Some great videos on spiritual/psychological topics

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Eckhart Tolle

Youtube just showed me this little gem. I've been wanting to post something by Eckhart Tolle, but I couldn't find any videos that I thought were good enough. I've read (at least a good chunk of, not sure if I finished it) one of his books, I think it's The Power of Now. This is an amazing discussion about his experiences in meditation and spiritual awakening. Many people are launched into it the way he was, through a crappy life and dissatisfaction with the world and people. And many of them then become very intensely interested in trying to figure out exactly who they are, or what people are. And this can kick off a spiritual experience where you discover that your thoughts are not you, that 'you' can separate from the stream of words in your head, stand back, and watch them go by without identifying with them. This is basically meditation. Your awareness (or presence as he calls it) is not a part of your thoughts, and it can also become aware of a deeper stream, that isn't words in your head. You can use spiritual terminology for this or psychological, in which it would be the unconscious or some part of it. Jung made exactly the same discovery, he referred to it as Personality #1 and Personality #2.

One thing that's clear in both of their stories—they were both very aware of the Bible, I mean because they had read it, possibly more than once, and they both suffered from something that today might be called clinical depression (?) or at least a deep dissatisfaction with people and with the world, and really with Being itself. But as Tolle said, he discovered it was never really people or the world or being that was broken, it was something in him, his inner narrative—that stream of words that he couldn't shut off and that tended to take a very negative turn. But he was shown in no uncertain terms that that wordstream was never really him, it was something he could disidentify with and switch off whenever he wanted to, and when he did he would fall into bliss and contentment. And I love that he said it's often better done in nature, while looking at a tree or something, That always does seem to turbo-charge it for me. Indoors it can be much harder to reach that state of bliss, but in nature it happens almost instantly (maybe not the first few times though). Ok, well, I'll let him do the talking. For anybody interested in the benefits of meditation or how to get started at it, this is a gold mine.

They haven't said this yet, and they might get to it, but another way to enter this creative, blissful unconscious state is through creative work. Rubin did talk about doing standup one night and being totally 'switched on', and actually detaching from himself, seeing himself from behind. That's the same thing, but I want to add that you can do it through any kind of creative work, like writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, etc. Anything that demands your full attention and absorbs you, and in which you might forget to run that constant inner speech in your brain. These are the times when it switches off naturally, and when we can come into contact with that deeper inner intelligence that doesn't think in words. I'm talking about those times when you get totally into the flow state, when you get so caught up that you forget all about outer reality, about appointments, meals, your to-do list, etc—the trivial external things that keep us separated from the creative non-verbal state of awareness. In fact this is one of the reasons many people love to do creative work. When this happens you're doing what's called an active meditation—meditating while performing some task. It's a beautiful state. Lol, sounds like a license-plate phrase for Iowa or something...

Tolle said something to the effect of 'When you're you're out in nature, you look around at all the beauty, and your inner thought stream shuts off. It allows you to fall into the meditation state much easier or faster, and perhaps more deeply.'

This may be why it works so well for me, much better than meditating indoors. Even beside a busy road, or walking across cracked and litter-strewn parking lots. Or in the woods on a breezy day, as branches and. leaves shift rhythmically overhead (and all around), and make little light patches that scoot across the ground and over everything, including you. It's so unutterably beautiful—and rhythm is hypnotic, just like it is when staring into a trickling stream or a fire. It can help lull you into the meditation state where you empty out of all surface-level thoughts, you empty your mind and it becomes filled with that spaciousness Tolle mentioned. The same spaciousness Jill Bolte Taylor experienced during her stroke when the left brain shut down temporarily again and again. All words would stop in her head, she would forget language and even who she was or that she was a human being, and expand out to become a vast spirit far bigger than a human body. Not a recommended method by the way.

But when this experience happens to me, this nature trance I can fall into that's so blissful, it always begins with noticing the beauty all around me. The pleasant, rhythmic, pulsing beauty. I become enraptured with it, lost in it, and words just fade completely. I become like a seeing, hearing entity, not even a body, but perhaps somehow attached to this one, and I just get emptied out of this petty human personality and filled with bliss. I become one with nature, a part of it, caught up in the rhythms and the beauty. It lasts for a timeless moment, that feels like an eternity. In that state you don't understand time in the conscious way. It's why Tolle and many others refer to it as the timeless moment. The eternal present. The eternal Now. The past falls way, so there's no regret or bad memories or anything, and the future falls way, so no worries or anxieties. In the present moment these things can't exist. It's because of the way the unconscious works compared to the conscious mind. Our conception of time is a conscious construct, and it disappears along with words (also conscious constructs).

Oh no, I'm sorry, but I must correct Brother Tolle. The Enlightenment wasn't Yin energy (feminine, receptive), it was pure Yang. Pure conscious control (masculine, assertive). You could see him struggling when Rubin said the opposite, and then he decided to just agree I think. Then Romanticism, which he already said was Yin energy, came in as a reaction against too much Yang energy, in the same way the hippie movement of the 60's was Yin energy reacting aginst too much assertive masculine Yang energy of the 50's. Yang is when we try to take control consciously, Yin is when we allow nature to assert herself. He also seemed to be implying that Yang energy is always destructive, and Yin always pleasant. Not true. Both masculine and feminine can and do become destructiuve in excess, but as long as they're not in excess both are positive. We do have a tendency to go too far in one direction and then need a correction, that then usually goes too far in the other direction, so we need these corrections from time to time. Also it isn't good to remain in either one for too long, you need to balace things out by moving back and forth between them, or by learning to achieve a semi-balanced state where you're always aware of the underlying greater Self, even when thinking or doing things.

Basically the conscious mind is Yang and the unconscious is Yin. This is what was being referred to in the first video by the marriage of the masculine and feminine parts of the psyche—get them both aware of each other, and allow the quieter Yin energy to well up from under the constant control of Yang. The Christian Mystics talk about "Letting the Mind drop into the heart," by which they mean stop thinking so much, or at least let your unconscious work in conjunction with, or even direct your conscious mind. Iain McGilchrist says the left hemisphere (conscious linguistic mind) is supposed to be the emmissary of the right (creative unconscious mind), and the right should be the one driving. Unfortunately, in Western society we tend to do things the other way and to discourage letting the unconscious be in control, or even talking about it.

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Some excellent info on the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, according to which she was Jesus' favorite among the apostles, and he gave her secret esoteric teachings he didn't share with any of the others. Teachings that align with what's been presented in the above videos, about the Kingdom of Heaven being within, rather than in the sky or waiting for you after death. It's here and now, inside you, and you need to understand the discipline of meditation to reach it. The presenter is good, but he doesn't seem to consider the idea that Mary might represent the unconscious and the males the conscious mind, which is an interpretation I've run across several times. It would actually fit the theme of her gospel pretty well, no? Plus the way (was it Peter? Or Paul?) asserted his authority and railed against her apparently because of her gender—that pretty well mimicks the way the conscious mind with all its masculine authority and assertiveness likes to lord it over the quiet, passive unconscious and silence it.

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Esoteric means inner—the focus is directed inward—whereas exoteric means outer or external. In this video she explains that esotericism is the most symbolic version of each religion, purely concerned with inner development. Every figure represents an inner aspect of yourself while on the spiritual journey. It's a different interpretation or perspective on a religion. Some people will say "That's ridiculous, it's pure woo-woo," but then, how relevant or helpful to us today is a purely historical version of a religion? Or a purely literal one? They're all different perspectives or interpretations. You know, those Hubert Drefus lectures are proving quite useful, despite that he really only covers one subject (religion) and repeats the same ideas over and over (hey, that's the way you learn, right? Through repetition). The lectures are giving me a very helpful language for discussing these ideas, and a new way to look at them.

Once again, we have the masculine and feminine aspects of the self. That's self with a small-s, as opposed to the Capital-S Self, which is the Higher or Greater Self in the Collective Unconscious. The small-s self just means you, or your ego, your conscious mind, or the personality center of it. The Capitol-S Self is a part of the inner nature, the unconscious, that needs to be awakened and developed through spirtual work and that brings a level of enlightenment. These ideas do seem to be as old as religion itself, and to stem from some Eastern religion, probably Hinduism or something closely related to it. I think keeping several of these interpretations in mind (the literal, the historical, the esoteric) really keeps you aligned properly. The idea, as Melville might say, is to not get stuck in just one of them, but be able to rotate through them or move between them. Taken together I think they give a much more complete picture of what spiritual development is. It reminds me of the fact that symbols in a dream can have multiple meaningsa, each of them completely relevant, even if some of them might seem contradictory on the sufrace. Keep in mind, we're talking about the inner world here, where laws of physics (the physical) have no relevance. The kind of logic and reason that work for doing sicence or for figuring things out in relation to the external world of physical objects (objective world) is irrelevant when disussing the inner. We live in both of these worlds, we need a language and a way of thinking for each of them.

She said the Christ Consciousness and Sophia (wisdom) are twin flames or syzygies. The term syzygy means a pair, and I think originally referred to a yoked pair of oxen that would pull a cart or maybe a plow, but also means, in esoteric/psychological language the Anima and Animus, or our masculine and feminine aspects. We all have both, it's just that for many of us one is external, it's just who we are right on the surface, and the other is repressed into the unconscious. For many of us of course, we're a little bit of both, on the surface and internally. Most of us aren't purely masculine in how we present to the world, or purely feminine, that's extremly rare, actually probably impossible. It's more like what you see in the Yin and Yang symbolsm where each has a little dot of the other in it, that looks like an eye. And that probably carries meaning, it probably means something like it's that little bit of our opposite we carry, that we're aware of or that we carry right on the surface, that allows us to see more clearly in a spiritual sense.

If you're a man who is fairly masculine, then your animus is right on the surface and visible to everybody, You look and behave like a man, so that's conscious, meaning right there on the surface. But you also have feminine traits, it's just that they're pushed down inside and have become unconscious. You have an inner woman who can show up in dreams carrying important messages or helping with your spiritual development, or to face life's challenges when you need some help. And of course the same applies to women. Things are reversed for predominantly feminine men and masculine women. A feminine man will present as very feminine on the surface, and will have a male figure inside who shows up and helps in dreams. And will probably also have a male shadow, so his shadow figures will be male. So the terms Anima and Animus really just refer to your masculine and feminine apsects, one of which is consciously expressed and the other is unconsciously expressed.

And here's an interesting and very helpful little factoid I learned from Jonathan Pageau—esoterically the spiritual just means thought and feeling—the non-material parts of the human being. Your inner world. The mind, the heart, or the soul if you want to call it that. Esoterically when Genesis says God created the heavens and the earth, what it means is he created both the physical and the inner or spiritual worlds. Remember, heaven is within you. Again remember Spirit is the breath of God or of the gods, it's life. He created Adam from earth and then breathed spirit or life or thought and feeling into him. Adam was originally made man and woman, or complete, and then separated, because the word that got mistranslated as Adam's rib also means side, as in a side of beef. A side of beef is half of a cow, not just a rib or even a rack of ribs. Adam was split in half, into the male and female parts. In all the esoteric wisdom, Adam refers not to an individual, but to man in the collective sense. Or in one version, I think it's in the Jewish Kaballah, there's a figure called Adam Cadmon, who is the prototypical human being, the cosmic human, a gigantic figure who stands among the stars. It's the representation of the human race collectively. Just as gods are representations of certain moods or ideas or principles or human traits raised to the ultimate level of perfection (which is possible in the realm of pure idea, which is what the spiritual realm is).

As you start to grasp how all this works it becomes a very useful way of thinking about spirtual development or spirtual matters.

Kaballah, the Tree of Life symbol from ancient Jewish esoteric mysticism

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This is what she was talking about, the Kaballah's Tree of Life graphic, where the middle column represents apparenlty Christ. I had never heard that before, but it puts it all into perspective now. The left pillar is the side of Judgement or Severity, and the right is the side of Mercy. So it's like a balance—the scales of justice or something. It's something like a map of your gradual ascent toward the upper levels, and you move from side to side as you go upward. The center is the balanced pillar, neither too harsh nor too accepting/forgiving. Here's a more simplified version of it, without all the words:

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Well there he is!

Malkuth at the bottom is the world, it's the plane of pure material manifestation, aka the objective world of objects that science studies. At the top is Kether, which if I remember right is what we would call Heaven, the world studied by religion. The lines between the sephiroth (spheres) are paths you can take. It sort of looks like a board game, doesn't it?

And it just hit me—the left pillar is the feminine and the right pillar is the masculine. Bam!!

And it also just hit me, those two versions are reversed. In the top one Victory, Mercy and Wisdom are on the right, in the bottom one they're on the left. Mind officially blown!! And the lettering isn't reversed. What's going on? Cue Twlight Zone music...

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I've been binging on The Alchemist's videos lately. They're all about pluralism, about broadening your understanding by accepting multiple perspectives, and not allowing yourself to be trapped in just one. Opening up your bandwidth as she calls it.

Esotericism isn't a religion or a spiriual system. It's a viewpoint, a way of looking at all religions and all spiritual systems. She calls it the most metaphorical or symbolic way of understanding a religion. It's a perspective—in fact it consists of many perspectives. Its the mystic's way of looking at religion and spirituality, and her way of doing it is to incorporate ideas from many different religions together. Many of them are compatible in this way. Maybe it's wrong to say 'incorporate', it might be better to say take them all together, or consider them all, because they're somewhat different expressions of the same or very similar ideas.

The idea of the Higher Self as she explains it encompasses the Jungian Self as well as the Hindu Atman and many other similar ideas. It's the Protean shapeshifting Collective Unconscious, able to present itself in any form because it contains all of and can become any of the Archetypes. I also see now that it's the All, it's Everything, it's the Absolute, and encountering it even slightly is an experience of the Sublime. It's uncanny how well this all fits in with the idea of religious/spiritual pluralism being presented in the Dreyfus lectures.

What Jung did was to psychologize all the religious and spiritual systems. He found the psychological basis for all of them. As I discovered on this massive journey through this blog and other incarnations of my jounral, religion and spiritual systems have always been, among other things, the earliest forms of psychology and philosophy. They're repositories of our deepest wisdom couched in the form of mythology—life wisdom. All of it rolled into one, before they got separated into individual disciplines or categories (psychology, philosophy, etc).

All my studeis into Christianity, spurred by Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, were a way of incorporating and studying the wisdom and trying to find an esoteric way of looking at it all. They take a very esoteric approach, a very metaphorical way of looking at the symbols of Christianity and finding the wisdom—philosophy and the psychology included in it. But the same is true for all other religions and psiritual systems. I just chose that one as my way in. You can't go into that much depth on every religion, there are too many, it would take more than a lifetime. But looking deeply into one like that is immesnely helpful.

"What Jung did was to psychologize all the religious and spiritual systems."

And what I'm doing now, through videos and books like the ones I present here is to spiritualize the psychological. To take what Jung put into strictly psychological terms and allow some life to be breathed back into it. Actually Jung did that too, but he mostly stuck to presenting his findings in their most psychologized form in his books. But clearly he believed (and straight-up said) that you must take a religious attitude toward life (not meaning any one religion) or run the risk of the many anxieties, neuroses, complexes and psychoses our age is characterized by. He just meant you should have an atittude of awe and wonder before the majesty of the great mysteries of life. The religious or spiritual attitude is what we mostly lack today, except of course for the religion many people make of science/materialism, and that doesn't work as a religion or a spirtual system. It's nothing more than a way of studying the material world. It tells us nothing of wisdom, or of connecting with something deeper and more profound than our petty egos, or shedding our self-centered (small s) understanding of the world and our place in it. Of course many people who seem purely materialistic actually do have a sort of vague spiritual side, like Carl Sagan did, when he would stare in wide-eyed wonder into the sky and feel himself overtaken by something larger and more powerful. This is a sort of unacknowledged spiritual attitude, much like my nature trance or a form of meditation.