Nikolai1

Yes, that's true, but we can't let their errors dictate our own lives. And the opposite is also true, many cramp themselves by pinning everything on the 'material' world which they consider the foundation for all truth. Of course these two approaches need to be harmonised. There comes a time when we realise that the seen and the unseen worlds are not in tension with each other. We could say that the exist on the same spectrum. Matter is perhaps 'dense thought'; thought is insipient matter. The spiritual awakening aids this vision hugely because for the first time we are no longer under the impression of a subject/object split. Our thoughts are as much 'out there' as the birds and the trees are. A hardcore materialist would simply discount the above paragraphy as 'more of the same spiritualism'; but the vision is not spiritual but rather the vision where the unseen realm of thought and the seen realm of matter are united into the same thing. This is a healing vision; it brings great peace; and the fluidity and felxibility of thought is injected into the material world in a way that allows the miracle to occur. Going deeply spiritual is only a dark side when it remains divorced from the material world: the worldview where wishes and dreams and poetry are good and bodies, and concrete and cities are bad. You are right that there are plenty of people who are like this and they do end up in the dark depths before very long. But true spirituality both includes the material and transcends it. It transcends it by re-uniting it with the poem so that 'beautifual architecture is nothing but a frozen sonnet'. True spirituality is in ltself an emptiness. It is the place from where we are free to see mind and matter reunited and healed.

I think any true spiritual growth will make you fear your sanity, but you have to fight the fear and do it anyway. Sanity is a very conventional term. It is much prized by conformists and conservatives, and only they will be afraid to undergo the personal growth that is the spiritual path. When I say that mind becomes common property, this is a liberating movement. If you have no sense of the one mind, then you must intepret the words in the only sense you have. This may lead you to think that one mind is 'herd mind', or 'totalitarian mind'. The fear of these is justified, the trouble is: the fear will make you think that all the sages are talking abut something undesirable. There is no greater barrier to spiritual growth than people intepreting the spirituall life in worldly terms. Ah me! all those Chrisitans who think they understand Christianity...and have no greater religious concept than collecting money every Christmas for the poor. They are blocked by the words! It would be better if they had never gone to church at all!

Yes! And this has been my aim from the very beginning of this thread: to show that the sage, in his behaviour, is novel and creative. This is individuality! The individual is someone who isn't just following some set of rules; a person who doesn't always react in the same stereotyped ways. The more of an individual a person becomes, the harder it is to describe them. They are not a fixed entity. they contradict themselves day by day. They are new and fresh and therefore unlike anyone else around. They are truly individual, but this does not make them easier to categorise - it makes them harder. We see them as they stand out as individuals...but when it comes to describing them we are lost. They are unique in being undescribable! And all this is possible when we have the humility to stop being a definable person in this world. When we divest our cardboard social identity that is known and recognised by other people, and become the one higher mind, then we are free and able to be more of an individual than ever before.

Yes, an awareness that seems miraculous according to the usual worldview. But what can it mean? Our selfhood seem to extend above and beyond time and space. We are able to know things that haven't come in through the physical senses...and this knowing isn't rational deductive knowing as in maths - but direct knowledge of unique situations. The world of time and space is where the laws of science operate - the laws that are so sacred to those who disbelieve in miracles. But all around us life is showing that we can know about situations that are in different place and different time. We break the laws, we make sport with the laws. Actually it was a knowing of this nature - not with a twin, but with a loved one - that made open up to the miraculous.

Yes, my point exactly. But what's your point with the twins?

Well, no, and this is where it gets more complex. The miracle making mind is the non-dual mind. It is the mind that has realised its union with the world. It is the mind that sees self and non-self as being variations of the same thing. To enter this mind is to leave behind individuality. A person's mind becomes common property. But if you can only understand the mind as a private thing, then you won't understand my miracle.

Sorry?

I have a psychology degree where twin studies are methodological gold! Why do you ask?

Yes, this is a more flexible attitude. Perhaps you might describe the miracle as something improbable, but possible. The person who is closed to the miracle does not deal in probabilities. They say: "There are things that are truly impossible in this world: It is impossible for a person to know about the death of their parent in another continent, unless they are directly told. Any claim to the contrary is either a lie, a meaningless coincidence, or a memory that you fabricated upon hearing the news." The miracle therefore is always a personal thing. It is the enchantment of your own world. Others will not see it or share your wonder. They already have their explanation. When you ascend into the realm where reality is felt as the product of your own consciousness, you in the most part travel there alone. It is a new radical worldview, and the old self and the old self's associates very often don't make the journey.

Unfortunately it's not as straightforward as this. People may see and experience the reality of something miraculous, but it doesn't mean they accept it as a miracle. Or, more commonly, they act like medical science acts towards the placebo. They half-acknowledge it, but make no attempt to explain it. If others try to explain it using 'mind over matter' type thinking - they will reject it in the strongest possible terms. The psychological mechanism is exactly like denial, in the Freudian sense. As I've said in this thread already. it seems to be human nature that the miraculous is not truly confronted until it makes a dramatic and unmistakable appearance in our own lives. This is our calling, if you like. After this happens, it feels wrong, cowardly, to just explain it all away. In my experience, and to my thinking, the insurrection of the miraculous starts gradually. Somewhere on these boards I remember writing a hierarchy of the miracle. At the lowest levels, it is nothing more than the strange affinity we have for the moment before us - commonly called, deja vu. Moving on from this, the synchronicity is like strong deja vu. As we go on, the miracle is less an inner felt sense, but starts to physcially manifest in strange ways and so on.

As usual, there is an area where 'thoughts creating reality' are actually widely accepted and recognised. This is the area of psychosomatic medicine - where a person's state of mind creates physical illness or well-being. Same with the placebo. If a person believes that the pill will heal them, then it will - regardless of what is in the pill. And by the way, the healing is not just in the patient's perceptions. The placebo healing is directly reflected in the physical body. Some examples: 1) In Parkinson's disease placebos have been seen to produce a 'flood' of dopamine. 2) Fake oxygen, given to a person at real altitude, has been shown to cult levels of prostaglandins (which by dilating blood vessels are respponsible for the symptoms of altitude sickness). 3) In Japan, blindfolded children were told that a harmless leaf rubbed on their skin was poison ivy, and they came out in a rash as a result of their belief. 4) In asthma, a study first told the patients that the inhaler would tighten their lungs (but it was only water vapour) Not only did it work, but when they were told that the next drug would open up their lungs again (more water vapour) - their lungs opened up again. 5) Howard Beacher, the main lobbyist for inclusion of placebo controls in medical trials, ran out of morphine as a wartime surgeon. nevertheless he found that saline water calmed the patient enough to perform operations so distressing that cardiac shock might have been a risk. Modern medicine has gone a long way towards exploring and describing the placebo effects. But how it works??? There is nobody who even dares to confront the strangeness of how it works. Facing up the placebo effect requires intellectual courage. It is a worldview changing phenomenon, and yet it as ancient as the hills. What we think shall come to manifest in our intimate physical reality. I'm glad it fascinates you, because in my opinion it is the biggest, most radical subject in modern science!

He was so alone intellectually as well. He was saying things that were totally unthinkable for everyone. I mean, even today it is hard to get people to understand the radical enormity of his arguments, but at least we have his name to back us up if we need it. He had nothing except himself. He is a martyr in the truest sense; madness was the only course available to him. He dreaded that one day people would pronounce him holy. I must confess that I often come close

It is up to we, his heirs, to complete it. Could one man have propellled human thought forward more than Nietzsche did? He was a martyr. I cannot imagine how lonely he must have been. He was alone in all humanity because he didn't or couldn't recognise who his peers and comrades were...Buddha, Nagarjuna, Chuang-tzu. But by going it alone he was able to prepare the western thinker so that they could properly understand the high wisdom tradtions of the world. From west to east, he built a bridge but did not have the strength to actually walk it for himself.

I agree that the sage doesn't act in order to be moral; it is more that he is only capable of the moral action. And the moral action has the Dao behind it - this is a distinctively Chinese idea - Daoist and Confucian both. This latter point, in my opinion, is something that Nietzsche never came to realise. The Superman is an intrinsically moral man. He is pitiless perhaps, but never one to impose an unnecessary harm on a person because he does not wish to enervate himself; he does not wish to squander his power. Chinese thought here enables us to harmonise Nietzsche with the Christian tradition. We do not need his neurotic 'demolition of all values'; all we need us to stop making our moral concerns the centre of our existence, because that is a recipe for misery and mediocrity...and puts us at risk of the being the slaves of those who have no such scruples. But back to the theme of the thread, to my knowledge Nietzsche said nothing of the miraculous. I think he was basically a materialist who viewed the natural world rather like Schopenhauer: a blind, striving Will that the mere human cannot know or understand. Individual adjustment to this Will is one way of viewing wu wei; but in my opinion there is a higher, more dramatic understanding. The Will of the world and the will of the man can be seen to be one, and we become as irrepressibly creative as Nature herself.

Nietzsche attacked conventional notions of free will in many ways and I think MH confuses things by calling him a free-willer per se. He certainly saw free will as an error at the heart of Christianity and gave people the sense of moral responsibility which is the chief trait of the herd thinker. As I remember much of his criticism is of the notion of causality upon which free will rests. Any given cause is also an effect when viewed from a different persective. The danger of the moral man is that he views himself as causa sui, a cause in himself, without taking into consideration all the conditions that led up to moment of choice. I don't think Nietzsche has much to say to the matter at hand. He resolved this issue of freedom and determinism simply by taking interest in power of will. Power is the only alternative to morality - it is the true force that shapes reality. His ideal man does not disempower himself by adherence to old superstitions codes. He acts with power and without pity. This is all quite un-Daoist. For the Daoist power of intention and the virtue of the intention co-arise. The sage only experiences weak intention when the virtue is also weak. When the intention is virtuous, it is sure to happen.

This is the worldview we awaken from, and talking with Karl allows us all to feel the impossibility of explaining anything to someone who does not have the eyes to see.

Yes! In order to resolve the contradiction we simply have to learn that everything can be seen from two perspectives. Perspective 1: Our inner will acts upon an external world Perspective 2: Our will is itself a part of the external world. This second perspective is what really opens up in a spiritual awakening, because our identity is seen to be transcendent of both individual will and nature. Before our awakening our identity is equated with inner will, and thus opposed against nature. I think the important point is that perspective 2 doesn't refute perspective 1, it complements it. This arational view becomes easier as we settle into the emptiness of our Self. It then troubles us no more than the fact that my house is on the right side of the street and the left side. Eventually, we see that it would be irational to settle on one rather than the other.

There is some stuff I'd like to discuss if there are knowledgeable people out there? Basically around the transition from First Tier to Second Tier thinking?

Wilber's view of a mature spirituality is that which is able to tolerate difference, and extend loving-kindness outside of the immediate clan. His perception is that the conformist American Baptist is less able to do this, than the liberal human.rights campaigner whose religion is a sort of ecological, world-wide vision. I get exactly your hesitation though, because ultimately what is the scale by which we measure spiritual growth? Also, personaly, I see no reason to think that people have changed that much over the last couple of millenia. I often wonder if society isn't more like a kind of non-hierarchical caste system. Spiritually minded folk are always the minority, and the majority are always conventional and focussed on, shall we see, worldly issues.

From the wikipedia article on wu wei we have: So to live this way is the goal of spiritual practice. Now the fundamental question: Is wu wei nothing more than the adjustment of our desires to nature? In other words, is wu wei learning to stop desiring what cannot be? Or, Is the person who has attained this exalted mode of being, wu wei, the wilful creator of nature and the her laws? My argument in this post is that both of these intepretations make sense, but the reality transcends them. Our will and nature's scheme become one and the same thing. This means that the sage can legitimately be called a creative figure, in the same way that Nature is irrepressibly and effulgently creative in every given moment.

I asked you to define wu wei, not 'the Way'! So anyway, you said action-less-action. How might a person in this state act? How might a person in this state feel? Why is this mode of behaviour considered the summum bonum of human existence?

I think your mind can only possibly start to take these matters seriouly when the uncanny starts to enter your life with great force. Yes, the uncanny makes minor insurrections into everyone's life - usually in the form of strange coincidence, or serendipity - but these are often not quite enough to rock our convictions. When the uncanny happens with great force, and great meaning then we feel like shirkers by brushing it away. There comes a point where our integrity as thinkers demands and requires that we make sense of it. Don't liken this conversation to a 'spanner thrown in the works', because we can' possibly agree with that analysis. In the meantime, you can't make the miraculous happen, but if you call yourself a thinker, then you might try seriously engaging with all the doubts that surround your objectivism. Legitimate doubts that go back to the dawn of thought itself, and have never gone away.

I think this is such a radical idea that I think we have to start experiencing the miracle first hand if we are to seriously engage with it. Speaking personally, events have happened that have been so strange that I needed to incorporate them into my worldview. Happily the philosophical tradition does enough to dismantle our native materialism / scientism, but first-hand experience gives us the intellectual courage to really start making sense of this very strange subject.

Hi Michael The whole practise I'm talking about simply isn't possible while we are in the dualistic mode of being - where we believe very strongly in our individuality. Your relaxation, I would say, is the ability to move into non-dual being where our very thoughts are natural and valid events in the flow and we can see and believe that. When we are in the dual mode, our thoughts are private and insubstantial. In the non-dual mode our thoughts are like sunshine and warmth on the germinating seed. Yes good question. I think the more we dwell on this we more we realise that all our happenings result by the same process you described. So the miracle and the mundane are, and always were, one and the same thing. But when we believe in our duality we disbelieve that our will can flout the laws of nature.

Hi Creal Obviously the magic has been a major part of Daoism since time immemorial. Crowley defined magic as 'the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will', so I guess the results of magic are in the same ballpark as miracles as both are supernatural methods. Yes, and the question is: can a person wish for or predict events that are not acknowledged by common sense. I say they can, and I consider wu wei in its highest form to be doing this all the time. My reasoning is thus: When a person considers themselves to be separate from a world 'out there' he imagines that the world has its own laws of cause and effect and the person must adapt their technologies (in the Heideggerian sense) to them on order to fulfil his will. With a spiritual awakening the person comes to understand that there is no separate world 'out there'. What the world is and what he is are the same. He therefore ceases to experience the 'frustrated will', he does not encounter a world to which his technologies are not equal. The notion of the will, and the notion of a causal realm separate to his will completely breaks down. What is left is a state that blends individual will with the flow of external events. To will and to predict become one and the same thing. All that we can say is that we are tune with the flow - neither willing things nor not willing things satisfactorily describe this state. But the term wu wei fits it very well. As I hope I've made clear, the will is not dismissed - only transcended. I like this term Creal a lot actually because it captures well what I'm trying to say. Our world is both created and real in its own right...yes, the Creal world!