Spiritual Realism is easier to understand than most other approaches to the burning spiritual issues of our time. This is not because Spiritual Realism is watered down or popularizing but because it is concentrated and essentializing. Most important of all Spiritual Realism is not grounded in an ideology, psychology, or belief system as such, but in a radical way of self awareness and being in the world with others.
Spiritual Realism takes spirituality really seriously. We regard the spiritual challenges we face, to be the most important and far reaching challenges posed by life. We are aware that the spiritual question is the first and foremost of all questions and everyone asks this spiritual question. Even when the individual does not realize that they are asking this spiritual question, still they ask it every time they think or wonder: “What gives my life its true meaning?”
Religions, ideologies, and psychologies have for too long exploited this question as a primary human susceptibility. Spiritual Realism refuses to be put to sleep or confused by any appeal to authority, tradition, or psychologically sanctioned explanations.
Every thinking individual seeks to understand themselves, the people important to them and the world. This is natural and anyone who lives in a thoughtless way fails as a human being and suffers the consequences. We live in a rapidly changing world in crisis. There are many models of reality all claiming to make sense out of the chaos of modern existence. Evidently none of these models are capable of responding fully to this humanity and Earth in survival crisis.
The Spiritual Realist response to this world in crisis requires new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
The new clarity of spiritual realism has been hard won in the fires and trials of Initiation.
Objectivity has emerged and we have deconstructed and will continue to deconstruct the nonessential from all spirituality and culture. The nonessential is superstition, magical thinking, psychologism and infantile emotion. This essentializing spiritual deconstruction does not result in the fatal error of nihilism as we will see, but opens up a new possibility for mans being in the world.
This has profound implications for all aspects of life: culture, politics, economics, education, ecology, and the family.
Spiritual Realism has not merely leapt fully formed from the brow of a god. It has a history and background from which it has systematically freed itself. This essentializing and distilling of spiritual understanding has been born of the need for an effective and doable spiritual practice that can be carried out by the countless millions now entangled in the perpetual business of modern cities. There is also the urgency of understanding what should and can be passed on to future generations.
Spiritual Realism perceives the contemporary world as the site for radical spiritual awakening. All of the real trials and tests of spiritual awakening are presented daily to the millions who now live in capitalist and technology driven urban centers and places of work. Your job and your life just as it is can become your spiritual path, school and playground.
We have studied, contemplated and understood a vast quantity of ostensible teachings from many different streams and traditions. We have remained current with the main streams and schools of spirituality within the Newage movement and also with those who set themselves apart from it.
At all times we have respected the esoteric dictum: “Learn to discern the true from the false”.
In a time of spiritual crisis and information overload these are crucially important issues.
We are aware that many engaged and busy people would love to embark upon a spiritual life
if only they could be quickly directed to spiritual knowledge and methods of significance. These same people would also love to find a community of like minded individuals in a context of open minded learning teaching and exploration. This website has been created to meet these worthy challenges.
Obviously before any attempt to travel a spiritual path it is necessary to know what you are in for. This is why it is imperative that we understand the whole nature and being of man. Only by understanding our real spiritual being and context can we know what is actually possible for us. The failure to achieve this understanding will turn the spiritual path into an endless morass of confusion and failure.
With rare exceptions this confusion and failure has bedeviled every attempt to bring spiritual awakening into the world for the last century.
At exactly a time when we should be witnessing large numbers of authentically initiated deep awakened Individuals, we are witnessing epidemic spiritual consumerism and narcissism instead. We need to understand why this is so and what can be done about it.
Fourfold Sevenfold Being Of Man:
In the Republic Plato points out that man is composed of different interacting principles or parts. This idea or insight predates Greece and can be found in India, Persia, and of course Egypt where so much of what we consider to be Greek originates.
For Plato man is composed of Desire-epithymia/eros, Mind-nous and Spirit-thymos. When we include mans Physical Body-soma, we have a fourfold image of mans nature and being.
Spirit:
Mind:
Desire:
Body:
It is easy to see that a great deal of mans behavior and history can be explained by understanding that it is driven by desire and reason combined. Yet this analysis must remain incomplete until we understand that mind and spirit too drive man to reach out beyond the simple search for physical survival and the satisfaction of desires. Indeed it can be said that what makes man the being that he is, originates in spirit and expresses itself in mind. Each individual discovers an intrinsic self worth within themselves. The combined individual and collective expression of this inherent self worth is culture civilization and politics. If man settles for life in the combination of Desire and Mind he looses the very essence of what makes him a spiritual and thus human being.
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4:SPIRIT:
THYMOS. |
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3:MIND:
NOUS. |
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2:DESIRE:
EPITHEMIA/EROS. |
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1: PHYSICAL:
SOMA. |
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These four self evident principles of mans being determine his nature life and culture. It is easy to see that different stages and communities within a culture tend to emphasize different combinations of these awareness states in the human being. But the ideal has always been the one who is fully alive in all four principles simultaneously.
When mans life is focused in:
1: The Physical: he is guided by Instinct and sees the virtue of strenuous physical effort. He holds the Athlete and the Warrior as Heroes. When he turns to a spiritual practice he chooses Martial Arts, Sports or Hatha Yoga. This man embodies the ethics of honorable physical competition and reflects the physical vitality and courage of his people.
In 2: Desire: We find the man moved and guided by Emotion. His religion and its rituals are very important. He sees life in terms of ‘like and dislike’ ‘good and bad’ polarities. In love this man is a romantic. There is a strong sense of emotional territoriality and loyalty which extends over his family friends and community. The love of music dance and celebrations gives his life its rewards and satisfaction.
In 3: Mind: Intellect is the prevailing attunement and rational explanations for how to master life are sought. This man will always seek out information on the best and easiest way to get things done. He questions tradition and entertains serious doubts about the simple explanations found in religion. He turns to philosophy and theology in the effort to think his way through to the truth of existence. He is committed to the preservation and perpetuation of education law and politics.
In 4: Spirit: The Spirited original ground of the human being is the source of the vitality and inner strength that gives him life and an innate awareness of his own worth as a being.
Obviously the same man can develop all four principles in the course of his life. And in fact in general terms this is what happens. The boy/man is focused in the physical even as he passes through puberty into manhood. He develops an emotional life through marriage and children. In the course of a life spent actively within a community he acquires a more intellectual and less emotional grasp of life’s challenges. When he begins to think about first causes and the meaning of all existence he finds himself contemplating the spiritual.
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7:SPIRIT |
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6:SPIRITUAL SOUL: |
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5:MIND |
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4:PERSONAL
MIND |
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3:EMOTION |
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2:ENERGY |
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1:PHYSICAL |
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We see clearly that when Intellect 3: combines with 2: Emotion/Desire we self evidently have a Personal Mind. And also when Mind/Intellect combines with Spirit 4: We perceive that there is a Spiritual-Soul-Mind. Also the inherent energy expressed in the physical and in the other awareness states constitutes a principle in itself. The four awareness states are really seven.
In this way we have discovered that there are seven primary modes or awareness states inherent in every Individual. These awareness states are if you like hardwired rather than the result of cultural influences. In fact they are the original cause of cultural influences. The innate Sevenfold nature of the human awareness organism is everywhere the same throughout the whole of universal humanity. This means for one thing that a global federation of free peoples is possible and even in the long run probable and this is why we mentioned Plato and the Republic above. We will have more to say about the Sevenfold nature of man and the spiritual meaning of democracy.
But at this stage we need to look more deeply into what man is in order to understand the way he is.
Man is a complex awareness organism simultaneously alive in all its parts and awareness states. The Earth itself is alive in all of its parts and awareness states. For the Spiritual Realist there is no dead matter and the Universe is not a machine. The Earth and the Universe is a vast awareness organism where everything from the smallest particle/wave to the solar system and galaxies beyond are all part of One Life.
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SPIRITUAL REALIST |
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SPIRITUAL
REALIST:
AWARENESS STATES:
NAME:#: AND MEANING: |
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7:
IMMESURABLE ONE:
HORIZONS OF ETERNITY:
TRUE LIVING TIME:
FORMLESS SELF:
ORIGINARY GROUND:
SOURCE OF ALL SEVEN AWARENESS STATES: |
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6: SACRED SOUL:
HORIZONS OF BEING:
SELF IS LIVING TIME:
FORMLESS SELF:
UNIVERSAL
WE-AWARENESS:
INTUITION:
WISDOM:
DISCRIMINATION:
DEEP- AWAKENED: |
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5: MIND AWARENESS:
AWAKENED:
HORIZONS OF MANIFESTATION:
ACTUALITY:
SITUATIONAL WE-AWARENESS:
AUTHENTIC THINKING:
OBJECTIVE KNOWLEDGE: |
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4: PERSONAL MIND:
RECEIVED INFORMATION:
BELIEF SYSTEMS:
EDUCATION: SOCIAL SURVIVAL:
+
HORIZONS OF SUBJECTIVITY:
SELF DOUBTING “I THINK” PSYCHOLOGICAL
SUBJECT:
PSYCHOLOGISM:
SEPARATE-SELF: |
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3: PSYCHE:
EMOTIONAL AWARENESS SPACE:
PERSONAL IMAGINATION:
PERSONAL EMOTIONS:
PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTENT: |
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2: ENERGY:
AND GENETIC FIELD:
ALL LIFE SUSTAINING ENERGIES: |
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1:PHYSICAL FORM:
ALL LIFE SUSTAINING ORGANISMS AND
SUBSTANCES: |
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When we look out into the world we see that it is primarily functioning in the first 4 awareness states shown in the graph of the Sevenfold nature and being of man. Society is driven by the ‘enlightened selfishness’ of the 4th the Personal Mind. Capable of a high degree of social and economic mobilization the fourth awareness state constitutes what we call the mainstream or consensus reality. Any of us when in the 4th awareness state longs for physical security for ourselves and our family, permanent employment, emotional and sexual gratification, and the respect of our peers.
The Personal Mind is capable of being trained and developed to relatively advanced skill levels.
In all of the post industrial technological societies of the new global economy we see that workers of all kinds are capable of learning how to carry out the most varied and complex of tasks. As many of these tasks demand the full concentration of the 4th awareness state we see the emergence of specialization in all areas of skilled work. In the course of a lifetime the modern worker may be required to abandon several skill sets and acquire new ones.
Personal Mind the 4th is unable to generate original thoughts plans or creations. It functions on the basis of “received information”. This is what makes it capable of being educated and trained, but this is what also makes it vulnerable to misdirection and distortion. The received information internalized by Personal Mind comes from the culture it grows up in with its traditions, customs and religious or materialistic beliefs. In the current situation or “electronic information age” media provides most of the information being internalized by Personal Mind. The emotionally inclined Personal Mind is always looking for something to believe in. The intellectually inclined Personal Mind is always looking for something to understand.
Each awareness state exists as an essential spiritual organ within the awareness organism we call man. Each awareness state or spiritual organ contains the fusion of all seven states. And we see that the 2nd awareness state of Energy is functioning fully on all six levels and in fact emanating throughout the entire awareness organism from the 7th. The entire awareness organism is in a constant state of transformation and change. When healthy there are no static cells, energies or awareness states. Yet the coherence and integrity of the whole being persists throughout all changes and stages of existence. Man is a manifold unity and a unity of manifolds. Extraordinary Diversity within Unity each man is
a world in his own right.
It follows that the content to which each awareness state is attuned can vary in the widest degree. Even though anthropology fails to reach the essential spiritual ground of beings, it nevertheless collects and compares the extraordinary variety of human cultures. We see that each age and each generation of any given culture attunes itself to specific cultural and social forms which constitute a mainstream or consensus reality. At the same time all cultures by definition preserve myths traditions rituals and patterns over time. These collective mind-fields are alive and endure in strength for as long as people attend to them and animate them with new energy.
It’s no accident of language that we can speak of “sexual magnetism” and “mental energy” or “mental magnetism”. Everyone understands that genuine sexual attraction is a palpable energy that is powerfully felt and when really strong next to impossible to ignore or resist. The magnetic energy of sexual attraction is simultaneously received and transmitted. The whole of life is animated by complex polarities of energy of attraction and repulsion.
Mans mind exists in an environment, or mental ecology, of mass-mind-fields, or mass-awareness-organisms. And at an individual level we are connected to the mind fields of all the people we know. Many of the mass-mind-fields are really old and like vast recording devices carry the total energy and experience of all the minds that have contributed to them.
This insight is significant to anyone who is intending to connect their mind and thus entire awareness organism to a spiritual mind-field.
There are of course also new and futuristic mass-mind-fields like Technology, Ecology, and the New Spirituality. The more successfully the individual can attune themselves to the current mass-mind-field the more successful they can become in the eyes of society. But if this mainstream reality excludes too much of the individuals actual being and potential, as a whole being, then alienation and social breakdown is the inevitable result.
Attunement can be carried out to an extraordinary degree by individuals and groups over long periods of time. The mind-fields created by attunement are accumulative. The human awareness organism is both a receiver and transmitter of mind-field-energy. Spiritual Realists are awake to these facts of energetic life. The central fact here is that attention is energy and that whatever you give your attention to you are also endowing it with your energy. So too are you receiving the content and quality of the mind-field you have attuned yourself to.
The longer the attention is maintained the stronger the attunement becomes. We hear a lot about “short attention spans” making the actual education of our young people virtually impossible. But at all times, their attention and everyone else’s, is being captured by the images and expectations of psychologism and capitalist consumerism.
When we consider the whole complex and nuanced configuration of awareness states inherent in mans being, and how little they enter into mainstream daily life, we see clearly that we are living in a kind of Dark Age.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than
those who falsely believe they are free."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
You can observe the movement of your own awareness by simply witnessing your own mind. Let’s say that anything you give your thoughtful attention to, involves “attunement”.
The more you concentrate the more completely “attuned” you become, until you are fully “absorbed” by the object of your attention.
Right now you are “absorbed” by the ideas on this page. You are able to sustain
your concentration on these ideas because you are “absorbed” by them. This is
actual “attunement”. Now at the same time you are aware of your silent mind as
the site where these ideas exist. This is awakening into Mind-Awareness. The
more clearly you are able to observe these ideas and be aware of your own mind,
the more you are awakening into Mind-Awareness. There is an impersonal and
objective quality to this Mind-Awareness.
In other words you have transcended Personal Mind the 4th and become the active witness of your own mind in action. You are no longer the passive recipient of information but have become actively engaged in co-creating what you are thinking about. And you are fully aware that this is what you are doing. In this way you have also entered “self-recalling” within “absorption”. You are self aware and present “self-recalling” within this mind-awareness.
This active “self-recalling” is also the movement of “transcendence”.
Your Mind is fully aware of itself and what it is choosing to be “absorbed in”.
Transcendence is the realization that you’re self recalled Mind-Awareness exists with or without something to think about.
You are released from “absorption” into the “transcendence” of "absorption".
This Mind-Awareness is “releasement” leaving you free to resume “attunement” or to “attune” your attention to something else.
This is how a free mind functions. And while this Mind-Awareness may doubt the accuracy or truth of a given sequence of thoughts, it never doubts itself.
ATTUNEMENT:
ABSORPTION:
SELF-RECALLING:
TRANSCENDENCE:
-RELEASEMENT:
ATTUNEMENT:
But in this current cultural and mind-field climate, very few people have a free mind.
When we enquire into the reason for the un-free Personal Mind that is the slave of psychologism and capitalist consumerism, we discover that something alien has been introduced into the Personal Mind making it incapable of becoming free.
The Personal Mind the 4th exists in the awareness space between Mind Awareness the 5th and Psyche the 3rd to which it spontaneously attunes itself. This Personal Mind has been colonized by Descartes “self doubting I think subject”. As we all know the Cartesian axiom states “I think therefore I am” in order to doubt this axiom I must ‘think’ about it, by ‘thinking’ about it I confirm it. Clever little tricks that, so long as you leave it unexamined. Whatever supportive philosophical arguments one can make for Descartes Axiom, are in a certain sense beside the point here, as we are looking at its role in support of psychological subjectivity.
The 4th awareness state: Personal Mind having been colonized and distorted by its definition as the “self doubting I think subject” has become the platform for the complete take over of the Personal Mind as the site for “self doubting I think psychological subjectivity”. Thus we have the “Separate-self” in place of the Personal Mind.
When the human being attuned to Personal Mind attempts to gain any kind of depth understanding of themselves, others, or the world they find themselves engaged in an inner process involving their own past reactions and memories. Psychological subjectivity is a condition of continuous self involvement, producing a separation of the self from the actuality of life. There is continuous self concern combined with distraction and a drifting mind. There is a sense of inner emptiness and loneliness, a need for entertainment and experiences. There is underlying anxiety and hopelessness. There are endless problems in relationships.
Psychological subjectivity also separates the personal-mind-self: 4 from the real source of the Self which is in Mind-Awareness: 5, Sacred-Soul: 6 and Immeasurable-One: 7. Thus the Separate-self subsists separated from others and itself. It is a chronic case of mistaken identity.
This is why we call this fragmented psycho-magnetic construct the “Separate-self”.
This is a personal and collective catastrophe of enormous proportions. The Separate-self is the voracious consumer driven by narcissistic antisocial impulses and socio-pathological selfishness. When the Separate-self says the word “freedom” it means Separate-self-indulgence.
The Separate-self is the tyrant-victim filled with demands and self pity. There is absolutely no way for the Separate-self to embark on a spiritual journey, because it can never leave its fragmented self obsessed centre. It can only collect information about the spiritual and this information it always distorts. The Separate–self believes that it can find a spirituality that suits it, never realizing that it must come to suit spirituality. The spiritual gullibility of the Separate-self knows no bounds.
The Separate-self has “spiritual needs” and it greedily insists that these needs must be met or else it will keep shopping in the Mystical Mall until its “spiritual needs” are met. But of course its needs generate more needs and so its needs can never be met. Try telling it that “spiritual needs” are a totally false and meaningless starting point for an authentic spiritual life and it will react with defensive conviction: “that’s your opinion”. In this way the Separate-self reveals that it has no “truth sense” whatsoever. And if it holds a notion as an ostensible ‘truth’ it is because it supports its Separate-self concern either as vanity, which it calls ‘self-esteem’, or victim hood. The Separate-self is convinced that spiritual knowledge and practice is some kind of exotic psychotherapy.
As we saw above you can observe the movement of your own awareness by simply witnessing your own mind. And we have witnessed that anything you give your thoughtful attention to, involves “attunement”.
The more you concentrate the more completely “attuned” you become, until you are fully “absorbed” by the object of your attention.
Now in the case of the un-free mind that has been subverted by Descartes “self doubting “I Think” subject which has now become the Psychological Subject, the Separate-self; “absorption” instantly deteriorates into “entanglement”.
No sooner do you become “attuned” to an idea or event than “absorption” turns into “entanglement” in psychological subjectivity. This “entanglement” is distraction and “self-forgetting”. This condition also catastrophically means that the Psyche 3 is dying into psychologism. There is the total loss of innocent spontaneous emotional response.
Every act, every gesture, every statement is a carefully contrived substitute. Continuous “entanglement” in the Separate-self: means that you are never fully present and at vibrant peace with yourself.
You are your own problem and nearly everything you involve yourself in turns into another problem. Your divided mind is inhabited by an ‘internal dialogue’ inwardly you are talking to yourself all the time. Sometimes you completely forget yourself and talk to yourself out loud.
You are always listening internally to the past and inventing fantasy futures.
Divorced from yourself and others you are living painfully, unsatisfied, addicted to the pursuit of pleasure. If you have the money or the credit you buy things that you don’t need. But nothing brings satisfaction or peace.
You have been told that spirituality can solve your problems and give your life the meaning it lacks. But until you realize that all psychological subjectivity is delusional you will simply turn the spiritual into more fodder for the voracious Separate-self. There is no spiritual starting place in the Separate-self.
ATTUNEMENT:
ABSORPTION:
ENTANGLEMENT: Psychological Subjectivity:
DIVORCED FROM AUTHENTIC SELF-RECALLING:
INCAPABLE OF TRANSCENDENCE-RELEASEMENT:
ATTUNEMENT IS DISTORTED:
There can be no real political democracy for a population of psychologically enslaved Separate-selves.
Many people are now taking a psychological approach to the spiritual nature and being of man. Helpful as this may be in making the members of a psychologically conditioned culture aware that there are spiritual levels to their being it is also a kind of calamity. The Separate-self has become armed with near endless psychological rationalizations for clinging to its toxic subjectivity and reality avoiding narcissism. To be sure theories of ostensibly spiritual psychology make for fascinating and sometimes informative reading. Many people are now convinced that spiritual development constitutes a kind of super therapy. This has been called the “therapy myth of total integration” which has been flying like a winged multicolored horse through the subjective skies of psychotherapy and the new age movement these many years now.
First Initiation reveals that all subjective reactions to the events and happenings of others and the world are idiotically pointless; because the simple fact is that “everything that is happening is happening” regardless of ones subjective reactions or personal history. The enemies of freedom and mental clarity inculcate the notion that ones conditioned subjective reactions are meaningful when in fact they are meaningless. We expend enormous energies in the process of reacting subjectively to the world of others.
It has been understood that the feeling of self importance that goes with being a psychological subject leads the Separate-self into the delusion that its reactions are meaningful. This feeling of self importance is the crazy glue that binds the toxic fragments of the Separate-self together. There is also the delusion fostered by the central theories of psychologism that the Separate-self can be ‘worked on’ improved and ‘transcended’.
The notion that every stage in mans development can be “integrated and transcended” demands deeper examination. In the case of the post Cartesian psychologized Separate-self one is attempting to integrate an aberated phase in the cultural development of western man. And the attempt to integrate this false entity makes its transcendence impossible.
All over the evolutionary map we witness life forms that take a wrong turning in their evolution loose their adaptive capacities and lapse into a fragmented and counter-survival crisis, followed by extinction. This is exactly what is currently happening to the human race and this planet.
Spiritual Realism and Psychologism are entirely different ways of regarding the human being.
We-awareness is the very opposite of psychological subjectivity and intersubjectivity and seeks at every turn to overcome and dismantle that abominable post Cartesian psychological construct the Separate-self. We-awareness means a mutual awareness space free of all psychologism.
In this spiritual realism is absolutely ruthless and anyone who wishes to acquire real spiritual knowledge and retain their narcissistic and toxic Separate-self would do well to stay away from Spiritual Realism.
As we have discussed above the free mind functions by being able to experience that it is free in and for itself. Able to freely meditate upon the source or ground of its own arising, it can confirm its own self evident truth and freedom to itself. The freely living and moving mind is aware that it is simultaneously unified and manifold; coherent in itself and filled with complex variety. It is diversity within unity. It is Awareness-aware-in-Awareness. It is the silent lucid mind able to perceive in a flash that Descartes’ “I Think” self doubting psychological subject” is a banal absurdity.
The free mind can awaken to its own radical depths in the 6th and 7th awareness
states, simply by choosing to attune itself to the source of its capacity to
“attune” in the first place.
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