.  
They are looking in the wrong direction.  
What they don't know is that they want to 
understand their own inner workings.  They 
are like children and look outside for internal 
answers.


   A side of human nature has to be able to 
go out, work, and accomplish.  I've been 
unable to do this.  You can't be as one-sided 
as me and have a great deal of relief, 
although I have about as much relief as 
anyone, but on the other side of the fence, 
internally instead of externally.  People are 
always at war within, but most don't know it.  
I'm different in that I've faced this war and had 
my day in the sun.  Once you've had a day in 
the sun, your system will not accept any other 
answer.  The things that satisfy me now - a 
simple room, a few pegs to hang my 
belongings on, would send most people 
living in the success mode into the depths of 
depression. To me it is being free, free from 
having to chase things.


	END

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