Mind – mover of the Soul (4) Where is the World?

October 27, 2022 / Leave a Comment

Where is the world? Is this a fair question to ask ourselves or some pointless intellectual game?

A friend sent me a beautiful piece of writing, created by a Kabbalist teacher. The Kabbalah is a system I’m very familiar with, though the Silent Eye uses the enneagram as a map of egoic and spiritual consciousness, rather than the Tree of Life used by the Hebrew-derived Western Mystery Tradition (WMT).

(Above: Kabbalistic Tree of Life – in this case portraying the psychology of mankind)

Modern ‘magical’ systems also use the Tree of Life, so I’m always keen to understand how what is really ‘one truth’ is mapped onto each one, differently.

(Above: the Mystical Enneagram used by the Silent Eye offers a simpler map of the inner journey but shares a common goal – finding the true Self and handing the Life to it…)

Both the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the Mystical Enneagram have the concept of a higher state that we already possess. We are simply asleep to its presence – but the inner identity knows itself.

Your mind is a powerful tool. Your mind is what connects you to Heaven…
Rabbi Ariel Bar Tzadok

At birth, we had no choice but to use our worldly-facing senses to ‘make sense’ of where we found ourselves. Conscious of material realities only, we made our slow and careful way to maturity, gradually losing the sense of that ‘other world’ which was always ‘in-here’ rather than ‘out there’.

In reality, this is a meaningless division, since science confirms that the ‘atomic world’ we inhabit is actually nothing like the one our consciousness ‘assembles’ from the sensory information it receives. We build our world by education and consensus. That’s why we all agree with what is in our reality.

There is a division; our body. The senses our body convey to us provide more immediate information than that available by secondary analysis of what we received – such as logic.

There are many paths before us that are only hard in the mind of the beholder.
Rabbi Ariel Bar Tzadok

We take for granted that, psychologically, we live in our own worlds. Yet we persist in thinking that the greater reality is shared, rather than being entirely relative to our-selves… What creates this is our societal agreement as to what that big ‘container’ is ‘out-there’ The process also gives us the relative freedom to be individuals in this world, as long as we conform to societal conventions. The picture cements itself into place, and we grow in its environment… conditioned.

Welcome to the world.

But there is one added aspect. Because our senses feed us such vivid signals, we come to think of them as ‘me’. We create a centre for our selves and regard it as our primary reality. So, we have the new ‘me’ and ‘the world’. We have entered a state of total duality, all based on the primary illusion of separation and the growth of a personality – the egoic self.

Your mind is what connects you to Heaven. At the same time, your mind is what connects you to Earth. Do you see it?
Rabbi Ariel Bar Tzadok

There is a personality and, in reality, there is the higher Self, but the me-ness of that higher Self is the same as the person – the personality. Within the personality there are barrier to spiritual progress. The task is to find and remove them.

We build and wear a ‘suit of armour’ against the hurts (and dullness) of the adult world. We mature to deal with that world, but at the cost of our spirituality, which is pushed away in favour of ‘real things’ that benefit the personality – the eogic self. To set out ‘back’ on that road to get beneath the heavy armour that life has built requires a certain bravery, dedication and self-honesty… but it is open to anyone who is sincere.

(There have been many attempts to illustrate this journey. Here, the Egyptian Pharaoh is depicted as Osiris, re-made and risen with dominion over all things and with a duty of care to all Life)

The Tree of Life views reaching our original state of Oneness as a ‘vertical’ ascent of consciousness’, from an earthy base to a vastly expanded role for the mind and heart and touching the spirit- connected with our source. This is the mind freed from its limited world of ‘objects’, its focus of looking ‘down’ at the ground instead of up at the stars… metaphorically.

The Silent Eye uses the circular enneagram for the same journey, but with the more modern language of spiritual psychology to take us from the edge of the circle (personality) towards the centre, where living knowledge and experience of the true Self reside. Indeed, it can be said that the inner Self is just a name for what cannot be described yet is utterly personal to the person who finds it!

The circle, like the tree, is only symbolic and representative of a vivid and utterly real journey of self to Self.

The ‘circle’ has always belonged to the Self, but with this journey, is seen as the individual path back to the higher state – our true home.

Your mind is what connects you to Heaven. At the same time, your mind is what connects you to Earth. Do you see it? Do you understand? Your mind is the ladder, the ladder is YOU

Rabbi Ariel Bar Tzadok

Stephen Tanham is a Director of the Silent Eye, a journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog