Post by johnbc on Oct 4, 2020 18:01:11 GMT
If there is a well-proven fact in this world, it is the extrasensory perception during the state of clinical death. An inert body, with no heartbeat or any brain activity, suddenly awakens and describes, in great detail, what happened during his trance, not only in the room where he lay, but in the other rooms of the house or hospital, which from where he was he could not see even if he was awake, in good health and with his eyes open. This has been repeated so many times, and it has been attested by so many reputable scientific authorities, that only a complete ignorant in the matter can insist on remaining incredulous. But even some of those who recognize the impossibility of denying the fact are reluctant to draw the conclusion that it necessarily imposes: the limits of human consciousness extend beyond the horizon of bodily activity, including that of the brain. The reluctance to accept this shows that the “modern man” — the product of the culture that we inherited from the Enlightenment — has identified himself with his body to the point of feeling frightened and offended at the mere suggestion that his person is something else. It is evident that this is not just a conviction, an idea, but an incapacitating self-hypnotic trance, an effective block of perception.
This state is implanted in souls by the tremendous anonymous pressure of the collectivity, which keeps them in a state of spiritual atrophy through the threat of scorn and the fear — imaginary, but no less efficient — of exclusion. Infinitely multiplied and enhanced by the educational system and the media, what was once a mere philosophical idea, or pseudophilosophical, is incorporated into individual personalities as a reflection of self-defense and, to the same extent, restricts the self-perception of each to the minimum necessary for performance in the immediate tasks of socio-economic life. It is all a self-fulfilling prophecy: if overwhelming evidence of extracorporeal perception is denied, it is not just because people do not believe it — it is because they have become truly unable to live it consciously. They live alienated from their deepest and constant psychic experience, locked in a circle of banalities in which the “cultural” and “scientific” triumphalism of the popular media instills an illusion of wealth and variety.
The “real world” in which these people believe they live is the Galilean-Cartesian dualism, already totally demoralized by the physics of Einstein and Planck, but that the media and the school system continue to impose on the souls of the crowds as the definitive truth: everything that exists in this world are “physical things” and, on top of them, “human thought”, “cultural creations”. On the one hand, the harsh reality of matter governed by supposedly inflexible laws, on which the universal and unquestionable authority of “science” is based; on the other, the soft and ductile paste of the “subjective”, of the arbitrary, where every opinion is worth the same. This “subjective” sphere includes “religion”, which is the right to believe whatever you understand, with the proviso that it never proclaims objective truth or universal value.
Under these conditions, the exercise of religion itself becomes a grotesque caricature. As much as the atheist, the religious man of today believes strongly in the existence of an autonomous material sphere, governed by specific laws that science enunciates, only occasionally broken by the interference of the “miracle”, the “inexplicable”, the “divine”. As much as philosophy skunk the “God of hiatus” (the one who only acts through the gaps in scientific knowledge), he is the only one left on the altar of the multitudes of believers. Officialized by the governmental, university and media establishment, the strict Kantian separation of “knowledge” and “faith” has become the gospel truth for most religious souls, although it is, in itself, perfectly heretical in the light of Catholic doctrine, interposing an unbridgeable chasm between dimensions whose interpenetration, on the contrary, is the very essence of the Christian conception of the cosmos. It is self-fulfilling prophecy in action again: the mutilated perception of the individual self corresponds to a mutilated religion, and vice versa.
When I say mutilated perception, I am saying, emphatically, that the image of the self as something that resides in the body or identifies with it is fantastic, illusory, sick. It imposes limitations on consciousness that are by no means natural, much less necessary. All spiritual traditions in the world, all wisdom disciplines start with the obvious realization that the self is not the body, it is not “in” the body, but in a way it encompasses it as the supra-spatial transcends and encompasses the spatial (this is marked out by certain mathematical relationships that, in themselves, are nowhere in space). But it is one thing to understand this by pure logic, quite another to be able to see it in the living fact of extrasensory perception in cases of clinical death. Strictly speaking, a single episode of this type would be enough to completely refute with the nonsense that the brain, that is, the body, “creates” cognition, thought, consciousness. But the episodes are thousands, and the lack of interest of believers in this type of phenomena (more studied by atheists, New Age followers and Buddhists than by Catholics, Protestants, or even Jewish believers) denotes that the religious mind has already conformed to a diminished state of existence, in which the supracorporal soul, a fundamental condition of access to God, will only come into existence in the other world, through some magical transmutation of the bodily psyche, instead of already constituting in this life our most concrete, most substantive personal reality and more truthful, present and active in our most minimal acts as in our highest and most sublime experiences.
For millennia each human being, when pronouncing the word “I”, immediately and automatically referred to his immortal soul, the only one who could pray and answer for his own actions before the altar of divinity. Of this soul, the bodily psyche was a minor part and function, focused solely on the material and social environment, alien to every sense of the eternal and, strictly speaking, incapable of sin or holiness, only of socially recognized crimes and virtues. From the moment that the bodily psyche was assumed as an autonomous reality, each individual only sees himself as a member of an animal species and as a “citizen”, amputated from that dimension that underlies the ultimate sense of responsibility and then he cultivates, in its place, the mere instinct of social adequacy, adorned or not with “religious morality”. Imagine the difference it makes, for example, in your understanding of the Bible: if you don’t read it with your immortal soul, perhaps it would be better not to read it at all, because you read it with the flesh and not with the spirit.
This state is implanted in souls by the tremendous anonymous pressure of the collectivity, which keeps them in a state of spiritual atrophy through the threat of scorn and the fear — imaginary, but no less efficient — of exclusion. Infinitely multiplied and enhanced by the educational system and the media, what was once a mere philosophical idea, or pseudophilosophical, is incorporated into individual personalities as a reflection of self-defense and, to the same extent, restricts the self-perception of each to the minimum necessary for performance in the immediate tasks of socio-economic life. It is all a self-fulfilling prophecy: if overwhelming evidence of extracorporeal perception is denied, it is not just because people do not believe it — it is because they have become truly unable to live it consciously. They live alienated from their deepest and constant psychic experience, locked in a circle of banalities in which the “cultural” and “scientific” triumphalism of the popular media instills an illusion of wealth and variety.
The “real world” in which these people believe they live is the Galilean-Cartesian dualism, already totally demoralized by the physics of Einstein and Planck, but that the media and the school system continue to impose on the souls of the crowds as the definitive truth: everything that exists in this world are “physical things” and, on top of them, “human thought”, “cultural creations”. On the one hand, the harsh reality of matter governed by supposedly inflexible laws, on which the universal and unquestionable authority of “science” is based; on the other, the soft and ductile paste of the “subjective”, of the arbitrary, where every opinion is worth the same. This “subjective” sphere includes “religion”, which is the right to believe whatever you understand, with the proviso that it never proclaims objective truth or universal value.
Under these conditions, the exercise of religion itself becomes a grotesque caricature. As much as the atheist, the religious man of today believes strongly in the existence of an autonomous material sphere, governed by specific laws that science enunciates, only occasionally broken by the interference of the “miracle”, the “inexplicable”, the “divine”. As much as philosophy skunk the “God of hiatus” (the one who only acts through the gaps in scientific knowledge), he is the only one left on the altar of the multitudes of believers. Officialized by the governmental, university and media establishment, the strict Kantian separation of “knowledge” and “faith” has become the gospel truth for most religious souls, although it is, in itself, perfectly heretical in the light of Catholic doctrine, interposing an unbridgeable chasm between dimensions whose interpenetration, on the contrary, is the very essence of the Christian conception of the cosmos. It is self-fulfilling prophecy in action again: the mutilated perception of the individual self corresponds to a mutilated religion, and vice versa.
When I say mutilated perception, I am saying, emphatically, that the image of the self as something that resides in the body or identifies with it is fantastic, illusory, sick. It imposes limitations on consciousness that are by no means natural, much less necessary. All spiritual traditions in the world, all wisdom disciplines start with the obvious realization that the self is not the body, it is not “in” the body, but in a way it encompasses it as the supra-spatial transcends and encompasses the spatial (this is marked out by certain mathematical relationships that, in themselves, are nowhere in space). But it is one thing to understand this by pure logic, quite another to be able to see it in the living fact of extrasensory perception in cases of clinical death. Strictly speaking, a single episode of this type would be enough to completely refute with the nonsense that the brain, that is, the body, “creates” cognition, thought, consciousness. But the episodes are thousands, and the lack of interest of believers in this type of phenomena (more studied by atheists, New Age followers and Buddhists than by Catholics, Protestants, or even Jewish believers) denotes that the religious mind has already conformed to a diminished state of existence, in which the supracorporal soul, a fundamental condition of access to God, will only come into existence in the other world, through some magical transmutation of the bodily psyche, instead of already constituting in this life our most concrete, most substantive personal reality and more truthful, present and active in our most minimal acts as in our highest and most sublime experiences.
For millennia each human being, when pronouncing the word “I”, immediately and automatically referred to his immortal soul, the only one who could pray and answer for his own actions before the altar of divinity. Of this soul, the bodily psyche was a minor part and function, focused solely on the material and social environment, alien to every sense of the eternal and, strictly speaking, incapable of sin or holiness, only of socially recognized crimes and virtues. From the moment that the bodily psyche was assumed as an autonomous reality, each individual only sees himself as a member of an animal species and as a “citizen”, amputated from that dimension that underlies the ultimate sense of responsibility and then he cultivates, in its place, the mere instinct of social adequacy, adorned or not with “religious morality”. Imagine the difference it makes, for example, in your understanding of the Bible: if you don’t read it with your immortal soul, perhaps it would be better not to read it at all, because you read it with the flesh and not with the spirit.