 157. Spiritual Experience |
However, the instructions given to new initiates into the mystical or inner path are themselves only metaphors for experiential revelations that will develop as the inner practices develop toward maturity. Therefore, only the most mature devotee both experiences and understands the secret of mystical religion and cosmology. Mystical knowledge of the body-mind of Man, not the material and knowable universe outside the body-mind of Man.
Thus, in the final phase of Re-cognition, the position of the brain as the controlling mechanism of the sense functions is no longer the point of consideration. Rather, the mechanism of attention itself, prior to states of mind or body, is inspected in the Life-Current. The practice at this stage has correspondences with jnana yoga and certain meditation practices found in the schools of Buddhism.
The import of practice at this stage is the discovery of the Transcendental Condition of the presumed personal or separate soul. But the practice and the profoundly inward Realization at this stage must at last be transcended, since it is dependent on the exclusion of the psycho-physical phenomena of both the brain core and the extended physical body.
Suddenly the "eyes" of the heart are opened, and the body-mind is no longer prevented or suppressed by the extreme motive of inwardness. And there is a profound Revelation in that Event, or Bodily Enlightenment. It is the Revelation that the world, the body, the mind, and all experience are simply forms of modification of the Life-Current, which is Transcendental or Free all the while. And the Life-Current is Realized to be not merely Energy, felt by the body or contemplated by the mind, but it is identical to Consciousness, which is Transcendental, prior to all forms. Thus, in the seventh state of life, all conditions, internal and external, high or low in the structure of human experience, are tacitly re-cognized to be unnecessary and temporary modifications of the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness, which is prior to all conceptions or experiences of God, or the soul, or the cosmic world.
