The danger is that, when we combine our patterns with esoteric knowledge ~ which has been stored and conveyed by people caught inside their own patterns ~ what it does is provide esoteric rationale for staying inside our patterns.
For example, if we recognize something as a pattern through esoteric knowledge, it becomes fairly easy to let go of it. And if we recognize something as an esoteric teaching that is turning into a "pattern" ~ a belief system ~ we can also let go of it easily enough. But when we unconsciously use esoteric knowledge to strengthen and justify our patterns, we are really stuck in them. The reason is that the combination of intellectual knowledge with emotionally invested drives convinces us that we have found Truth with a big T. Actually, we have just found a perfect esoteric match for our patterns.
All esoteric teaching and "pathwork" is for the mind, and it is attractive to the mind because the mind knows that it will never really work, so the mind gets to play with its awakening, without ever being all the way undone by it. If it really worked, we wouldn't go near it.
The mind cannot ever co-operate with, much less bring about, its own awakening.
IMO, all these teachings are valid as a means to understand what I just stated above. At that point, to me at least, they become entirely without value or interest. This coming from someone who just published a book about them, and really wants you to buy it!
6 comments:
Is anyone else reading this other than me?
(echo) ??
How strange...
probably not; but it's nice to feel special, no?
Nah, not me either... didn't read a word - honest.
"The mind cannot ever co-operate with, much less bring about, its own awakening."
Why Magicians are night people, the point between sleep and wakefulness hypnogogic bliss is the only real world there is.
There are more spooks, agents, non human entity's hanging here than followers.
Providing a google earth link to your current location on earth space time would really be interesting for us. Or perhaps a neighboring target. why?
who knows what may show up in the night, from the unconscious.
Hi Aeolus, I'm really loving Homo Serpians. I have to honestly say it's the best work of its kind I've read in years, probably since The Key.
Some thoughts on your post...
"All esoteric teaching and 'pathwork' is for the mind, and it is attractive to the mind because the mind knows that it will never really work, so the mind gets to play with its awakening, without ever being all the way undone by it. If it really worked we wouldn't go near it"
This passage is giving voice to a powerful and long standing paradox: what reason could the ego have to seek its own annihilation? I think we could all begin to dissolve this issue if we consider that the "mind" is not seeking anything, in the sense that "mind" is not the causative principle at play in the act of seeking. By mind, I mean a temporal nexus of attachment and conditioned perspectives, a transitory and ephemeral sort of personal Demiurge. This is not Self but really a function or an activity of the True Self. If one sets out to destroy the ego, one is only reifying the illusion of ego. Transcendence is not about dissolving the ego, it's about recognizing that the ego was an illusion to begin with.
Stating the problem as you did above seems to preclude the possibility of awakening within the context of a tradition, but in my own experiance, the traditions can be a powerful catalyst for inner transformation. Whether one gets stuck in the tradition as an end in itself depends on whether one regards it as a methodology or metaphysics. As you say "all these teachings are valid as a means to understand what I state above". I disagree, though, that their value ends there. Whatever definition you accept for "truth" - a propositions correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality, or its capacity ti generate intersubjective agreement, or its soteriological potency - it's still the case that some teachings are more true than others.
As the saying goes, "By their fruits ye shall know them".
As your saying, the thing that makes the difference between spiritual development or spiritual stagnation is having someone, either yourself or an authentic teacher, who is constantly reminding you not to mistake the map for the territory.
One could still argue that any world view, carried to its ultimate conclusion contains the seeds of its own undoing, its own apocalypse and revalation. If you pursue the thesis that the world is flat with enough determination, walking and swimming until you reach your point where you started, then you will have shattered the belief.
The same process has unfolded for scientific materialism, consider how physics - for centuries the very essence of reductionism and determinism - essentially disproved the existence of matter. It was only able to do so because it carried the hypothesis of materialism to such a relentless extreme.
So I suppose the question of Occult paradigm has an intrinsic value. I think it does, in that it compels us to "remain in a state of question" where it is possible to evolve.
Damn typos - last sentence should read "I suppose the question is..." not "I suppose the question of"...
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