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Wednesday, November 21

JACK

All there is is Consciousness.. if this is
understood in depth there is nothing more to
understand" - Ramesh Balsekar.

Surely to understand in its totality and its
fullness is going to require an absolute total
meeting of everything that is held in the
unconscious, both individual and collective.

I would feel to recognise totally that 'all there
is is consciousness' one would have to remain as
fully conscious

Carl Jung once said; "Meister Eckhart theology
knows a "Godhead" of which no qualities, except
unity and being, can be predicated, is "becoming",
it is not yet lord of itself, and it represents an
absolute coincidence of opposites ...... union of
opposites is equivalent to unconsciousness as so
far as human logic goes.

For consciousness, pre-supposes a differentiation
into subject and object in relationship between
them.

Where there is no "other" or it does not yet exist,

all possibilities of consciousness cease.

Only the father, the god welling out of the
godhead, notices himself, becomes beknown to
himself, and confronts himself as a person ......

As the godhead is essentially
unconscious,..............

so to is the man who lives in God.

Carl Jung found this so appealing that God requires
conscious man in order to come into existence.

J. Campbell some believe to be the greatest western
mythologist and enlightened being once said ` `we
need poets and seers and who will render to us the
experience of the transcendent through the world in
which we live in'

For a lot of us here in the west who have grown up
with absentee fathers either physically,
emotionally or psychologically, the idea of a
Master not being here, gone beyond, becomes very
appealing.

Father's not here, the Master's not here and then
sooner or later we start waking up to seeing that
we are not here either.

We are not here because there is a deep unconscious
fear to really be here fully conscious aware. Most
people that I discuss this with who are able to
honesty are really frightened of what it means to
be very very conscious always. It reeks of absolute
and total responsibility for what I am and what I
am doing saying and thinking.

Joseph Campbell once said `eternity is in love with
the `forms of time' but to comes into `time' it has
to be dismembered

Then you as a separate entity `me' in the form of
time, in order to loss the commitment to this
little `me' you must enter the process of
dismemberment.

This dismembering process as we all know is
extremely painful and very frightening and sooner
or later we come to realise that while we are going
to spiritual gatherings to get enlightened and want
to get enlightenment, all we're really doing is
cultivating a spiritual ego that will do anything
to avoid facing the process of inevitable
dismemberment.

The old story about the jug maker who finds a
pumpkin vine with a pumpkin that has just start to
develop. Just for fun of it, he slips the pumpkin
inside one of his jugs and leaves it.

When the harvest time comes, the pumpkin has grown
only as large as the jug. The sides of the jug have
limited the potential of, as well as shape, the
pumpkin.

I feel here in the West, people want to believe in
these Eastern Masters i.e. Ramesh S. Balsekar and
now this new wave of young spiritual teachers who
hammer away at the fact that `all there is, is
consciousness, and you can't do anything here.
there is no I.

It really fits in with `our' model of understanding
that we don't know how to be here consciously and
find with the smallest circumstance(s) how easily
`we' become identified; lost in thoughts, feelings
and emotions, screaming blame as we drown in a sea
of unconsciousness.

Many of our /my models that we / I operate in are
the very jugs that we /I are trying to understand
that all there is is, consciousness.

In modern day Germany today, in the collective
psyche in many of the young people, there is
immense fear of their father's past. In many ways
they are simply not prepared to be told that all is
consciousness and that you can't do anything here.
I feel anyone with any depth of intelligence and
responsibility could not try and blanket this
statement over so much feeling of shame and guilt.

I'm not so sure when Ramesh S Balsekar does teach
in Germany occasionally, his feelings and thoughts
beliefs about God acting through Hitler and the
Nazi's, that he is so open spoken in Germany. That
concept openly spoken about will end a person in
deep trouble in Germany.

_____________________________________________________________

GLORIA

This article may be of interest here. Summarizing
doesn't quite cover all the bases, but after it's
read, there are some good questions it raises. His
thesis, which he thinks proven by physics, shows
that consciousness being primary, it has a
causative relation to matter. What surprises me is
how this leads him to the conclusion that there is
free will, thru this downward causation of
consciousness interacting with the more often
assumed primacy of the upward causation exerted by
matter.(He still asserts that matter, once created,
is real and has properties or "attributes".) This
excerpt is about that aspect of primacy:

It was my good fortune to recognize it within
quantum physics, to recognize that all the
paradoxes of quantum physics can be solved if we
accept consciousness as the ground of being. So
that was my unique contribution and, of course,
this has paradigm-shifting potential because now we
can truly integrate science and spirituality. In
other words, with Capra and Zukav—although their
books are very good—because they held on to a
fundamentally materialist paradigm, the paradigm is
not shifting, nor is there any real reconciliation
between spirituality and science. Because if
everything is ultimately material, all causal
efficacy must come from matter. So consciousness is
recognized, spirituality is recognized, but only as
causal epiphenomena, or secondary phenomena. And an
epiphenomenal consciousness is not very good. I
mean, it's not doing anything. So, although these
books acknowledge our spirituality, the
spirituality is ultimately coming from some sort of
material interaction. But that's not the
spirituality that Jesus talked about. That's not
the spirituality that Eastern mystics were so
ecstatic about. That's not the spirituality where a
mystic recognizes and says, "I now know what
reality is like, and this takes away all the
unhappiness that one ever had. This is infinite,
this is joy, this is consciousness." This kind of
exuberant statement that mystics make could not be
made on the basis of epiphenomenal consciousness.
It can be made only when one recognizes the ground
of being itself, when one cognizes directly that
One is All. Now, an epiphenomenal human being would
not have any such cognition. It would not make any
sense to cognize that you are All.

http://www.wie.org/j11/goswam1.asp

.....I'm fully aware of how contrary or just plain
stupid I may seem in resurrecting this old free
will issue. However, I do so because Goswami seems
to me to be missing a point,by personalizing the
impersonal consciousness to human beings. Thus he
appears to make the very mistake he accuses other
scientists of: making consciousness only secondary,
an epiphenomenon of material existence, even while
he claims to do otherwise. What I do like about his
approach is that he restores an emphasis on
consciousness being not only causative and primary,
but creative, and how creativity not only implies,
but requires freedom. To me, it seems the issue of
some agency of will entering into this creativity
is moot, creativity only requires the possibility
of multiple possibilities. Otherwise, consciousness
is limited and becomes itself subjected to some
more primary agency of determinism.

Well, it raises as many questions as it purports to
answer, still it's nice that physics is even
raising them.

Articles regarding a (supposed?) relation between
consciousness and matter sure are funny - as if one
or the other could be known "objectively". I had to
learn that electrons encircling nuclei, don't
radiate despite the observation that otherwise,
accelerated charges will radiate. But the axiom
nicely illustrated the observation of emitted
spectra - hence "no more questions asked". The
physics professor refused to answer, how an
electron could know wether in orbit or not, when i
proposed an orbit the size of the universe...

Because, statistically it would be almost absent,
yet the "jump" to its "original" orbit would result
in a predictable photon being emitted. I also
wanted to ask, how long the "jump" would take as
electrons, whether wave or particle, do have to
travel through space. Unless of course, there are
"extra" dimensions, only available in case of
entanglement - something not known at that time.
Which would make "nirvana without substratum
remaining" a local all-entanglement feat - "normal"
laws of nature no longer having their "former"
sway. Something of that kind was remarked by the
Buddha - at least a "rational" explanation for
non-Patanjali (III) siddhis, the Buddha obviously
was familiar with.

A pleasant reading on (quantum) entanglement is at:
http://www.qubit.org/intros/entang/ How that could
translate into human life will show when there is a
special relation with for instance, the mother.
When in great danger, the mother will know that at
the very same moment - irrespective of time or
distance. No "ordinary" physics could explain that.

The description of an atom as a bunch of electrons
encircling a nucleus is a utilitarian explanation
that "covers" quite a number of observations. But
taken to the extreme, an orbit the size of the
universe, that model will break down - hence it
cannot be "the" description.

Dependent arising means the universe arises with
its observing and cannot be separated from it -
this could be called local entanglement on a
macroscopic scale - everything is correlated. But
on that scale it escapes attention - it only shows
in sub-microscopic scales.

In Patanjali (III), the siddhis are described for
the sole reason, that they can't be missed even
when not wanting them. Patanjali doesn't explain
them, only shows how to "attain" them and considers
them obstacles to illumination when sought for.
These siddhis often seem to lead a life of their
own, known in the West as well - several saints did
show signs of for instance unwanted levitation.

For the sake of argument, the Buddha spoke of
"nirvana with substratum remaining", which is the
same as what for Patanjali (IV) is "liberation".
Hence, the same warning applies and that goes too
for samadhis. The term "nirvana without substratum
remaining" describes the "state" of a mind-body, no
longer subject to urges like breathing as they are
no longer felt. According to the Buddha, then the
mind body is like a microcosm where the laws of
nature (as known) do not apply. That can only mean,
observed entanglement on a macroscopic scale. It
has to be as a statement like "matter is
'crystallized' thought" would be a lie, unless
somehow observable..

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