Some wisdom from this weekend

Post Reply New Topic

One of the mystic organizations I've been a member of for a short time met this weekend and had a national speaker give a class for us throughout the day Saturday and part of Sunday. The gentleman himself has been with the organization close to half a century and needless to say is quite advanced in years.

I'd already known that all of this is Hermetic or Neoplatonic at it's base - ie. it's an emanationist mode of reality and an understanding of consciousness having emanated from The One Source where everything truly does remain connected.

The core message of this weekend, if I could sum it up in one sentence, is a very dear and sweet one. It wasn't so much phrased in these exact words but the message goes like this: Life is a love story between you and God within you.

If one could take the New Testament of the bible and isolate Jesus's ternary - Love God with all of your heart, mind, and soul, Love your neighbor as yourself, and the implied Love your neighbor and yourself the way you would love God - and isolate that from the more dogmatic angles, this is pretty much what you get. It works out that way as well because under that rubric, when you really think about it, is always different faces of God meeting each other thus love of self, neighbor, and God are all different facets of loving God. It's an understanding of life that, yes, incorporates reincaration/metempsychosis and karma and does so from the understanding that the purpose each soul personality has it's 'physical' member incarnate is to have experiences that help bringing it to be more like what it strives to emulate with everything in it's being - the Most High.

Clearly looking at the world around me there's a lot of shock the other way - ie. I could look at the Middleast, the genocides in the Congo, the three madmen of the 20th century, or even Miley and others on tv and ask how any of this correlates. The understanding I'm coming to with this is that the critical mass of 'different from God' within each little soul or tributary of God is tantamount to a bank of condensed original karma that gets unwound over time. That unwinding and many people doing it at the same tends to obscure the general evidence that thoughts are things and that every thought we think has as much consequence as our actions. One could note that thoughts for ill or for good are always precursory to action of one kind or another.

All this would sound like it's standing on a third order limb and I never would have entertained it if it were just someone's attempt at rationalizing life circumstances in a way that made them feel fuzzy. This isn't that kind of thing however, ie. it's what people legitimately find if they explore the depths of the esoteric as well as the contents of what one would generally call mystic or preternatural experience. Even if the Neoplatonic fused energy moder were completely untrue for some reason in the objective and literal (ie. that we were purely physical beings with consciousness not leaving our nervous system, God being a big imaginary friend, etc.), what wouldn't change is that there's something in us where, if we do such internal exploration, this is what we find - the sense that there is a divine within us that can work through us if we let it, that we notice a qualitative difference if we do, and that there is something to be experienced in life that the phrase 'being born again in the spirit' matches up quite well with in how the experience plays itself out.

One thing anyone here could do if they felt like giving it a shot - if you're ever out at the store, grabbing a sandwich, at the mall, at school or work, whatever the situation is, you can ask your higher self whether you can feel it's there or not, to use you as a conduit and send out love to everyone in the room. You acknowledge to it that your love is circumstantial and that you yourself don't have the capacity to send your love out in such a manner but ask it to just flow out and send it's love and nourishment to the other people around you - ie. their surface layer or egos as well as aiding the God within each of them. This is a way that, when I really think about it, I can do something to walk this knowledge and a) I don't have to get myself wound up in the consequences of what would happen if I tried that in the physical b) get myself and eventually keep myself on a track of thinking that's beneficially angled toward doing what was etched out in front of many of the temples of the ancient world which is 'Know thyself'.

I know how this kind of thing often sounds to some people and I'm not particularly worried about that one way or another. It was a great weekend, met a lot of wonderful people, and I thought it would be well worth sharing essentially the order of ontology that was shared with me. It's a pretty well-known organization at the mystic end of things and this is perhaps riding centuries of research in their particular spiritual/western esoteric current - both research of spiritual experience and research of mysteries and philosophy from ancient times through renaissance, 18th/19th centuries, and onward.

I wouldn't try providing evidence because it would be pointless philosophical haggling of assembled ideas and to even call them 'facts' would invite too much controversy considering that everyone has their own when it comes to these things and whether or not they exist. It's more one of those 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating' kind of things though - ie. if you try it you're much more likely to find that supporting evidence you were seeking.

Sounds like you enjoyed this meeting. Is it something you could attend on a regular basis you think?

This particular kind of thing was a yearly convention. There is a monthly local group I go to and we're trying to grow in membership.

Most of this, in both orders I'm a member of, involves monthly receipt (by mail or electronic) of weekly lesson plans. It's a bit like what the Golden Dawn used to do, ie. both lessons and self-initiation by correspondence learning, but no longer does.