Spiritual Hierarchy–Its Nature and Relation to History and the Cultural Evolution of Humanity

What is Spirituality: A Montague of Answers from the Best Sources

 

A compilation about the essence of spirituality, what it is, what it means, and nature of direct realization or enlightenment. A video montage of personal narratives of spiritual experience.

Impersonal Misconceptions

 

When I reflect on those I’ve learned the most from, I find that they are very personal people. They tell of themselves, but in subtle artful ways, and their motive shines through. In any case, I know it is not helpful to hide ourselves, to cloak ourselves in a concept of philosophic impersonality. We shouldn’t fear personality, but should be natural. I think there is a sense in which we must be very personal, that is, we should be honestly ourselves. And we should not imagine that this is not good enough for a given situation. If we fail in this, I think we may do so because we are too personal in the wrong way.

What is impersonality? It is not non-personality but illuminated personality. And if personality, in some sense, is to be renounced, it would be good to have an actual one fully in place for the ceremony. And if renunciation is empowerment, then personality will be strengthened, and the reflected light will be intense. Perhaps a paradoxapersonality is in order. It might be the flowering of the same personality, the veiled unearthly lights, that we see everywhere.

Worldly Reflections

Without intuitive light, we exist imprisoned in symbols, in forms, in surrounding things. But by light we pass through symbol to meaning by way of intuition. Or failing this we are caught in symbol, mistaking it for the real. To be caught is easy, because symbols are not entirely dark–there is borrowed light in them, a moonlight reality, mirror of the sun’s radiation. Without the sunlight of intuition, only glamour is visible, and we exist then in an eerie moonlight world, knowing only surface lights. While moonlight is from the surface, sunlight shines from an inner depth. So moonlight is borrowed but sunlight is fiery-original and an apt symbol of intuition. On the surface we live in a moonlight world of things, yet rightly seen each natural thing conjures for us the sunlight world.

True life expresses in a radiance that illuminates all surrounding things. Knowledge or consciousness may be conceived as the source of this interior radiance–it is the light of intuition or teaching from within. It is revelation of truth, the release of imprisoned splendor.

Shocks of Beauty

 

Why is the perception of the real world such a shocking experience? Because it is so different, so unusual, being revelatory of both the grandeur that we are, and the littleness we often express. This contrast is shocking. Imagine how the awesome beauty of reality compares to the thoughtless ignorance of our daily life. We may see something so beautiful that it is painful. The beautiful itself is not painful, but the contrast between beauty and our newly revealed ignorance is most painful. Spirit is pure Beauty and it illuminates errors by contrast.