The first movement is toward self’s union with God which runs parallel with the psychological process of integration, wherein the emphasis is on interior trials and dark nights by which the self is established in a permanent union with God — the still-point and axis of its being.
It was an interesting read but there were some parts that flew over my head. I don’t understand what this sentence above means at all. I am just going to say I am glad I am an atheist and avoided spirituality, seems harder to make sense of than calculus. I understand the definitions of the words but I don’t understand the context and I gather it is not an expression or idiomatic description.
To me this post ultimately highlights the permanent battle between the “Objective and the Subjective”.
I rejected Richard’s writings at first because there was nothing I could subjectively relate to. I mistook it for spirituality at first. I couldn’t relate to ever having had a PCE at all (I could relate to descriptions of EE’s though). However, I could see the sense in what he was advocating, happy and harmless and such, and that there was a discernible method that didn’t require any belief, in the same way that one can give me instructions on how to start a fire or make a paper aeroplane. Additionally, that I would be an authority of such experiences that I would not answer to Richard or anybody involved in the process, there would be no gurus, priests, middle people etc.
Every person who has subsequently become free I have viewed with scepticism and cynicism as seems my ingrained inclination. I don’t take what people say at face value. Ultimately, if they are lying or being deceptive or have incorrectly defined the state they are genuinely experiencing that is their issue and not mine. Maybe this is the result of growing up surrounded by pathological liars.
On Zulip, I put several of what I thought were fair questions to Craig as regards the nature of his subjective beliefs that to me didn’t seem in agreement with what I had understood about this method and this universe that we inhabit and I don’t think he ever adequately answered them. Not that he has to answer me (I am no authority on who’s free or on the validity of experiences) but for me the inability to answer clearly and openly always rings alarm bells. From years of debating religious and spiritual people online and in the flesh, to me it always comes down to “I just know.” or “We have to agree to disagree.”
The defence of one’s subjective beliefs/experiences as some unknowable or unchallengeable concept. To me everything else in the universe seems repeatable, knowable in the realms of the technological limitations of ones era.
This domain of one’s subjective experiences seems to be the source of all my conflict with the humans in my life; wife, siblings, colleagues etc, that if they have a subjective experience I must accept it as a fact. I don’t validate people’s beliefs or subjective experiences and it makes them very uncomfortable.
I wonder if things like Elon Musk’s Neuralink will begin to open doors in making the subjective more objective.
) way.
). Something to that effect anyway.