 163. Terminology |
NATURE SPIRITS: The spirit or consciousness in nature which directs the growth of plants, trees, flowers, and animals.
NEOPLATONISM: Medieval philosophy combining Plato's teachings and religious thinking.
NEW AGE: Contemporary philosophy that stresses higher spiritual consciousness on a global level.
NIHILISM: The ultimate in a despairing, negative worldview. Utter hopelessness.
NINDRAS: Ideas which are obtained or relieved during sleep or astral travel, but most often forgotten on awakening.
NIRVANA: Liberation from the body-mind, basically the same as enlightenment, self realization, Satori, Samadhi, etc.
NOMINALISM: The Middle Ages belief that opposed the Aristotelian theory of Universals.
NOUMENA: Kant's name for the metaphysical world, the reality that lies beyond our ability to perceive.
OBJECTIVISM: Ayn Rand's popular twentieth-century view that combines rugged individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.
OBJECTIVITY: The idea that knowledge does not reflect personal concerns, but its true for everybody.
OCKHAM'S RAZOR: The philosophical version of the slogan: Keep it simple. The simplest solution to a problem or question is also usually the correct one.
OEDIPUS COMPLEX: In Freudian psychology, the problem young boys experience when they feel in competition with their father for their mother's love. This complex sometimes persists in later life.
OJAS: The highest form of energy in the human body. If expressed as an aura, it would be a golden glow or halo around the head.
OM or AUM: And the modern version is now "Amen," means "I believe." The vibration of creation. The "word" of God.
ONTOLOGY: The study of being, or existence. Ontologists want to know what we mean when we say something exists.
"OPEN EYES": The phrase graphically describes the non-exclusive, non-inward, native State of the Divinely Self-Realized Adept, Who is Identified Unconditionally with the Divine Reality, while also allowing whatever arises to appear in the Divine Consciousness (and spontaneously Recognizing everything that arises as only a modification of That One.) The Transcendental Self is intuited in the mature phases of the advanced stage of life, but It can be Realized at that stage only by the forced (or Grace-Given) exclusion of the phenomena of world, body, mind, and self. In "Open Eyes," that impulse to exclusion is unnecessary, as "the Eyes of the Heart Open" and Perfect Realization of the Spiritual, Transcendental, and Divine Self in the final stage of life becomes permanent and incorruptible by any phenomenal events.
