The fourth type of experience is the highest experience available to us spiritual experience, and I want you to hear now that this experience has nothing to do with imagination, with mediated experience it has nothing to do with it. It grows out of your direct experience. I also call it the ultimate expression of direct experience. That way, first in practice, we move from imagination, where we are stuck and where our attention is stuck for many days to direct experience, and from direct experience, we, without applying any means, move to spiritual experience. These are very specific experiences, these are very specific practices, and these are very clear states that are testable and repeatable because they are not fantasy. Therefore, there are teachings about spirituality, about mysticism. I want you to understand that these are very precise teachings. I generally call it science, because it meets the criteria that are presented to science, it is repeatable and it is testable. Therefore, spiritual experience is a very clear experience.
The first such spiritual experience, oddly enough, you will not believe, is Love. That is, Love is not a feeling, it is not a sensation; Love is a spiritual experience. In fact, a loving person is already a spiritual person. The entrance to spirituality is the entrance through Love, if we are talking about the first and most accessible experience. Yes, you should be a rather subtle person with an open mind. What is the soul in this sense? The soul is essentially a counterparty to spiritual experience; the soul is the recipient of spiritual experience.
If the mediated experience is received not by the body, not by the organism, not by the senses, then this mediated experience through words is received by the mind, and this is essentially a mental experience, modeled by the mentality, and the recipient of it is the mentality. Do not be afraid to say that this experience is received by the mind, that it is not received by your body. The experience received by the body is a direct experience, and the experience gained by the mentality is a mediated experience. The experience of which the soul is the counterpart is a spiritual experience. And the first such experience is Love. Love is not a feeling, Love is not a sense, Love is a deep spiritual experience, it is a guide to the world of spiritual experiences. So, mysticism is a science that deals with spiritual mystical experiences.
A very important point, which we have already talked about, is the practice of withdrawing attention into direct experience. If you do not learn this and do not begin to distinguish, then all your spirituality may take place in imagination, that is, in modeling, in fantasies, in thinking out. And this is not spirituality, this is pseudo-spirituality, this is mental spirituality, mental fantasies. Therefore, the road to spirituality goes through being in the Moment of Now, in direct experience. You must first stand here. This is where the spiritual journey begins, this is where our spirituality begins and it grows out of direct experience. It has nothing to do with psychedelic experiences caused by all kinds of drugs or exercises that involve changes in brain chemistry. It has nothing to do with imagination, our fantasies. If you hear me, then I will be very, very happy.
I have passed on to you the teaching of the four types of experience. Although it seems very simple, your discernment will have to work and assimilate this information.
3. Worldviews, pre-rational and supra-rational viewpoints
In this chapter, I would like to continue to keep the story up in the same way as it was started in the previous chapters, but now we are going to discuss one very sophisticated issue, which is not spoken at all in modern teachings and mysticism. It is an issue of viewpoints, or worldviews. So what does this mean? A worldview is a view on the world, such a global understanding of the world order, it is precisely the global understanding, not private, and it is not about how some single events take place. It is about the global world order. And I would like to devote this chapter to a story about what worldviews mean and the understanding of world order viewpoints.
As usual, I split this concept a bit. We have three main types of worldviews: pre-rational, rational, and supra-rational. Exactly the same grading is offered by Ken Wilber. He is a very interesting modern mystic who puts forward such a distinction of worldviews. He studies and practices mysticism. We will nevertheless split them into several more subparts to make it clearer what is at stake. The teaching that I present to you in this chapter is the teaching on worldviews. Their distinction is very important, since it is very easy to confuse the levels and mix up the pre-rational worldview with the supra-rational one.
The supra-rational is a mystical and spiritual worldview that surpasses the rational explanation of the world that science investigates. Mystical science is engaged in a supra-rational worldview. It is only a supra-rational worldview that provides answers to such global questions, that are just beginning to arise before leading scientists now, when they reach a certain progress in the study of consciousness and they have already come to the conclusion that all of this is rational. Some people even joke that they will prove God and his existence sooner than the mystics who got bogged down in the pre-rational viewpoints. So, I would like you to understand this issue quite clearly and to be very correct with it, because today we are often faced with one problem: when the pre-rational is taken for the over-rational. Some believe that mysticism and spirituality are some kind of swims in the imagination, fictions, that these are some kind of mythical stories, magical siddhis and so on. But in fact, this is a road in a completely different direction, and rational thinking, a rational worldview serves as the Rubicon in this matter. This is, in fact, a scientific worldview, and, thus, science is closer to mysticism than all this mythical religious husk. You should understand that I mention religion here in the framework of some fairy-tale dogmas only. Returning to the issue, it is oddly enough, but in the modern world we can rarely find a very clear understanding of worldviews, so I would like to acquaint you with a brief summary of this issue.
We are going to make an overview of worldviews: there are several worldviews within the framework of rational views, within the framework of mystical views and within the framework of pre-rational views. I will try to discuss this issue as briefly and as simple as possible in this chapter, even though this issue is very, very global. In fact, it is not even mystical at all, but it is rather an information and philosophical issue, although the mystical worldview levels are comprehended by practice, they are not dreams, there exists some experience behind them. So lets start.
The first type of pre-rational outlook or worldview is a magical worldview, it, like the mythical, refers to a childs worldview, it is immature. When a child does not have any idea of how the world works, about interconnections, about causes and effects, but he wants to explain how everything works here. As an individual, the child places himself at the center of the world. There is some healthy grain in this assumption, since each point of this world can be called its center, due to the fact that it does not have a clearly defined border. But this idea is also fed by egocentrism, namely by an unconditional belief that I am the main one, I am the best, I am in the center, and everything revolves around me and, in general, I am the steersman of this world, the world revolves around me, I have my free will, my choice, I can decide to do something, and everything around me must obey me.
This magical, childish worldview is very well nourished by the ego structure, by this false sense of authorship. However, any developed mind, evaluating such a system of views, comes to very serious contradictions, noticing that this seeming control, in fact ends, as they joke, at the length of your hand. You cannot control the weather, nature, any social phenomena, or other people. You do not control your body, you cannot predict any diseases and, therefore, this worldview I am in control, I am a steersman collides with contradictions. In addition, the will of another person is another global contradiction. It opposes my will, and these collisions begin at the level of a magical worldview. What can I do if I want to do something, but he doesnt? How can I force him to do what I want? After all, I am the creator, I am the driver, and my will must be carried out. But his will is completely different, and therefore a clash on the basis of this magical worldview is inevitable. I am not going to dwell on this issue for a long time, I can just add that this childish worldview, which arises within the framework of egocentrism, is doomed to failure. You cling to it, you continue to promote it, but a mythical worldview comes to replace it.
You must create some other center of will or choice in the mythical worldview. This center of power carries this will out in relation to all living beings, for example, it can be God. For a child, it starts like this: at first it seems to him that he is ruling the world, then he thinks that the world is ruled by his mother, but when his mother is not able to fulfill his whims, he realizes that she is also not omnipotent. Then a certain mythical God appears who rules the world, and you should deal with him, and you should please him as he seems to control all people, while you personally either have a limited will, or you share it somehow with God, you have some kind of contract, some balance of interests. The mythical worldview presupposes some kind of outside force that controls this world, and we should be on good terms with it. So we start to flirt with it, we try to please it, our internal dialogues begin not only with people, but also with some higher power. This higher power is the level of the mythical worldview.
It is replaced by a rational worldview and it means that the fairy tale ends. The child goes to school, where they begin to teach him what we call cause-and-effect relationships. They begin to explain to him that each effect has its cause, and each reason, in turn, is also generated by some effect.
At first, it has a clearly expressed linearity, in a way, that you can always find some reason in everything and every action is generated by some reason you should look closely, and then you will definitely find this very cause-and-effect relationship.
This is a rational worldview, of the first level when we strongly believe in causes and effects and carry out some kind of functioning in the mode of these cause-and-effect relationships. We try to figure out them out in order to avoid mistakes, to calculate what exactly leads or does not lead to this or that consequences, to build some logical chains. And this is how we function this way, but at some point we begin to notice that cause-and-effect relationships fail. Of course, if you throw an object a hundred thousand times and then it falls on the ground a hundred thousand times afterwards then certain regularities could be derived from this simple fact. They are not laws, they are regularities, because they work within a certain dimension, within a limited space-time continuum where this particular law functions. This is how the whole science works, all its discoveries, all science laws are essentially regularities, because there is not any single law that could function in any dimension on the same level of objectivity since it is always tied to some certain conditional boundaries. You know what boundaries mean, because only within a certain limited continuum measurements can be taken, neglecting the influence of other forces. This neglect of some factors is always present in any scientific event, which is called an experiment. There are always some limiting factors that are taken into consideration, and there are some that are not admitted, and there is always some conditional boundary of the experiment, where the rest of the factors can be neglected. This is how certain regularities are derived that confirm the cause-and-effect relationship. This is a rational level and we become rational people when we rely on it, our thinking develops, we calculate various connections and observe that many of them take place in a certain space-time continuum.
The next type of rational worldview is the awareness that the number of mutual impacts is infinite. In fact, it is a postulate that everything affects everything, this also includes string theory, and so a person begins to expand his narrow boundaries a little and realize that the world of mutual impacts is infinite. It is impossible to calculate all the factors; we can only talk about the dominant influence of one of them. For example, we do not consider the influence of all planets on the Earth, but we feel the strong influence of the Sun and the Moon, but it is clear that all other planets and stars also affect the Earth, the Earth also affects them, and all this is one huge cosmic system and there is not a single star that would not be influenced by all the others. Mutual impacts or interferences are innumerable and endless and everything affects everything. This scientific understanding has already been an approach to the border of the mystical worldview.
Therefore, we can say that science is closer to mysticism than myths, fairy tales, epics and other stories that we often take as mysticism and spirituality. In fact, this is a childish worldview. As a result, many scientists like Einstein and other scientific luminaries, for example, Niels Bohr, met and conversed with mystics: they wrote about their conversations with Jiddu Krishnamurti. In this way you can understand the desire of psychologist Carl Jung to meet with Ramana Maharshi and so on. All the leading scientific minds sooner or later realize the manifested conditionality of the discipline being studied and they wanted to come in touch with a truly genuine mystical model.
Next, we are going to consider a couple of such models. The first model is the simultaneity of the whole creation. It is a very common non-duality worldview, which says that creation happened simultaneously, at once and only its recognition is a linear process. That which is created at once and simultaneously is only perceived and described by us linearly. It means that there is a gap between the whole creation and its perception. Our perception is discrete, partial, limited, the description is linear, but creation itself is one-time, simultaneous, all-embracing and total. It is a very deep mystical view that means going beyond the linear time. I think I will soon write the chapter The seven kinds of time, where we will dwell into the concept of time and how we consider it in our Free Away teaching in more detail, but today our topic is the topic of worldviews.
Furthermore, there exists such a world view named Maya-vada, which is considered to be a deep mystical view. According to it, the world seems to us as a kind of illusion that has arisen against the background of something stable, eternal, real, and hence there has appeared this world view of the illusory nature of the creation. If in the first mystical view, we have a view of a one-time simultaneous creation, and it is not questioned, then in the second mystical view everything, the whole world is just manifested and it is illusory, but this illusory is related to a certain reality.