Category: SOULS

THE GNOSTIC EXPERIENCE – ARE HUMANS RELEVANT?

Some mystics would tell us the only spiritual life worth talking about is the experiential kind, not the religious. 

Why we are here is based on inner experience, gnosis, not the expectations of our country of origin, tradition, culture, teachings or habits.

Gnosis is connection to Reality.  Those who have experienced it are marked by a reluctance to talk about it. 

What we know of it suggests it is spontaneous, though some religious teachers claim they can induce it in their pupils by special disciplines.  the Jesus of the Christian bible said his message was only for those already prepared by his God, perhaps a reference to the experience of gnosis. Bible and mystical references suggest it can’t be earned or deserved. 

Anecdotal evidence suggests the experience happens to those aged between 20 and 30. Each experience brings with it a sense of departure from the body. 

While it lasts, the feeling is of being infused as if anaesthetised with a profound sense of joy. Everything that exists or has ever existed belongs intensely to the one having the experience. There is no absence of time, just no such thing as time. 

It is as if the subject is being observed with benign indifference, as if their existence is unremarkable, as if they are an essential part of a reality in which they exist for ever.

The experiences come with an undetectable gentleness as if from an infinite, unassailable strength. There is a sense that the even greater Reality is waiting nearby. Afterwards, some subjects conclude they are given as much of the experience as they can bear. As the experience begins to leave the loss is fought against with agitation and sadness, and a panicky sense of loss.

The experiences do not lead the subject to want to be a better human being.  They can even make the subject impatient with being human at all. Being a “better”, a “good”, human being, become givens, “fruits of the spirit”. After such experiences these attributes seem axiomatic, automatic, needing no effort to achieve. 

This gnosis is not anthropomorphic, human centred, not even biological.

Gnosis makes a clear distinction between the human spirit and what humans call the Holy Spirit, that which is of man, (matter, morality and ethics), and that which is Real, pure, the soul.

The soul is a part of what those who have the gnostic experience then know as their true identity, an identity which is part of a whole to which they will eventually return permanently.

The sense is that the soul is merely placed in the human mind and body in order to experience matter and when that is satisfactorily accomplished, when the soul is pure spirit, then the body is discarded and the mind is shelved as no longer required. Only souls are eternal, not humans.

All Is Well. 
Mysticexperiences.net

Please feel free to reblog.

Note: This was originally posted in 2016 and is posted here again in slightly re-edited form. It is a restatement of my Mystical Experiences Of Reality, (MER) several times a year from my late 14 years to 35 years of age.

I WAS THAT. I DO NOT INTEND TO RETURN By Anthony Garner, zenothestoic.com

 

Last night was a night of my soul, but not a dark one.

I am aware where true happiness lies and nowhere was that more evident than in the middle of a starlit, cool summer night dreaming in my garden.

I had commented to a friend during the day that my version of life was best summed up by Mathew 6:25-34 in sharp contradistinction to a summary I had read of a book called “Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance”.

According to that book, it seems that a better world requires that I get up at 4 am every morning, become an “entrepreneur” and run something called a “for profit”.

Instead I lay in the dark and gave thanks that I was as far removed from such a dystopian nightmare as it is possible to get.

It had been a day of intense heat, such as I am not used to and have come to dread. 33% in the shade – nothing for Madrid or Texas no doubt, but enough to induce in me a sense of panic and claustrophobia. Enough to send me off to the beach and take a very unaccustomed John the Baptist.

By evening a coolness had spread, and the middle of the night found me sleeping in the garden. Dozing perhaps, dreaming certainly, meditating.

A sense of calm and gnosis crept over me. I heard a gentle murmuring all around me; I heard night sounds of animals I might have recognized by day, but whose voices were until then a mysterious closed book to me.

The over riding emotion was oneness. I wondered at one stage whether my mind was disintegrating along with my no longer young body. Perhaps my end was coming or was it my beginning? Regardless, it was neither harrowing nor joyous, just intensely peaceful. An overwhelming acceptance of what is. A strong grasp of the infinity all around me and the certain knowledge that all was somehow well, dissolved as I felt in the universal.

More properly speaking I was at the foothills of disintegration but such absorption was felt to be a progress, and achievement of some sort and not an ending.

Above all I was where I should be, where I belonged. I was nature, I was that vastness above. I was that haunting animal cry, I was the coolness of the night and its starry blackness.

There is yin and there is yang, it is said. There is no beauty without ugliness, no goodness without sin. Is that true I wonder? And if so can the whole come to be seen as beautiful anyway?

I think maybe the latter. Perhaps it is a question of acceptance, of letting go. And yet if you are yin I do not think you can survive in a world of yang. Not unless you have managed to transcend the physical and become pure spirit.

Where once I was prepared to try out the world portrayed in that book, to imagine that “for profit” and “entrepreneurship” was the way to go, that was all yang to my yin.

Even as a small child, at heart I realized my yingness but for so much of my life pretended I was yang. Instead of “for profit” my reality was the lilly. Instead of entrepreneurship, my soul was in truth a bird which did not wish to gather in barns. I did not wish to sew nor to reap.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.

And thus in the middle of last night, in the cool and under the canopy of the stars I felt myself; as I am. I looked to the night sky and felt I am that. I heard the night owl cry and that too was me. The quiet susurration of distant waves, the gentle rustle of leaves and branches in a cool night wind. That too was me; I was that.

Do I wax too poetical, do I lose my meaning in a sea of fantasy. No, I think not. I was a part of reality last night and content to exist or not. If there was yin mixed in with yang, I was not seeing it. Or was I seeing a bigger picture altogether – the glory of yin and yang combined in an unblemished whole. I was bathed in a glorious unity and nothing seemed to matter. I did not seem to be body or earthbound, transcendence seemed somehow to have happened.

I do not intend to return.

zenothestoic.com

IS THERE A SOUL?

From my multiple spiritual experiences of Reality (MER) I would define Soul as being the Reality experienced in MERs. What souls we have are part of that Reality.

Reality is the total of all things anywhere, It is absolute consciousness so knows everything in existence beyond mere present human mental, ‘spiritual’ or physical experience even though we are a part of Reality. That Reality is our real soul, or consciousness.  Reality, Soul, Real Consciousness is our only existence. We are not merely ‘human’.

Most humans are not conscious enough to know we are manifestations of Reality. We are created and nurtured in Reality whether we know it or not. Only some humans (mystics) are made conscious (of some?) of this for some reason as yet unknown.

Science and academia are more aware of the phenomena in our time. In fact, there has been an outburst of intensive research and study on the subject in universities around the world for nearly 30 years. So far, no evidence of the kind traditional science has been using has emerged to satisfy science and academia’s increasingly challenged traditional disciplines.

So if MER is not yet a conscious part of some humans then presumably what such people are left with for now is a basic, undeveloped shadow of Reality some call, ‘the human spirit’?

The amount of Reality absorbed or even understood or exhibited by those who really experience It varies, though most basic definitions of Reality are the same throughout history in every culture from long before the cultures of today.

Some scientists say MER is created by the brain. This is wrong. The brain does not create Reality, Reality creates the brain. Reality transmits Itself through the brain. The brain merely receives Reality which then asserts Itself into individual human consciousness not only as direct experience of Itself but to the language of Reality: intuition and instinct. These transmissions enlarge the mystic’s consciousness of existence throughout life. Thus is real Soul, true personal consciousness, developed in humans.

Today, MER is not as rare as history suggests it has been.

Whether these experiences, intuitions and instincts also exist in animals or matter I was not given to experience. (Reality consciousness might be different in and beyond the two trillion galaxies that contain billions of planets like ours).

Mysticexperiences.net

FINDING THE SOUL

This excerpt is taken from an essay written by Ron Krumpos after he interviewed 10 mystics from around the world. The essay appears in his free pdf reprintable book, The Greatest Achievement in Life, which can be found at suprarational.org. The book is a comprehensive account of mysticism experienced today.

He writes:

“Finding the soul, even if that was possible, is less significant than living in the soul.

“Most of us live in our immediate emotions, our extended minds and our ever present bodies until death. Few of us live through the soul, constantly aware of the divine essence in us.

“It is the spiritual life which gives true purpose to our human lives. It is spiritual life which continues after this brief stay on Earth.

“It is the spirit in each of us which unites us with the spirit in All: all people, all sentient beings, all seemingly inanimate objects, and the divine.”

Mysticexperiences.net

THE DIVINE ESSENCE

“Using Allah, (celestial) Buddha, God, ha-Shem, Ishvara, or other words does not change eminent Reality as the holy One in All and All in the wholly One. Soul is simply a word for our spiritual essence, now separated from the ocean of Reality by a cloud of ignorance. Like rain, it does come from that ocean and it will eventually return to it. The billions of souls on Earth are just as surface ripples in the vastness of the universal One.” — Ron Krumpos*

*From his eBook, The Greatest Achievement in Life: Five traditions of mysticism, Mystical approaches to life, 2012, pub.

COMMENTARY

This book is deeply researched, produced out of experience and spiritual study, from worldwide travel, living mystics, and ancient and modern texts. It is well accepted academically, and to those who have had the mystical experience of Reality and are finding what is left of their humanity thereby a sometimes tedious daily challenge, this work is a seminal, validating comfort.

Mysticexperiences.net

A Spiritual Interpretation of “The Truman Show”

A Perennial Follower

The other night, I watched with my fiancee an (nowadays) old classic movie, The Truman Show, released in 1998 and starring Jim Carrey at perhaps the peak time of his career in cinema. For those of you who have never seen or heard of it, it centres around a man, Truman Burbank, whose entire life has been recorded on live TV since before the moment of his birth. He lives in the artificially created town of Seahaven, which in reality is situated within a giant dome situated in Los Angeles.

Even though this analysis may be twenty years too late, I’m going to write it anyway! A quick plot summary is forthcoming, so spoilers ahead for those who don’t want anything ruined.

The plot basically follows Truman’s gradual realisation that his entire world is an illusion. As the movie progresses, he finds more and more strange happenings around him…

View original post 1,226 more words

A ONE-SENTENCE, 125-WORD EXPLANATION OF EXISTENCE AND THE SOUL?

Since Plato and Aristotle disagreed over the soul being spirit or physical, giving rise to the argument among humans ever since, it is my contention Ultimate Reality – which modern science, the way Professor Fred Alan describes it, suggests to me is an “‘intangible, irreducible field of probability; the quantum physical wave function from which all matter and energy arise” – that this Ultimate Reality “wave function” invented the phenomenon of the direct individual experience of MER (the Mystical Experience of Reality), thus explaining spiritual existence accurately and fully once and for all without any human intervention whatsoever, (even avoiding languages to do so, using individual human brains as receivers of MERs) – thus reducing scientific physics and philosophy to the level of mere materialistic technological enquiry …

PS: Perennialists 1, Constructionists 0.

Mysticexperiences.net

THE GNOSTIC EXPERIENCE – ARE HUMANS RELEVANT?

 

Some Sufis would tell us the only spiritual life worth talking about is the experiential kind, not the religious. Why we are here is based on inner experience, gnosis, not the expectations of our country of origin, tradition, culture, teachings or habits.

Gnosis is connection to Reality, a much more proper name for God. Those who have experienced it are marked by a reluctance to talk about it. What we know of it suggests it is spontaneous, though some religious teachers claim they can induce it in their pupils by special disciplines. Jesus said his message was only for those already prepared by his God, perhaps a reference to the experience of gnosis. Bible references suggest it can’t be earned or deserved.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the experience happens to those aged approximately between 20 and 30. Each experience brings with it a sense of departure from the body. While it lasts, the feeling is of being infused as if anaesthetised with a profound sense of joy. Everything that exists or has ever existed belongs intensely to the one having the experience. There is no absence of time, just no such thing as time.

It is as if the subject is being observed with benign indifference, as if their existence is unremarkable, as if they are an essential part of a reality in which they exist forever.

The experiences are benign, they come with an undetectable gentleness as if from an infinite, unassailable strength. There is a sense that the even greater Reality is waiting nearby. Afterwards, some subjects conclude they are given as much of the experience as they can bear. As the experience begins to leave the loss is fought against with agitation and sadness, a panicking, agitated sense of extinction.

The experiences do not lead the subject to want to be a better human being. They can make the subject impatient with being human at all. Being a “better”, a “good”, human being, become givens, “fruits of the spirit”. After such experiences such attributes seem axiomatic, automatic, needing no effort to achieve such personal attributes.

There is no such thing as an Islamist, Christian, Buddhist, Hindhu or Jewish gnosis. Any attempt to entangle the pure mystical experience of Reality (MER) with the doctrines, ideologies and cultural mythomania and attachments of humans and their religions is an oxymoron.

Real, unadulterated  gnosis is not anthropomorphic, human centred. It makes a clear distinction between the human spirit and what humans call the Holy Spirit, that which is of man, (matter, morality and ethics), and that which is Real, pure, the soul. The soul is a part of what those who have the gnostic experience then know as their true identity, an identity which is part of a whole to which they will eventually return permanently.

The sense is that the soul is merely placed in the human mind and body in order to experience matter and when that is satisfactorily accomplished, when the soul is purified through such distillation, refining, then the body is discarded and the mind is shelved as no longer required. Only souls are eternal, not humans.

Keith Hancock . Nanaimo mid 1995, added to in 2016.

 

INDIVISIBLE SOULS? By Laura Giles.

“I am a past life regression facilitator. It is my observation and experience that each lifetime has a different personality that does not carry over from lifetime to lifetime. For example, I may be angry in one and passive in another. This is purposeful so that we can experience different facets of life.

There is a common thread, a soul if you will, that moves from lifetime to lifetime, but in the bigger picture than that, all souls are one soul. Just as the human body, mind, and spirit are indivisible, the soul is indivisible from the One. We are just experiencing a facet of it because that is all the brain can contain.”


Laura Giles, Norfolk University, Virginia. From LINKEDIN.