=kit90.txt

KIT 90 - JABARUT - IDENTIFYING WITH THE PERENNIAL LEVEL: 
REALIZATION

             "Perfect realization can only be gained by passing
through all the stages between man - the manifestation - and God -
the only Being, knowing and realizing ourselves from the lowest to
the highest point of existence, and so accomplishing the heavenly
journey."                  
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            By identifying with a more perennial level of your
being: your angelic counterpart which is not subject to perishing
or decay, you will venture into the more advanced modes of
thinking. As you shift your identity from your physical body, and
then your etheric shroud to your celestial body of uncreated
light, concomitantly you will shift your notion of being the
spectator from the I that is body-conscious, through the I that
flowers in creative imaginings to your celestial I: 'the spectator
in the heavens'. This step will eventually lead to the next state
of awakening (to be studied in future KITs) in which, by dint of a
radical reversal from one's personal perspective, one sees things
from the divine (transcendent) perspective.

            The key to this is eschewing or downplaying any
knowledge gained by experience and highlighting a kind of inborn,
inherent knowledge reminisced from prenatal memory (or access from
peri-natal levels of awareness). This is where both ascetic
detachment and the lover's yearning for the sublime prove crucial.

            "The one who lives in one's mind is conscious of the
mind; the one who lives in one's soul is conscious of the soul."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

            "You thought that you were the spectator, the witness
of what you experience, but the real witness in you is your
angelic counterpart - the witness in the heavens."
SHIHABUDDIN SUHRAWARDHI

            "We are skirting here the transit from individuality
to the Oneness."
(M. Corbin, sans doubte)

            "To know one's own archetypal essence is to know one's
angel, that is to see one's eternal individuality as it results
from the revelation of the Divine Being revealing Himself through
Himself."
HENRI CORBIN

            Let us now summarize the stages we have gone through
in the current series of KITs.

            1) When we identified ourselves with our physical
body, we were programmed in our commonplace thinking (Khayal) and
took for granted that our personal subjective I was the spectator
of what we perceived and experienced. All that we could grasp of
what we ascribe to God were the clues, the signs in the physical
scene and scenario of our lives of what was trying to transpire
through that which appeared. If we permutate the terms of this
perspective, then it is God revealing Him/Herself through that
projection of Him/Herself that is this magnificent bountiful
universe.

            2) When turning within, feeling like gossamer, (the
Arwah level) we reconnoitered thoughts emerging from within,
impromptu, bespeaking of the way the universe unfurls as our
personal idiosyncrasies. We were picking up those clues or signs
within our own selves (the mode of cognizance called Mithal).

            You noticed that your notion of being the spectator
had changed. For one thing: you saw yourself as both the spectator
and the object experienced. ('taijasa' in the Mandukya Upanishad).
Furthermore you may have envisioned your eyes as being the 'eyes
through which God sees'.

            "Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God;
not by thyself."
IBN 'ARABI

            Therefore if once more we reverse the perspective,
then it now appears to us that God is discovering Him/Herself
through our discovering His\Her nature exemplified as our
idiosyncrasies.

 "The second degree of the Sufi is knowing yourself through the
knowledge that God has of Himself through you."
IBN 'ARABI

            3) Now to hoist your notion of yourself from the
physical or etheric levels to the celestial level: (i) Offset your
body and also etheric consciousness. (ii) Shift the field of your
thinking from the physical world and your emergent thoughts which
translate emotions into images, into grasping God irrespective of
the clues whereby He discloses Him\Herself.

            "Wipe away the phantasmagoria of images, then Haqq
(reality) will emerge from inside."
JAMI

            "Absorb yourself in the dhikr until the imaginary
world escapes you and the abstract thoughts manifest to view.
Eventually the one who is invoked will disclose Himself beyond the
signs. ...Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God;
not by thyself."
IBN 'ARABI

(iii) Bridge the gap between your being the experiencing subject
and the object (which may be a thought or emotion) further than in
the Mithal mode. Instead of thinking 'I am the eyes through which
God sees', think 'my glance is the divine glance that has gotten
funneled down and therefore limited, maybe distorted'.

(iv) It must have been your experience that when you meditate, you
are assailed with random thoughts. These are constituted by the
regurgitation of experiences of the physical and social
environment in the process of digestion of the psyche. They are
remnants of the past. You may also be pondering your future
projects, taking into account both the advantage and the fear of
failure. At the Malakut level, your being seems perennial and
therefore not inveigled in the process of becoming. To identify
with your celestial being, let go of the memory of the past and
prefiguration of the future which are both of a finite nature; you
will have a sense of having transcended the passage of time which
now revolves in the twilight of your consciousness but cannot
reach you unless you turn the headlamp of your consciousness
towards it, thus slipping back into the commonplace perspective.

            While awaiting the next steps, (in the next KITs), let
us however compare the modes of cognizance encountered so far:

I) You will recognize the first, (elementary) mode - ordinarily
taken for granted: (i) one assumes that one is the subject and the
world or the circumstances the object, (ii) the world seems to be
composed of 'discrete' entities, occupying different locations in
space, (iii) one infers an effect from a cause in a time sequence,
(iv) one interprets situations as assessed from the vantage point
of what one assumes is one's consciousness which is the
focalization of an overall universal consciousness which we may
call God's consciousness. It is clear that this perfunctory way of
thinking is limited and therefore could not possibly give an
exhaustive opinion about your problems.

II) As we readily wallow in ponderous thoughts about ourselves
revolving around a fictitious self-image with which we identify,
we are touching upon the personal dimension which we project upon
the outer world. It eschews logic. Avoid confining your thinking
to the commonplace mode we described earlier. As seen in the KIT
on Mithal, we can 'reconcile the irreconcilable', 'gauge
complementarity'. We can see both sides of a problem, we can
envision ourselves as a continuity in change. We can grasp the
connectivity between situations that do not seem to be related in
time and space or in a causal sequence, what would seem ordinarily
like unpredictable coincidences. Everything seems to be
intermeshed in a way that defies our ordinary sense of space:

            "The order of the world as a structure of things that
are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and
emerges from the deeper implicate order."
DR. DAVID BOHM

             This mode of cognizance could be described through
the holistic paradigm illustrated by the holograph:

            "Each part of the holograph is an image of the whole
object. It is a kind of knowledge which is not point to point
correspondence...Therefore every part contains information about
the whole object... information about the whole is enfolded in
each part of the image."
DR. DAVID BOHM

            We call this intuitive thinking as opposed to
commonsense. Our intentions actualizing in our motivations hail
from this nebulous mind-field which Polanyi calls 'tacit
knowledge'.

            "We cannot possibly describe in detail more than a
very small part of the significance that we sense at a given
moment. ..Deeper intentions generally arise out of the total
significance in ways of which one is not aware, and over which one
has little or no control ('I didn't mean to do that')."
DR. DAVID BOHM

III) In the mode which we are now exploring, we can detect the
limitations of ordinary logic. Even in our subjective way of
projecting how we feel into irrational ways of thinking that may
prove creative, we can see how easily we may be caught in a
perspective that locked us into a logical framework.

            As you hoist yourself into transcendent levels in your
meditations, you will discover that at each level there is an
underpinning (subtle body, body of uncreated light), getting
subtler and more elusive as you rise, and you will notice that
your sense of being the spectator becomes less and less personal -
and therefore one ascribes it to divine consciousness). Also you
will discern a different mode of cognizance - a more transcendent
logic.

            In a New Model for the Universe and Tertium Organum
(1982), Ouspenski had announced a super-logic:

            "Our ordinary logic helps us to gauge only the
relations existing in the phenomenal world."
(OUSPENSKY)

            While it is often taken for granted that body
consciousness stands in the way of the realization of the soul, if
you shift your sense of bodiness into the subtler non-substantial
textures, you will not find that your sense of being a celestial
body stands in the way of the sublime understanding encountered at
this level. In fact, you will find that your bodiness and
consciousness are mutual expressions of each other.

            "The soma and significance are two aspects of one
overall reality... If you go to infinite depths of matter, we may
reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of the
mind."                                          
DR. DAVID BOHM

            Mind and body are two poles of the same reality. Both
poles are to be found, no matter how you fragment the totality.

"...every part sustains a superposition of north and south poles."
DR. DAVID BOHM

            This holds good for the finer counterparts of our
being. If you identify with subtler levels of your being, you will
have the impression of awakening from the mind-bind encountered at
the grosser levels into the free outlook of realization.

            "What is manifest on one level may be subtler on
another. Therefore the relatively subtle somatic form of thought
may have a meaning that can be grasped in still higher and more
subtle somatic processes. And this may lead on further to a grasp
of a vast totality of meanings in a flash of insight. . . This
sort of action may be described as the apprehension of the meaning
of meanings which may in principle go on in indefinitely deep and
subtle levels of significance."                                    
DR.  DAVID BOHM

            Let us see how the insight gained at this level of
meditation applies to our assessment of our problems. (i) At
first, we were projecting our own personal psychological bias upon
the situations, judging our problems and people generally within
the limits of this perspective. (ii) Then we were seeing how
everything is interconnected and the extent to which our own
idiosyncrasies and free incentives are involved. By discovering
our own potentials, enhancing our own creativity, we could apply
our realization upon the situations. (iii) Now we can envision how
the situation looks from a transcendental point of view, what the
cosmic issues are that are enacted here, customized as it were in
our particular 'storm in our teacup'.

            To summarize: we saw a reason, then a reason behind
that reason encompassing it. Now, freeing ourselves from the mind-
bind confining us to the reasons we had previously entertained, we
grasp reasons beyond reasons or significances beyond significances
in infinite regress.

            "Ecstasy comes from touching the reason of reasons and
by realizing the essence of wisdom."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

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