CHOOSING TO SEE

A new type of vision becomes available when we switch from the search for forever expanding consciousness or 'looking', to intelligent seeing. You know the old expression, 'You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink'. It's equally true you can enlighten a person but you can't make him see.  See life as one. Nothing mystical, just a new (or terribly old) way of looking at things:  

Illumination does not concern religion or even the soul but instead offers a fuller grasp of the nature of divinity, of reality, of life itself. Perhaps enlightenment is to our conscious mind what illumination is to our abstract mind. And while this must be achieved, it is available to all.

Humanity believes in (is governed by) limitations of consciousness. As individuals, however, we are free to explore and change our awareness, to believe in or not believe in whatever we wish, to experiment with perspective and to experience the oneness that mystics call Being. I call this abstract awareness ‘synthetic intelligence’. 

I called myself an esotericist for thirty years. One becomes (according to Alice A. Bailey) an esotericist when the intuitive mystical side of ourselves is united with the logical occultist in us, and both are transcended. When an esotericist is able to abstract himself from the limitations imposed by the symbols of his knowledge, you might say he becomes a synthesist.

Back in 1970 (egods!), in Houston, Texas, I started a radio talk show exploring 'new age consciousness'. Today I barely recognize this ‘new age’, encrusted as it is by crystals, unicorns, gross sentimentality, and buried under ads for phony psychics, inept astrologers and misguided spiritual teachers. So again I am compelled to speak out.

Masters, initiations, ashrams, telepathy, chakras, secrets, magic, and even more mystical nonsense. Egods. New age consciousness, so mysterious in the 1970’s, turned out to be the now widely accepted global awareness or international or environmental orientation (helped along by our further ventures in space). This global perspective is a far cry from earlier merely national awareness--prior to the moon walk. 

This newest age turned out not to be called the Age of Aquarius but the Information Age. And the telepathy so many anticipated or feared a few decades ago turned out to be the intensely intimate nature of oneness (abstract intelligence), reflected in a worldwide network of communication and information toys, not the least of which is the still embryonic internet, wireless or not.

Using a spiritual checklist may help root out unnoticed conceptual misunderstandings in our thinking and peel away layers of stale symbolic beliefs.  Erroneous (yet respected) spiritual assumptions blunt our commonsense and dampen our spirits. Even innocuous assumptions about enlightenment can produce conceptual limitations since all beliefs inherently impose intellectual or spiritual dependency.

The liberating influence of any direct (abstract) perception tends to free us from the 'stop action' complexity of ordinary sequential thinking associated with having a brain. Abstraction releases us from archaic (or childish) spiritual symbolism into the reality of timeless awareness. Absolutely nothing changes but our perspective. We still wear watches and run late for appointments but the perceptual limitations of time no longer create stress or distort our thinking. Yes, perspective--soundly focused in reality--is everything. Beyond consciousness, that's all there is. 

As Sogyal Rinpoche puts it, "Spiritual truth is not something elaborate and esoteric, it is in fact profound common sense." 
 The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT?

The long process of becoming enlightened does not, cannot and will never transform us into infinite being in spite of symbolic teachings about transfiguration, bridges, mystical whispers about masters, or the promise of secrets, words of power and transforming initiations. Like hoping to squeeze orange juice from apples, the final result is bound to be disappointing. There is a Way, however. And delay is wasteful when humanity needs every creative problem-solving idea. Good people sincerely trying to ‘let go and just BE’ have no clue that their own aspiration to greater wisdom and spiritual understanding actually prevents attainment.

In this process of becoming, the belief that the future may improve on the present fuels all human progress. Most political, scientific and educational efforts rely on this linear, temporal belief. So it's important for us to make distinctions between:

Time is symbolized as a wheel or globe revolving in upon itself in both directions (timely and timeless), a Möbius strip in the finite realm of becoming in a finite world of ‘forever and ever’. Already people from science fiction writers to physicists, from esotericists to artists, are skilled in imagining the implications of timelessness. But while some successfully live in the 'here and now’, too many live only for the moment.

What most people don't realize is that Time, a trinity symbolized as past, present and future, is essentially a closed circuit and does not lead to the abstract reality of eternal being. So it's important to realize that the limitations of Time (not Time itself) can be superseded.

THE DELIGHTS OF DISILLUSIONMENT

I think of disillusionment as the Welcome Mat to cosmic reality.  Losing our illusions about the nature of life celebrates our mental liberation from any and all forms of dependency, from all forms of symbolic consciousness such as the soul or psyche, from the restrictions of our sense of time and space. We value our own subjective liberation so we celebrate it for others.  Appreciate this very spiritual process of disillusionment.

As individuals pursue the ageless process of losing their illusions about to the psychological nature of reality, much of humanity remains in the past, clinging to old attitudes, beliefs, limitations. Others live for a better future. In terms of perspective we can have little nostalgia in leaving behind both a 100-year astronomical cycle of destruction, pain and progress and a 2,500-year astrological cycle of attachment, confusion and suffering. These both reflect the astrological theme of humanity's recent past, elements of a long-term exercise to sensitize mankind to its relationships.

At this stage of the game, I find disillusionment a wondrous and exciting process of personal clarity and liberation. I think my friends find this perplexing. In our youth, episodes of disillusionment mean disappointment, embarrassment, pain, but all mistakes stimulate us to pay closer attention to everything and everyone. At any point, even for a moment, as we lose our illusions (especially about our isolation) we become aware of subtle new understandings about life and, in glimmers of direct perception, we realize not spiritual unity but our oneness. We gradually realize the truth of the statement, 'there, but for the grace of God, go I'. Or, as I prefer, but for the luck of the draw, go I.

In important ways the internet heralds humanity's growing sense of oneness. Today growing numbers of people work abstractly with intelligence rather than symbolically with consciousness. Big, big difference.  As we test ideas and toss out false assumptions, we soon see through the illusions of our times. Some come to this later in life, others (especially now) are born with few illusions. Because they don't fit into society notion of what is acceptable, this lack of illusions, or 'disillusionment', produces interesting and often antisocial forms of expression among the youth of all races and nations.  

Vague ideas like omniscience and omnipresence are coming to be seen in a different light. Omniscience or all-knowing, all knowledge, knowing everything. What is the internet but a form of virtual omniscience? And omnipresence is already a reality in a sense, for we can 'be' anywhere on earth at any given moment via cell phones, internet, faxes, and so on. Virtual omnipresence is not so mysterious after all.

In fact, all the 'givens' about who we thought we were are already subtly altered. So with this clarifying sense of being (as opposed to the stress, frustration and temporal progress of continually becoming), the possibility of virtual omnipotence takes on new interest. The global, or solar, perspective is the new baseline. As we grasp the implications of these matters, no one notices perhaps but we no longer rush to change with the times. No longer content with 'exploring the Hemline of God', we instead use abstractions to explore the abstract nature of eternal reality.

To become more sensitized to this new global or solar or universal way of looking at things, we must begin to distinguish clearly between the old point of view (stressful and pressed for time) and the new (simple, clean, where absolutely everything is ‘relative’ and there is all eternity to play).  We clarify the distinctions between aspiring to soul knowledge and in releasing the spirit in ourselves; between symbolic or timely awareness (constantly shifting between past and future) and abstract relativity (the freedom of eternal Being). 

Perspective is a significant personal choice. Clarifying our understanding of the sharpness and accuracy of these distinctions gives us that choice. So. Either we clarify, adapt and change (especially if we believe we are advancing nicely), or we remain stuck in traffic on the crowded freeway of the soul or psyche.

TWO SIGNIFICANT DEFINITIONS:

REALITY

THEORY OF THREE ASPECTS OF INTELLIGENCE

In varying degrees, it appears that we mortals are hot-wired for brain-mind access to all three aspects of universal intelligence. By working directly with what I posit or the three relatively formless types of intelligence, we avoid all limiting symbols of mind. The type of intelligence we normally employ—whatever is most effortlessly perceived as meaningful—depends specifically on the relative flexibility of our favorite mechanism of perception:
 

Sensitivity to sequential abstraction allows us to grasp the broader implications of those things that affects us. This provides the means to see the implications of one human intelligence. As we exercise our capacity for abstraction, it is clear that intuition is not so much a type of intelligence as a psychic mechanism, a temporary or transitional group-sensitive interface relating intellect and abstraction.

When we can work more abstractly, we still perceive two types of intelligence within ourselves: individual awareness and universal awareness. These are: intelligence (intellect-intuition) and abstraction, an essential duality of the material and the spiritual inclinations of brain and mind, matter and spirit, diversity and synthesis. Intellect (alone) and abstraction no more represent spiritual becoming and Being than intuition (alone) and abstraction. We must work with synthesis, with oneness, with Life.

SHIFTING FROM BECOMING TO BEING

I have no interest in considerations of personality ‘correspondences’ of either intellect or intuition. Countless teachings are devoted to human psychology and the history of Man on this planet, and far too many inspirational courses, interest groups and books are devoted to religion, happiness and personal relations, self-improvement and success and treading the path of spiritual progress.

Consider this rather lengthy article on BEING as an interactive handbook, a clear and focused examination of Intelligence studied as two isolated aspects: intuition (symbolic consciousness which is both group and hierarchical sensitive) and abstraction (the willingness to identify abstractly with synthetic oneness, direct perception of reality). 

Each of us can clarify beyond reasonable doubt those liberating distinctions between soul and spirit, between the duality of timely/timeless and eternal. To illustrate the immediate shift from becoming to being, I spend as little time as possible on the so-called 'lower mind'. the magnificently creative, linear intellect of the ‘strictly human personality’.

If our thinking is flexible, accurate and imaginative we are soon comfortable recognizing intuition (also known as the psyche, the soul, consciousness, a temporary energy interface, love or the heart principle, the middle principle of mind, inclusive intelligence, the Christ principle) or other symbols of awareness of spiritual relationship.  When this is grasped to any degree, it's time to move on from the study of the meaning of dualities and symbolic relationships, to more significant, relevant spiritual matters—issues of Spirit, and not of soul.  

For many of us today, the time has come to make that spiritually radical, abstract about-face from becoming to Being.

A final note. I wrote BEING from the perspective of walking back down from the mountain top of enlightenment. Most books are written as striving upward, aspiring, seeking the top of the mountain. I start from the highest point--from spirit, to soul, to personality--and stroll back into ordinary awareness, viewing symbolic spiritual teachings all the way back into daily life. This avoids a lot of mystical nonsense and, I think, produces a more sensible view of the actual processes involved.

Remember, participating creatively in human society, in human culture, is the only game in town. It is possible that from this culture springs the next civilization.

If these ideas are new to you, perhaps you might begin at "The Nature of Human Awareness"--part 6. Then decide whether to read yourself up to the mountaintop (6 to 1). Or whether you are ready to move from enlightenment back down into a new reality.  

Your choice, always...  

Rae Lake

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