Synthesis: Towards a Unifying Plan - Part 6

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded Part 5 with the following:

 

" This higher consciousness has been present in humanity from the earliest times.

A well-established example is shamanism, which has been investigated extensively

by Mircea Eliade, Joan Halifax and others, and is found to occur all over the

world. Shamans develop psychic powers and attain psychic knowledge, going beyond

the physical and the ordinary psychological domains, to experience the early or

lower levels of the transcendent. With such experience are associated what we

call psychic phenomena, like visions and revelations, knowledge of the future

and the past, and the ability to heal. These and many other parapsychological

powers have been developed by shamans over the ages and continue to the present

day. Such experiences are all part of what is called the subtle world and they

were, of course, developed further in the great religious traditions. There is

the gross world which is the world of the senses and of ordinary understanding.

Normal Western science belongs simply to the gross world. (p.266) But beyond the

gross is the subtle world, the sphere of the subtle senses, the subtle feelings,

the subtle imagination, the subtle mind and the whole subtle organism, and all

the forces of that world which are present and can be experienced. Many people

today are more and more commonly having these experiences, and we know that in

the past this was quite normal. The forces which are encountered in the subtle

realm are depicted as both good and evil. Some assist the growth of the

universe, of human evolution and of human persons while others prevent and

counteract such growth. So when we enter the subtle, psychic world we are

exposed, as we are in the ordinary human physical world, to both good and evil

forces. These are cosmic and psychological forces working in the universe and in

the human consciousness and we have to learn how to understand and how to relate

to them. Again in Tibetan Buddhism this complete grasp of both positive and

negative forces, and how to relate to and deal with them, has been worked out in

great detail. "

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith)

Chapter 12, p.265-266

 

Here now, is Part 6.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

Synthesis: Towards a Unifying Plan - Part 6

 

(p.266) Not only shamans but all the prophets, seers and visionaries of the past

were people who had these psychic powers and psychic vision. Today this whole

area is being studied more systematically and the whole sphere of

parapsychological phenomena is generally recognised. As we have more knowledge

of this area we begin to see how it is structured. The experience of the subtle

world depends on an intuitive insight. It cannot be attained by rational means.

The ordinary, rational, mental level of mind has no access to this realm and

ordinary scientific methods are useless to map it. It is important to remember,

however, that in these investigations we do not discard our reason. The method

is to open ourselves through intuition to these deeper insights and then to try

to understand them, to relate them and appropriately to systematise them through

the reason. Reason and intuition always have to be used together. Intuition by

itself can be misleading. (p.267) All sorts of weird fantasies can come up in

flashes of intuition and these have to be corrected by reason. It is a matter of

the right and the left brain, the right being the intuitive and the left the

rational, and for a balanced understanding the two sides have to work in

co-operation rather than one to the exclusion of the other. Even in the physical

sciences intuition is recognised to be essential and it is well known that some

of the greatest discoveries, for instance some of those by Newton and Einstein,

have been made by pure intuition. It was by intuition that they caught glimpses

of aspects of the inner structure of reality and then with the rational mind

they were able to express this mathematically to show how it actually worked. So

intuition has always been present but its use is limited in both science and

ordinary philosophy. When it comes to the realm of the psychic, however,

intuition is fundamental but, and this needs to be repeated, whatever is

experienced in this realm always has to be studied in the light of reason. The

attempt to understand with the reason is part of the process of gaining

knowledge and it can never be dispensed with.

 

We have, then, the world of psychic experience, but beyond the psychic world

there is a deeper dimension, the world of the transcendent. This we find in the

great revelations. There what is revealed is not merely the physical or the

psychological or psychic world but rather there takes place an intuitive insight

into the ultimate, the transcendent. All the great revelations are, as it were,

messages from that transcendent world. They are given in the scriptures of the

various great traditions, the Vedas and Upanishads, the Quran, the Buddhist

scriptures, and the Bible. These are all revelations of transcendent reality.

Then again the process is that the revelations are interpreted by the rational

mind and so there are the great theologians and philosophers, for example

Sankara and Ramanuja for Hinduism, Nagarjuna, Asanga and Vasubandhu for

Buddhism, Ibn al Arabi and al Ghazzali for Islam, and St Thomas Aquinas, St

Bonaventure and others for Christianity. (p.268) These great thinkers bring the

rational mind to bear on the transcendent mysteries which are realities of

experience. It is important to realise this because so often the impression is

given that these revelations are, as it were, dropped from heaven, and people

tend to accept them uncritically and therefore to misunderstand them. The

reality is that all religious truth comes from an original experience, that of

the seer, the prophet, the saint. But the experience always has to be

interpreted in the light of rational, conceptual thought.

 

In this way then we go beyond the physical, beyond the psychological, and beyond

the subtle world of psychic experience to the infinite transcendent reality

beyond. As long as we are in the psychic world it is a world of multiplicity.

There are many gods, many angels, many spirits, many powers of various sorts and

this is why the psychic world is always somewhat ambiguous. One can somehow come

under the power of these different spirits and gods, and as long as they are

diversified they can be dangerous, because they, like other entities, are only

properly themselves when they are part of this integrated whole of which we have

been speaking. Idolatry and superstition arise when some psychic or cosmic power

is isolated and worshipped in such a way that one comes under that power. All

the evils of religion come from that, when some aspect of the whole world,

particularly the psychic world, is isolated and worshipped as if it were the

ultimate. That is what we know as the worship of false gods.

 

On the other hand, just as the physical universe is an integrated whole and the

whole psychological universe is an integrated whole, so the subtle world is an

integrated whole. In the great religions it is always seen that all these

powers, these gods and angels, are under the control of one supreme power. This

leads to the sense of the cosmic Lord, the cosmic Person, who rules over all.

(p.269) In each religion, as we have seen, the point is reached when the cosmic

Lord is acknowledged. But now the next stage is to go beyond that and to realise

that in and through the cosmic Person the whole of this universe, physical and

psychological, is being reintegrated into its source. When we come to the

Supreme, everything returns to unity. Everything comes out of that original

unity, exploding into a universe and evolving through all these forms that we

see. That outward movement is called 'pravritti', the whole universe coming out

from the Supreme, manifesting in all these worlds and in all these forms. But at

the same time there is another opposite movement, the movement of return or

'nivritti'. These two movements act together, sending forth the universe and

drawing it back to its source. And so everything in the universe is all being

drawn back to its source, back into its original unity. Or, using a different

image, just as everything came forth from an implicated whole into explication,

so now it goes back from explication to the implicate and everything is

fulfilled in that One. The whole universe is implicated in this unity and exists

eternally in a state of absolute oneness in this being. The whole universe, and

everything and everybody in it, exists eternally in that one infinite being

without any differences, in a total oneness.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and

Christian Faith) Chapter 12, p.266-269

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0