Swedenborg, mystic born in1688, was the Leonardo Da Vinci of his era. He was the leading mathematician
in Sweden, and spoke 9 languages...Throughout all of this he meditated regularly, and when he reached
middle age, developed the ability to enter deep trances during which he left his body and visited
what appeared to him to be heaven...The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote an entire book on
Swedenborg, entitled Dreams of a Spirit - Seer. According to Swedenborg, the information that arose
during the opening of the Book of Lives was recorded in the nervous system of the person's spiritual
body. Thus, in order to evoke the life review an "angel" had to examine the individual's entire
body "beginning with the fingers of each hand, and proceeding through the whole." ... Dole, who
holds degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Harvard, notes that one of the most basic tenets of Swedenborg's
thinking is that our universe is constantly created and sustained by two wavelike flows, one from
heaven and one coming from our own soul or spirit. "If we put these images together, the resemblance
to the hologram is striking," says Sole, "We are constituted by the intersection of two flows -
one direct, from the divine, and one indirect, from the divine via our environment. We can view
ourselves as interference patterns, because the inflow is a wave phenomenon, and we are where the
waves meet."
Sri Aurobindo [born 1872 a thinker, political activist, Yogic teacher, and mystic whom Indians
revere alongside Gandhi...]. Through meditation, he eventually learned to become, in his own words,
"an explorer of the planes of consciousness." One of his most intractable obstacles he had to overcome
was to learn how to silence the endless chatter of words and thoughts...To plumb the subtler and
more implicate regions of the psyche does indeed require a Bohmian shift of attention. ...
"We fragment things because we exist at a lower vibration of consciousness and reality", says
Aurobindo, and it is our propensity [tendency] for fragmentation that keeps us from experiencing
the intensity of consciousness, joy, love and delight for existence that are the norm in these higher
and more subtle realms.
Just as Bohm believes that it is not possible for disorder to exist in a universe that is ultimately
unbroken and whole, Sri Aurobindo believed that the same was true of consciousness ...
But if the cosmos is ultimately ineffable, a farrago of multicoloured vibrations, what are
all the forms we perceive? What is physical reality? It is, said Sri Aurobindo, just "a mass of
stable light."
We must not only cut asunder the snare of the mind and the senses, but flee also from the snare
of the thinker, the snare of the theologian and the church-builder, the meshes of the Word and the
bondage of the Idea. All these are within us waiting to wall in the spirit with forms; but we must
always go beyond, always renounce the lesser for the greater, the Finite for the Infinite; we must
be prepared to proceed from illumination to illumination, from experience to experience, from soul-state
to soul-state...Nor must we attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they
are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable [too great for words] who refuses to limit itself
to any form or expression.
Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do
what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.
Zen, being Buddhistic in its essence, is a unique blend of the philosophies and idiosyncrasies
of three different cultures. It is a way of life which is typically Japanese, and yet it reflects
the mysticism of India, the Taoists' love of naturalness and spontaneity and the thorough pragmatism
of the Confucian mind.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
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