SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, part II

SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, part II - by Guenther Zuehlsdorf, translation from the original German edition into Portuguese by Huberto Rohden and translated into English by Flavio de Mello.

 

 

 

 

To internalize and the deep intuition will eventually convince man that exists within a distinctly knowable Reality, which needs no demonstration of magical character, occult, or miraculous. All occult phenomena always runs towards superstition. The history of religions is, in this sense, the history of lack of human discernment, that always try to materialize spiritual things, worshiping them in shapes and images or wishing to see them as miracles and experiments.

 

 

The more man lacks the consciousness of his essence, the more grows in him the craze of wanting to see miracles and wonders and  to consider them as a means to strengthen his faith. What seems to us a miracle, such as the "supernatural" cure of a disease, it is inexplicable solely on the present state of our experience; but, viewed from a higher perspective, it is entirely natural, effect of our mental capacity or consciousness, which has nothing to do with a supposed power that acts upon us externally. Alexandre Ular, the translator of Lao-Tse, rightly says that the miracles attributed to men transformed into mythological heroes, are always in everywhere the same. Man gives to the hero what he interprets as superhuman: powers that he himself desire; the living resurrect the dead; wild waves are calmed; sick are cured; water is converted into intoxicating liquor. To Lao-Tse, Buddha and Christ are reported the same wonders. So are interpreted as thaumaturge men who came into the world to free us from spiritual blindness and awaken in us, the faculty of the inner vision. So tiny is the confidence that man has in his own inner Reality, this element that rests his life, that he always tries to subordinate this Reality to the needs of his physical life.

 

 

This transposition of consciousness, from the essential centre to the periphery, from the reality of the intimate Being to the illusion of the external facts, resembles an expulsion from paradise.

 

 

From there, man finds himself exposed to various kinds of enslavement; delivered to an incessant here and there of replacements, of material and spiritual aspect, in order to camouflage the sensation of pain of his inner vacuum. Weaves a magic carpet, from the lowest animalism to the highest philosophy; only in rare moments of grace that man can be himself. He does not live his own life, guided by his inner intuition; is guided by external images and theories without account. Goes to the extreme to apply to the spiritual world, the Absolute Reality, the scientific principles of the relative world, eventually being lost in an inextricable mythological labyrinth. Men are, in the words of Ramana Maharishi, often like sleepwalkers, so intent upon the alleged reality of their dreams, that in no way wants to be awakened.

 

 

According to this, man should convince himself clearly that no external help can save him, nor even the institutions and authorities regarded as sacred; what redeems man is only what he finds within himself, a true self-knowledge and a total transformation of his consciousness. Too long was the period during which man clung to the belief that a formal creed could produce the inner experience he lacked. Now he  has to recognize that, somehow, is enough to profess a creed by simple obedience, by force of routine or practical convenience. Man should not ever trust what, others before him, lived or investigated; he must plumb to the depths of his own; should develop his own religious consciousness. What completes the really religious man is not the object of his veneration, but rather as his way of thinking and acting; what matters is that his daily experiences rises from the highest comprehension that he is able, in the deep abyss of his being.

 

 

For comments:    dawn.3rd.heaven@gmail.com