Mysticism from A to Z. A clear introduction to the deepest and most complex spiritual issues. NGO-MA
of these fantasies reaches a certain level and disrupts all defense mechanisms, you start to see in reality what you are imagining. This is called schizophrenia, since no one sees these images but you and this is the problem. Thus another person, other people who see the same objects with their own organs of perception, can be a tool for the testing of your sobriety.
Please do not be offended, but I must point it out to you, because this is the guarantee of your mental health, sobriety, the support at being in the Present Moment of Now. Why do you think monks sit and stare at the wall? Why do they cut off the mind? They are not sitting in fantasies, they are sitting and trying to concentrate on this Present Moment, on the moment of Now. Why are they counting breathing cycles? Why are they looking at their navel? Only because they should “anchor” in the Present Moment, in the moment of now and discard their fantasies, discard the “imaginarium”, discard everything where the mentality can drag them: to other planets, to some miracles. I’m not against all these childish dreams, but it’s only a return to childhood and you know that! Therefore, when you come across things that are unverifiable by experience, it is just fantasy.
What is going to happen next? It is possible that we have been boiling in these pre-rational things for several years or decades, because even when we have been reading very deep texts of mystics, we have been still adapting them to our worldview, that’s the whole point. We cannot comprehend Ramana Maharshi, because we “stick” him into our pre-rational thinking. Everyone constantly asked him about some “siddhis”, and he answered them thousands of times: “I am worried about the issue of suffering, if you are suffering right now, without any ‘siddhis’, could ‘siddhis’ turn out to be a source of additional suffering?” And in this issue he was absolutely right. The issue of healing from suffering, the issue of sobriety, the issue of clarity has nothing to do with these speculations, reflections and fantasies. Therefore, this discrediting of mysticism and spirituality has recently acquired a colossal, quite colossal scale precisely because of the diving of adepts into the pre-rational.
Still there are those who, having dismissed pre-rational, go out into the rational again and begin to find fault with all the mysticism. They begin to assert: “This all is all only fantasy, this is all fiction, I was there, it’s all terrible, just stay normal people.” And here I nearly agree with this position, but you should not pour out the child with water! The supra-rational exists, the mystical exists – this is a certain complete science, and it is open to you. As soon as you are getting sober, grown up – do not close this door for yourself, you will definitely go into a real mystical spiritual world, and this will not be the world of fairy tales. This will be the world of your direct mystical spiritual experiences.
Now, I would like to finish the transmission of the doctrine of worldviews. We have analyzed magical worldviews, mythical, rational worldviews, and finally supra-rational worldview, that is the spiritual vision of the world, confirmed by experience.
4. Types of thinking, if mind could be called ego?
In this chapter, I would like to return to the issue of thinking, to the issue of the mental plane, and continue to clarify it. Once again, I would like to emphasize a very important point: in our Free Away teaching, the mentality, the mental plane does not mean consciousness, does not mean individual consciousness, but rather an instrument for describing the world, which is secondary to direct experience and perception. It develops as a service structure for our direct experience, it is more the intellect than consciousness in our terminology and in our understanding of the mental plane. Thinking arises as a processing of immediate direct experience received through the senses, therefore it can be called another feeling. As we have five senses, the mentality as well can be called the same sense organ, because it does not develop without other senses. For example, if a child has some problems with his direct experience, with the sense organs – vision, hearing, touch, smell – then his intellect also develops weaker, because some channels of perception of the world are blocked. Therefore, in teaching this is a very, very important point, and we clearly distinguish between consciousness and the mental plane, mind. We can say that the basis of your spiritual healing is a very clear and precise distinction between these two things, because today many western masters use the word “mind” as a synonym for consciousness. They adopted it from Buddhists and Zen Buddhists, or from someone else. But we have not adopted such a definition, we can name it soul. The meaning of the word soul more corresponds to such a concept as consciousness, but the word mind is usually used when we mean intellect, intelligence, mental plane.
Let’s touch on this mental plane a little more, but not from the position of “living one”. In the first chapter, I discussed four sectors of the mental plane that serve different kinds of experience. One sector only engaged in serving the illusion of the “living one” including serving the author’s program which also occurs there. If you’re interested, you can watch the very long video “From Contrast to Comparison” on my YouTube channel, where I go into great detail on the damage to the mental plane by the ego structure. In this chapter, there will be more information about mental functioning. I would like you to understand not only these four sectors, but also what kinds of thoughts exist.
We can often hear that the mental is a conceptualization, the mental is a running line, that for someone it has stopped, for someone it has slowed down, and for someone it has completely disappeared. No, it’s not like that. First of all, the basis of the mental plane is figurative thinking. What is it? Figurative thinking functions by means of creating images. Creating images is the same thing as photographing. Your camera or phone takes a photograph and in the same way imaginative thinking creates a photograph, creates images. It’s like photographing objects, like creating figurative casts, everything that is perceived by figurative thinking is fixed in the form of images – this is the primary type of thinking.
Then, when a person gets an idea of these images, the photographs are labeled with words and thus we give names to the images. Therefore, the child asks a lot of questions: “what is this, what is that?” So it gives names to its images in its mind. Look around: there is no single phenomenon labeled with some name here, but you know for sure that a mug is a mug, a table is a table, a chair is a chair. So, at the same time with perception, you load an image from the mentality, and this image already has an inscription. The appearance of names is the so-called conceptual thinking, and it is the second level after the figurative one, concepts arise, names appear and then we can already operate with them. When we operate with concepts, the so-called concrete-logical thinking appears, conceptual chains are created, and we begin thinking logically. How are these images related to each other? It is the connection and interaction of phenomena with each other, which are built into conceptual logical chains. This is the second kind of thinking and it is very important for us to be adequate people. In this way we not only name the phenomena, but also build concepts into certain chains, and it is conceptualization and concrete logical thinking.
The third and most difficult type of thinking is abstract thinking. It is an opportunity to summarize our images into some symbols, which can also be called abstract-symbolic thinking. This thinking functions through symbols, where several concepts, images and so on can be packed at once. Abstract thinking is the ability to think symbolically. For example, all mathematics thinks through symbols. At first, in order to understand what 5 is we must have 5 objects, but then when we say the word 5, it can mean any 5 things: 5 fingers, 5 rubles, 5 objects; but we were taught at school what 5 is, on sticks, on objects, do you remember? We do not understand what 5 is, unless we represent 5 objects, and then objects are replaced by objects, and then we move on to a symbol 5. Therefore, when you tell a person 5, he understands what 5 is, he already imagines what it is about and substitutes numbers. There are, in fact, a great many such abstractions.
There are four main groups of abstractions. Abstractions