Comparing Ra and the Cassiopaeans

[Asolsutsesvyl]

Yes, I understand where you don't get my point.

To start with, spirituality is a personal thing.
Each person decides for themself which way to go, so that is not meant as a judgement

Having said that, the idea spiritual development would be a movement away from the physical is what I would call a misconception.

[...]

So my recommendation would be to NOT move away from the physical, but to move fully iNTO the physical.

When I wrote my previous reply, I wondered if I was unfair to guess that that was your thinking, because it seems like such a caricature of an approach.

I mean, your thinking is in response to the idea that the focus of consciousness may pendulate, that it's not meant to be fixed in a purely non-intellectual physical focus, and that there's legitimate spiritual value in moving up and not only down in focus. You only make an exception for those stuck in materialism who may need a small initial exposure to non-materialistic ideas.

As such, I basically wonder why you value or are at all "into" any spiritual teaching which goes beyond the simplest? Because anything that stimulates the mind in an abstract direction is basically bad, according to your view, except as a necessary temporary ill in a few cases. I mean, you make that unambiguously clear.

However, I don't dismiss this:

The "danger" in that would be not realizing that in fact you are exactly as deeply entrenched in the non-spiritual as before.

While before you were "lost" in thinking about mundane concerns, now you would be lost in thinking about spiritual concerns.
You are still lost in "thinking".

There's many possible qualities of mental activity. And mental activity can work more harmoniously with one's being as a whole, or as one of several currents of inner focus which clash with each other.

Some teachings which recognize a difference between spiritually good and useless mental activity add basic distinctions, and describe how it works in life. The Fourth Way describes the "lower intellectual center" as one center (roughly matches one chakra) belonging to a functional third of the organism -- but the "window of the soul" of a center is not necessarily well used. The difference is, compared to your type of teaching, that it's viewed as possible for it to be well used. "Intellect" may be disharmonious and mechanical, or truly consciously soul-directed.

But it's still a "lower center". Other lower centers include the two other fundamental "lenses" of the soul, emotional and instinctive/motoric. For each, there is also a corresponding "higher center".

In turn, the path to consciously using "higher centers" is the great challenge, and begins with the heart, the emotional higher center being the first eye of the soul through which one can clearly see in the incarnation. (This is not to be confused with the soul soulfully using a lower center as a device.) That's achieved by few, there's nothing trivial about it. The second eye of the soul is a mind which is not the brain-mind, and which is integrated into the being through connection with and past the higher emotional center (which needs to meld with the lower emotional center first), not the lower intellectual center directly.

Also -- a basic and tricky topic -- Gurdjieff made a distinction in the area of "lower intellectual" between thinking which is all physical "formatory apparatus" and based on labels and associations, and "mentation by form" which people in civilized sociaties tend to use all too little. Only by using the "proper mind" can understanding be approached. The one and only sticking point is really the idea that a "proper mind" exists, vs. the idea that no such thing can exist.

The practice related to all this is extremely tricky, but begins with exercises in awareness, such as learning to distinguish between the centers in where awareness is centered and activity is driven from.

I make no claims to mastery.

We started this incarnation in a state of consciousness that you could call enlightened.
Then we had traumatic experiences, which (in Ra terms) created blockages, or (in other terms) made you seperate from yourself and the physical.

At that point a "dissociation" did occur, a seperation from your deeper Self as well as from the physical.

You could view that as a "semi-dieing".

I think that's oversimplified. Modern societies mess stuff up in people in all kinds of ways, especially scrambling emotional functioning and leaving much in its development to chance. But a clean slate before that is not the same as enlightenment -- it's not perfection in wisdom or some type of divine consciousness, any more than animals have it -- it simply means less interference for the soul in trying to get going with the body.

So actually we inhabit an abstract thought realm, which is neither physical nor spiritual.

It's a basic pattern, one of several, which many -- I recognize myself in it -- tend to match. I matched it even more in some earlier periods of my life.

There are also people who don't live in their minds and mindlessly embrace the now and are living examples of how that is not enlightenment.

And there are people so centered in their feelings that it dwarfs all physical and intellectual things not directly about it, all revolving around their liking and disliking their way around the world.

There's several ways in which people can be lopsided. From each a more balanced whole can be approached. But this idea is at odds with all the simplified generalizations (ironically very abstract) which make one problem pattern the only and the answer to it the only answer, which doesn't work for everyone.