I realized that I had to start from the very beginning. This way many people can use this course of mine “Mysticism from A to Z” as a way to get acquainted with mysticism. I consider mysticism to be an exact science, I would like you to be able to comprehend this teaching from the very beginning, as a science, without all sorts of insinuations and profanities, so that it would serve your interest, so that it would be your journey into the world of practice, to the world of comprehension, to the world of new revelations, and would not be associated with any mystifications, with some secrets, understatements. I will formulate as much as possible, and what cannot be conveyed in words, you can check yourself in practice and make sure that all the indicators are correct, although not all of them are sufficient.

I want you to understand that any teaching is a map, a map of the path that you will have to follow yourself and check everything from your own experience.

1. About thinking and the Moment of Now

Dear spiritual friends, I am very glad to welcome you to the pages of my book. I decided to record a short but complete introductory course for you, for those who are interested in mysticism.

Recently I have received an interesting question that concerns a schematic understanding of the mental plane system. It is closely tied to the question of what is the practice of staying “right here and now” in the Moment of Now, and I would like to discuss with you whether we understand this practice in the same way and whether we understand what the mental plane is, what is the cutting off of the fantasies of the mind, and what is staying in the Moment of Now. There is a lot of confusion around this topic. It is primarily associated with the fact that in a huge number of traditions Mind is equal to consciousness, they often write “Mind” (with a capital letter), equal to “consciousness.” In our country, in our colloquial and in our conceptual apparatus, it is written that the mind is thinking, intellect, mental plane. Because of this, there is a lot of confusion associated with misreading Buddhist and Zen Buddhist texts. I want you to have a complete clarity on this subject, so I have separated the concepts of consciousness and mind. This will correspond to the fact that there is a “small” and a “big” mind. So, for example, in India in general there are several concepts of the mind, so the most important point is to be aware of what do we mean using this word. I am referring to our intellect, using the word “mind”, I mean our descriptive ability, this little mental plane of ours. In that way, it is by no means consciousness. Therefore, you and I will consider the mind as a collection of thoughts that describe our direct experience.

The main activity of a working mind is to describe, to interpret, to evaluate, and to compare our direct experience. In my model, which I give to my students, we divide the mental plane into sectors. It is very simple and you need it in order to be aware of what is at stake. So, the first sector is the mind serving our direct experience. This is what helps us to survive in our daily life. Every day we understand what we see, we interpret it, we evaluate it, we compare it, draw conclusions – all this is a working mind that really deals with direct experience.

The second sector of the mind activity is work with mediated experience; it is our way to receive mediated experience. This is the mind that helps us to understand speech, to create images when we hear words, to remember them, and this is the most important element of experience in the modern world. Experiences that are mediated are of paramount importance: these experiences you do not put into practice. You, as it were, accept it from people who have gone through something in practice, but accept it in the form of words, descriptions, images, explanations, clarifications, and you may check a small part of it directly in practice. A modern person, a social person does not exist without the ability to receive mediated experience. If we were told that you shouldn’t stick your hands into the electric plug, few people would check this out by experience. Many will be able to understand this intellectually and to get indirect experience from other people that this act can lead to some kind of damage. They would never test it in their entire lives. They would just take other’s word for it. So, the ability to gain experience through words, through description is very, very important, it is the most important ability of a modern person, in whom this experience is already much superior to the experience that you get directly. These are books, films, dreams, and communications. This all gives us a kind of indirect experience. Thus, the second most important part of the mental plane is the part of the mental plane responsible for indirect experiences.

The third important part is the creative mind. This is the mind that is capable of creating something new from the first and second parts, relying on them – on the direct and the mediated experience, to create something that has never existed before and this is something that drives evolution, drives our progress. It is a very important element of the mental plane, it is the ability to compile, the ability to evaluate, and also create something new that has not existed there before. Yes, it may be a blueprint for a new car that is going to be embodied in metal, but it is something that was not there before. Of course, a person relies on previously seen cars, on the study of their designs, on the study of what was given to us in direct experience, when it comes to an engineer, but in any case, a creative element, a creative approach and something brand new is appreciated.

So, I have listed for you three types of the mental plane, three types of mind. First is a working mind that operates with the direct experience, second is a mind that relies on the mediated experience, which we receive mainly through words, third is what we have called the creative mind. And only the fourth part of the mental plane is damaged by the virus of the ego-structure, this ego-virus, only this one is occupied with serving the ego. So, only one fourth of the mind is involved in maintaining the ego structure, no matter how much it is there in percentage terms, each one probably has a little bit in a different way. However, it is very foolish to say that you can turn off the mind. Any damage to one of the listed segments is a serious illness. You would become practically a “vegetable”. You would be not able to function or live in our social space, therefore, do not take seriously those who have “killed the mind”, “turned off the mind” – we do not need it.

There is only one sector that brings problems, and this is the sector which serves the ego-structure. And this sector is not related to direct experience. It can be associated with mediated experience and, basically, it is associated with imagination, with thinking about, with some kind of implication, therefore, when we talk about withdrawing attention at the “Moment of Now”, about living in the “Moment of Now”, we are talking about the output into direct experience and we leave the sector of thinking that serves the ego.

Staying in the moment, staying in the immediate experience of the Moment of Now, it is okay to know the names of things – this is a working mind; it is normal to be aware of and know the purpose of objects, it is normal not to be a moron who does not understand what he is looking at. Socially active people should not practice at this level: in order not to know the names of objects, to look at them and not to know their purpose. It is already a very deep disconnection of the entire mental plane and, as a rule, it is practiced in some retreats by hermits, but not by socially active people. You all have been in such states when, after some long flight, you woke up somewhere in an unfamiliar place and could not understand – who are you, where are you, what is hanging on the wall and, what does it all mean after all? After such long flights, changing time zones, sometimes it takes time for the mind to turn on and “download files” for the normal movement of thinking to begin. Otherwise, you simply have perception, you open your eyes, but the mind does not turn on, it is still in some kind of dormant state. Sometimes this happens during sudden awakenings, when you wake up in the wrong phase and, again, it takes time to align the mental plane and your perception.

So, I told you about the four parts of our mental plane, and also pointed out that staying in the Moment of Now turns off, in fact, three of the four parts and leaves only one at work. It has nothing to do with time, first of all – it is connected with turning off the imagination. You turn off the imaginary, those thoughts that produce stories, that unfold a certain time continuum, and you come to the Moment of Now in which this psychosomatic organism is functioning. Now there is quite a lot of speculation that thoughts are also occurring in the Moment of Now, but these are some kind of advanced people that confuse you a little. Of course, thoughts also occur in the Moment of Now, but our “imaginarium” is able to unfold its space-time continuum, and when attention begins to “swim” along this continuum, asking questions: “What is going to happen?” “What has happened?” “What happened when I was a kid?” “Where is it now?” – it is what is called the exit from the “Moment of Now” which is right here and now. Thus, you lose touch with direct experience, and attention is immersed in these stories. So, the Moment of Now, about which Ram Dass once spoke, he called it – “be here now”, and as Eckhart Tolle now says – this is not a profanation. It is practice, the practice of staying in direct experience. It allows you to see how much trouble and suffering your imagination is giving you, and this practice is the cornerstone of all teachings. I have not come across a single teaching that would not give you support for the Moment of Now, which would not talk about disconnecting, stopping internal dialogues, about stopping this imaginary. But you should not stop the working mind, which adequately tells you the names of objects and their purpose. This is superfluous, this mind does not serve the ego structure, the ego structure is served by the imagination, thinking, etc.

Now I have told you in detail about the mental plane, as we see it in our Free Away teaching, have told you about the practice of the Moment of Now, that is the withdrawal of attention and the best of all is the withdrawal of attention in which you are aware of your body. You can concentrate on breathing, you can concentrate on sensations, you can concentrate on perception, but at the same time, you do not lose the perception of your own body. Because your body is always in the Moment of Now, it is never yesterday, it is never tomorrow. This organism is always fresh, always – today, and, as I like to joke, even with your own breakfast: you have this “fast break” not tomorrow, not yesterday, but right here and now.

This is where I want to end this chapter. Send your questions to the address at the end of the book, and I’ll be waiting for you on our live streams every two weeks.

2. Four kinds of experience. Mystical and spiritual experience

After writing the first chapter of this series, I was very pleasantly surprised by the great attention and received quite a lot of mail with questions about this. Therefore, literally in hot pursuit, I decided to continue and I understood that I had touched on a very important topic – the topic of thinking and the topic of the gradation of this thinking.

People ask me about a working and parasitic mind or a thinking mind, but this is the terminology of Ramesh Balsekar – “working mind” and “thinking mind.” I think that in our system it will be precisely the “working mind” and “imagination”, respectively, we conditionally divided the mind into 4 parts. I believe that this is the best option for you to be aware of what entering into the Moment of Now means and what is ultimately being cut off there. It is that thinking that is able to unfold the space-time continuum and switch attention from the current immediate experience into a fantasy about this experience, and the distinction of these things is very, very important.

What questions will we discuss next? I would like to raise an issue that is very closely related to the types of thinking – this is the issue of the types of experience. Today I will give you such a concept as “four types of experience”, and you will add a little bit to the picture. What do the “four experiences” mean? Yesterday we dwelt in some detail on the mediated experience that we receive through our mental plane – that is, it is the ability to receive experience through the imagination. We are told some kind of plot, we receive information, we build all this into a kind of a picture in our imagination, we put an image of ourselves there and just through this we get an indirect experience.

This experience is very important, and we can call it the experience of the mind, but more important is the direct experience. This is an experience gained in the Moment of Now through our senses. It is then remembered, it is then recorded, but it should never be confused with the experience gained indirectly. You must clearly distinguish – this experience I got directly, for example I learned to ride a bike, and this one – I read about how to ride a bike. You can read a book about a world swimming champion, but that does not mean that you have learned to swim, that is, learning to swim directly, getting direct experience and reading about it, hearing about it – these are different things. In your system of thinking, there should be different folders in your memory, which do not allow you to lie that this is – I received directly, and this I received indirectly. The differentiation and distinction between direct and indirect experience is a very important point.

The fact is that when we touch mysticism, spirituality (and now we have a very large access to literature), we, of course, have a great temptation to simulate all this and wake up just in our imagination. However, any difficult situation pisses us off and sends us straight to who we really are and what we think of ourselves. Therefore, it is very important not to confuse mediated experience with direct one. It is such a childhood illness to present fantasies as reality and do not have the ability or strength to admit that this is only my mediated experience, that I don’t have it in my direct experience.

These are the two types of experience. The next type of experience that I am going to give you is an experience of altered states of consciousness. In our Formation, we do not consider this type of experience at all, because we have a very clear attitude to spiritual experiences. Experiments obtained with the help of all kinds of means, no matter what – permitted or prohibited, changing our everyday state of consciousness – are not spiritual. They are psychedelic experiences involving changes in brain chemistry. That is, if you accept something or influence in some way the body – these are altered states of consciousness, and they are not a spiritual experience. I want you to understand this clearly.

The fourth type of experience is the highest experience available to us – spiritual experience, and I want you to hear now that this experience has nothing to do with imagination, with mediated experience – it has nothing to do with it. It grows out of your direct experience. I also call it the “ultimate expression” of direct experience. That way, first in practice, we move from imagination, where we are stuck and where our attention is stuck for many days – to direct experience, and from direct experience, we, without applying any means, move to spiritual experience. These are very specific experiences, these are very specific practices, and these are very clear states that are testable and repeatable because they are not fantasy. Therefore, there are teachings about spirituality, about mysticism. I want you to understand that these are very precise teachings. I generally call it science, because it meets the criteria that are presented to science, it is repeatable and it is testable. Therefore, spiritual experience is a very clear experience.

The first such spiritual experience, oddly enough, you will not believe, is Love. That is, Love is not a feeling, it is not a sensation; Love is a spiritual experience. In fact, a loving person is already a spiritual person. The entrance to spirituality is the entrance through Love, if we are talking about the first and most accessible experience. Yes, you should be a rather subtle person with an open mind. What is the soul in this sense? The soul is essentially a counterparty to spiritual experience; the soul is the recipient of spiritual experience.

If the mediated experience is received not by the body, not by the organism, not by the senses, then this mediated experience through words is received by the mind, and this is essentially a mental experience, modeled by the mentality, and the recipient of it is the mentality. Do not be afraid to say that this experience is received by the mind, that it is not received by your body. The experience received by the body is a direct experience, and the experience gained by the mentality is a mediated experience. The experience of which the soul is the counterpart is a spiritual experience. And the first such experience is Love. Love is not a feeling, Love is not a sense, Love is a deep spiritual experience, it is a guide to the world of spiritual experiences. So, mysticism is a science that deals with spiritual mystical experiences.

A very important point, which we have already talked about, is the practice of withdrawing attention into direct experience. If you do not learn this and do not begin to distinguish, then all your spirituality may take place in imagination, that is, in modeling, in fantasies, in thinking out. And this is not spirituality, this is pseudo-spirituality, this is mental spirituality, mental fantasies. Therefore, the road to spirituality goes through being in the Moment of Now, in direct experience. You must first stand here. This is where the spiritual journey begins, this is where our spirituality begins and it grows out of direct experience. It has nothing to do with psychedelic experiences caused by all kinds of drugs or exercises that involve changes in brain chemistry. It has nothing to do with imagination, our fantasies. If you hear me, then I will be very, very happy.

I have passed on to you the teaching of the “four types of experience.” Although it seems very simple, your discernment will have to work and assimilate this information.

3. Worldviews, pre-rational and supra-rational viewpoints

In this chapter, I would like to continue to keep the story up in the same way as it was started in the previous chapters, but now we are going to discuss one very sophisticated issue, which is not spoken at all in modern teachings and mysticism. It is an issue of viewpoints, or worldviews. So what does this mean? A worldview is a view on the world, such a global understanding of the world order, it is precisely the global understanding, not private, and it is not about how some single events take place. It is about the global world order. And I would like to devote this chapter to a story about what worldviews mean and the understanding of world order viewpoints.

As usual, I split this concept a bit. We have three main types of worldviews: pre-rational, rational, and supra-rational. Exactly the same grading is offered by Ken Wilber. – He is a very interesting modern mystic who puts forward such a distinction of worldviews. He studies and practices mysticism. We will nevertheless split them into several more subparts to make it clearer what is at stake. The teaching that I present to you in this chapter is the teaching on worldviews. Their distinction is very important, since it is very easy to confuse the levels and mix up the pre-rational worldview with the supra-rational one.

The supra-rational is a mystical and spiritual worldview that surpasses the rational explanation of the world that science investigates. Mystical science is engaged in a supra-rational worldview. It is only a supra-rational worldview that provides answers to such global questions, that are just beginning to arise before leading scientists now, when they reach a certain progress in the study of consciousness and they have already come to the conclusion that all of this is rational. Some people even joke that they will prove God and his existence sooner than the mystics who got bogged down in the pre-rational viewpoints. So, I would like you to understand this issue quite clearly and to be very correct with it, because today we are often faced with one problem: when the pre-rational is taken for the over-rational. Some believe that mysticism and spirituality are some kind of “swims” in the imagination, fictions, that these are some kind of mythical stories, magical “siddhis” and so on. But in fact, this is a road in a completely different direction, and rational thinking, a rational worldview serves as the Rubicon in this matter. This is, in fact, a scientific worldview, and, thus, science is closer to mysticism than all this mythical religious husk. You should understand that I mention religion here in the framework of some fairy-tale dogmas only. Returning to the issue, it is oddly enough, but in the modern world we can rarely find a very clear understanding of worldviews, so I would like to acquaint you with a brief summary of this issue.

We are going to make an overview of worldviews: there are several worldviews within the framework of rational views, within the framework of mystical views and within the framework of pre-rational views. I will try to discuss this issue as briefly and as simple as possible in this chapter, even though this issue is very, very global. In fact, it is not even mystical at all, but it is rather an information and philosophical issue, although the mystical worldview levels are comprehended by practice, they are not dreams, there exists some experience behind them. So let’s start.

The first type of pre-rational outlook or worldview is a magical worldview, it, like the mythical, refers to a child’s worldview, it is immature. When a child does not have any idea of how the world works, about interconnections, about causes and effects, but he wants to explain how everything works here. As an individual, the child places himself at the center of the world. There is some healthy grain in this assumption, since each point of this world can be called its center, due to the fact that it does not have a clearly defined border. But this idea is also fed by egocentrism, namely by an unconditional belief that I am the main one, I am the best, I am in the center, and everything revolves around me and, in general, I am the steersman of this world, the world revolves around me, I have my free will, my choice, I can decide to do something, and everything around me must obey me.

This magical, childish worldview is very well nourished by the ego structure, by this false sense of authorship. However, any developed mind, evaluating such a system of views, comes to very serious contradictions, noticing that this seeming control, in fact ends, as they joke, at the length of your hand. You cannot control the weather, nature, any social phenomena, or other people. You do not control your body, you cannot predict any diseases and, therefore, this worldview “I am in control”, “I am a steersman” collides with contradictions. In addition, the will of another person is another global contradiction. It opposes “my” will, and these collisions begin at the level of a magical worldview. “What can I do if I want to do something, but he doesn’t? How can I force him to do what I want? After all, I am the creator, I am the driver, and my will must be “carried out.” But his will is completely different, and therefore a clash on the basis of this magical worldview is inevitable. I am not going to dwell on this issue for a long time, I can just add that this childish worldview, which arises within the framework of egocentrism, is doomed to failure. You cling to it, you continue to promote it, but a mythical worldview comes to replace it.

You must create some other center of will or choice in the mythical worldview. This center of power carries this will out in relation to all living beings, for example, it can be God. For a child, it starts like this: at first it seems to him that he is ruling the world, then he thinks that the world is ruled by his mother, but when his mother is not able to fulfill his whims, he realizes that she is also not omnipotent. Then a certain mythical God appears who rules the world, and you should deal with him, and you should please him as he seems to control all people, while you personally either have a limited will, or you share it somehow with God, you have some kind of contract, some balance of interests. The mythical worldview presupposes some kind of outside force that controls this world, and we should be on good terms with it. So we start to flirt with it, we try to please it, our internal dialogues begin not only with people, but also with some higher power. – This higher power is the level of the mythical worldview.

It is replaced by a rational worldview and it means that the fairy tale ends. The child goes to school, where they begin to teach him what we call cause-and-effect relationships. They begin to explain to him that each effect has its cause, and each reason, in turn, is also generated by some effect.

At first, it has a clearly expressed linearity, in a way, that you can always find some reason in everything and every action is generated by some reason – you should look closely, and then you will definitely find this very cause-and-effect relationship.

This is a rational worldview, of the first level – when we strongly believe in causes and effects and carry out some kind of functioning in the mode of these cause-and-effect relationships. We try to figure out them out in order to avoid mistakes, to calculate what exactly leads or does not lead to this or that consequences, to build some logical chains. And this is how we function this way, but at some point we begin to notice that cause-and-effect relationships fail. Of course, if you throw an object a hundred thousand times and then it falls on the ground a hundred thousand times afterwards then certain regularities could be derived from this simple fact. They are not laws, they are regularities, because they work within a certain “dimension”, within a limited space-time continuum where this particular law functions. This is how the whole science works, all its discoveries, all science laws – are essentially regularities, because there is not any single law that could function in any “dimension” on the same level of objectivity since it is always tied to some certain conditional boundaries. You know what boundaries mean, because only within a certain limited continuum measurements can be taken, neglecting the influence of other forces. This neglect of some factors is always present in any scientific event, which is called an “experiment.” There are always some limiting factors that are taken into consideration, and there are some that are not admitted, and there is always some conditional boundary of the experiment, where the rest of the factors can be neglected. This is how certain regularities are derived that confirm the cause-and-effect relationship. This is a rational level and we become rational people when we rely on it, our thinking develops, we calculate various connections and observe that many of them take place in a certain space-time continuum.

The next type of rational worldview is the awareness that the number of mutual impacts is infinite. In fact, it is a postulate that “everything affects everything”, this also includes “string theory”, and so a person begins to expand his narrow boundaries a little and realize that the world of mutual impacts is infinite. It is impossible to calculate all the factors; we can only talk about the dominant influence of one of them. For example, we do not consider the influence of all planets on the Earth, but we feel the strong influence of the Sun and the Moon, but it is clear that all other planets and stars also affect the Earth, the Earth also affects them, and all this is – one huge cosmic system and there is not a single star that would not be influenced by all the others. Mutual impacts or interferences are innumerable and endless and “everything affects everything”. This scientific understanding has already been an approach to the border of the mystical worldview.

Therefore, we can say that science is closer to mysticism than myths, fairy tales, epics and other stories that we often take as mysticism and spirituality. In fact, this is a childish worldview. As a result, many scientists like Einstein and other scientific luminaries, for example, Niels Bohr, met and conversed with mystics: they wrote about their conversations with Jiddu Krishnamurti. In this way you can understand the desire of psychologist Carl Jung to meet with Ramana Maharshi and so on. All the leading scientific minds sooner or later realize the manifested conditionality of the discipline being studied and they wanted to come in touch with a truly genuine mystical model.

12 Next

Mysticism from A to Z. A clear introduction to the deepest and most complex spiritual issues

Introduction

1. About thinking and the Moment of Now

2. Four kinds of experience. Mystical and spiritual experience

3. Worldviews, pre-rational and supra-rational viewpoints

People who read this book also read