True Life

Do we ever stop to ponder on what Christmas time really means? In ancient times it was about a “higher birth”, the nurturing of an "inner infant" and its reality, which implies the connection with the Spirit, and with the Soul of a mythical Earth, a forgotten Paradise that has received many names and of which much has been written, despite its nature remains elusive, even when it looms shyly in our night dreams. But it always leaves an imprint in each one of our individual lives:

 Our authors [i.e Sohravardi] suggest that if the past were really what we believe it to be, that is, completed and closed, it would not be the grounds of such vehement discussions. They suggest that all our acts of understanding are so many recommencements, re-iterations of events still unconcluded. Each one of us, willy-nilly, is the initiator of events in Hûrqalyâ, whether they abort in its hell or bear fruit in its paradise. While we believe that we are looking at what is past and unchangeable, we are in fact consummating our own future. Our authors will show us how a whole region in Hûrqalyâ is peopled, post mortem, by our imperatives and wishes –that is to say, by that which directs our acts of understanding as well as our behavior. 

[...] 

Everything is strange, say our authors, when one sets foot on that Earth where the Impossible is in fact accomplished. For all our mental constructions, all our imperatives, all our wishes, even the love which is the most consubstantial with our being –all that would be nothing but metaphor without the interworld of  Hûrqalyâ, the world in which our symbols are, so to speak, taken literally. March 1960.

This is how the scholar Henry Corbin –expert in Islamic and Persian mysticism–, ended the Prologue of his work Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth; a wonderful research and delicious reading that intends to be simply a hint, not a map. It points to a dimension of life that surpasses all fictions, and yet is imaginal in nature, far more real than ordinary imagination, or as the wise men of the Renaissance said, imaginatio vera, true imagination. An inner faculty that is waiting to grow in us, for as we said in recent posts, we lost the connection with the Soul and the Spirit (Psyche and Pneuma). 
Henry Corbin says in the Prologue –following the tradition of the Persian philosopher and poet Sohravardi, which goes back to figures like Zoroaster and Empedocles–, that our perception has to go through a progressio harmonica, analogical to the process of listening to a single melody in two different octaves, one more subtle than the other. Not an intellectual activity, but “music in our being”.

The heart, the mind and the body need to be musically fed by the feeling of primordial archetypes. With a proper attunement, an echo may be heard within. Nobody can convince us then that this sensory reality we see is all there is, for reality is not in beliefs, not in vague perceptions, not in books. When the echo of reality reaches our heart, our actions and experiences, all the suffering and beauty we feel, appear immediatly on another level, a higher octave, since they´re not just ours; all we see is but a sacred manifestation of the True Life, even the non-sense, the rocks, the trees, the birds...everything is part of the History of the World Soul, and our role in it is really up to us. What place do we choose in it then? A laborious journey continues; there is still a Great Work to be done.

Inner Alignment

Image from http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/CarlsonR2.php

The Winter Solstice has arrived and this time it brings a curious  event that may perfectly be interpreted as a point of reference for the inner work. 
From an astronomical point of view, thirty six years are approximately the time our sun is taking to cross –not literally– the famous Dark Rift or central region of the Milky Way Galaxy  –an event that only happens every 26.000 years (a Great Platonic Year). Such a central bulge, visible to the naked eye on a non-contamined night sky, was venerated by many ancient cultures, for reasons we are not ready to understand fully yet. 
The galactic centre seems to be what the Hindu and Judeo-Christian traditions referred to as Throne of God, source of powerful influences that regulates the clock of Cosmic Eras, as the great Sage Swami Sri Yukteswar explained in his work The Holy Science. 

According to that Clock, our entire solar system already left a dark Cosmic Winter and is presently returning towards its star-counterpart, experiencing a Cosmic Autumn (Bronze Age for the Greeks). 
Interestingly enough, our sun has appeared to be aligned to the galactic centre for more than a decade now, and it will continue thus for several years. During the present Solstice the sun even dances in alignment with the "exact centre". Now, it should be noticed that the "factual, literal closest point" to the galactic centre wouldn´t be reached until several thousands of years in the future, when our star system meets its counterpart again, according to Yukteswar.
Right now we seem to be "in the middle of the road". And whether or not the present alignment implies some type of magnetic influence related to the Solar Cycle, it anticipates our essential Destiny. So, it may be seen as a reminder of our connection to the Source. And what a better way of doing it than by listening to our silent heart? 

In the Sufi Order Mevlevi, the dervishes swirl and swirl like galaxies, until a higher force takes control of their bodies and their consciousness merges with the "mysterious centre of gravity". 
Something similar happens by playing deep music and listening to it in a proper state of receptivity, as an act of prayer:

Associative Chains

 The following excerpt complements the previous one, being a concise summary of a curious psychological phenomenon, an essential root of the "mechanicalness" that severs the link with the unknown, generating thus the soul-less manifestations that predominate in modern times, both in art, personal relations and other social areas. Something to be observed in different situations of daily life:

Have you ever tried to watch yourself mentally when your attention has not been set on some definite problem for concentration? I suppose most of you are familiar with this, although perhaps only a few have systematically watched it in themselves. You are no doubt aware of the way we think by chance association, when our thought strings disconnected scenes and memories together, when everything that falls within the field of our consciousness, or merely touches it lightly, calls up these chance associations in our thought. The string of thoughts seems to go on uninterruptedly, weaving together fragments of representations of former perceptions, taken from different recordings in our memories. And these recordings turn and unwind while our thinking apparatus deftly weaves its threads of thought continuously from this material. The records of our feelings revolve in the same way—pleasant and unpleasant, joy and sorrow, laughter and irritation, pleasure and pain, sympathy and antipathy. You hear yourself praised and you are pleased; someone reproves you and your mood is spoiled. Something new captures your interest and instantly makes you forget what interested you just as much the moment before. Gradually your interest attaches you to the new thing to such an extent that you sink into it from head to foot; suddenly you do not possess it any more, you have disappeared, you are bound to and dissolved in this thing; in fact it possesses you, it has captivated you, and this infatuation, this capacity for being captivated is, under many different guises, a property of each one of us. This binds us and prevents our being free. By the same token it takes away our strength and our time, leaving us no possibility of being objective and free —two essential qualities for anyone who decides to follow the way of self-knowledge.  (Views From The Real World, G.I.Gurdjieff, Speaking about different subjects, Section II)

  After hearing this, one might feel inclined to think that the string of habitual associations (pleasure-displeasure, satisfaction-irritation...) is random or even unnecessary. But that wouldn´t be entirely right.

 First of all, the psychological and physical chains of associations are necessary for the flow of Life in general –even the DNA is an associative chain or sequence–. 
  Now, the "lack of attention to the senses" opens the door to associations that make us erratic and destructive. On the contrary, a proper focus cleans the brain and fosters harmonious associations that fill our being with clarity and serenity.

 Certainly, many inner associations are unnecessary, frantic and chaotic, as those promoted by an insane mass media through the bombardment of morbid TV News, commercials, movies, poisoned food and other products that generate addictions and low passions. All enough to see how deep is the pit many modern humans dig for themselves, "aimlessly".
 Surprisingly, the associative chaos is not completely chaotic, for there seems to be a "pattern in delusion"; otherwise nothing coherent could be known about it. In fact, ancient art mirrored this aspect in some way or another. We have for instance the image of the Milky Ocean being churned by two groups of deities that remain on opposite sides of the World Axis, pulling the Serpent, the Cosmic Energy that binds all opposites in chains, as Aphrodita did for the Greeks. 
There are also wise men who became experts in showing the Pillars of Delusion. The famoust example is Siddharta Gautama the Buddha and his teaching about the Four Noble Truths and the co-origination of the Twelve Causes of Existence, which we may examine some day. 

And as the Greeks said, "like attracts the like". All associations are chained by "affinity". Therefore, in the end we are probably responsible for them, since the decision to avoid feeding contaminated associations that lead to suffering and attachment is ours. On the contrary, pure associations can be fostered with attention, and these might even help us to be free. 
Isn´t all this the purpose of true art? Isn´t that the purpose of meditation and reflection? Isn´t the cultivation of "sanity amidst insanity" the most important task of modern humanity? 
Next time we will open a new window to discover if music can really help to bring creative associations and re-connect ourselves to something greater. 

Soul-less or not?

Anticipating a series of Christmas gifts, here comes a bitter shock that serves as a counter-point of the previous post on Neo-Platonic psychology, and it may help us avoid taking for granted "sublime ideas" when the inner house is still a zoo, a battlefield of World War I, or somehting worse...

You think that a "soul," and even a "spirit," is necessary to do what you do and live as you live. But perhaps it is enough to have a key for winding up the spring of your mechanism. Your daily portions of food help to wind you up and renew the purposeless antics of associations again and again. From this background separate thoughts are selected and you attempt to connect them into a whole and pass them off as valuable and as your own. We also pick out feelings and sensations, moods and experiences and out of all this we create the mirage of an inner life, call ourselves conscious and reasoning beings, talk about God, about eternity, about eternal life and other higher matters; we speak about everything imaginable, judge and discuss, define and evaluate, but we omit to speak about ourselves and about our own real objective value, for we are all convinced that if there is anything lacking in us, we can acquire it. 

If in what I have said I have succeeded even to a small extent in making clear in what chaos is the being we call man, you will be able to answer for yourselves the question of what he lacks and what he can obtain if he remains as he is, what of value he can add to the value he himself represents. 

I have already said that there are people who hunger and thirst for truth. If they examine the problems of life and are sincere with themselves, they soon become convinced that it is not possible to live as they have lived and to be what they have been until now; that a way out of this situation is essen- tial and that a man can develop his hidden capacities and powers only by cleaning his machine of the dirt that has clogged it in the course of his life. But in order to undertake this cleaning in a rational way, he has to see what needs to be cleaned, where and how; but to see this for himself is almost impossible. In order to see anything of this one has to look from the outside; and for this mutual help is necessary. (Views from the Real World, “G.I.Gurdjieff”, Speaking about different subjects, Section II)

 There seems to be some afinity between these ideas and what we heard from Plotinus in the last post. If we recall, the "ordinary man" he referred to moves away from an essential centre of gravity, and thus he is absorbed by blind impulses, becoming, as Gurdjieff described, an "animated automaton", a marionette moved by the caprices of a puppeteer rather than a man guided by Intelligence.

 Yet, Plotinus basically focused on metaphysics and the level of theoría, which in Greek means “divine contemplation”, from the verb theorein, to contemplate divinely –an activity that is probably too far from us. 

In contrast, Socrates and other teachers, including Gurdjieff, preferred to help seekers to unmask inner contradictions mercilessly, because that is the essential step, very little can be done. 

 Trasparency is usually indigestible when we take for granted things that are not given to us fully.  Even if we assume the presence of a “buried divine spark” that may explain the origin of consciousness, will and higher feelings like compassion, what kind of connection can we have with the Spirit or the Psyche if the gifts remain unattended or misused? 
One does not need a “divine intellect” to manifest negativity and self-indulge with fear like a savage. Animals can be very wild, but only because its natural for them. However, the "animated automatons" can be even wilder, as shown by the progressist butchery known as "advanced modern society", where even art, food and human relations have lost the soul. 

 In earlier times there existed the idea of “soul making”, which implies cleaning the inner world and consolidating the connection with the Higher. In this regard the Egyptian priests taught about joining the individual will-consciousness or Ka, with the volatile body of personal features and experiences, the Ba, in order to forge a strong vehicle that may travel safe across life and afterlife without being devoured by Nature, and thus let the spirit return to its home in the stars, and never be pulled back again into lower realms of suffering. 
Greeks and Christians inherited that doctrine as well, until it was forgotten and changed, as all things important. 
In any case, the point is that without a strong “bond”, the spark humans carry as a precious treasure, may just fly away and perhaps continue its journey in someone who has more respect for what really matters, or it will simply return to its Source. Does that makes sense?

 A crude and honest look to ourselves is necessary then.