Sunday 19 May 2013

Spirits In The Material World

Reflecting on things that I have experienced over the last week I am reminded of how things that come into our worlds change us.

If we have some spiritual practice then we aim to develop that core within us which is beyond the material conditioning we have all received through our incarnation and external life influences.

Finding a place within ourselves which seeks to balance and stabilise how we relate to the troubling events outside is the first step towards having a more benign effect in the world than if we simply respond from a level of information and material control based on desires and the effort to fulfill them.

Becoming more ourselves is to bring spirit into matter.  Matter is a good servant, but a tyrant of a master.  In Tolkien's 'The Children of Hurin' which I am currently reading it is stated that Melkor the Morgoth, the fallen angel to whom Sauron was merely a vassal in the First Age of Middle-Earth which is recounted in the Silmarillion, has become so attached to domination of the world that he has become trapped in incarnation.

To submit that spirit entirely to matter not only in the unavoidable reality of our own incarnation, but to seek to live only through that, and not in some higher meta level of reality that brings more to matter than its own substance is to lose oneself.  Although I do not mention it in the video blog, it is of course the case that consciousness actually creates reality, the appearance of matter and so on as demonstrated by quantum physics and the observer effect.  So for consciousness to seek a complete fulfillment in matter alone is to get trapped in the mirror rather than to see the meaning of the image.

Diverse forms of spiritual practice enable us to get beyond this limitation by allowing us to experience altered states of consciousness which can then lead us to understand that we are not the contents of our consciousness, but that we are some continuum beyond that which evolves through assimilating and interpreting what passes through it.  The discipline of practice, whether in ritual form or simple mindfulness leads us beyond slavery to the external world and leads us into service through a recognition that we are all eyes of the same consciousness ~ In Lak'ech

The transhumanist movement, which only sees humanity as something to be improved, made more efficient and productive fails to see that it would remove us from the very process of learning and evolution which informs our ascending metaview of reality and how it unifies all thing.  If all we were to become was a machine which could not help but to love its servitude, then we would have lost who we are and become more and more separated from the sea of universal consciousness and existence.

Better to evolve organically, spiritually and in our consciousness and this will allow us the perfect freedom of choice through discipline and respect for higher laws rather than slavery to lower ones.  The more we choose to do that which is good for all, then the greater freedom we create for all, contrasted with the agendas whereby all would serve the intent of a few in which even those who are served become ever more limited in their own slavery to self.  The sterility of the latter eventually limits itself out of existence while the former is the basis of life, ecology and limitless inner and outer growth.





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