Rupert,
Many thanks for your deep and extensive response. It was very illuminating to have you clarify that not the mind, but simply a simple belief, is what might be said to conspire to keep one from understanding. As for myself, given the extensive reliance on conventional thinking in the past, it is easy to see why a blanket condemnation of mind was so readily accepted. The possibility and actuality of a reasoning not done by the mind, is now what is being explored and reflected on.
I think what lay behind my question to you was just this sense that for the first time I am having the sense or intuition that what is natural to the being, in tuitive sense of ‘I’ or feeling of existence, is being seen and lived from, though that is still in its infancy. Yet this process itself, what might be labeled a phenomenal maturing sense of an unlimted self, is, as a phenomena, a part of nature. To take your quote from Blake, ‘As a man is, so he sees’.
So here is a new question: Is what a man is, in the context of what Blake is saying, a matter of continual natural refinement? When you write that Higher Reasoning is a subjection of the mind to the reality of our experience, does the reality of our experience change? I of course have your book as a resource to use in addressing this question, and shall do so. Thank you again for your generosity and asistance.
Bob
Dear Bob,
‘A man’ is whatever it is that is seeing or knowing these words. That is, what a man is, is consciousness.
Because this consciousness is, being is inseparable from it. So man is not just consciousness but rather consciousness-being. This consciousness of one’s own being is what is referred to as happiness, so it could be said that a man is consciousness-being-happiness.
This is not a matter of continual refinement. Consciousness is always its own unchanging, causeless, ever-present self or reality. However, the realignment of the body and the mind with this understanding isa matter of continual refinement.
When Blake said, ‘As a man is, so he sees’, he meant ‘Whatever a man takes himself to be will condition the way the world appears to him’. That is, if a man takes himself to be a separate entity located in and as the body, the world will appear in accordance with this belief, as something that is outside and separate from himself and, moreover, made out of something other than himself.
Likewise, if a man takes himself to be knowing presence or consciousness, the world will appear, in accordance with this understanding, as being intimately one with and made out of himself, that is, made out of presence.
Bob: When you write that Higher Reasoning is a subjection of the mind to the reality of our experience, does the reality of our experience change?
Rupert: The reality of our experience never changes, just as the screen, which is the reality of the film, never changes. So Higher Reasoning is the subjection of the mind to the truth of our experience, consciousness. It is, in a way, a realignment of the mind with the reality of our experience.
As a result of this realignment, appearances change. We see the same ‘world’, but because the interpretation has changed, or rather, because there is no interpretation, our experience ‘in the world’ is very different. Of course, it will vary in each case, but friendliness, peace, ease, beauty, spontaneity, freedom, humour and sensitivity are some of the characteristics of this new appearance.
With love,
Rupert
