If we’re going to set off in search of the spiritual – as seen in humanity’s ‘internal pictures’, we need to have a more modern definition of what the ‘spiritual’ actually is…
Imagine we are reading a paragraph in an absorbing book – something like the image below. Normally, our brains would assemble a sequential stream of characters into recognised words, then meaning. The meaning would be gradually tuned as we read into the context of the whole.
Clever stuff… Our minds equip us well to interact with the information sources in our world – some of which could kill us, if wrongly interpreted: think of a traffic crossing. We have a life-imperative to protect our organic existence, but it does not mean that, beyond the needs and duties of this lifetime, it was ever truly our home.
Back to the paragraph in our book. Imagine if, instead of that sequential, character-by-character interpretation of the language, we looked at the set of words and suddenly sat back with surprise as the whole thing sprang into vivid life in front of us!
Now, everywhere we look, and from every angle, the deepest meaning of the text becomes vital; and with a force that simply leaves no room for it being wrong…
That’s what seeing with a ‘spiritual eye’ is like. The sense of ‘me and it’ is lost in a glorious, calm involvement with what had been the object of our vision – and this can be the whole world. What’s happened is the sudden and miraculous removal of the learned idea of a separate entity for me and it. Instead, there is a seamless and deeply personal absolute knowledge that we are seeing the truth of where we look.
The experience is completely real. It means the state we have entered is a higher one. By that, we mean that it came first… It is a parent of the state we are now in.
The state we normally live in, this lesser ‘ordinary’ consciousness where understanding comes through slow absorption of ideas, is the product of a natural process as we enter life and become in-volved with our new world.
It is essential that we do this; that we experience this biblical ‘fall’ into the denser world of organic matter. Why this is so is a much deeper answer, one requiring a more developed vocabulary for the shape of our existence. The brain cannot fully comprehend it, but it can string the bow… What happens next requires that we have an arrow.
Our personal power in life comes from having a strong ‘identity’ with ourselves… and this is a picture of self. This self, and its interactions with the world, are gradually assembled into a composite which solidifies with a psychological ‘whoosh’, somewhere around our seventh year of life. From then on, this ‘me’ becomes the core of how things are felt, and how we take things forward. It is the personality; but it is built on many, smaller units of ‘me’ that are part of a process of deeper involvement with the world.
The prenatal infant does not know itself to be separate from mother. But ask any mother and they will tell you the poignancy of knowing something that your body has ‘made’ will have to leave your warmth to achieve its life, separated. The mother knows the infant is not her, the infant does not… until, mirroring the deepest spiritual tales from our collective past, it is born, a stranger in a strange land.
Instantly, there is it and the world. The most beautiful state of Oneness, paradise, has been lost… And only the most magnificent human potential could justify that event.
Mother is there, of course. Her breast and her warmth are everything to the child, but they are not the exact match to her needs as when in the womb. There begins a process of not just separation, but of ‘lack’, especially orally when there is not enough milk for the infant’s hunger.
From these early events is formed a set of relationships with the new experience of independent life. The infant is always present to its experience, so everything is seen in a relationship to itself. The whole of the infant’s life will be patterned by these formative experiences.
One way of examining this development – which is mainly psychological – is the technique of ‘Object Relations’: one of the tools of modern psychology, and one that finds itself most closely allied with certain mystical schools – though not by intent. An understanding of Object Relations will help reveal the pictures formed during this first stage of our-selves.
We are not attempting regression, here. The goal is to unite the adult mind’s power with the early and potent feelings of being human. We do this because there is a correspondence between those early events and the patterns of experienced energy we find when can touch our own essence.
It is no accident that the ability to form good mental images – visualisation – has always been one of the key tools of spiritual development. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, is most famous for his exposition of building living images of oneself ‘imitating Christ’. These techniques are truly ancient, and have been the tools of ‘priests’ throughout history. To get what we want and hopefully need, requires a ‘clear picture’ of the desired state, even if it is partial.
But there is a problem when it comes to visualising a higher spiritual state. The mind cannot conceive of something higher than itself. However, we can assemble a small armoury of self-tools certain to take us at least part of the way to the spiritual eye spoken of in the opening paragraphs. It’s time to make our arrow…
In the next few weeks, we can follow an overview of the Silent Eye’s method for:
- Understanding the most important of the early pictures of self, and how they became the foundations of ‘us’.
- Examining the aspects of ‘ancient wisdom’ that correlate most closely with the pictures.
- Reconciling the adult and powerful self with the fears of the infant, experiencing a ‘washing away’ of that early anxiety, thus freeing the energy inherent in the early states that were so close to Oneness.
- Finding the separate ‘faces’ of that Oneness, and forming a new picture of each, as the Sufis do, as Intimate Friends on our deeply personal path.
Equipped with the above, we truly notch our arrow into the taut and harmonic string of a mighty bow, and, standing tall, fire it into the heavens of our own sky.
We might even get an answer to this focussed message. But its nature may surprise us…
©Stephen Tanham, 2021.
Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, A journey through the forest of personality to the sunrise of Being.
Thank you, Stu x
Thank you Sue x