 157. Spiritual Experience |
Great masters, saints, and spiritual teachers go "in and out" of the spiritual eye, the pranic star "door" of salvation. Jesus said: "I am the door: By me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. (In "mystic" meditation only - there are other forms of meditation in which no inner vision is seen or needed.)
-Yogananda
The thief (Maya or delusion) cometh not but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I (the Christ consciousness) am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (as spirit).
-Jesus, John 10:9, 10
Bodily weakness sometimes produces hallucinations which are mistaken for spiritual visions.
Self discipline is not to be confused with bodily torture, the habitual practice of asceticism or self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, unprofitable, and ought not to be followed.
-The Buddha
The parts of religious experience are universal in space and in time. They are found in different parts of the world and in different periods of it's history, attesting to the persistent unity and aspiration of the human spirit. The illuminations of the Hindu and the Buddhist seers, of Socrates and Plato, of Philo and Plotinus, belong to the same family, thought the theological attempts to account for them reflect the temperments of the race and the epoch.
-S. Radhakrishnan
Esoteric Knowledge is Transcended in the Final Stage of Self-Realization
Conventional mysticism communicates through metaphors of the Objective or Independent Creator Deity, the immortal soul, and the Spiritual Cosmos or Hierarchy of planes and heavens and powers. Thus, the language of mysticism is wedded to the religious or dualistic conception of God and soul, as well as the conception of a cosmic scheme, wherein the soul descends from God and, by ascending, returns to God.
But truly, the secret key to Wisdom concealed in mystical language is not religious philosophy nor an visionary or scientific description of the cosmos. The literal plane in which mystical activity takes place is not the cosmic world of soul travel but the ordinary body of Man. The key to mystical language and religious metaphor is not theology or cosmology but anatomy. All the religious and cosmological language of mysticism is metaphorical. And the metaphors are symbols for anatomical features of the higher functional structures of the human individual.
Those who enter deeply into the mystical dimension of experience soon discover that the cosmic design they expected to find in their inward path of ascent to God is in fact simply the design of their own anatomical or psycho-physical structures. Indeed, this is the secret divulged to initiates of mystical schools.
The world of ordinary men has traditionally been given only the exoteric instruction, wherein Man is described as a fleshy mortal with an immortal inner part. The exoteric instruction is essentially a moral and devotional teaching, offering salvation after death, when the mortal part falls away and the soul stands naked before the God above Nature.
But those who mature in self-discipline, moral sacrifice, and prayerful surrender are naturally drawn into a deeper consideration of the Condition of human existence. They inter into the inner path, the esoteric or mystical path. When they begin to enter the mystical path, they are given "secret teachings," or esoteric descriptions of the cosmic planes that will be experienced during the ascent to God. And such new initiates are also given instructions in the mystical attainment of inversion (or withdrawl of attention from the outward movement of the sense organs) - in the forms of higher methods of prayer, yoga, and so forth.
