Long and reflective.
A lot of interesting conversations going on backstage, stirred up by Matthew’s last message. One piece of feedback that arose was that I’m being too intellectual in trying to understand spiritual states.
While we’re all recovering from the holidays, maybe it’s a good time to push back the chair and reflect. And here I’m about to be intellectual. This is the exploration that the comment raised. Just a reflection on it.
For me, as you know, there are three levels of knowledge: the intellectual, the experiential, and the realized. (1)
Let me just dwell on one part of that division for a moment.
I have no control over realization. I freely wander into cognitive dissonance to court paradigmatic breakthrough. (2) I ask for realization. I meditate. But that state is bestowed by the Mother, her archangels, our guides, the masters, etc.
I can describe aspects of it. Realization brings release plus bliss. It’s the bliss that lifts us up to a place where simple knowledge there is seen as realization here.
But I have to be careful. My excursions into higher states do not make me a spiritual teacher. Nor do I want to be one. I’m a writer.
***
I still feel reflective. May I unwind further?
When I enter a new field, I say to you that I’m establishing a beachhead of understanding about that field. (3) The beachhead is just a landing zone and may be totally abandoned later on.
If I were a non-dualist, I’d jump for joy that I know nothing and have an empty mind. I would just allow things to be rather than establish a beachhead of understanding, which would be seen as limiting me.
But I’m a dualist this lifetime. I serve the Divine Mother. For that I need understanding and the ability to communicate. Sitting in the cloud of unknowing is not appropriate for me in this go-round.
I need to communicate. To do that I need to stay within the universe of discourse of you, the reader I serve. That can mean trying to reduce the ineffable into the language of the day. A task that proves impossible.
I won’t for instance suddenly lapse into an erudite explanation of quantum physics, even if I knew anything about the subject, which I don’t. (I think this article is erudite enough for folks who are working and raising children.)
But the heart of the feedback was that I was being too intellectual. In spirituality it seems either to boil down to a matter of the heart or a matter of balance. Either way you end up in the same place: In the tsunami of love that flows in the heart.
If I can develop that feedback, however, it means, to me, staying too much within the orbit of ideas; never escaping and going higher. It means too often reducing living, breathing entities to ideas, which is a task beyond delicate and perhaps impossible.
The emphasis is on the “too much.” The emphasis is on leaving the center, the balance point, the heart and wandering off into the extremes of passion, clouded judgment, and abandoned caution.
That’s fine if you’re a young person breaking free of your parents – whoopee! But a lightworker committed to service? I think we agree to give up a lot of those moments.
If I want to pierce through the cloud of ideas to the experience of it, no matter what we’re looking at, I have to feel into it with the heart.
(Concluded in Part 2, below.)
Footnotes
(1) See:
- “Realization is Simply Seeing from a Higher Level of Consciousness,” February 25, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/02/25/realization-is-simply-seeing-from-a-higher-level-of-consciousness/.
- “Who’s Behind the Curtain?” February 13, 2023, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/category/news/spirituality/intellectual-experiential-realized-knowledge/
NB:
“Truth begins as intellectual knowledge, but can never manifest into expression until realized.” (“The Arcturian Group via Marilyn Raffaele. January 10, 2016,” January 11, 2016, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2016/01/11/the-arcturian-group-via-marilyn-raffaele-january-10-2016/.)
(2) See Paradigmatic Breakthrough: Essays in New-Age Philosophy at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Paradigmatic-Breakthrough-4.pages.pdf and “Paradigmatic Breakthrough as a Type of Spiritual Realization,” October 11, 2020, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/?p=313922.
(3) See:
- “A Beachhead of Understanding,” August 16, 2013, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2013/08/16/a-beachhead-of-understanding/
- “Establishing a Beachhead of Understanding,” February 10, 2014, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/02/10/establishing-a-beachhead-of-understanding/.
- “Establishing a Beachhead of Understanding in a New Context,” January 13, 2019, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/01/13/establishing-a-beachhead-of-understanding-in-a-new-context/