I said earlier that there’s a difference between facts and values as stated and as experienced.
The facts and values that we talk about are both ideas. However, the word “value” or “fact” relates or points to more than just an idea.
To illustrate that difference, Werner Erhard used to say that we often eat the menu instead of the meal. Accepting ideas as the same as what they refer to is equivalent to eating the menu instead of the meal.
S.N. Goenka would have called it placing the pill bottle on the family altar and worshipping it instead of taking the pill.
The idea is not the thing itself.
Living in a world of ideas or the mind rather than a in world outside of them Werner would have called living in “unconscious awareness” or “unexperienced experience.”
There’s a level of our being that’s aware, but the level of awareness is itself, in his terms, unconscious.
In that state, we live through our experience but we don’t experience our experience with full consciousness; we don’t talk with full self-expression; we don’t appreciate with full satisfaction or happiness, etc.
The vibratory level that we’ll attain upon deep penetration into the Fifth Dimension (not mere entry) is a world in which the mind, the producer of ideas, will not mediate our experience of either “value” or “fact” any more. Once past sahaja samadhi, deep inside the Fifth Dimension, the mind will no longer mediate our experience of anything; we’ll know fact and value directly.
To put that another way, there’ll be no separation between the knower, the known and knowing. All will be One.
But we’re not there yet.
And until we are, I suspect we have to deal with the fact that we live in a social world where what we call “value” and “fact” and what value and fact actually are are not the same.
Werner would have pointed out that there are levels of certainty to our experience. He used to depict a kind of ladder of certainty starting with mystification.
Our early ancestors were mystified by what they saw around them. They might have conducted rituals to pacify what they regarded as the “gods” who caused everything to happen.
It might have been a great step forward in evolution when they actually came up with beliefs about what they saw.
Some among them might have gone further and become philosophers. They might actually have thought about the nature of reality and their world.
Others may have noticed that they had feelings and consulted those for the truth as it arose for them.
Still others might have taken action and touched and (kinetically) felt things and in other ways sensed and experienced the world around them. This “empirical” knowledge may have increased their sense of certainty about the world as it appeared to them.
And some, as a result of all these approaches, might have realized that they actually did not know the truth of their world and reality. And this is itself a very high state.
Everything up till this point is lived in unconscious awareness, although that unconsciousness is starting to wear a little thin by the time we realize we don’t know.
But above this place, we leave behind unconscious awareness and enter the state of conscious awareness. Werner used to signify this by talking about life “above and below the line” between unconscious and conscious awareness.
The first space we pass through above the line is simply observing or witnessing all that takes place or exists around us. The mind is quiet. Observation places us in the center. Our faculties are in balance. We are in the “heart” and the deeper into the center we plunge, the deeper into the heart we go. (1)
If we remain in the observer mode, eventually we enter a space he called “natural knowing,” which is the transformed space. Here love is not simply a wonderful feeling but a transformational state of being. To compare the two – love as a transformational space and as a romantic feeling – is, to quote Mark Twain, to compare lightning and the lightning bug.
When we’re below the line, when we’re in unconscious awareness, we settle for the idea of value or fact. When we’re above the line, when we’re in conscious awareness, we experience the thing-in-itself. In that space, nothing separates us from the thing we’re considering, whether it be value, fact or something else.
Only when we’re not One with everything do we come up with the complex assessments of so many things that we find in Third Dimensionality. When we’re One, life gets much simpler very quickly.
So for this interim time I must proceed to a certain extent as if the menu actually is the meal and talk about values and facts as we’re accustomed to in the old Third if I’m not to lose at least some readers. But doing so is not the truth, the full truth, so help me God. It’s an interim truth said of a reality that’s fast disappearing.
Footnotes
(1) The heart itself is the same as the soul. To actually enter into or merge with the soul is a very high state of awareness. Most of us simply have intimations from the soul by remaining in the center. That is what I’m calling “being in the heart.”