The nature of suffering November 30, 2009

Recalling some interesting episodes from Daniil Andreev, as promised.

I find his idea of SUFFERING very refreshing, compared to the classical religious idea. Andreev denies suffering being a necessary condition to develop. He underlines the non-divine nature of suffering.

It is hard to quote Adreev outside the context of his book, so I would just re-phrase some points (my words in Italic).

All the suffering that beings experience, all their pain and agony, emit radiations….. Every feeling, every emotional response necessarily emits corresponding radiations. Radiations from anger, hate, greed, or animal and human lust sink to the realm of negative forces. True, those radiations are barely sufficient to replenish the energy of individual demonic groups. But the radiation from suffering and pain is capable of satisfying hosts of demons of almost all types and sizes. This  is essentially their food.

Among the various types of suffering-radiation, the one associated with the shedding of physical blood occupies a particularly significant place. When people and animals bleed, a burning radiation of especial intensity is released in the first few minutes. Therefore, certain categories of demons are not so much interested in the death of living beings, or in the suffering of their souls in the afterlife, as they are in bloodshed. Not one bloodbath in history has occurred or will occur without the subliminal instigation of those bloodsuckers of the afterlife. Further, the bloody sacrificial rites of some ancient cultures were horrifying not only because of their cruelty but also because it was not gods but those very same demons that were feeding on them.

This is a very metaphysical description, but I hope you get the point:

Human attitude towards Nature throughout History – interesting overview November 22, 2009

The earliest phase was characterized by a conception of the universe as extremely small and of the Earth as the only inhabited planet. The world, however, possessed, besides our physical plane, a number of other planes, also material but with a materiality of a different nature and possessing different properties than ours. None of the planes, including ours, were thought to evolve. They had been created once and for all and were inhabited by good and evil beings. Humans lay at the center of those beings’ interests and were, so to speak, their apple of discord. Humans were not conscious of Nature as something distinct from themselves and did not contrast themselves with it. Individual natural phenomena evoked, of course, one or another feeling-fear, pleasure, awe-but it seems that Nature was almost never perceived as a whole, or was perceived so in a purely aesthetic sense, and even then only by individuals who were highly gifted artistically. For that reason, one rarely finds among artistic works of those eras lyrical poetry about Nature, and even more rarely does one find landscape painting. In the main, the cultures of antiquity, as well as certain later cultures in the East, belong to that phase. As for religion, polytheism was typical of this first phase.

Typical of the second phase were the monotheistic systems, which either ignored Nature or else were hostile to it. The growth of individuality led to the conception that humans could grow spiritually. Nature, on the other hand, showed no signs of spiritual growth. It was stagnant and static; it was amoral and irrational; it was under the power of the demonic; and if the spirit itself was not to be vanquished, that part of a person’s being that was cosubstantial with Nature had to be vanquished by the spirit. This was the antinature phase. The Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu peoples all passed through it; Jewry (meaning believers in Judaism) still remains in it. The latter, however, like the Muslim peoples, did not so much declare war on Nature as simply snub it.
The Semitic attitude to nature has, generally speaking, been marked by a poverty of feeling. It has long been remarked how lacking the authors of the Bible and the Quran were in their feeling toward nature compared to those who wrote the great epics of ancient Greece and of India in particular. The Semites gave Nature what they considered its due, sanctioning procreation with the blessing of their religion, but in their religious philosophy and art they strove to ignore it, and with grave consequences.

10 quotes to dissolve your thoughts November 19, 2009

Sincerity is the jewel that forms in the shell of the heart.

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Life is an opportunity given to satisfy the hunger and thirst of the soul.

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There are many paths, and each man considers his own the best and wisest. Let each one choose that which belongs to his own temperament.

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All earthly knowledge is as a cloud covering the sun.

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Life is a misery for the man absorbed in himself.

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Happy is he who does good to others; miserable is he who expects good from others.

The Rose of the World – my review November 17, 2009

The Rose of the World by Daniel Andreev is a unique and poetic cosmological treatise passionately written out of personal experience. It offers a prophetic call for the spiritual reunification of all people and an open and harmonious relationship among the great world religions. For Daniel Andreev, whose mystic revelations are often compared with those of Dante and William Blake, the Rose of the World is a spiritual flower whose roots are in heaven: each petal is a unique image of the great world religions and cultures, and the whole flower is their joint co-creation with God.

Roza Mira (full title in Russian: Роза Мира. Метафилософия истории, literally The Rose of the World. The Metaphilosophy of History), that was written in the fifties of the 20th century gives a unique and fresh view on the history and future of mankind. The uniqueness of this perspective its intellectual brilliance combined with a deeply spiritual insight…

According to Roza Mira, there are no contradictions between different religions, because they tell about different aspects of spiritual reality, or about the same things in different words. Daniil Andreev compares different major religions to different paths leading to one and the same mountain peak (which is God). Andreev names five world religions, he believes in the Trinity of God, but the third hypostasis, instead of being the Holy Spirit, is claimed to be the Eternal Femininity. (which is by the way, one and the same thing to me personally).

Beautiful vision, isn’t it? The more so, Andreev also tired to give a solution how exactly this could work out!  However I can’t say I was delighted about the book. Why?

This book is  the most contradictory of all books I have read in the last 10 years. The contradiction for me lies  in the fact that one and the same book has some highly vibrational pieces and some that can block one’s mental level completely. When I read some pages I feel the author was a true saint of a rare caliber. However at some points his visions not only lack vibrations, but I would not recommend to read them at all…The reason for that “quality variety” may lay in the different methods by which Andreev obtained his knowledge and visions. Some of them were probably from the supraconsious site. Whatever it is, I would like to share with you my impressions.

The most wanted currency November 16, 2009

Love is the current coin of all peoples in all periods.

Hazrat Ihayat Khan.

(iamge by me)

The magic of Materialism November 6, 2009

Materialism is our glittering Reality. Especially now, then the Christmas time is coming, the amount of that glitter increases, as if accumulating material riches was the message of Christ. The magic of Matter is powerful. The human/physical part of our being is longing for comfort and beauty, sensual satisfaction and delight…We dive into the fascination of matter and its hypnotizing charm.

But the Matter is not all we consist of. Another powerful part of us is the Spirit (I don’t mean the soul here though)

For a spiritual person is not easy to find the balance between the two.  While in a mediation I dwell in the Realm of a Spirit and realize the tremendous power and beauty of it, it is the magic of materialism that wants to take over in my daily life, for instance in a form of the pretty Vienna City with its imperial style and flavour of coffee…

Is it possible to have both, to enjoy the Materialism and Spirituality?

Since several years I am trying to play a game and make these two happily coexist. When you meet me first, you might say I am quite successful in that (I keep up a glamour look  and spend much time in restaurants and cafes). An yet it feels like a game, because all the time I am aware of the silent completion between the two. The famous dualism is always there…

Honestly, I am in owe of the black magical power of Materialism. Since last 2 decades I have been watching  Materialism taking over in two greatest spiritual nations like Indian and Russian. Within no time (historically seen) the value system crashed down and many people had to undergo a wired transformation of their attitudes to life and themselves. 

Extraordinary experience of ONENESS November 4, 2009

These days I am reading a truly unique book , a bit later I will post my review. However now I cannot hold myself back from posting a true gem of it, a beautiful experience of the author, Daniel Andreev - a Russian poet and religious thinker of the middle of the XX century. The book itself  is called ”Roza Mira” (“The Rose of the World”, “Роза Мира”), it was written mostly in prison at Stalin’s time, and is about religion in the modern world.

The extraordinary experience I am quoting here reminds me a lot of the Enlightenment of the main character Herman Hesse in his famous novel Siddhartha. This is the unique experience of ONENESS, of feeling oneself being not only the part and parcel of the whole, but actually being this WHOLE…

Enjoy:

“In my life such an experience took place on the moonlit night of July 29, 1931, on the banks of the Nerussa, a small river in the Bryansk Forest. I usually try to be alone when in Nature, but that time it so happened that I had taken part in a camping trip with a small group.
We reached the banks of the river at the close of a hot, cloudless day. We took a leisurely dip, then gathered brush, and, building a fire two meters from the quietly flowing river under the canopy of three old willows, prepared a simple meal. The sky darkened. A low July full moon glided out from behind the oaks. Little by little the conversations and stories died down; one by one my companions fell asleep around the crackling wood. I was left awake at the fire, lazily waving a branch to ward off the mosquitoes.
When the moon, noiselessly moving behind the finely patterned, leafy branches of the willow, entered the range of my vision, those hours that come close to being the most wonderful of my entire life began. Breathing softly, having laid back on a handful of hay, I heard the Nerussa flowing not behind me, a few paces back, but as if through my own soul. That was the first unusual thing I noticed.

It`s fascianting to have same experience as saints did! October 22, 2009

We live in fascinating times. Unbelievable but fact – being an ordinary householder, one can still  have extraordinary spiritual experiences like the saints of all times did.

I came across a stunning quote of a great South Indian saint Ramana Maharshi, (1879-1950) who describes his spiritual experiences exactly the way I have been experiencing it thanks to my meditation practice:

“…the samadhi I speak to you about is different. It is sahaja samadhi. In this state you remain calm and composed during activity. You realise that you are moved by the deeper self within and are unaffected by what you do or say or think. You have no worries, anxieties or cares, for you realise that there is nothing that belongs to you as ego and that everything is being done by something with which you are conscious union.”

Or this one: ” Your own Self-Realisation is the greatest service you can render the world”.  How true is this, incredible!

And that one is reflecting my own daily experience:  ”Nearly all mankind is more or less unhappy because nearly all do not know the true Self. Real happiness abides in Self-knowledge alone. All else is fleeting. To know one’s Self is to be blissful always.”

 This beautiful saint is only one example. Reading of or about saintly people of all times I realise that they all had basically same experiences.

Imagination as such does not exist October 20, 2009

When someone starts picturing something unusual we say ”oh, what an imagination”. Imagination is what is commonly known as creation of images or ideas that have not existed before. 

In my personal opinion there is no such a thing as imagination: I belive that everything already exists somehow somewhere…I can back up this idea either with Socrates’s Allegory of The Cave  or with the modern string theory -no matter what I take, it is obvious to me that there is noting in the world that has not been existing somewhere yet.

Let’s take horror films,  all these dreadful images are nothing else than already existing beings. They definitely exist in our collective subconscious (the prove is that in many different cultures these images are similar), and the collective subconscious is a reality. This reality hunts us in our dreams or drunkard/under drugs state. And this is not imagination, this is pretty real. A good example – Hieronymus Bosch. or just any horror film

The futuristic images are also real – they pop up from our collective supraconsious, which is another interesting realm.

The soul speaking with nature October 19, 2009

TANAS
(Tana:  The soul speaking with nature.)

Little dandelions, what are you doing here?
–We reflect on earth the stars in the heavens.

Little pool, why is your water so muddy?
–Because of my narrow mind and depthless heart.

Coal, what makes you so black?
–I am the evil of the ages accumulated in the heart of the earth.
What is your penalty?
–I must pass through a trial by fire.
What becomes of you in the end?
–I turn into a diamond.

Earth, to the clouds:–Why did you come back after once you had deserted me?
–The heavens would not have us before we had reconciled ourselves with you.