Thanks, Dean, for your sharing your thoughts with us.

 

People have been theorising about philosophy for thousands of years. There's nothing wrong with that. It's fun, and part of helping us to think clearly. I think it would be great if Philosophy became a subject in primary schools. But it's not liberating, in my opinion.

 

Great philosophical systems are built up, only to be destroyed by a brutal reality. For example many people thought humanity had reached its greatest development in the 20th Century - until World War 2 came along and showed them a bestiality beyond their wildest imagination. The holocaust, concentration camps, the Burma railway, lampshades of human skin and Hiroshima soon brought people's consciousness to the bitter reality of life in this universe: eat or be eaten.

 

This scenario has happened again and again. Whole civilisations have come and gone, and both their philosophies and their religions have gone with them. As Ecclesiastes says, everything that's ever been has been before. there's nothing new under the sun. We remain prisoners of this world of opposites. Whatever good we do is opposed and finally neutralised by evil. Whatever beauty we create is ultimately replaced by a change in taste, or by ugliness.

 

I believe that no matter how hard we try, nothing we can do with our heads will change anything, apart from shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. Philosophy, art, culture - they're just a veneer on the hopelessness and pointlessness of life.

 

Why does man keep trying to find a purpose to life? Why do we keep trying to look for an indestructible basis for life - for eternal life?

 

I believe this question is answered in my last post - the discussion of Chapter 13 of The Coming New Man. This is post No. 227. http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/summa-scientia/message/227. I said there: I think the most important thing to me is that my I-consciousness is not connected to the Holy Nucleus of the microcosm, in Harry Potter called Lily. My consciousness is totally speculative, learning by experience, and motivated by the blood ego in the spleen-liver system. The Lily in my heart is dormant, but not totally dead. It receives the calling radiation of the magnetic field which the Universal Brotherhood has created. This causes me to be restless and never content with anything life has to offer.

 

What I'm saying there is that the mind is just a tool of the I-consciousness, and can never reach liberation. On the other hand there is something eternal and non dualistic in the heart. Can I prove it? No, of course not, but I can feel it. It's an experience more real than my sensory experiences. I can philosophise all I like, I can pray to a thousand and one gods for help, and I can sacrifice my whole life to the greatest humanitarian causes; it will achieve nothing.

 

Here we are, we modern people, with a pile of philosophy books so big we could spend our whole life reading them. All for nothing, because the answer to all the riddles of life are already within us. It's so simple it's astounding. Thousands of years of civilisation: it's just a merry-go-round. Thousands of years of religion, asceticism, yoga, theology, meditation: a total waste of time. Religion is just the opiate of the people.

 

All we have to do is turn to the heart and arouse the Divine that is asleep there. For millions of years we've been looking for liberation outside of us - and we haven't found it, because it's within us. How simple!

 

But it gets even simpler. How do we arouse the Divine asleep in the heart? The answer is so simple it's almost unbelievable: we have to long for it. Not just a wish, not just a fantasy about life in Heaven, but an all-consuming, all-sacrificing longing for GOD, for TAO, for the Original Spirit that gave us life in the first place. We should experience this longing the way a suffocating person screams for oxygen. There's no need to philosophise about that. A drowning person doesn't philosophise; he just wants air in his lungs. That's how simple liberation is.

 

Psalm 42 says it so beautifully:

 

This vivid image is also used in Harry Potter to make the same point. It's not only very simple; it's exquisitely beautiful. And when you understand the symbolism, it becomes refulgent and glorious. Once again I would advise you to read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dean, as it says so vividly and clearly what I'm trying to say.

 

Of course the longing for God is only the first step. After that comes the self-surrender and self-sacrifice to the Inner God. As I said in post 227, I know that the only way to find peace is to surrender to the Lily in the heart, so that the New Soul can be born. I have to make the Inner Christ the focus of my life; the sun, the centre. Once the New Soul is born I should go the way of complete self-sacrifice, saying, "He who comes after me is greater than I. He must increase while I must decrease."

 

And the self-surrender results in a complete new mode of life, so radical and so different it's impossible to describe. All the time a new unconscious soul is growing which will one day replace the old one. This is also described in Harry Potter.

 

And now I can add: the old philosophising and seeking have proven to be of use after all. They have proven that there is no escape from this world through philosophy or religion. And that's a paradigm shift! That realisation is absolutely necessary before we can begin to long for God.

 

I hope you can understand what I'm saying Dean, and everyone who reads this, and that it will be of some help and comfort.

 

Love from Hans