On 2008-Nov-08, at 11:19, Ryan Waldon wrote: > That's difficult. The best description is probably one's elemental > essence. It is important to maintain Balance and Harmony, within one's > spirit and with the World. > > This not to be confused with the Judeo-Christian "soul".
It is a word that is used a lot but I never get what it is supposed to be referring to. What's interesting is how it can be described in very different terms. A depiction of Christians in Heaven shows actual people, even wearing the same clothes; you look and act the same, you just have a slightly transparent body. A description in Sri Aurobindo's writings is very different. Here your soul has almost nothing recognisable as an actual person. And the description you give, about an essence in harmony with nature, is also something very different. As a geek I'm perfectly happy to dismiss it all as made up stories and fantasy. But the dead simple idea from Wilber and Coombs is that because all humans go through life being awake, go to bed and dream, and then have deep dreamless sleep, the three traditional spiritual modes are just variations on these. awake - gross dreaming - subtle deep sleep - causal Lucid dreaming (which I do rarely) is a variation on the dream state. So like, many other variations are possible. All that spiritual exercise may do weird things to your consciousness and these three modes may be experienced quite differently. If you think about typical "spiritual" imagery with weird apparitions, etherial forms, lack of material substance, energies, luminous colours, and so on, all of that is typical of dream experiences. There is no time and space in dreams, there is no material substance--maybe you can fly--and yet things are felt more raw, more frightening, more blissful, more weird. In the real world you don't just have real material stuff, you also have an ego and a whole sense of self that is related to the real world. You are a rich businessman and that confers on your ego a sense of who and what you are. You have a personality that is shaped by nature and nurture. But in the dream state all of that drops away, and you could feel yourself to be something quite different--you don't even have the same body--so the dream state can give you a whole different experience on your identity. awake - ego dreaming - soul deep sleep - atman I like this model because it avoids having to simply dismiss 99% of the world's people now and in history as being deluded foolish primitive eejits. instead, you have a soul--it is what you feel in the dream state (or a variation on it). But of course most of the cultures of the world disagree on how to describe the soul. But that's where the last part of the Wilber-Coombs idea completes the picture: when you wake up again from your altered dream, perhaps whilst sitting round the camp fire on a mountain, or as you are about to face the battlefield at dawn, how do you interpret what you saw? If your village culture depends on living off the land and moving with climate cycles in nature, then you'll see animal spirits. If you live in a hierarchical society governed by a King who gathers wealth and dishes out punishment, you'll see Christ on an throne in Heaven. And so on. It seems that people in the East often see women with many arms, but people in the West never do. Do the East people have different souls, or just different culture. Stefano The very last question is whether the real world is the only reality, which is to say, you cannot dream without a gross physical body, or whether it is possible to continue dreaming after your gross body has burnt to ashes. But that is a question that is essentially unknowable? _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
