Angela wrote: What does it mean to experience the “realization of the cosmic reality” as it applies to being “conscious of the meaning of meanings” and being “self-conscious of insight”? The mind explodes!
Yeah, exactly! I hear yah. Here’s the way I understand it, for what it’s worth: Experience is something more than thinking, even though an experience can occur in the mind. Experiencing cosmic reality rocks the whole self, all parts recognize and react to the gravity of it. It has to involve the personality especially. The experience of realizing cosmic reality is a form of religious experience and it changes things. It reorients the attitude toward a new view of reality, and because it’s true and real, is able to be lived and acted out. The acting out part has to do with fruits of the spirit. Is this making any sense, or am I making it murkier?
The meanings of meanings is spiritual insight and spiritual insight is God-consciousness. One can be God-conscious, aware that God exists intellectually, with the mind, but the experience of God-consciousness is spiritual insight into the soul where the experience takes place. The soul is where the presence of God is, as well as the personality presence of the Holy Spirit and Spirit of Truth. Religious experience is basically a personality-to-personality phenomenon at its heart. You bang up against spiritual reality, recognize it and wholly adopt it as part of your personality and bingo! You’ve been invaded by divinity and have become more real. (Alright, so maybe you don’t actually bang into it, but you definitely wake up to it, relate to it and identify your personality with it (which isn’t an “it” at all). Also, you have to be looking for it in the first place in order to “see” it . . . reality that is . . . which is not an “it,” but God.)
p2095:4 196:3.17 Every time man makes a reflective moral choice, he immediately experiences a new divine invasion of his soul. Moral choosing constitutes religion as the motive of inner response to outer conditions. But such a real religion is not a purely subjective experience. It signifies the whole of the subjectivity of the individual engaged in a meaningful and intelligent response to total objectivity—the universe and its Maker.
Angela wrote: Indulge me, I’m philosophising — but isn’t our own conscious religious experience an ever-expanding awareness of connection upon connection and layer of meaning upon layer of meaning, as we progress through the seven circles.
The psychic, or cosmic circles, are more than awareness of connections, it’s about attuning to reality and deciding to identify with it, which occurs when you decide to act upon it. You can be aware intellectually and not choose to act on it, or not choose to discover higher values/ideals. The psychic circles require decision-action, and lots of it. The reason why they use the word “indirectly” in quote 110:6.19 is because you can have a spiritual experience at any circle level and have it change your orientation to reality, but progress in the circles requires repeated decision making, which is not entirely dependent upon spiritual religious experience.
Angela wrote: Worship and reflection is met with revelation, right? As we meditate on cosmic meaning we become ever more mindful of our relationship to cosmic reality. As we cultivate sensitivity to divine values we overcome barriers to understanding cosmic values.
Well, I guess it depends on what you’re worshipping and reflecting on. If you’re worshipping and reflecting on your feelings, then maybe not. I don’t think you can ever become conscious of true worship though, possibly only the desire for it. Reflection, on the other hand, is definitely useful if it’s directed properly, as you say, on reality. I could reflect on myself and my feelings if my entire cosmic reality is wrapped up in myself and my navel . . . just sayin’. True reflection would be exercising one’s powers of discrimination on all three levels of cosmic reality: causation, duty and spiritual, then discovering, recognizing, interpreting and choosing higher and higher meanings and values, right?
Are you’re talking about auto-revelation? I don’t think we are always conscious of auto-revelation since it is Adjuster derived. But we definitely can attune our inner sight in such a way that is directed toward discovering it. Prayer, or prayerful reflection and meditation work nicely for that. Prayer has to be person-to-person though, even though you have to accept on faith alone that the other divine person is there listening and responding, albeit on a different level than you’re conscious of. Whole hearted desire alone is enough to make changes on superconscious levels, which will bear fruit in their own time.
143:7.4 Prayer is designed to make man less thinking but more realizing; it is not designed to increase knowledge but rather to expand insight.
p1216:6 111:1.5 And it is not so much what mind comprehends as what mind desires to comprehend that insures survival; it is not so much what mind is like as what mind is striving to be like that constitutes spirit identification. It is not so much that man is conscious of God as that man yearns for God that results in universe ascension. What you are today is not so important as what you are becoming day by day and in eternity.
