(ideas from a lecture by ALLEN WATTS)
(revised and edited by White Rabbit)
I guess if you want to act as a person's kind of internal compass for reaching a state of transcendence, it seems logical to identify the what the 'essential' or 'active' ingredients of the mystical experience really are. It seems there are four ingredients imparticular that make up the state of consciousness in which the individual discovers itself to be one continuous process with God, the Universe or whatever name for the ultimate and eternal reality...
'SLOWING DOWN TIME', 'POLARITY AWARENESS', 'RELATIVITY AWARENESS' and 'ETERNAL ENERGY AWARENESS':
(keep in mind that these are all aspects of a SINGLE state of consciousness, this is just describing the same thing from different angles)
SLOWING DOWN TIME
...a concentration in the present. normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, awareness of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results. "tomorrow never comes". foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its advantages.
POLARITY AWARENESS
...realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a magnet. each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. things which are explicitly different are implicitly one. this then leads you to feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply eachother. you feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet the universe is equally something being done by you.
RELATIVITY AWARENESS
i am a link in an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human beings, and maybe to angels and gods - a hierarchy in which every level is in effect the same situation. the difference is in its substance or dimension. all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme... we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. "the more it varies, the more it is one". just as the retina of the eye enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single self.
ETERNAL ENERGY AWARENESS
...often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in our nerves and einstein's e=mc2. all existence is a single energy and this energy is one's own being. i find it helps to repeat my own name to myself silently, until all at once, as if it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of the individuality, the individuality itself seems to dissolve and fade away into boundless being.
One of the things we learn from all of this is that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much "I" as myself. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other" - to something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. There is death as well as life because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off. You yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. True 'death' is an almost laughable impossibility.
(revised and edited by White Rabbit)
I guess if you want to act as a person's kind of internal compass for reaching a state of transcendence, it seems logical to identify the what the 'essential' or 'active' ingredients of the mystical experience really are. It seems there are four ingredients imparticular that make up the state of consciousness in which the individual discovers itself to be one continuous process with God, the Universe or whatever name for the ultimate and eternal reality...
'SLOWING DOWN TIME', 'POLARITY AWARENESS', 'RELATIVITY AWARENESS' and 'ETERNAL ENERGY AWARENESS':
(keep in mind that these are all aspects of a SINGLE state of consciousness, this is just describing the same thing from different angles)
SLOWING DOWN TIME
...a concentration in the present. normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, awareness of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results. "tomorrow never comes". foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its advantages.
POLARITY AWARENESS
...realization that states, things, and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front, or the poles of a magnet. each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purchase, and no purchase without a sale. things which are explicitly different are implicitly one. this then leads you to feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply eachother. you feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet the universe is equally something being done by you.
RELATIVITY AWARENESS
i am a link in an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human beings, and maybe to angels and gods - a hierarchy in which every level is in effect the same situation. the difference is in its substance or dimension. all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme... we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. "the more it varies, the more it is one". just as the retina of the eye enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single self.
ETERNAL ENERGY AWARENESS
...often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in our nerves and einstein's e=mc2. all existence is a single energy and this energy is one's own being. i find it helps to repeat my own name to myself silently, until all at once, as if it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of the individuality, the individuality itself seems to dissolve and fade away into boundless being.
One of the things we learn from all of this is that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much "I" as myself. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other" - to something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. There is death as well as life because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off. You yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. True 'death' is an almost laughable impossibility.
