Section IIb: spirituality

 

Combinations: parcels and parts,         
what accords and differs,         
harmony and disharmony,         
from all things one and from one all things.         
Herakleitos.       

The spiritual, the religious and one's own nature
In section Ib discussing the Small Philosophy of Association was already dealt with the respect for the person. Human beings therein engaged can, to the reality of their actual material position, be set apart as to differences of age and profession (varnās'rama). Neatly divided four by four one thus obtains the sixteen different basic identities or status-orientations active in the four fields, to which, considering the risk of the falsehood of class-consciousness, we may wonder analytically what exactly the relation now would be between spirit and matter, what the true and the false would be and what exactly the meaning of the game would be that man is playing in his societal sense of order. Analytically we discovered art as the emotional expression of man confronted with the duality, the light and the dark and the apparent conflict of the material matters of good and evil. Spiritually seen the interest of the spirit occupies itself with the problem of the development of quality in a material world of quantifiable differences we call the quantity. In relation to the different fields of civil action, one has oneself to make a difference with it, if one wants to make a real and discernible presence. The burden carried to its consequence, is what the philosopher Vyāsadeva calls karma. Karma, next to the likewise concept of the christian cross also a western concept now, is in fact the workload of man committed to manifestation, to sacrificing and to choices for a certain idea of order and respect for the person. Jesus thus, at the beginning of our yearcount, took the karma upon him of mankind, while before that, in greek mythology, Heracles in his twelve works, for a moment carried the dome of the sky, the burden of the world, taken over from the proverbial Altas, the titan for the duty. With the karma we also know about the ego by which we accrued to the conflicting feelings concerning the duality: the I, in the struggle for equity in having a grip on the world, constitutes a curse and a blessing at the same time. To work for a result, or for the 'I' and 'mine' of an ego, for the sake of money and possessions, is a collective conviction, but also a burden we want to get rid of on sundays when we no longer are able to carry on with that struggle for our existence, with that competition in opposition to deliver a material proof of quality.

We analytically saw that the idea of God in the form of the factor of time in relation to the ether plays a part in this. The time of the ego some moment is over and the time of the more sacred I of the soul is found next then. The Muslims do it on fridays, the Jews on saturdays and the Christians on sundays. They reserve time for the soul and thus show that the day of rest, or the day of study to reiterate the holy book with song and prayer, is indispensable as a necessary counterweight to the karmically being entangled in a society of accomplishments. But now we have two approaches in this drive for purifying the motives. Firstly there is the, with the principles put first, spiritual contemplating of the essence. It is, in its philosophically by Aristotle in his Analytica Posteriora being defined as: 'that what is fundamental, typical, qualifying and of a general value to something else' or lexically stated more simple is 'essential and indispensable', linguistically not all too precise being described, as something that remains ethereal, because that essence may adopt so many forms with so many methods. Secondly one has the 'less on itself' directed religiosity in the sense of being of a common contemplation based on rituals and formalized services, we normally call religion. The two camps, the spiritual people and the religious souls, have the propensity to decry each other as being of illusion. The religion in that dispute would be too much bent upon the outer form, or be too hypocritically or sanctimoniously of a false authority in the eyes of the 'ethereal' souls, and spirituality , in its independence, would be a dead end street and a form of conceit that would be selfish and, just because of a liberal 'emptiness', be leading to godlessness and sin in the eyes of the 'believers'. The hypocrites flee from the self-confrontation and the ethereal souls flee from the responsibility, so it seems to be, thus being divided. But analytically we already learned from Freud that there is something like projection. The pot blames the kettle for being black. Apparently one tries to separate something, to distance oneself from something, from which one cannot separate oneself. The holiness of the ethereal souls depending on some rules, only of concern to the essence, and the togetherness of the believers, deriving from the together-one-is-stronger principle of being tolerant with the weaknesses one happens to have with those rules, together point the way to a like-mindedness with the sacredness, which is both of respect for a certain regularity of contemplation and for a certain freedom from being time-bound. This combination of responsibility and self-confrontation is what our filognosy is aiming at.

Without the respect of time the difference between the two kinds of truth-loving people, who in reality are as intertwined as the birds in the 'Sun and Moon'-woodcut of M. C. Escher (1898-1972), is not easily understood. For the time aspect, so was analytically found already, itself is the influence of the Personality of Godhead, He who is worshiped by the believer to arrive at consciousness and self-realization, and who by the free-floating ethereal soul is internalized in order to find purification with the same purpose in mind. They both want to purify themselves, they both seek solidarity in meditation groups or in church, but the believer has a narrowly defined idea of an order of time and a fixed institute, while the ethereal person indeed is 'floating in the sky' for that matter. There are even groups of meditation, the followers of Maharishi Yogi to precise, who actually try to 'hop' specifically, who really have (or had) the literally floating in the sky as an attainable goal in mind...

The religious perspective is further characterized by its focus on one specific person: the person one reveres. One prays to Krishna as the hero, Jesus as the lamb, Mohammed as the prophet, or the Buddha as the one teacher of enlightenment. The 'new-agers' or the people of the New Time, also called the New Man by the meditation guru Osho (previously Bhagavān S'rī Rajneesh, 1931 - 1990), who is the godfather of our modern self-inquiring spirituality, are, on the contrary, not specifically focussed on one person: Osho himself is, as far as they are concerned, but a comedian and a friend in self-realization, whom one must not take too seriously. The dutchman Amrito, the ex-psychiatrist (Not-Made-of-Wood) Jan Foudraine, spoke, also to the instance of the guru Jiddu Krishnamurti, of master, anti-master en psychotherapist: one sometimes needs a psychotherapist to learn from the master that there is no need for a master. The 'orange people' and other transcendentalists with their 'anti-masters' occupy themselves with meditation-techniques - sound bowls, Tai Chi, Yin/Yang and Tao, enneagrams, flower-therapy, Reiki, dynamic meditation, acupuncture, homeopathy, massage, channeling, encounter, transmission and what not - and derive thereby from a variety of sources in order to validate the diverse methods to find a cure for the afflictions of materialism. Furthermore they are after embracing the here and now, for the past is not really there anymore and the future is not there yet. The reality is now. Seen from our perspective it is a different notion of time the spiritual person is working with. He is seeking the 'third time', not the time thus of a clock or even the time of the sun and the moon directly, not a time of desires, expectations and fixed and rusty patterns but, as we pointed out in the preface, the time experienced of the eternal now that knows no beginning or end, which has a sanctity of its own that is called sacral as we before saw it sociologically. From another angle we in the twentieth century more or less  arrived at this insight also with investigators of consciousness like the autodidact A. Watts (1915-1973) stressing the interest of Zen and Tao for the sake of a more naturally united type of man, the philosopher Robert Ornstein who spoke of the personal integrity in relation to competing parts of relatively independent parts of the brain, the transpersonal thinker Ken Wilber speaking of the part-and-parcel holons of non-dualistic entities relating to time-bound forms, and the analytical psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) with his concept of archetypes of an individual identification of the self connected in 'non-causal synchronicity'. Making appointments, it is difficult to engage in fixed societal relations with spiritual and timeless on the ether oriented people who, seeking their freedom, want to put and end to their karma. But on the other hand they are more open to you as a person and to life as a process, once you dare to seek association with them. It is more or less a paradox; because of the timelessness of sacral time there is, with the spiritualist, more attention for the individual person, while the believers, who on the contrary put the person first, often do not know each other at all, nor want to learn to know each other, and neither are capable of learning to know each other in their formal services.

As for time, the spiritualists, without too much of a conviction, tend to sun- and moon worship, as also to astrological meditations of an interplanetary time indication relative to a non-astronomical celestial sky. Completely timeless are they not thus, and for some time one may very well follow a course, therapy or group with them. Of the believers the Christians e.g. are, on the other hand, also not so very fond of the time factor, as evidenced by the words of apostle Paul, who would not want to have that aspect prevail over the love for one's fellow man, and the words of Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 A.D.) who had not much of a heart for the subject either. Islam on its turn, fanatic as it may be concerning the times of prayer, is not very motivated either in defining the fridays of its gatherings to the nature of the sun and the moon, and is neither really to the point in the philosophy of the commercial time of their normal working hours. As different and contradictory one thus is with the idea of time, with a certain freedom from being bound to the natural order of time as opposed to a type of compromising certainty to the political nature of standard time, both positions of contemplation are still to be recognized as being part of one and the same evolution, of one and the same emancipation process, in which the soul finds its purification in relation to the force field of the ether. The spiritualists are, being more gnostic than the religious souls, more bent upon the philosophical explanation of religious truths, and with that also more creative and more personally focussed on the impersonal of the rules and principles of that freedom alone: the freedom of realization which then, eventually with a fixed agreement on time, may result in a new order or religion in which one, some way or another, for the sake of God talks to oneself - or prays - and in another way upholds and remembers the honor of it in respect of a certain holy scripture. And that hoping for the better is also the idea of being ambitious one likes to cherish spiritually: the spirituality, as born from discontent, disappointment and powerlessness with the existing religious and societal order, has thus also the function of operating for the sake of preparing for either the extant or else a newer or renewed sense of functioning spiritually and societally. With the perfection of our causal illusion reasoning from this section to the - more on the person oriented - next section, we first of all will be dealing with the 'ethereal types' we predominantly know by the grace of a certain form of relativizing the concept of  'rules'.

Simply stated it is the practical interest of the spiritual man to arrive systematically, under the lead of a couple of basic principles like nonviolence and truthfulness, step by step at an, as said, alternative consciousness of time: the third order of the time experienced. That inward directed search for a stable absorption in the integrity of the true self is in India simply called yoga or, literally translated from the Sanskrit: to link oneself up (with the soul). To be precise: it is the eight-fold yoga we know from Patańjali - that already implicitly was mentioned as early as with Vyāsa (in S.B. 3.28: 4-11) that is the source of inspiration to arrive spiritually at the integration of thought, feeling, volition and action at a higher and higher level. The dismal, from one's location separated 'square' standard-time experience of karmically running after money and other accomplishments, must be overcome with mantras, meditations, different meals, different company and a purer life sphere. A more timeless self, which practically thus entails a more natural idea of time  - because the timeless is dualistically inevitably linked again to the time-bound, constitutes another idea of filling one's calendar with appointments in the different fields of action as was discussed in the science section. That spirituality which misses an alternative perspective on time may thus, filognostically, be considered something hypocritical and phony or false. The new man reverting to nature is complete, not damaged anymore, and perfected by a certain detachment. There was just a slight shift in emphasis. A spiritual, inner life has been discovered in which one can find stability and for which one then, alas more often than for once, to begin with has to be 'turned on': one simply has to get a grip on materialism with her syndromes, comprehend what to do and then put an end to the habits associated with it and consequently step out of that system, out of that prison of conditionings that was already mentioned by Plato in his discussing the cave of ignorance where one only sees the shadows of what is real. Search the light and see the reality in it's full glory. It is thus also the way the psychologist and drugs-prophet T. Leary (1920-1996) stated it, but then also for the sake of the drugs, somewhat naive, in the beginning of the sixties of the twentieth century, together with Jack Kerouac, the beatnik of the book 'On The Road' (1922-1969): 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out'; it is, like the Beatles were singing, a 'Magical Mystery Tour' to live alternatively enriched but-not-quite-sure-how, with a healthy dose of mysticism; and it is like the beat-poet Alan Ginsberg (1926-1997) formulated it as a matter of going public, with the personal poetic experience going against the negative values of consumer society. But, ike the Hare Krishnas are defending it in the West ever since the sixties, one must manage to do this with the principle of purification - Vedically called the vidhi, if one durably wants to have that change of consciousness for true humaneness, meaning that one, for the sake of the preservation of one's happiness, as a vegetarian not hankering for still more karma, has to live without that free sex, drugs and 'rock and roll' of the beginning. The lusty nature of the liberation in denial of the wrong order, also known by the most bourgeois person from an isolated experiment, constitutes but an unstable preview, a sample of God. That impurity of free love is there for the beginners, for the S'iva adepts one could say, from the viewpoint of the Vishnu worshippers. Vedically the three gods Brahmā, S'iva and Vishnu stand for the forms of god-consciousness one progressively passes on the path of self-realization. At first one thinks of - and maybe also practices - a lot of sex as the symbol of love and of being united, without having much of a clue about it all, but one is 'cool' staying friendly, being respectful and meditative, not being after results or desiring a 'square' - or cramped civil - order of time. With the personal of Brahmā, the intellectual order, one next discovers a certain responsibility with the impersonal god of time, the natural authority that does demand for a stable spirit and life habit, if one wants to enjoy the knowledge and wisdom thereof. One then firstly creatively seeks that stability - also sought by the most obedient civil theologian -  in self-made solutions inclining to existing traditions. These matters are dealt with in the more personal respect of the next section. Finally we then have Lord Vishnu, the godhead of the personal order of maintenance, who has to preserve the created culture founding it on the basis of a classical notion of wisdom, of respect for this process. And that is how the religions originate. Precisely this way, with insight in the necessity of a godhead to set things right, the Jews e.g. could predict their Messiah as the maintainer of their love for Jaweh. And precisely so is it also stated in the Bhagavad Gītā (4: 7) heard from the mouth of Lord Krishna, when He says that He time and again will return for that reason.

The word god and the word order for a long time are, up to the last phase of wisdom and maintenance, exchangeable and it is also in this phase of preservation that the personal nature of being of service to this ideal finally floats atop: the svarūpa, thus says Lord Kapila to his mother: 'I explained to you the four divisions [to the modes and the transcendence above it *] of identity [svarūpa] in devotional service as also the imperceptible of the movement of time [the conditioning] that drives the living entities. For the living entity there are many courses of material action in ignorance, resulting from working for a material outcome [karma] my dear mother, of which the soul entering that existence does not understand his own ways. (S.B. 3.32: 37-38). Lord Krishna about this says to Uddhava: 'Just as someone blinded by liquor is unaware of the clothes he wears is the one of perfection, you see, not watching the perishable material body sitting or standing, to God's will departing or by fate determined obtaining [a new body], because he has achieved his original position [his svarūpa]. (S.B.11.13: 36). The svarūpa, the personal identity with God is the goal of selfrealization. And so do we step by step see the filognosy originating of the human being who, while meditating and for his expression practicing mantras or prayers, from a knower of facts evolves into a meditator and from being a meditator arrives at the position of a purified devotee with an identity and mission of his own.

The actual question in this spiritual section is what consciousness exactly would be. In the science section was clarified that nature, in the cyclic of time, positions the moon opposite to the sun. There is something like a natural consciousness in opposition with a cultural consciousness being not that conscientious with the external validity of the chronometer. The fact that the culture, complete with her religions, tends to decay into a false notion of conservatism with the politics of an order of time manipulated for the money, spoils the spiritual outlook on the traditional religion as a final purpose of one's spiritual evolution. The religion, seeing itself as the grace for that original sin of going against nature, stands with her pious preservation of that grace also for the betrayal of that nature she therewith tries to protect. The reformer behind the spiritual man wants it differently: he is alternative, a rebel of reacting against who, as a persecutor in the court of God, by the rest of the society easily is discarded as an heretic. But evolution urges on and progress must be if we, with the political oppositions in this conflict, do not want to lapse into national and international warfare. With the filognostic reboot of the mediation in the love for the knowledge in this, we return to the Holy Self we then must learn to serve with regularity and order, without directly saying which religious tradition or Godhead would rank first in that practice. Spiritually keeping matters open we then know that Self, which is of consciousness in the midst of the oppositions of the world and is characterized by two more qualities. And these are the qualities of eternity and happiness. The spiritualists, in short, are searching for that consciousness of the duality of the time-bound world, which is durable on the one hand and gives happiness on the other. The true self we know Vedically by the qualities of sat, cit and ānanda, or as being eternal, conscious and blissful. The eternal, despite being called timeless, is not so though, dualistically bound as one is with having a body. The aspect of the eternal consists of - or exists by the grace of - the lawfulness and inevitability of the natural order of time (In the next section we will list the quotations thereto). That is what makes consciousness stable, sacred, divine and ethereal, and offers recollection; that is what makes consciousness real as the second quality of the knowing self. We are not so much aware of that true self as a consequence of opposing dates with the days of the week on the basis of an ulterior profit motive, we are rather aware of that self on the basis of that durability of the, by natural laws controlled, material reality of time. It concerns the time of lunar phases running through solar dates, as being signal days more naturally of order, against the backdrop of the ether, the integrity of the forcefield that also assigns the stars their place. Letting go of the ego of being more identified with profit motives, gives a sense of - and also insight in - enlightenment. The insight then acquired is that one is not really engaged consciously when one is concerned with the ego of standard time. One is only consciously engaged if one builds on the real self of the consciousness of the natural state which is stable and blissful. A burden is lifted and a spirit is awakened therewith, even though it, for starters, religiously is maybe but the respect of a cultural sunday in stead of a natural lunar signal day. The durability of that happiness though demands more than the happiness of - for a while - not for material loss or gain suffering the stress and fear of the burden of the original sin of going against the command of nature. For that sake we have to be conscious of what in fact the clouding of that insight and spoiling of that happiness implies: the not really being of service to that stability of natural consciousness; the not, together with the other norms and standards, to the sun running of your clock, and not being in accord with the moon of the order of one's linear week. It is for this reason of being locked up in the prison of standard time, that at the index page of the site of the Order of Time is stated: 'a platform for an alternative time consciousness', with for it's symbol the six-pointed star of the filognostic division of not only the six leaped two-month seasons relative to a celestial sky turning in opposition with it, but also of the order of the six logically cohering, multicausally each other mutually influencing visions of the mindfulness of filognosy as set to the method, the factuality, the analysis, the spirituality, the person and the politics. In this perspective  spirituality is then an indispensable part for purifying one's consciousness, so that one, on the one hand being directed downward for what is more concrete, may think and act in a more (natural) scientific way, while one on the other hand being directed upwards more aware of the person, can be more of progress politically.

The timelessness of the spiritual for itself is thus an illusion, as good as a certain materially oriented consciousness of time is, thinking to keep existing for itself. The stability is found in one's arriving at the most personal balance in this, in one's most personally conquering of also the human weaknesses that obscure the consciousness, in the creating, or better said discovering, of a certain order and discipline and in the preserving and fitting in of that order in the, by nature and tradition, already existing and maintained order. And also this course upwards in the direction of an aligning of oneself with the soul in a wider perspective is thus, when only understood a linear fashion, as we already saw, on itself also an illusion. The stages of meditation in the ashthānga yoga of especially B. K. S. Iyengar in the West are also by its adherents not seen as strictly linear, but more as a lotus flower of mutually overlapping and interacting spiritual petals or limbs (angas). Only when the course 'upwards' in the direction of the abstract of God equals a course 'downwards' in the sense of a concrete form of respect for one's fellow man in which the holiness, the wisdom, all the talents, the wealth and the solidarity all blend harmoniously, there is the completeness of the human being, as envisioned by our filognosy with her scientific love for the facts of the universe, the principles of the spirit and the politics concerning the person.

For the spiritual department we thus have a different emphasis: from being structurally involved in a scientific sense one gets involved on principle. The concrete question rising is how the discipline of that alternative time consciousness then practically would look. Thus there are no tables anymore of a structure of time, but behavioral directions, discussions of principles, estimations of value and graphical presentations. Thus we have an encyclopedically arranged selfhelp section, as good as a separate book, named 'The Other Rules', which divides the different limbs of transcending for the sake of a happier self in eight sections concerning daily life, business, dates, relations, being married, sports, matters of the body and being sexual, associated with the eight angas of the yoga as mentioned. Next there are the chapters on the idea of reincarnation relating to a certain fear of time, what exactly the essence of spirituality is, what the relation of our subject with the sexual is, how precisely the filognosy dialectically sounds like in spiritual terms, and what, in the sense of an integral outline of the different divisions of concepts, her factual structure is.
     For this section we must conclude that the spiritual perspective stands for the integrity of the gnosis: the true oneness of Christianity that which us evolved into a syncretic filognosy. The yoga, in all its aspects, is the discipline thereof offering us the only thing absolute and real: the moment of the here and now. What we learn from spirituality is that being clear with the ether, like the Chinese say, we share the moment, but differ in place and time. The moment is absolutely the same, but the time is absolutely different. The moment is real when the time is different. Concerning the absolute we must keep in mind that one can have two absolutes: the absolute difference of the time and the absolute sameness of the moment;
let Patańjali be happy with the moment and let Einstein be happy with the time.


Voetnoot

* The four identities to the modes and the transcendence are known as the the Game of Order the human being plays in his identity of functioning with a certain experience in respect of the four classes, four statuses, the three modes and the eight levels of transcendence.

Pictures:

The painting with Jesus is of Hieronymus Bosch. It is called Christ carries the cross and dates from 1485-1490, oil on panel 76.7 x 83.5 cm. and can be found in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Gent, Belgium.

The etching with the birds is of M.C. Escher. It is a woodcut printed from four blocks, and is titled Sun and Moon. It dates from 1945 and measures 25.1 x 27 cm.

The portraits of the transcendentalists are, upper-left to right of: Osho, Jan Foudraine, middle: Alan watts and Ken Wilber and at the right in profile J. Krishnamurti.

The man carrying the fez is the analytical psychologist Carl Gustaf Jung.

The statue underneath represents Patańjali with the body of a snake because he is considered to be an incarnation of Adi S'esha or Sankarshana.

The statue with the three heads is a so-called trimūrti from India, showing the three gods S'iva, Brahmā en Vishnu as one.

The picture with the Ohm sign in it is a sundial pictured as a representation of the will of God.

The picture with the colored fields is a graphical representation of the interwoven levels of transcendence that are discussed in the Other Rules according the subjects in the fields indicated.

 

 

The site linear as a perfection of the causal illusion:




 

 

 

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