I came to believe that there were three fundamental functions of infinity or eternity, all of which are trans-psychological, or if their entry is in the psyche, their end takes us elsewhere. I saw that the purpose of the traditions I have typified as belonging to Law, Void, and Creation had the simple purpose of teaching us that these functions are in fact infinite. The purpose of all the practices and beliefs of Law was to develop the understanding that conscience is infinite; of Void that consciousness is infinite; of Creation that imagination is infinite.
When I considered this I often wondered that the great spiritual teachers did not teach this and I am puzzled. Certainly I do not believe myself to be a greater authority than Confucius or Michelangelo or the Buddha. So either they saw it and they saw through it, or it wasn’t for them to see.
This wouldn’t be concerning if the great teachers of every variety of verity had an accord, but it seems instead that they bored like oil miners into the depths of their own infinity, without much concern about alternate infinites. This is not to say there may not be similarities and a peace at the end, but one wonders why the masters didn’t say “and this isn’t all of the truth, go to that fellow if you like his angle” if they knew that it was not. And ultimately on the road to our own precise relationship with spirit we will find that, rather than these practices and teachings creating simple harmonies, they often conflict: crashing with the counterforce of tides in a tremendous storm, or like in sleep when one dream blinks out of existence to be supplanted by another.
And ultimately, I suppose, what I contend is this. Any person who has experienced, firsthand and fully, the truth at the center of each of these practices, who has been kissed by Law and conscience, Void and consciousness, Creation and imagination—will forever recognize that the history of spirituality has been schizoid despite its best beauty. That person will then be confronted with the three spirit problem, or how to find what the process or pattern is of these three forms constantly in motion.
The three spirit problem brings a great deal of agony and destroys a practitioner’s spiritual innocence. That is the purpose of this self-help book.
When I first read The Three Spirit Problem I thought 'why does it have to be a problem?' and then I realized it was written by Abraham. Such clarity and such consternation. And such weight.
ReplyDeleteThe ancestors knew of the problem. They also knew it was not for them to say. It has been saved for us.
Dash ofThemes
As the world turned, climate refugees moved north, fleeing drought and famine, then east and west. Uprooted from where their families had been since the original evolutionary migrations, these people saw for the first time new horizons, not only for themselves, but for the human spirit. Some went the path of ancient wisdom texts, others sought a synthesis with empirical psychology, and a few felt those roads towards wisdom were insufficient to getting towards that new horizon. These few walked paths parallel to old and new traditions, not rejecting them, but recognizing their limits, embraced a deeper, more abstract definition that would encompass the newly emergent human. Perhaps it had always been there, waiting for language itself to coalesce, to develop beyond the rules of faith or even truth. For these people, starved in body and mind, and aching for an authentic system, the Three Spirit Problem emerged slowly, tragically, at first.
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