For me the comic illustrates what it would be like for an ego attempting to approach or live among the angels, if they reveal their fuller powers. I don’t have any doubts about this, that if the angels bring any kind of authentic reflections of the divine potential, the egos will all flee. We won't need any rules or laws, no banishment proceedings like the Hutterites or Amish. Instead merely to see the angels in ordinary daily interactions would strongly repel egos, like they are walking on fire. Everyone hates me, this I know. It is only a small amount of logic to see that if others bring anything like authentic reflections of my character, egos would run away with no need to insist, or legal proceedings.
I've been thinking about this recently, that there is momentum in life. If the angels gather, new channels emerge for energies, which are like new vistas in the interpersonal sphere. At first the angels could only enter these new vistas slowly, but if you are born into it all your energies would deployed in higher sectors, which are not available to sense consciousness. An ego encountering a group of angels thus not only encounters differences in opinion, but the entire momentum of mental energies, in which the expressions can grow extremely at odds with what the egos can produce or comprehend. Like Swedenborg I am limited to my experiences among humans, to imagining what it can be like with angels. The strongest indication I have seen was in "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944), where a woman announces unabashedly of the world's fair, "It must be like a fairy land!" To me that is a small sampling of angelic potential, which will be a right response to the miracle of God's creation. The egos by contrast are tied to a mundane consideration, mistaking sense alteration for value and complaining rather than rejoicing. So you hear a woman gushing like that, and your heart swoons along with her, the creation is like a magical land, she is right!
To the egos the world is marvelous only one time, as it is being discovered and analyzed to the senses. They are responding to stimulation of the senses as their meaning and value. To the angels the world is continuously marvelous, for they have awareness of the potential that there might have been nothing, rather than something. The egos would thus find the angels rejoicing over an orange, or a glass of milk, when they thought the subject had already become well-known and well-studied, thus losing interest. I saw this from Laurel as she described a glass of milk as being like "liquid flowers," and if the egos were dragged along with her a little ways, to tolerate this expression in her writings, they can by no means bear or withstand her constant awareness piercing from above the sense plane, rejoicing in what-is.
This really fascinates me, that the seeming naïveté of people who appreciate that it was possible there might have been nothing rather than something, is thousands and millions of times better than the blasé attitude of people who experience the senses then lose interest.
From angels I would thus expect a living spring of rejoicing over the intrinsic glories of creation, without reference to technology except as a support. This spring would be intensely aggravating to egos, who had thought the purpose of what-is or creation was to circle around desire.
From all the perspective of this lifetime, I see an easy and huge cleavage between the divine perception and the mundane perception, to the extent that there should be total repulsion between angels and egos, from the root of life in birth. Throw an ego in among angels, and his only desire will be to leave as soon as possible, at any cost he can imagine. I am talking about full-powered angels here, not half-powered as they try to maintain relevance to human affairs. A full-powered angel would absolutely kill egoism. Put many of the full-powered angels together and you have a totally-repulsive force against egos, like the invisible shields put up around a city in science fiction. Inside the city there is love and happiness, and though to the denizens of the city it all seems natural and ordinary, the egos hate it into the depths.
It struck me recently as utterly fantastic, that Easwaran never conceived of an entertainment beyond violence. I recall that Mary and many others at Ramagiri would read murder mysteries, and Easwaran himself cited with enthusiasm the murder mysteries of G. K. Chesterton, yet nowhere in there is any slightest impulse for an entertainment where all foul egoic motivations are nullified. Easwaran watched Mary reading these books, and said nothing. In fact he enjoyed it too, yet I'd stand there wondering why there couldn't be an entertainment arranged around people who thought rightly murder was a horror too hard to bear, who thought cooperation was thrilling and evil is better forgotten.
The point about regarding this as fantastic, is to see the Holy Spirit arrayed in total support of the life of Easwaran, while he yet was so impure that he could not lift his audience beyond violence. All that power was given to him, but he could not respond with actual virtue. To me, Shakespeare is like a violent dog whose head I'd love to crush. So many words emerged, but they reflected the violent human ideal, that is not like the divine ideal, and could only have been put in place to satisfy the greedy. An entertainment beyond violence, is violently beyond the potential of the entirety of human history. For it to emerge requires a power hitherto unseen, that I think would fully justify the expression of Jesus that He would return in "power and glory." All humanity is turned toward violence as power, but gentleness is the king.
There is no quick way to gain concentration or other skills of the spirit. I cannot shout to the people, "Come over here, then you will be equipped for Heaven!" There is no shaktipat, and there is no such thing as a "perfection talk," though the humans might expect something that can fit into the narrow window of their attention span. It is not only concentration, but awareness of the spiritual elements which constitute a personality, an area in which Easwaran was still totally dead. On the big-screen television
my wife and I bought recently, which allows much clearer perception of the aura, I saw Bruce Willis standing back and watching over a scene in which a child was treated roughly, though not abused. Watching him I imagined the forms of compassion running through his mind and heart, but I realized with a start today that Easwaran would have been blind to Bruce's inner dynamic! Examining what I am doing, I create a "space for nobility" where Bruce can expand in his native capacities, and I would appreciate and support it. In other words there was some emotional and mental commensurateness between the forms of his aura, his behaviors and speech, and what I might have felt and done under that circumstance.
This is more than an inner skill then, it requires vast inner powers and a purity that can recognize and support nobility rather than hating it and wishing to tear it down. A noble person walks into your life, and you understand how he is feeling and reacting, and together you can solve most problems. This requires perception of the interpersonal field on a spiritual basis, lifted above mere sense reaction and the petty pleasures of the ego, by which it imagines it can be made happy if another is miserable. When I've said the angels have been exhibiting the angelic persona in Hollywood, really it is something less than 10 % of their potential, the humans cutting off 90 % or more of what they can truly accomplish. If multiple persons can perceive the true interpersonal field, then they'd break away from those who lack this perception.
Universal love is not easy. It is not possible or desirable to feel a continuous sense-based attraction. Instead a deeper power is required, that is not overcome or influenced by the senses. The humans know only grasping for their love, so if they attempt universal love it is with this sensate emphasis, as they struggle to feel an emotion of liking all the others. The higher way is the direct spiritual perception, where you observe and cherish the noble attributes. Then you don't have to struggle to love, you don't have to keep applying a feeling of attraction. Instead by logic you are confronted continually by beings you can identify as lovable in their attributes, so your love is a response to the real.
Easwaran would not have felt attracted by Bruce Willis, but I did feel attracted. He is a mysterious, profound person, and I'd want to know more about what motivates him, why he acts and thinks as he does. I am not responding to the senses, but to what appeared to be the aspects of nobility, that in that particular scene in one of his movies, he was really looking at another person in their intrinsic attributes, with a well-coordinated response of compassion and support, banishing evil automatically from awareness of pure spirit. Easwaran used to try to say that love was a skill, but this is far more advanced than he could begin to understand. You have to be able to see another person as noble from real attributes they are exhibiting, create a large warm space for them in your heart, and then engage in actions to bring them joy.
Aggression is not divine. Aggression can only arise in a situation without spiritual awareness. If you perceive others as living spirit, then you see immediately that aggression is unfriendly and will cut you off from warm social interactions, which are the major source of meaning in a world. Aggression arises when the mind is able to think about itself in isolation from other spiritual entities, which is a state of delusion. Thus when I wrote that the angels are "fiercely independent," it was an error induced from the limitations of language. The angels know no ferocity. All aggression is from the animals, which is to say the beings who are ignorant of spirit, and identifying with the body believe they can be made happier if another is miserable or pushed out of the way. In the higher state, one sees that the "game of life" is in spiritual interaction. You are therefore always thrilled to encounter other living beings, ready to grow in your own spirit and happy to see them grow in theirs. This delusional state of conceiving one is at the top by pushing all others down, is the source of all violence and trouble in history.
Through its somber black motif, the comic insinuates that the complexity of language, including multiple languages, might make humans sufficiently rational. Yet the comic shows the girl following the foundational duality of exchange, her mind tracing a reactionary pattern to her sense experience without valuing persons nearby for their spirits. The human mind is like a trash compactor, as it attempts to think about other persons. The family somehow gets in there "closer" so that they hide their terrible faces of unconcern and abandonment, but with all others it is obvious they have no heart of response. This was true of Easwaran too, after samadhi. His heart was cold to the intellectual and emotional presence of those around him, nor could he warm his heart by any conscious effort. To create a warm space in the heart for real others requires self-knowledge, so you know you are a spirit with specific properties you can also list. Without that the others come in as apparitions of human bodies, and you wonder how to dominate the situation while allowing them "self-respect" in their forms of domination.
If you have spiritual awareness, then you are always living in a huge treasure room. Everywhere you look in your community there are noble persons manifesting unique and intriguing attributes, and your mind is fully occupied cataloging their traits and forming loving mental models for their personalities. If your mind is arrayed in this advanced manner, that is beyond sense contagion, then all talk of presents is insulting. You had been thinking about their personality, suddenly they thrust an object in your face, expecting to create mutual value! You begin to understand they must have a primitive mind, and are not really forming a mental model for your personality, but had thought to curry favor by making a trade, "Remember me, here is another object to carry on your back through life." Now you also find the person expecting you to value them for the sake of this trade, which is to say they are unaware you had been building a mental model for their personality, and such trades are not quintessential to spiritual properties, so are always distracting. This is just one of the mental gymnastics angels require, when dwelling among humans. They also find themselves cut off at every turn for what they'd regard to be warm and fitting discourse, for aware of spirit, the angels always present information in a personal context, but humans repeat their sense experience raw and unedited, which is chaotic and backward from the perspective of pure spirit. In this situation the angels hardly know themselves, for it is a very great work to bend down to try to meet the egoic mind where it dwells in body-identification and ignorance. You have to have some consciousness there which agrees with and responds to what they are saying or doing, but the higher potential is totally hidden, and you also don't enjoy yourself.
To state this a little more clearly, an angel dwelling among humans must put on a false face which will seem commensurate and responsive to the humans. It is like a little ugly head that grows out of the back of their higher and nobler potential. Deep inside the angel always feels disturbed when interacting with egos, but the cause of the disturbance seems difficult to trace, for part of this "ugly head" is a feeling that they are really human, not much different from the others. If the angel does not project this false face, it becomes immediately apparent that their thinking is not commensurate with those around them. This incommensurateness has no pattern in history for comprehension, thus as varied angels have attempted to bring forth a little awareness, they often followed the route made available in society, that if they were very different, perhaps they were insane. Angels have the power to pretend to be human, but it creates this bifurcation in them that I relate. They feel deeply disturbed, but are not able to trace their own virtues for no comparisons are available in sense experience, where humans lack all the virtues! The standards of virtue are surprising and the opposite of what egos expect. Humans are only good, out of selfish motivation.
The cartoonist here would say Gracie had been a "good girl" and so had a "rightful expectation" of presents from Santa Claus at Christmas. An angel who had retracted the "ugly head of human commensurateness," would see behaviors that look nearly animalistic, for Gracie is missing every mental element of constructing warm mental models for other persons, her mind revolving around objects in her idea of value. The living people are going to create their meaning in warm, stable, interactions. They have the virtue of true friendliness, that is a rational response to the perception of noble attributes. This virtue has never been seen on Earth, except occasionally among the disciples of the Lord. The gurus of today lack this virtue, and represent the conquest of domination rather than true divine glory, which includes profound awareness of the surrounding spiritual dynamic and responsiveness to the other living persons. Jesus would have said that Gracie is mostly dead, as when He remarked to the disciples, "Let the dead bury their own dead." She would look at Him, and fail to see the divine Person.
Out in the cold, I can see the Source of warmth more clearly, for instance being the first on Earth to observe that money is damned unfriendly. Money springs from the root of human thought, yet all that movement is foul and derived from the senses, not the spiritual core.
Humans have not yet classified failure to bestow the five essentials as an unkindness. This is because their vision is of an ever-expanding humanity where the general mood is that work is disliked. Pockets of oppression and poverty stay owing to this unstable and unwise vision.
More than this, I behold the Holy Spirit turning human faces to one another in every relationship and group. None have yet been turned in the direction of Kurt, but when they are, how valuable can that be to me now that I've beheld this truth? I'd rather have a few good friends.
The ego begins and carries on its business by initially making an enemy out of all others, as it conceives them to be competitors over the object-field. This is just how the ego thinks, it wanted to grab, but others interfered that it then dislikes, or occupies itself trying to manipulate.
Money is thus a form of extortion against living spirit, where you deny that the other spirits should have automatic and logical rights to all the five essentials of life, so they can experience joy. To humanity it is natural to think about money, because to them the spirit is not wonderful.
These are the goodniks, and I've long felt the cartoonist responsible for this strip is in dhyana, not an angel. It still remains the most likely proposition to me, that the population is going to split, the meek inheriting the Earth while the pure in heart see God. Dhyana is not truly meek, but it hates war. Its motivation is not selfless. The reason it hates war and interpersonal conflict too, is that outward stress makes it difficult to continue ascending in awareness of inward states and the slight tastes of ecstasy dhyana receives. The higher reason to cease from war is that you can witness the violence in the emotional states of others, whose joys you cherish. Dhyana still groans and grinds, over the notion that another can be happy, so it cannot enter authentic Golden Rule Thinking. It is likely that dhyana could establish a more egalitarian distribution of wealth, but I'd be surprised to see it ready to obliterate money and capitalism entirely. Those people still want their prestige, their sensible distinctions from others, although they tend to dislike abject poverty because, again, it interferes with inward progress.
True meekness is a complete withdrawal from the tendency to domination, supported by awareness of the spiritual core, which is a living divine personality. The spiritual aspirants are in dhyana, the heart chakra having opened. Below them are the philosophers in dharana, in which the second and third chakras are open, and below that the politicians in pratyahara, where the basal chakra is open. These three states comprise sattva, where there is some spiritual consciousness awakening. Below them are the most numerous states today, rajas which is energy without organization, and tamas which lacks energy too. This is the spiritual pyramid underlying human existence, secretly shown on the dollar bill, where the "floating eye" above the pyramid represents the illuminati, the ones who are awakening to awareness from above the body. Human civilization has been built by pratyahara, which with a smattering of spiritual awareness is able to find ecstasy in organizing and leading the lower states. These have been the generals and politicians all along, and why this world is not yet beautiful.
Though the Holy Spirit presents massive overlays of power against the human souls, still there is great evil generated within those minds. The Holy Spirit tries to pick up the people to say to me, "Kurt, I am at one with these beings, it is like that verse on which you used to meditate, 'He is that man, he is that woman, he is that old man too, tottering on his staff.'" But watching specific decisions and actions of theirs, it is clear an antagonism enters the equation that is not derived from any part of God's being, except in the most abstract sense as Brahman has created the flecks of spirit to form souls from unthinking regions of His own spirit. All things emerge from Brahman, but the Agents of Creation, which are the Solar System Formers and the higher Gods who acted with powers bestowed to them by Brahman to create and uphold the universe, are primary living Ones who insist they are separate from Brahman in profound ways, granting individuality.
The souls by their own powers end up queerly against the creation, including their own long-term best interests as spiritual entities. They hate one another, and they also do not know their own nature, for to know oneself opens the portals of universal love for all that was made. Although they are against creation, they still believe they're creating value for themselves that will endure, as they act on the material plane. The conundrum of the scientists is that certain intellectual disciplines or channels have arisen, by which weak spirits can act powerfully upon the material creation. Souls devoid of spiritual wisdom can wield the tools of science to great effect, including incredibly intricate mathematics and the appearance of genius through alterations in externalized consciousness. They are cold-hearted but brilliant, savage yet effective. These scientists have cast themselves as the enemies of spirit, in effect prohibiting ecstatic consciousness through their laws.
When Ramakrishna came, Vivekananda also came to Him to say, "I always wanted to meet an individual who had God-perception." Thus in nineteenth century Calcutta the Lord and His disciples set up shop over affairs of the spirit, under the noses of the scientific and industrial community of that day, which was already pervasive in its influence on culture and history. However the Lord has a higher route against humanity, by which they can be criticized severely from huge faults in intellect and emotion, as they fail to act from awareness above the senses. If they are criticized in this manner, they cannot react because the critique is at the level of being itself. They are that hateful thing the Lord notices, not the ones who can hear about it and restore a right function to irrational and unlikable minds. Perhaps sadhana offers a chance for amelioration of these major defects in being, perhaps not. But the creatures are wrong before their Creator, fragments of ugliness.
This is one of the poignant things about humanity, that they nearly seem to ascend to ecstatic consciousness in their love for tropical vacations, but no one who lives in the tropics can remain ecstatic about his situation for more than a few weeks. Here, sense pleasures and ecstatic consciousness seem to be mixed, for the appearances of happiness in a tropical environment are reminiscent of true warm-heartedness. Let's see that all the time, let's see you display such joy when turning in any direction to consider all the people around you!
I've been thinking lately the minds of humans are like prunes, which are dried-up plums. The ripe plum is fat and succulent, and when dried it is still sweet, so the analogy is not too accurate since the human minds are devoid of sweetness. But these minds can turn to the family members with seeming warmth, yet when they turn to consider those outside the family there is an immediate freeze or shriveling as they say, "Oh, THOSE people," as if those others are irrelevant to whatever they thought their project was in the human frame. They pack in the sweetness for family members, but everything is dried and shriveled if you try to talk about who is outside the family. This is weakness. They are unable to form warm and rich mental models for others, and if you investigate, you see their models for those in the family are also cold.
Situated in the human frame and feeling smugly confident it will always be theirs, men exhibit the trait of malevolence without understanding this marks them as hateful not only before God, but before others of their own kind. There is no real justification for this feeling of smugness, which arises as a single-life phenomenon as they gain experience bullying others and getting their own way. They did not place their own souls, and at death they are completely at the mercy of the Transmigrator, which so far has handed out births like candy, as if everything is occurring naturally and human consciousness might even be biochemical in its origins, as many scientists believe. If a couple is out hiking, they report disquiet when meeting others on the trail, that the serenity of the occasion has been marred. But the couple that they met, will report the same thing about them! Humans are by nature irascible, unable to keep a rock-solid basis of harmony as their guiding light under all circumstances. If an unlikable person complains that another is unlikable, he almost seems to gain an advantage. This is one of the very deceptive attributes of language. The trouble is within them too, not only within the other, which is why Jesus warned against judging others.
In order to remain non-malevolent in all interactions, a direct spiritual perception is required, so you know at each instant what is injurious in discourse and action against other living spirits. If you don't have this perception, you don't have a good idea about a living person, and you think about them in terms of object-models, looking for ways to manipulate, dominate, or abuse. These object-models are an advance over raw animal consciousness, which forms virtually no ideas about other members of the species, but they are as distant from the divine potential as ants from the human realm. Aggression in all its forms interferes with the rule of logic, for you obscure the ability of others in the situation to find and express the truth, with what amounts to whining as you suck in everyone around to focus on you in your incapacities, wondering what they can do when you are carrying on so heatedly but don't really know what you are saying, and stop responding to truth.
These two have been feuding, but this resolution is not true harmony between their minds. Instead it is a mere reduction in a sensate tension they could not bear, as they struggled with a self-image of persons not at peace with family members. Various souls have varying degrees of striving for this ideal, and family feuds tend to be rare in dhyana for this reason. They now return to the former image of peace within the family, as the ahankara of each hides the underlying egoism that was the real cause of the disturbance, which can only be addressed through millions of lifetimes of sadhana. When two souls rise to independent reason, harmony is natural since what is rational and grounded on direct spiritual perception cannot be rightfully disputed. When one or the other is distant from objective reason, they become irascible and unlikable, bound to trouble, as the Bible says, like sparks fly upward. The dispute between them is traceable to causes that can be examined, and a logical resolution existed without necessitating a melodramatic display of tears which hide the fact that neither is an adept in personal relations. In the case of an angel mixed with a human, the resolution may be departure for a happier situation.
It is difficult to describe the harmony of advanced minds without sounding cold, because when a soul has enough power to exist in warmth independently, they cease to lean on others physically as is shown here with these disgraceful hugs. They also cease to schmooze or share mutual validations with others. They cease from complaining, only speaking if they are prepared to take action over their complaint. There is a long list of negatives, things that were reactions to the senses but are now missing, if I try to describe the perfectly inoffensive personality. To such a person lost in the world today, it is hard to tell about the higher condition. Such people tend to be cast out in feelings of affection for those around them, but failing to notice consciously those feelings are never returned as they were sent out, so that they could begin to see they belong to a different class of persons. They likely need an act of power to awaken them, driving them to the truth.
There are no examples in the world to which I can point to say, "There is the divine society." The ideas to form the root of such a society have also never been presented in history. To imagine it, you need to think about a classless, moneyless system, where each person is valued for his or her desire to work for the good of all. Since there is a division of labor, you also benefit indirectly from your work, but you don't think about giving and getting in return. Instead you think only about giving your best at all times, understanding logically that if the others act in that way too, the society will be beautiful beyond imagining. There is no prestige. The farmer is as valued as the doctor, for both are needful and the one who performs the needful task is fully worthy of association with the others, his intellect powerful and wise.
No one seeks a job by desire. Instead a pool of administrators formed from the over-fifty crowd of those who worked their entire adult life, makes an assessment of what jobs are truly needed, and these are assigned to the youth. These youths understand they are not experienced enough to know what society needs, and are very grateful not to be tasked with such weighty decisions. They see their role as demonstrating the power to be flexible, adapting themselves to the assigned role, understanding that in their next birth they will likely be tasked with a different role. Since the young are more physically potent, roles requiring physical labor are often assigned during the twenties, with a shift to mentally-oriented work and retraining occurring in the thirties. In such a system, administrators must be incorruptible.
The people are very spiritual in their orientation, so beginning at the age of sixteen or so, everyone meditates at least a half hour every morning without fail, for which the communities build beautiful meditation halls. The advanced souls always crave meditation, for it allows them to experience an ecstasy from above the senses, grounding their daily lives in a context above body-consciousness. Meditation is also a social activity, for you get to see the others of your daily association entering profound states of mind, living in a "mystery beyond."
The powerful souls crave a community, because they have the capacity to form hundreds or thousands of warm mental models for others. Since each begins with the perfectly inoffensive personality, very advanced and subtle nuances extend into daily living, where they are thrilled to get to know so many others that they see, a little here, a little there, over decades. The only reference to this phenomenon is to a "communion of the saints," and humans have proved themselves manifestly incapable of forming stable communitarian living arrangements.
In this communion, you are surrounded by nobility on every side, which means no negativity or anger, only happy chances and people who are never harsh or unkind. If the very root of anger is pulled out, the divine personality begins. Then you find many intricate social structures coming into play, where your ideas about what you can do with the others and how they can be expected to react begin to evolve and to take flight. All of this social warmth comes into play in a land without touching, since everyone recognizes that touch is the "dark sense," giving no information about personality and interfering with the formation of profound mental models for others. See, in order to describe this I need to take a step that the human race will not allow to me. It is a step into awareness of personality, without distractions of the senses.
The more I think about a divine society, the more human social standards fill me with horror. These are beings who are missing the point of existence itself, their minds lost in material manipulations, unable to focus on the growth of spirit, which would be their own power in eternity!
My idea about a warm social gathering is totally alien to human standards, and something that would look cold and uninteresting to them. Only if you'd achieved true sweetness in personality, and valued interactions in themselves, would you understand what is occurring there.
They call me antisocial, but their thinking from its roots begins with enmity against all others, as they see objects and think, "mine," instantly rendering the others competitors over the object-field, that is the only place they see value. History has been ugly by the absence of divinity.
I could make a movie about my conceptions, but who would act in it, and who would want to see it? There are the divine beings acting in noble ways, existing in pure selflessness and no end of positive social creativity, working hard for one another's joy, and continually ecstatic.
These things are tough to describe, and easier for me to exemplify. People devoid of egoism have never been seen acting in their powers on Earth before. They are likable individuals, but only by those who share their kind of power. They know how to contribute to spiritual joy.