{"id":4839,"date":"2013-04-04T17:19:40","date_gmt":"2013-04-04T22:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/?p=4839"},"modified":"2013-04-06T16:51:38","modified_gmt":"2013-04-06T21:51:38","slug":"the-key-insight-of-mysticism-and-meta-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/2013\/04\/04\/the-key-insight-of-mysticism-and-meta-physics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Key Insight of Mysticism and Meta-Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After having listened, watched, read hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of material from and about mysticism, over the course of more than a decade, the primary message that keeps coming through these experiences, if I could boil it down to one sentence is this:<\/p>\n<p><strong style=\"color: #ff0000; font-size: 1.17em;\">Consciousness creates reality. Consciousness creates matter and not the other way around.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s tough when 99.999999% of the time your mind, all of your senses (And I would say those false messages are directed by the &#8216;Ego&#8217;) are telling you just the exact opposite. But then, looked at one way, that&#8217;s part of the game. That&#8217;s the challenge of the game.<br \/>\nAnd that consciousness is not just our personal consciousness, or even our deep, archetypal consciousness (&#8216;atman,&#8217; &#8216;soul&#8217;), but a pure consciousness that is deeper and &#8220;a priori&#8221; to the Universe (or even &#8216;Multiverse&#8217;) itself. This could be called &#8220;The Ground of Being&#8221; which in the language of mysticism &#8220;neither is, nor is not.&#8221; The fundamental error of our experience is the belief of just the opposite: That &#8220;reality&#8221; or matter &#8220;out there&#8221; creates our consciousness &#8220;in here.&#8221; This is the fundamental source of all of our frustration. Because this latter belief leads to the feeling that life is a prison, that our consciousness, our experience. is determined by an outside force that we have no power to change.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look at an analogy in nature: An apple grows out of the tree. The apple isn&#8217;t made somewhere else and then placed on the tree. It grows out of the tree.<\/p>\n<p>Well, wait, you might say, you are contradicting yourself. If the apple grows out of the tree, isn&#8217;t that analogous to consciousness grown out of, coming from matter?<\/p>\n<p>Only if you mix up the metaphor. In this analogy, the tree, the &#8220;Axis Mundi&#8221;, is a metaphor for consciousness, and the Apple (The &#8220;Knowledge of Good and Evil&#8221;) is a metaphor for the duality of the &#8220;objective&#8221; world.<\/p>\n<p>So the question would be, if one believes this theory, or perhaps has even had a mystical experience themselves, is what do you do? How does one expand on that, how does one change? When does the adventure begin?<\/p>\n<p>My answer is that I&#8217;m not sure. It may take me another decade to even come up with a hunch. But my gut tells me a practice of meditation is one if not &#8220;the&#8221; answer, or at the very least a way to get to &#8220;first base.&#8221; Because when you can step back from your thoughts, it starts to take the energy out of them, to quiet them, and then the mind starts to become &#8220;transparent to transcendence&#8221; which feels like taking a psychological shower, cleansing the mind, cleansing the personal consciousness, so that the connection between it (Your everyday living body and wakefulness) and your archetypal consciousness (Your &#8216;Atman&#8217; &#8216;Soul&#8217; or \u00a0&#8216;Wisdom Body&#8217;) becomes reopened. Then the billions (if not infinite) of years of wisdom consciousness becomes immediately available to your present, your &#8216;right now&#8217;, \u00a0experiential consciousness.<\/p>\n<p>If that&#8217;s not the &#8220;It&#8221; itself, it would seem, at least at the gut level, to be a great jumping off point. A place where many more options or &#8216;doors&#8217; become available. A place where an adventure may begin. Like the earlier analogy I used, if the &#8220;Ultimate&#8221; is like a home run in baseball, then it seems like meditation, or some form of it, is at least a way to get to first base, from where you&#8217;ll automatically know, from the wisdom level, of what to do, or not to do, to continue your progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After having listened, watched, read hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of material from and about mysticism, over the course of more than a decade, the primary message that keeps coming through these experiences, if I could boil it down to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/2013\/04\/04\/the-key-insight-of-mysticism-and-meta-physics\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[146,442,17],"class_list":["post-4839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-metaphysics","tag-philosophy","tag-spirituality"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stephenpickering.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}