Theos-Talk Archives (February 1997 Message tl00014)

Tom:
>It is a law of how matter relates to other matter.
	OK.  But it can be different in other universes.


>I infer that you disagree with HPB's idea, as expressed in "The Secret
>Doctrine," that homogeneous spirit and matter are eternal.  I see no
>reason not to believe it.
	No, I agree with HPB.  But what is "homogeneous matter?"
She means that spirit and matter per se always exist in some form.
But material atoms and molecules come and go, just like all
material forms come and go.  All aggragates or compounds are
maya, as Buddhism teaches.  In the above quote, HPB is referring
to Purusha and Prakriti as defined in Hinduism.  This is not spirit
and matter as we normally think of them, but rather their original states.

>You seem to be saying that if anything exists, someone had to create
>it.  Who created homogeneous spirit and matter?
	Yes, every creation must have a creator.  The creator of "homo-
geneous spirit and matter" is the collective energy of our divine monads,
which are inherently creative and self-expressive.

>The word "education" would be meaningless, if this is true.
	No, because the purpose of education is to produce a shared
knowledge.  But even shared knowledge changes over time, thus Newton
gives way to Einstein, and so on.  Today's truth is often tomorrow's
error.

>Does this mean that you would define the word "error" as "confounding
>the planes, or is that only one type of error?"
	It is only one kind.  We only recognize something as
erroneous after a new perception changes our view of reality.
On the physical plane, an "error" is usually defined as anything
that is not shared, or that cannot be corroborated by others.   But
this definition doesn't work on the inner planes, because so little
is shared there.

>Sometimes what one believes to be true is false, and vice versa.
	I would say almost always.  Truth and falsehood, like right
and wrong, are two sides of a duality, and always exist together
because each depends on the other for its existence.  This is
easy to see with dualities like up and down, and hot and cold.  It
is not so easy to see this with right and wrong, or truth and error.
But truth makes no sense at all without errors to compare with,
and evil only exists because of our sense of goodness.

>This is what I meant by pure subjectivism.  It says that there is no
>reality besides perception.
	There is no such thing as pure subjectivism.  Our perception
is always of external objects.  Even when we try to perceive ourself,
we turn ourself into an external object.  Every subjective I has an
objective Not-I around it.  This Not-I is as "real" as anything gets.

>I would not label a dream "error," since
>the dreamer probably never believes that the images are objectively
>real.
	Maybe its just me, then.  But when I dream, I tend to think
the dream objects around me are real.  They effect me, and so on.
When I see a dream person and talk to them, I think of them as real.
Unless its a lucid dream, I only realize the unreality of it all after
I wake.  Even then, a dream is only unreal in comparison to the
physical world, which seems very real indeed, during our waking
state.


>But believing that the earth was flat did not become error when
>the spherical shape of the earth was discovered.  As long as the earth
>was shaped spherically, it was always error.
	It did become error in our minds, which is where it counts.
The world was flat when that idea was part of our shared knowledge,
and it became spherical when that knowledge changed and what was
once perceived as truth began to be perceived as error.  If you want
to call the fact that the Earth is spherical a truth, then OK.  But this
fact has little influence in our daily lives, and is simply one of the
rules of the game of life on Globe D.  It is a good example of how these
rules can change over time.  As science advances, the rules will
keep on changing.

>I have always thought of imagination as active and creative.
	It is, but there are limits to creativity within any one manvantara.

>You seem to be saying that it is passive, more along the lines of
>physical observations.  Or would you say that, just as physical forms can
be
>created by rearranging physical matter, mental forms can be created by
>rearranging mental matter?
	The latter, yes.  But these arrangements are limited to what
can be done with the human mind.  There are arrangements beyond
the scope of the human mind, and these we will not encounter during
this Round.

>Not at all.  That Bill Clinton is President of the United States is
>not a physical reality.
	Touche!

>A perception is accurate if it is identical to reality.
	Who, except maybe God, is to say what reality is?
I would say that "accuracy" does not pertain to perception
except in the sense of a consenus with others.


>To one who believes there is no reality besides perception, the term
>would be meaningless.
	Reality is whatever seems to exist relative to the perceiver.
Reality is not the perception itself, but what is perceived.  Although,
truth to tell, perception (a characteristic of Fohat) is real enough.

>Although I find your theory about the agreements that
>people have about what they consider to be "reality" being explainable
>in terms of overlapping of perception to be conceivable, I find it far
>more plausible to believe that this agreement can be accounted for by
>postulating a reality that exists independently of perception.
	This is certainly the prevailing view, and the one Occam's Razor
would suggest.  It is also the one that I held most of my life.  However,
when you start to visit other planes and states of consciousness, you
soon realize that this view is limited and doesn't hold up.  It cannot
account for the experiences that I have had on the inner planes.  So,
in an attempt to explain these experiences, I have had to adopt the
old teaching of a person being a circle with a nowhere center and an
everywhere circumference.  The I-Not-I Monad Model of reality, that I
developed in Enochian Physics, allows me to account for my
experiences in a way that the prevailing One-Universe Model does not.
So long as the One-Universe Model works, then my advise is to stick
with it.  All I am asking is that you listen to my model, and if your
own every gives out on you, you can recall my model and possibly
help yourself out.  I am actually not sure that any one model is
closer to "truth" than another, but the model of reality that we use
must always agree with our experiences, else we run the risk of
maddness or death (and I am not overstating the danger here).
This is also true when we experience the inner planes.  Our mind
must have a structure or model of some kind in which to explain
our experiences.  It doesn't matter much whether we use the
Tree of Life, HPB's Planetary Chain (what I call the GV) Model,
or the Enochian Magic Model that I developed in my books.  Use
whatever works best.


> I actually argue the possibility of the other side with
>Objectivists, whose philosophy is based on the premise of an
>independently existing reality...
	The Independently Existing Reality Model is the
one used by the materialists.  It is not terribly theosophcial
and I gave it up a long time ago.


>The dangers of both Objectivism and subjectivism are similar...
	Yes, because each needs the other.


>Reality is the standard, not consensus.
	I would appreciate it if you would expound more on what
you mean by "standard."  Reality as changeless objective fact
can be known only by God himself.  God seems to have stranded
us mortals in a mighty river where everything changes.


>In other planetary chains, then, perhaps murder is rewarded with
>social approval?
	Murder is often rewarded by society right here on Globe D.
Remember the gladiators of Rome who killed each other to the approving
roar of the crowd?  Remember war?  Our own society approves murder in
self-defense.  What about abortion?  Reality is neither black nor white,
but various shades of gray.

>But I would not call randomness "illogical."  It is also subject to law.
	It is only subject to law in a collective sense.  Statistics
rules the collective.  But when a person, who eats right and exercises
properly, and so on, gets cancer anyway, it often seems very
illogical to that victim.  Thats why I say that collective karma has
logical rules but personal karma is often illogical and acausal.
This is also why eliminating one's personal karma (the goal of the
Pratyeka-Buddha) is relatively easy while eliminating the collective
karma of humanity (the goal of the bodhisattva) is much more
difficult.


>Why would the mystic go to
>the trouble of discovering that his spiritual Self is not separate
>from the self of which most people are ordinarily conscious if it is
>not an improvement?
	Buddhism teaches that the ordinary mind is Buddha.  Its
true, but it is a paradox.  The "trouble" that you are referring to,
was once called the "ultimate joke" by the Zen master, D.T. Suzuki.

>You're being sorry implies that it would be an improvement for me to
>be aware of it, yet you are also saying that there never can be any
>improvement in one's perception, since you define perception as
>reality.  I don't see how those two contentions can be reconciled.
>Why seek truth if I already have it in whatever I perceive?
	Would you rather have a nice pleasant dream or a terrible
nightmare?  What I have been saying, is that you can change your
reality (yourself and the world around you).  In a large sense, this
is exactly what magic is all about.  I am advocating that we seek a
higher truth (little t) in the sense of a more pleasant one.  Buddha's
promise to us was a Path to escape suffering.  Magic is also a
valid Path to eliminate the sufferring in our lives.

Jerry S.
Member, TI