Theos-Talk Archives (September 1995 Message tl00506)

Paul:

>What was surprising and uplifting about the failure of my
>little exercise was this sense of aiming for a unified
>approach. That is, when asked to select thinking, feeling or
>intuition, introverted or extroverted, as the main way they
>approach the Masters, no one was ready to do so. All
>acknowledged that their own approach partook of several
>functions. But more than that, there seemed a general
>acknowledgment that we should all strive for a balanced
>approach to the topic that would as you say "embrace all the
>different slants." We can learn from one another's diverse
>outlooks as a means of approaching the integrated state.

Yes, and there's different ways that we can approach an
unified viewpoint. One is over many lifetimes, with our
personalities slanted this way that that way. A second is
to try to combine qualities from different approaches into
a single practice, like combining a private time of intense
devotion with the contemplation of intellectual imagery.
And a third is by being aware of different approaches as
different, being aware of more than one at the same time,
and distancing oneself from them, using two or more approaches
to pinpoint the unknown using "parallex". (This is like taking
two sightings of an object from different locations, and where
their lines cross on the map, we've accurately marked a location
that neither line, by itself, could precisely say. Each individual
line *gives a direction but not a distance*. By combining two
directions, we also get a distance or precise location of the
distant object.)

-- Eldon