I have often mentioned that the higher powers, those I call the Masters in my books, seek to communicate with us through impression. Despite my experience they do not use trance mediums except on the rarest of occasions because they are not seeking to provide spiritual information but to bring us up to the spiritual level, and this they do by requiring us to stretch up and become responsive to that level. So although they did use a medium in my case for a period they always said that was not their preferred means of communication, and was just intended to start me off. That is why the communications became less and less as time went by.
This is how the process works. The Master's mind functions on the plane of the intuition which is above the mental level as we understand it. The original communication or impression therefore starts off as a pure idea or formless pattern of meaning. Formless means it's not in any language or even symbol but is a pure spiritual truth which might be envisaged as a lightning flash.
This must be picked up by the disciple on this intuitional plane, a plane to which he is becoming responsive but is by no means fully established, and transferred down to the level of his own soul where it starts to take on a kind of form but still not in words or conventional thoughts. Here we might think of it in terms of light vibrations which I realise is an annoyingly vague phrase but does imply something of the nature and quality of the process. The soul here acts as an intermediary between the pure intuition and everyday mind, transforming or stepping down the light to a form that the mind can engage with and interpret. Note that the soul or spiritual self is on a lower level to that of pure intelligent intuition. It does not automatically have access to that but must grow into it, something to consider for those who think being in the moment is all there is to the spiritual path.
The concrete mind of the disciple then translates these spiritual ideas into words and sentences in a form drawn from his pre-existing knowledge which is why it is good to have a well-stocked, well-informed mind. You then have the wherewithal to present the pure idea in a form which can express it in the highest sense it can be expressed in human terms. The risk is that a well-stocked mind can become the enemy of intuition if it gets seduced by its own knowledge. This is something the spiritual aspirant must be aware of and guard against.
So, the idea appears in the quietened mind of the disciple. It must be quiet to receive the spiritual impression hence the need for some kind of meditation or upward directed aspiration as in prayer. The mind functions like a radio receiver, taking the formless spiritual vibration and clothing it in the language and concepts already existing in the disciple's brain. It's a four-step process. From Master to soul to mind to brain or from the intuitive plane to the soul and thence from the mental plane to the physical. The message will inevitably degrade on its way down and our task is to prevent that happening as much as possible which we do by inner purification and the constant stretching up of the mind to the higher level with an openness towards increased rarification of concepts.
Our understanding of spirituality is very crude. Love, wisdom, beauty, the good. These are things that have deeper and deeper levels of reality. Our task is to become aware of those and never rest content with the limited forms of them we currently respond to which are usually but shadows or reflections of the real thing. That real thing we can say exists on the intuitional plane and that is where we should be directing our spiritual attention. It is where God and his dedicated messengers wait to talk with us.
4 comments:
An accurate description, in my experience! Back when I totally rejected the spiritual and would have classified intuition as bottom-up (from ourselves) rather than top-down (from a spiritual level, although one I still think of as coming up through roots as opposed to wisdom shining down like the sun), I nonetheless one day had a lightning flash Muse experience. I needed a fourth story idea for a collection of novellas and suddenly there it was in my head. I hardly took it seriously since at the time I believed stories came from conscious work and intention by the writer, but I also couldn’t deny it, it was so present and sudden and clearly not at all from me.
To this day, I’ve not written it down but I continue to translate it into story form. It’s taken so long because (aside from my personal choice not to write much while my kids are young) from the beginning I didn’t want to turn it into *my* thing but rather be faithful to what it is. Ofc it’s also mine in a sense and will necessarily be reflected through me, but when I work on it and begin to go off path even with an idea that seems really, really perfect to me, I can feel it begin to tear like wet paper. Actually that’s the exact way it is, like it’s wet paper and something is written on it that we can’t read until it is draped over something solid, and while the shape of the solid thing is not totally prescribed, there are many *wrong* shapes that would cause the paper to be wrinkled or torn and the message to be obscured.
That's a good description of the experience as felt by the conscious mind. The inspiration comes from a universal level but it is filtered through our personality and takes its tone from that.
For some time I've been receiving hypnopompic "messages" of a few kinds - words and phrases, mental images, and brief auditory extracts from songs, movies and TV shows. It struck me that they seem like a variant result of the process you describe here.
I'm not sure that is the same. Images and auditory extracts from known outer experience is likely to be just the brain on its own. But perhaps the brain is interpreting something from a deeper level in language it is familiar with.
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