=kit071.txt

KIT 71 - Future Spirituality

            In a large number of human activities the know-how
must be continually updated. Meditation also needs to be updated.
Armed with the information in the enormous pool of published
material available in our day, we are now able to make a
comprehensive study of the methods of meditation taught in the
classical schools. By taking this opportunity to compare all these
methods, we can gain a whole new grasp of the core issues facing
our pioneering meditating predecessors. This in turn will help us
to look ahead, and to brainstorm perspectives on the future of
meditation at the scale of present-day thinking.            

            Since the challenges of our times are, in some ways,
more demanding than those faced by our predecessors, our free-
wheeling into the future must integrate a greater complexity. For
example, we will need to take into consideration futuristic views
in physics (some of which have not yet gained acceptance in the
party-line of physics), or the latest developments in psychology.
Meditation needs to give us the means to reduce stress, improve
decision-making, overcome resentment and overcome poor self-image.
We need in meditation to honor our concerns about the environment,
the population explosion, crime, and political oppression. We need
to gain insight into the disenchantment about
institutionalization, particularly in the field of spirituality,
and join the nascent trend to explore new expressions of our need
for the sacred, emancipated from hackneyed forms of
sanctimoniousness, prescriptions, dogmatism, and superstitions.

            Thanks to the momentous advances in communication (the
media, technology, education, and the new paradigms), our way of
considering the cosmos, and the planet Earth in particular, has
taken a quantum leap. Instead of looking at the stars as viewed
from planet Earth, we are now able to imagine how planet Earth
looks as viewed from the stars. Looking at those photos of the
Earth from outer space is almost like having been out there
personally. This has surreptitiously revolutionized our way of
considering our Planet, which in turn revolutionizes our way of
seeing ourselves. We imagine outer space to be "out there", but
has it ever occurred to you that actually planet Earth is in outer
space? It all depends on how you look at it. This progressive
vantage point is bound to open up new vistas in our meditation
practices.

            Consequently, for example, instead of sitting still in
meditation, simply observing the body or mind (which is tantamount
to observing a mere cross-section of reality), we can see the
whole forward march of the evolution of bodiness from our
ancestors to the present state (which is like the prow), and even
anticipate the future of the evolution of bodiness. Our
development from our animal ancestry has not finished; it keeps
advancing. The human race keeps on improving (albeit at the cost
of decadence at the jagged ends).

            Instead of aiming at escaping the "here and now" to
scan transcendental levels of reality (subliminal to the
existential level) as did our ancestral meditators, we will
endeavor to look at the "here and now" from an overview.

"I ask for no less than the impossible possibility: infinity in a
finite fact and eternity in a temporal act."
PRENTICE MILFORD

            Even this is too commonplace. It still evidences a
static view of the existential state, whereas, as we have seen,
existence is only a slice of reality in its dynamic state.
Therefore, we will be learning how to see how the "everywhere and
always" manifests in the forward march of becoming.

            Furthermore, instead of modulating consciousness from
one vantage point to another, we will need to learn to extrapolate
between several vantage points. The consciousness of future
humanity may well be called stereoscopic consciousness. This
applies equally to the mind, which will learn to extrapolate
between thinking in terms of categories and grasping the wholeness
of a situation. In addition, as a corollary, we will learn to
avoid accounting for things merely in terms of a causal chain in
time, of which they are the effect, but we will also include
causal chains moving from the transcendent dimension into the
transient. We may even grasp the concatenation of many causal
chains coming together in our time and space. As a consequence of
this forward step, we will be able to meditate in movement, even
dancing, which will reinforce the dynamic mode of meditation,
rather than the static.

            Quite understandably, the ancients, who had not yet
acquired our knowledge of matter, witnessing the decay of the body
after death, considered it to be like dust returning to the earth.
Since we can now see our live cells in powerful microscopes, our
whole perception of the fabric of our body has undergone a
dramatic change. Instead of dismissing our bodies as other than
ourselves, we are beginning to honor the involvement of our innate
sense of meaningfulness with the very fabric of our bodiness. We
are intrigued by the manner in which these two sides of the same
coin interact and modify each other reciprocally. It is not just
mind over body, but body over mind as well.

            "This is different from psychosomatic, because with
psychosomatic you say that mind affects matter as if they were two
different substances ...  any change of meaning is a change of
soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning."
DR. DAVID BOHM

            Consequently, we need to brainstorm a new method of
meditation that incorporates the earlier methods and carries them
into the future.

            To extricate ourselves from the rut into which we may
have inadvertently stranded ourselves by taking things for
granted, or from the stalemate which we may well have maneuvered
ourselves into owing to a faulty strategy in the game of life, we
need to rethink our lives.

            To achieve this, we need to hoist our vantage point
from the commonplace narrow range of the immediate environment and
look at things in a wider context. This is where some of the
skills of meditation can prove helpful. It is somewhat like
witnessing how different a familiar landscape looks when flying
over it in a helicopter or suspended from a hang-glider. Doing
this, we realize that our assessments of our life-situations
change with the altitude as it were, and furthermore that they are
a function of our values which manifest the higher levels of our
being- and monitor our motivations. Moreover we realize that our
sense of personal inadequacy or our pessimistic judgement in our
assessment of a situation were due to our mind's having gotten
entrapped in a way of thinking from which we failed to see a way
out. Yes, one can get trapped in one's thinking and ascribe the
prison to one's fate. The bind is in the mind.

            To escape from this prison takes two things: a flash
of insight and resolve. How do we trigger off the flash of
insight? We need to first ask ourselves: what if my assessment of
my life situations, (or of people around me), upon which I have
relied all this time and which I have always taken for granted, is
wrong? What is more, if this is true, any new assessment we might
convince ourselves of at this point stands an equal chance of
proving later to be erroneous. If we therefore forego not only
previous assessments, but any attempt at a reassessment, then,
faced with the collapse of our opinion, we find ourselves
hopelessly groping our way in the dark night of understanding.
Bereft of any crutches, a different mode of understanding dawns
upon us. Imagine that, walking in pitch dark, suddenly you are
able to see the auras of people and that the features of their
real countenance are revealed to you in contrast with the features
of their faces.

            It takes courage to let go of all that one has built
up over the years without any guarantee that a new light will dawn
upon one's horizon. But we find ourselves sometimes confronted
with the choice between situations which progress gradually like a
bud unfurls, or where things remain at a stand-still or run the
chance of reversing into decay, or where nature proceeds by leaps
and bounds. There are situations which one cannot change in their
outer circumstances, but will change by one's changing oneself or
by a new way of handling them. In exceptional cases - perhaps the
most meaningful - there is no slow transition from one perspective
to the other, the transit is sudden. Here lies the difference
between the moment of time where there is an overlap between past
and future and the instant where there is a sudden and
irreversible break of continuity.

            These rare conditions called singularities in astro-
physics occur in our lives and in our thinking. They may be
illustrated by a sunrise or sunset, or solar or lunar eclipse, or
the equinoxes or solstices where there is an alignment in space
between two luminaries at a given time called a syzygy. Let us
bear in mind that the coincidence is only meaningful from our
vantage point, therefore relates the objective world to our
subjective dimension.

            A particularly rare coincidence between two numbers,
illustrated in mathematics by an algorithm, illustrates our mind's
ability to grasp coherence of a sudden where two mental constructs
seemed previously to be irreconcilable. More generally what we
mean by our sense of meaningfulness is our mind's ability to click
when it grasps a correspondence between two thoughts which had
hitherto appeared unrelated. The grasp of congruence sparks our
being with delight because it gives us a sense of thinking in sync
with the thinking of the universe and feeling in resonance with
the emotion of the cosmos, and hence makes us aware of our
holistic connectiveness with the totality which we call God, not
just at the physical level but at all levels.

            "We are ourselves hybrids, born of the alchemical
betrothal between heaven and earth."
(HIK) [ HIK noted in SOS only ]

"At the moment of birth, two worlds meet: all that we have
cumulated in our descent through the spheres and that which we
have inherited from our ancestors."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            Moreover we can rebirth ourselves by going through the
steps that led us to our present state, altering them willfully
and consciously. Here we witness in ourselves the very task we
have investigated so far: conjugating in our very personality our
celestial and ancestral inheritance so that they actually click.

            C. G. Jung spent much ponderous enquiry upon this
paradoxical conjunction between our psyche and the physical world.
In paradoxical cases, rather than it be a perception or an event
that impacts our psyche and gets processed by our psyche, it is
our psyche that triggers off the event. He called it
synchronicity. Jung defines these rare and surprising cases that
one would normally explain away as situations which cannot be
causally determined as: The simultaneous occurrence of two
meaningful but not causally connected events.

            Yet he still strived to grasp the mystery behind
occurrences that could not be connected in a chronological
sequence where one occurrence could have triggered off the other;
rather they seemed to be causally connected in a network
irrespective of the arrow of time. The connections of events may
in certain circumstances be other than causal and requires another
principle of explanation.

            Then it occurred to him that rare events (like a
szyzgy or singularity) cannot be governed by the same laws that
apply to statistics, for example. Indeed the conjunctions that
take place in an instant of time are rare events as compared with
the gradual transformations where at each moment, the past
overlaps with the future.          

            "Probability theory is able to predict with uncanny
precision the overall outcome of processes made up out of a large
number of individual happenings, each in itself is unpredictable."
ARTHUR KOESTLER

            Of course, granted that our minds can affect our body
functions:

            "You see that deep changes of meaning is a change in
the deep material structure of the brain; we already know that
certain meanings can greatly disturb the brain, but other meanings
may organize it in a new way."
DAVID BOHM

            But how does a grasp of meaning affect the outer
physical world? (Incidentally this is what it meant by psycho-
kinesis).

            After years of painstaking research in psycho-kinesis,
Dr. J. B. Rhine arrived at conclusions that throw some light on
the problem. For Rhine, space and time are dependent upon psychic
conditions and therefore can be reduced to almost a vanishing
point.

            A parallel with David Bohm is called for here:

           " But there is still a mental pole at every level of
matter...and eventually if you go to infinite depths of matter, we
may reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of
the mind."
DAVID BOHM

            We are touching upon a most important point: space-
time is only meaningful regarding physical reality. Indeed for the
psyche, space is only meaningful where one is recalling physical
occurrences or the functions of the mind creatively in the act of
imagination. Yoga distinguishes where the mind adopts as it were
the form of that which is perceived or reminisced (Nirvetarka),
from the state where the mind absorbs the quintessence of the
perceived irrespective of form (Nirvecara), and at some point the
mind loses notions of space altogether (Asmita) and a further
point at which the mind loses the sense of time (Asamprajnata
Samadhi).

            For Speiser, at a certain level of our thinking, our
psyche touches upon a level prior to causality.

            "It is an initial state which is not governed by
mechanistic law, but is the pre-conditioning of law, the chance
substrate upon which law is built."
ANDREAS SPEISER

            Compare with BOHM:

            "The mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional
modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the
depths of the implicate order where this timeless state is the
primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a
secondary structure."
(DAVID BOHM)

            Indeed our commonplace understanding of causality is
based upon our concept of time as being uni-dimensional: the event
that we infer having been causated by another one, followed it in
a sequential order. In our ordinary thinking, we also assume that
an event causes another if they are related in space either by
electro-magnetic forces that extend in space or gravity that also
extends in space (including the strong and weak forces between
sub-atomic particles) . But modern physics questions the
mechanistic theories of their predecessors, replacing them with
acausal, non-local laws.     If everything in the cosmos is
connected with everything else as in the holistic paradigm, then
location in space is irrelevant in the determination of events: it
is simply easier for our minds to see the connection between the
motion of a billiard ball and that of the one it has hit, then to
see how the surge of a wave we think is in the Pacific could
influence that of a wave which we think is in the English channel.
Yet, as Dr. David Bohm points out, a wave in the ocean is not
caused by the previous one, but each wave is introjected back into
the whole ocean and it is the whole ocean that projects itself in
the next wave.

            A form emerges or is creatively projected from the
whole , then it influences the whole, or is injected back into it;
in the implicate order, it resonates with similar forms and then
is projected back into the explicate order.

            However, long before the holistic paradigm envisioned
by General Smuts revolutionized science, the Sufis saw the
insufficiency in reducing causality to the dimension of time which
we call the process of becoming. One needs to account for at least
another dimension of time moving from transcendence to transiency
and vice-versa.

            The Sufi Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi felt that beyond the
sidereal empyrean, other universes would be found in a
hierarchical sequence of spheres of light of increasing subtlety.
The higher ones precede the lower ones and enjoy a hierarchically
higher value (precellence) and consequently sovereignty
(prevalence); the lower ones proceed from the higher ones in a
causal order in a different time order than the commonplace arrow
of time - a kind of exponential order. This so called vertical
hierarchy which he refers to as the 'world of mothers' then splits
up in a lateral order where equality takes over from dominance.
Here we find the prototypes of the species. It is at this level
that our ordinary notions of the process of time take effect.

            But it is in the conjunction between a physical
phenomenon and a spontaneous thought that was not triggered off by
an actual occurrence that our delight reaches a degree of
intensity such that it could spark our creative faculties -
whether of a work of art or of our personality. One could define
creativity as the act of exploring unchartered regions of the mind
while grasping a correspondence between the mental constructs thus
gleaned and a form or configurations or scenarios in the fabric of
matter. Creativity is a congruent conjunction between the timeless
and the transient, the heavenly and the earthly.

            "We could say that our action toward the whole
universe is a result of what it means to us. ..In the long run
only those meanings that allow changes that tend to bring about
accord between us and the rest of the universe will be possible."
DAVID BOHM

            "We shall sooner or later have to give up many of our
old habits of thought and adopt new ones: habits that are better
adapted to life in a world that is living in the presence of the
past - and is also living in the presence of the future, and open
to continuing creation."
RUPERT SHELDRAKE

PRACTICES

            What would be the kind of meditations embodying the
progress in our thinking in our day and age and oriented towards
the future? Having learnt how the mind works when it awakens
beyond the existential realm, we need to learn to awaken in life -
grasping our place, our role in the universe.

            Let us follow retrospectively the trails of the two
evolutionary networks that have intermeshed into the formation of
our being as it is at present: (i) the legacy of our celestial
origination, (ii) our genetic inheritance. To do this we need to
reverse in our mind the forward thrust of the arrow of time and
carry our memory right back in time - into prehistorical aeons of
time whose traces are stored (though recessively) in deep memory
in the archives of the depths of the unconscious zones of our
psyche.

            1)         Bear in mind that the fabric of your body
originated in the big-bang explosion at the onset of the present
aeon in the genesis of the universe - there were however previous
universes! Ponder upon the fact that your body is made out of the
fabric of the stars.

            2)         Try to imagine what it would feel like to
be a vibration - more precisely a high-frequency vibration of pure
energy.

            3)         Imagine that this pristine state in which
you were gels into a crystal.

            4)         Can you visualize the marvelous symmetry of
lattice-work of the molecules and within them the atoms of your
crystalline primeval body jiggling and sparkling?

            5)         Can you envision the glee of the electrons
within the atoms as they avail themselves of the energy of ambient
light to free themselves, even if for a split second, from the
rigor of the constraint of the order of the universe maintaining
them in their orbitals, and dance with abandon. Imagine the
outburst of joy at participating with some measure of freedom in
the choreography of the cosmos!

            6)         Now imagine the sudden evolutionary leap of
the molecules constituting your body from the mineral state to the
plant - from the inorganic to the organic. Envision the
intelligence of the universe self-organizing itself in an improved
fashion through the awareness now emerging in the molecules,
finding a way of grouping gregariously with their neighbors to
cooperate by specializing in their mutual contributions to the
living cell. To illustrate this: instead of the repetitive series
of frescoes on a wall paper, we have a flurry of proliferating
forms and radiant colors.

            7)         Can you see the way the crystal connects
with light after being entombed in the earth? Now experience the
plant's ability to power its cyclic unfoldment, and more so: its
mutations by dint of light. Can you envision yourself as a flower
at night fluttering in resonance with the trembling of a star? Can
you feel the thrust of the evolutionary drive striving to free the
plant of its roots that it may explore neighboring space as an
animal whose instincts still conspire in us.

            8)         Or is it the impact of our heavenly legacy
that seeks freedom from the strict conditioning in the more
primitive developmental stages of our being and makes for ever
more variable structures in the material underpinning of our
being? Notice that simply thinking of the celestial spheres
conveys to you a sense of freedom. Now you may feel somehow the
connection between your body as it has evolved from its precursors
and your heavenly legacy.

            9)         At this stage, we are ready to understand
the implications of the alchemical betrothal. Recollecting the two
main genealogical streams generating your being, the celestial and
the genetic, try and see how they have been intermeshing in both
your body and your personality. If you recall some of the
practices we did, envisioning our celestial bodies, fashioning
them in accord with our thoughts and attunements and creative
imagination, and observing how this affected our countenance and
even our demeanor, you will have established that connection. The
same applies to our personality.

            10)       In meditative vein, envision yourself
descending through the spheres. Now gage the need you felt through
your descent to understand how the intention governing the
software of the universe gets actuated on earth. Now realize that
it was this very need to understand that you felt throughout that
impelled the mutations in the very fabric of your body as it
progressed though your precursors in the course of evolution that
enable your present body to be better able to serve the
intelligence of which it is the support system.

            11)       Now consider that, while you converge the
universe and therefore incur a great measure of conditioning, you
also act upon the universe. See how your incentive exercises an
impact upon the legacy of the past in your body and personality
which we have been recollecting.

            12)       Bearing in mind that the human condition is
just a developmental stage in the evolutionary march, can you
sense in yourself a longing to awaken beyond the human condition?
Can you feel the evolutionary drive spurring you on? Can you see
that if the initial spring-head behind the whole evolutionary
drive is the very freedom that resonates with your pristine
celestial nature, then the Cosmos envisioned as one being (which
is what is meant by God) tends to converge in each being . This is
incidentally the holistic model. If this is so , then the more we
converge of the bounty of the universe, the more self-sufficient
we become. Think of yourself as aiming at becoming gradually a
spin-off in which the universe rethinks and reconstructs itself.

            13)       Instead of visualizing the stars as they may
appear from Planet Earth, now reach out there and imagine them as
supporting civilizations different from ours and how our
civilization might look from the vantage point of their
intelligence.

            14)       Now if you ponder upon how the mind of the
crystal evolved into the mind of a plant, then of an animal, then
reached the human stage, realize that you can stretch your mind
beyond its limits. The clue to spurring our mind to surpass itself
is by jettisoning a lot of pre-conceived ideas - which is
precisely what we have learned in this course. There could be no
limits to this, but if indeed our minds are holistically sub-
wholes of the mind of the cosmos, and if indeed the smaller the
fraction of the holograph, the less well it reflects the original
object, then the more we stretch out minds, the more truly our
thinking will prove isomorphic with the thinking of the cosmos!
Think: we are decoding the code of the universe!

            15)       However we should not limit our thinking to
its cosmic dimension (its ability to extrapolate between more and
more factors); we could highlight transcendental dimension. As we
shift our sense of identity from plane to plane we discover
different levels of thinking. We normally ascribe the notions
acquired by our thinking at higher levels to our sense of values.
Values such as compassion, humor, authenticity actuate themselves
increasingly as evolution marches on.           

            16)       Starting with your spontaneous thoughts
however random, prompted by inspiring emotions, try to grasp the
archetypes of which these thoughts are the exemplars. You will
find yourself exploring a whole different dimension - the world of
metaphor. Now if you turn your mind as it were downwards, you will
find that these thoughts self-organize themselves as forms, or
landscapes, or scenarios, as in your dreams.

            17)       Now we arrive at a kind of pinnacle of
cosmic cognition: See yourself in the universe, your origination,
your purpose, your destiny, your past and future, your ability to
shift your focus through the spheres by adjusting your attunement.

            18)       At this point we grasp the antimony between
thought and emotion as the two sides of the same coin, and
permutate between them. Consequently we can trace our origination
to the emotion behind the universe beyond the software. Just like
the way that the emotion moving the cosmos, (the emotion behind
the universe that manifested as the universe) passing though J. S.
Bach's soul was crystalized into the notes of his music, you can
feel the emotion spurring the universe at the cosmic scale
configurating itself in the idiosyncrasies of your personality and
the countenance of your face behind its external features.

            19)       You could willfully reinforce these emotions
by indulging in the musings of your soul, by enjoying your sense
of bewonderment at the marvel of yourself and the universe of
which you are a part, and giving vent to your need for
glorification. Lo and behold, what at first seemed to be your
personal emotion - rapture - culminates into impersonal, cosmic
emotion - divine ecstasy

            20)       Now honor your intuition that behind all
manifestation there is great splendor and that you are born of the
divine nostalgia to manifest that splendor in every possible way
in and through your being at all levels. Accept the divinity of
your being. Awaken to the divinity of your being. Accept the
beauty of your being if you can reconcile it with a sense of
modesty, as long as you do not confuse it with false humility.
Priding oneself in one's self denigration avers itself to be a
failure to recognize one's divine heritage, and proves self-
defeating. The Sufis consider this to be an insult to the divine
Artist.

            21)       We have been exploring methods of meditation
whereby we may actuate the splendor of our divine investiture
thanks to the ability of our intelligence to surpass its previous
outreach, and by discovering in our high attunement, deeply rooted
in the very spring-heads of our being, the divine nostalgia in
search of beauty and love. Eventually we understand the enormous
implications of a saying of PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN, my father,
embodying the very quintessence of the metaphysical traditions of
the Sufis and representing the spiritual paradigm for the future:

"Awakening consists in seeing oneself as the fulfillment of the
divine purpose and recognizing that purpose in the universe at
large."
(HIK)
    
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