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The Struggle of Intellectualizing Spiritual Experience


A propos Mercury retrograding this week...

Sometimes it's convenient to package meaning into dense intricate sentences, which can only be unpacked after having participated in rigorous training usually of the reading and writing sort. It can be a complete system head to toe, or it can be a loose set of terms and definitions without which the text in question reads like garbled nonsense. I saw a lot of this in my short course through academia; increasingly specific subsets of definitions and presuppositions nested within larger ones until they were encompassed by the outer shell of study ie comparative religion, women's studies, documentary film theory.

It happens necessarily in very technical fields of human activity like the medical sciences, or engineering research for example. It can also happen in deep philosophical, religious, and metaphysical discourse as well.

This unpacking requires an initial investment of time and learning, in order to glean meaning from the text. How can one discern if the initial investment will be worth the effort? What I noticed in my own experience is that people invest a lot of time and effort (and money) and identity into learning a specific framework and its subsequent language and then become attached to it. The pursuit of truth and knowledge is stunted because there is an attachment to the information, or to the effort in learning to read that information.

One challenge that I've noticed is that of a desire to categorize or arrange experience into the mental systems we currently have going. It's as if nothing can exist without proper categorization. If it doesn't fit our framework it gets tossed aside.

This over-intellectualizing brings consciousness out of direct experience and is a form of control, where the mental faculty seeks to control all sensory experience through words or language.

THOUGHT // THOTH // MERCURY // WRITTEN LANGUAGE

In my view this is one of the fascinating and refreshing reasons why I've turned to videos in order to hear people's voices and see their faces. I'm becoming increasingly convinced in the power of oral tradition to transmit information and wisdom.

I've been afraid to speak and communicate online through video format because of the intellectual bias that I picked up, which I now feel comfortable shedding and speaking about. There is an important reason to why there is oral transmission of mysteries, spiritual truths, etc.

Language and words run parallel to reality; following it closely though never being it.

They give the illusion that we can understand something by labeling it. They give the illusion that we can transmit an experience by giving words to it. But words are never enough. I used to think words had creative power, that thoughts have creative power. Now I realize it's not the words or thoughts that create - that is another illusion. In a way there is no creating because what is true has always been, and will always be. If words and thoughts "create" something what they create are shadows, or images. And these images are not quite real.

Image - Mage - Magician

Images can be likened spiritually to copies. Images exist because we seek to be near the Original. Once the Original is present the images cease to have a function. And once we can all release our collective attachment to the mind we have only the field of pure experiences; without judgement, categorization or division.

Does being mindless leave us no better than the animals of the planet? I'm not suggesting that we throw out all written language (yet) but it's worth taking a close look at it especially in the context of transcendent experience.

Once we face fears of survival, fears of rejection, fears of any sort, there is nothing to stand in the way of the full surrender of the mind. What is happening right now energetically is a re-structuring of the collective mental body into something that is more relaxed and balanced with non-linear or spiral type of logic. Wisdom is an integral part of this universe and there is a God Mind space of all-knowing. By no means do I suggest that the whole universe is better off in an unconscious purely experiential state. If that were the case we should all dose up on DMT right now and get it over with. The mind I am referring to is the mind that has been trained and programmed through fear, and then left to be responsible for the whole show of life.

The mind cannot lead the Soul through life.

A balance of the left and right sides of linear thinking and non-linear analysis will be reached, where the controlling and fearful aspect of the collective mental body dissolves. The true function comes back into order with the other faculties of love and power. In this way we can reflect (imagine) more closely with a greater cosmic divine order.

The full dissolution of selfhood can happen for anyone at any time who says YES deeply. Most of us are not ready to let go of individuated consciousness, and that is OK. We have chosen the path of the Happy Dream (A Course in Miracles) in order to move closer to the full YES where we experience our ecstatic union with the greater transcendent whole.

with love,

Maria

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