Relaxing into the Witness beyond thought, the mind and the known self is the main process of spiritual evolution. Meditation allows the Witness to slowly differentiate from the ego/memory-self so this change in self-sense is manageable. However kundalini awakenings, drugs, falling in love and contact with a Guru, can force such rapid expansion that a "growth" crisis occurs. You could call this "necessary disorientation;" though through various experiences on the journey we learn that the Witness is still there even in catatonia, even when there is no ego or motor coordination.

It can take many years before reaching a point where we feel safe to just let go. Usually there is a series of crises, and surrender. Then eventually we learn how to breathe, open the body and draw energy up. Through the frequent exercise of our faith we become strong and awake enough to not back down from our own incarnation. At a certain point it becomes intolerable to resist our Self anymore--at that point greater coherency occurs between body, mind and soul, and the metamorphosis proceeds beyond the fractionating pull of inertia.

Through the Heart-Brain we still have concepts, but we know we are not our concepts...we have disidentified with our mind. It becomes an object like the moon, or the trees. If we can relax into the bliss without freaking out, and reverting to the defensive personality traits of the cocoon, that are also observable as distinct objects--then we find that we can actually operate in far greater intelligence and efficiency "without holding onto details arithmetically." When we let go the mind jumps to a geometric form of awareness and we are no longer conscious of the details, but our transconscious faculty has everything under control. This is a new form of autopilot beyond the conscious minds ability to grasp. In Buddhism this is called No-mind.

Letting go of the known and our fixed concepts of ourselves and our world, we slowly gain confidence in the profundity of this new multidimensional awareness. As we allow ourselves to dissolve, a much deeper sensoral experience and fuller perception arise--one that is markedly reduced in fear and need. The sense of being either "right" or "wrong" no longer has to be worked out with the rational mind for the heart just "knows." The dharma is just what the Buddha does. What Ken Wilber calls "non-seeking discipline." However this discipline is not as in "training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of controlled behavior, especially training that produces moral or mental improvement." One's desire, coming from a prior fullness of Spirit, is now aligned to Unity Consciousness, aligned with God, Christ or Buddha, and doesn't require the punitive enforcement that we normally think of as discipline. One becomes a disciple of the Self, an active adherent of Spirit. Thus it's not discipline in the normal sense, it's innate right action or moral intuition, and this comes about through the synergy of being arising from the higher integration of body-mind-soul. When one reaches this state, call it Cosmic Consciousness the gravity of Thanatos is transcended, then all inferior action (sin) is seen as the ignorance of "right-action" resulting from lack of higher integration.

According to Richard M. Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness, the marks of the Cosmic sense are:

"The subjective light. The moral elevation. The intellectual illumination. The sense of immortality. The loss of the fear of death. The loss of the sense of sin. The suddenness, instantaneousness of awakening. The previous character of the man-intellectual, moral and physical. The age of illumination. The added charm to the personality so that men and women are always strongly attracted to the person. The transfiguration of the subject of the change as seen by others when the cosmic sense is actually present." ~ Richard M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness.

Cosmic Consciousness is beyond shame or what Richard M. Bucke calls "The loss of the sense of sin."

Where does personality leave off, and Essence begin? What is the distinction between conventional and post-conventional awareness? It's really a change of focal-identity from the mind to the soul, from division to unity. One could say that the conventional awareness is still governed by the parented-mind, whereas postconventional is governed more from the universal-individual Presence, or Soul. We are each born with the raw materials, karmic direction and "work" that we have to do to resolve parental and societal archetypal memes. Our primary challenge is to deal with our inherited birth circumstances, repair family of origin trauma, and transcend the Thanatos of the collective culture. The moral call is to let go of immature defense patterns and armor that prevent Cosmic Consciousness.

Basically we have two motivations--toward pleasure and away from pain. Our behavior is controlled by the anticipation of pain or pleasure, punishment or reward. All moral learning is ultimately based on the pain-pleasure circuitry in the brain, on our own internal reward and punishment system. Awakening is learning to act in ways that create the most pleasure to ourselves and hopefully to others, because reward neurochemicals reinforce that behavior. We remember best the things that excite us because of a *censored*tail of excitatory neurochemicals; the production of which act to signal the importance of remembering the thing that excited us.

Individuals that are given adequate heart-eye primal mothering steal less, because their primary neural matrix is set at emotional satisfaction rather than deprivation and they are less divided and conflicted. Their native organic morality is based on the superior emotional experience they had as an infant, and the fact that they were not trained in learned helplessness. With an organic confidence that our actions will not be futile, we can then sincerely believe in principles, discipline and methods to achieve our goals, without resorting to self destructive or immoral machinations. So the good news is that a transformed spiritual community must generally progress morally, through the heightened sense of personal achievement and spiritual agency "for the collective good."

We are each born with a particular hero's quest to break through the cocoon of our conditioning and find our Holy Grail. The Holy Grail of course is our Heart and Soul. The paradox is that the way to soul embodiment is to follow the soul: this is both the Always Already and linear Always Becoming aspect of the path. But if we don't actually go on our hero's journey, then we basically just stagnate pretty much as we are 'conditioned' at the conventional level, to live the life of the cocoon. Postconventional consciousness however, is to have risen to the challenge posed by that very conditioning. To have burnt up the pupael body-mind in the fires of facing our edge, and to have alchemically incarnated our Universal Self. Postconventional is living at our edge embracing both suffering and pleasure.

The hero's quest is fueled by both the pain of separation that we experience and by our intuition of the pleasure of unity. The yearning to "come home" is the magnetic force that pulls us inexorably beyond the horizon of the known, to realization of our greater Self. At all times the whole is holographically represented in any present level of attainment. That is growth is simultaneous instant and linear progressive. All levels of being are present at any one time.

As an organism there is an economy of energy use, such that if we focus exclusively on basic survival then there is little energy available for communion with our soul. Cut off from the all in this way, we might long for union but instead of directing our energy toward spiritual union we turn toward uroboric union or oblivion by reducing consciousness. Thus we settle for basic need gratification and forays into the uroboric oblivion of addiction, rather than following the genius of our daemon to the meaning and purpose of our lives.

If Christ-Consciousness is to flower at all, it is Christ-Consciousness that is doing the attracting all along. Thus the implicate order is driving the explicit order. The future influences the present in ways the rational mind cannot understand or even conceive. The Passion for union, the desire for the Beloved, is the Christ Consciousness in us calling us home to the realization of its full flowering.

Rationality is a mere lapdog trying to keep up with understanding its master. Faith is the feltsense realization that the rational mind and its science, nor the subrational mind and its myth is adequate to explain the mystery of creation. Faith is a leap of transcendental cognition beyond the horizons of our known world. The moral call to emerge from the cocoon, the hero's journey and non-seeking discipline, are all the same phenomena stemming from a common process and that is "relaxing with the Transrational."

I finished the following "poem" off via a dream I had. In this dream I was in a substantial house and there were these sled ride shutes out the front, down a hillside...I took a ride down and the owner of the house said I had to take the sled back up to the top again; heck I was ready to just leave it at the bottom and walk away. But in trying to get up the slope I first tried a soft area with mossy vegetation but it just came away in my hands and I couldn't raise myself at all. Then I saw an area covered with rough stones and I knew I would be able to get up the hill on these because their roughness would hold me on the hill. These two surfaces compared the soft unworkable nature of collective thinking, and the rough workable nature of original thought—a much harder process than compliance.

Hence the comparison between Grace and understanding. Grace is the free ride down the hill courtesy of the law of Gravity, but to get up the hill again requires free-thinking for oneself...ie: Individation. Transrationality is the truth that is “given” to us, and rationality is the work taken to “receive” this truth.

You cannot have scientific certainty prior to scientific proof.
You cannot have original thought, without original thinking.
Empirical progress is an eternal progression based on the accumulation of new investigation and data.
There is no final truth.
Faculties beyond the rational mind can inform us via gnosis, tacit knowing, intuition, dreams and visions.
It is through this "transrational knowing" that we are then guided to look for empirical data to establish our temporary sense of truth.
Our transrational abilities in-form our rational.
The realization of truth is a recollection.
Because although we live mostly in the rational, we still are operating on transrational levels, though mostly not cognizant of such.
The more we exercise our transrational muscles without reverting to the mythology of the collective dream...the more we remember and live in the truth.

Psychic abilities are given by Grace.
Understanding is born from the hard work of love.
This takes strength of heart to hold the perspectives of the Many.
We may prefer to adopt the soft mush of collective certainty.
But undifferentiated thinking will not get us to the top.
God is realized through individuation not through consensus.
The truth must be lived to be known.
It’s an inside job.
This return to the One.

Osho's book Intuition: Knowing Beyond Logic is very useful to help reinstate balance, in this day and age when the masculine art of the left-brain faculties have taken precedence over the feminine right-brain arts of gnosis.

"Why has man fallen through knowledge? Because knowledge creates distance, because knowledge creates "I and thou," Because knowledge creates subject and object, the knower and the known, the observer and the observed. Knowledge is basically schizophrenia; it creates a split and there is no way to bridge it."

Knowledge creates distance by separating parts in the mind in order to distinguish, analyze and compare them. While direct knowing (grokking) perceives the under lying unity. Whole consciousness is the marriage of the distance of knowledge, with the nonseparation of grokking, forming the eye of enlightened awareness that perceives an ever widening expanse of Truth. Truth is not won by putting the parts back together again through a "knowledge" of their symbiosis—truth is grokked via a priori attunement to that which is already Nottwo.

"Reality consists of things, all separate. Truth consists of only one cosmic energy. Truth consists of oneness, reality consists of manyness. Reality is a crowd, truth is integration." 44

"It is only the mediocre mind that becomes too attached to knowledge; the intelligent mind remains above knowledge. He uses it, certainly uses it—it is useful, it is utilitarian—but knows perfectly well that all that is true is hidden, remains hidden. We can go on knowing and knowing, but the mystery remains inexhaustible." 49

It is amazing to think that we spend so much time trying to fill our data banks with information that we don't leave time for emptying them, sorting out what sits right with our original mind and listening for higher gnostic thought arising spontaneously. As it is our reasoning mind has absconded our full consciousness and uses its time, space and energy for its own limited devises.


PURIFICATION

Purification is the first stage of refinement and creativity...it is an “emptying,” a disembedding, rarification process. Through purification we make way for Grace. Purification entails “work” because it is a cessation—it takes effort to stop whatever we are doing and being. Thus purification is our volitional work toward receiving Grace. Plotinus says purification is separating the soul from the body and freeing oneself from any passional movement of the irrational part of our psyche. He also states that purification is the triumph over the body and subconscious, and abeyance to the dictates of spirit. Nowadays we are more inclined to think that purification is the ego’s acknowledgement and alignment with the inherent intelligence and spirituality of the body; and the sense of “freeing” an always already enlightenment by stripping away lower energies and forms.

The mystic is an occultist who has dis-identified with form and symbolism. The mind you see is an archetypal imagery device, but the mystic is “identified” with the process of the mind not its contents. The dream mystic sees through the archetypal forms of reality to the "process” of life. The content of the mind is entirely a reflection of "how" the mind works. Purification entails an evolution of this "how" of the mind.

Meditation for example is an act of purification because it builds neurotransmitters and neurons in the left prefrontal lobe which tends to give us a much happier outlook and affect. Fasting again affects "how" the mind works by removing toxins, acids and inferior cells and morbid material from the body, so that it can more perfectly reflect the light of spirit. Toning and mantra is also a major influence on how the mind works, through increased washing of brain cells with cerebrospinal fluid. Restitution of past mistakes and mis-relationship is also another purification method by which our bodymind is freed of the past influence and allowed contemporary freedom in which to rise to its full capacity.

The willingness to be receptive to Grace is a kind of "work" of receptivity, for love is the work of sympathetic apperception. In this day and age, “receptivity” is the hardest work we undertake because we are so conditioned out of it into “doing”. We are programmed to live a life of "externals." Which is why we are living through a cultural crisis of a loss of quality of what it is to be "human."

Psychic abilities, Grace and love are the same thing...they result from a gestalt of the whole human in perfect resonance. Thus Grace both purifies, and is increased via purification. You could also use the terms Eros and Agape... Eros being the involution of Spirit and Agape being the “will to open” to Eros...and it is this "willingness" that allows evolution or What Is.

Reality let alone Truth is way too complex for our limited conscious to "grasp," but if we let go of the sphincter of the mind, then we can Grok...and life becomes a lot easier. Truth is like an orgasm—you try and try and try and try and then when you let go, you get it.

Reading on the Transrational:
Dimensions of thought: Current explorations in Time, Space, and Knowledge (Perspectives on TSK)

Time, Space, Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality, Tarthang Tulku; Dharma Publishing, 1977

Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness, Tobin Hart, Peter L. Nelson, and Kaisa Puhakka, 2000)

Inner Knowing (New Consciousness Reader), Helen Palmer; Tarcher, 1999

Other Ways of Knowing: Recharting Our Future with Ageless Wisdom, John Broomfield; Inner Traditions,1997

When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities, Stanislav Grof; Sounds True, 2006

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