in his younger years my father had found inspiration in theosophy (H.Blavatsky) and he kept busy studying Paracelsus all his life, the Kabbalah and the Bhagavad Gita.
i grasped as a child that all religions have just one source as all words have, of which the latter was not hard to believe with continous exploration of etymology.
my young curiosity made me ask questions without end.
at school i met the teachings of christianity in various aspects, crude and ridden with guilt and sacrifice and blood and a history of martyrdom and heroism. I couldn't see any path to follow in it, and i could not find to "believe" as requested.
in my later years, what put me off in my mid-twenties, was not so much studying medicine and coming to modern scientific thinking: it was the mistrust in a hierarchical order of the universe.
in theosophy though admitting multiple universes which i find attractive to this day, a human is shown to consist of lower and higher levels from the mere physical to the highest spiritual level.
only: up to this day i cannot see the division between matter and spirit, i see matter is spirit. it is a perception, a working in the mind.
i feel the human should not bee seen in this way, in the division of parts less worth and more worth
nor in a light centered only on the human itself. i rather put the question: is the rose bush worth less than the rose as a flower? and is not the rose the same as we are, the universe and the earth unfolding?
hierarchy thinking is quickly arrogant and creates a division between "them" and "us".
when hierachically structured systems are used, this is easily taken as a tool for domination.
To be clear, it is as if to say: this is more beautiful than this. such a statement must be untrue. either something or somebody whatever these words can mean is seen as beautiful or as not beautiful.
the quality of beauty is lost in comparison.
it is the same with ugliness. i could say, it is ugly as an experience to see somebody
cruelly torturing an animal. when i should start to compare it to other ugly experiences,
the quality of ugliness may be lost in its full meaning.
unfortunately our perception of the experiene of qualities gets blunted by repetition and comparison.
as an example, this is brought on to happen with the daily news. one war and one suffering after the other appear on our tv screens for commercial entertainment. it is too easy to say, this is bad. and o, this is really bad. this is worse. in the end, thanks god i am not there.
this is exactly what happens: this stream of ugliness takes our presence away and in the end may even bore us and leave us in total estrangement from us and reality.
the quality of ugliness is lost, and boredom is the result.
now comes the difficult part, and it confuses me.it will continue to confuse me.
it is the badness in the world as i wouldn't know another name or term.
it confuses me, even my own..
it is very clearly there.
and there are people whom i experience as more bad than others.
it see it as important in each case NOT to compare them to other bad people.
it would again make badness a matter of "relatively" bad or "absolute" bad or not "so" bad.
i cannot accept this. bad is bad.
the difficult part now is: are people who concentrate a lot of badness in them less developed
spiritually than others? i don't know because there are many people who are not in any visible way developing much at all, they are just living restrained in their badness by law, opinion and habit, their narrow perspective doesn't allow their badness to come outside the full way. under other circumstances i could easily imagine them as wardens in a concentration camp.
so, without fixing this to hierarchical systems, i think there are persons spiritually more developed than others and it is not just a matter of intellect and intelligence acquired from books but a result of the heart of life itself flowering and smiling.
and it appears to me that it is more easy for some to allow this to be than for others, from birth.
for the "many" it can be true that they remember this in their depth and they have to fight through rubbish and obstacles, through clouds and memories and tears to create space for their heart and spirit to flow.
the old teachings in zen, in meditation, as long as they don't give a system, they can be some of the tools to create space by dissolving the inner noise and clouds.
the only wisdom i can see is kindness.
not a temporary personal enlightenment nor to reach a far and egoistic goal of non-reincarnation.
just light.
http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/ImagesRepository/ijts/Downloads/Friedman%20et%20al%20Spiritual%20Development.pdf
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