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

Next, we are going to consider a couple of such models. The first model is the simultaneity of the whole creation. It is a very common non-duality worldview, which says that creation happened simultaneously, at once and only its recognition is a linear process. That which is created at once and simultaneously is only perceived and described by us linearly. It means that there is a gap between the whole creation and its perception. Our perception is discrete, partial, limited, the description is linear, but creation itself is one-time, simultaneous, all-embracing and total. It is a very deep mystical view that means going beyond the linear time. I think I will soon write the chapter “The seven kinds of time”, where we will dwell into the concept of “time” and how we consider it in our Free Away teaching in more detail, but today our topic is the topic of worldviews.

Furthermore, there exists such a world view named – Maya-vada, which is considered to be a deep mystical view. According to it, the world seems to us as a kind of illusion that has arisen against the background of something stable, eternal, real, and hence there has appeared this world view of the illusory nature of the creation. If in the first mystical view, we have a view of a one-time simultaneous creation, and it is not questioned, then in the second mystical view everything, the whole world is just manifested and it is illusory, but this illusory is related to a certain reality.

And the final the most powerful view of mysticism is uncreatedness, which asserts that there was no creation at all. It is impossible to explain this, because this is the top of the views of the mystical school. In India it is called Ajata-vada, where vada means a viewpoint or worldview. Ramana Maharshi singled it out as the highest view of non-creation. In fact, it correlates with the knowledge of the Fruit of mystical teachings, and those who recognized the Fruit, those who are in a natural state, can claim that this worldview is correct, although, of course, it is only descriptions. So, we have gone through all the basic worldviews: supra-rational, rational and pre-rational.

Now I will focus on the problem that is faced by seekers. Do not be offended if it will be a very painful revelation for some of you. It lies in the fact that magical and mythical thinking are very ancient and powerful, the consciousness is very strongly captured by them. These childish worldviews do not let us go that easily, especially if we have not played enough with it in the corresponding period of our growing up. It holds us back and, therefore, the rational thinking imposed on us, seems to us dry, rational and lifeless with its causal relationship, with the study of physics and chemistry, how everything works, how everything really exists, how and what follows each other, what is possible, what is not. Only a few go to rational thinking consciously, so most often we feel trapped in these rational frameworks, in these physical laws, in these causal relationships, and we want something “tasty”, some kind of mystery, something unusual… And many seekers, let go of rational thinking and descend back to the pre-rational level and become esoteric. They imagine something here, some “siddhis”, some miracles, and they just dive into this childish worldview, and this is quite usual. Their consciousness is not ready yet to come to a rational outlook, to a rational picture of the world, and therefore many confuse the pre-rational viewpoint with the supra-rational viewpoint. Many seekers often believe that they have already passed to the supra-rational, but in fact they have sunk deeply into the pre-rational, and begun telling each other fairy tales, start chasing some “siddhis” and miracles, begin telling stories that they have not seen themselves, but they have supposedly been seen by their friends, and all this is very well supported by our “imaginarium.” These stories are precisely its fuel.

Everything that is pre-rational is supported by the mind that is responsible for imagination and fantasies, and since it is a creative mind, it can invent a lot of things that are not supported in our physical reality, in our direct experience. This way now I’m connecting the types of worldviews with the four types of thinking that I have described in the first chapter.

The fact that it happens is not a big problem, because sooner or later you have to realize that you have come back to the pre-rational level and you still need to return to the rational level first, but this time you should return already with opened eyes and not like in childhood, when all your favorite toys have just been taken away. By the way the virtual world is pre-rational in all means, it is a fictional world however even if practically does not rely on any physical reality, so it is also a return to the pre-rational level, to games, to childhood, to aliens and other fantasies. It doesn’t matter if aliens exist or not. I just want you to figure it out: it doesn’t matter at all in this case. It is important that they do not exist in your direct experience, in the Moment of Now. Well, they could exist, but what happens when you imagine? You think that someone comes from Sirius, or someone is from another constellation, from past lives, from other planets – they all could exist… But now you are engaged in the imagination, in the fantasy, you are cut off from the present, from current direct experience. So, when you lose this support, it is very difficult for you to return to sobriety. You start what we call “hard glitching, hallucinating”, and a lot of people sooner or later find themselves in some not very healthy mental states, and afterwards some people are helped in psychiatric clinics, in order to cope with them. When the power 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 created through the summation of images are, for example, “animals” There is no such thing as “animals”, but the very concept of “animal” is abstract and presupposes the presence in our thinking of a certain folder, which contains files with animals. It is now very easy for us to fully consider the work of our thinking using the example of a computer. The computer completely repeats the work of our thinking. Here we have a folder, we labeled it “animals”, and this word “animals” is an abstraction, the name of a folder, and it will contain specific photographs, images of animals, and they will have a specific name: a cat, a dog, etc. There is also a folder “nature”, there is a folder “plants.” In fact, “plants” do not exist, there are specific plants that are photographed and have their own names. These are abstractions created with the help of images.

There are also abstractions that are created through concepts, and it could be rather complex concepts that are collected into one abstract. For example, such a concept is “mathematics.” It means some specific set of knowledge, but the set itself is some specific logical postulates. “Physics” and “mathematics” are abstractions created on the basis of certain concepts.

The third type of abstraction is a mixed abstraction, which presupposes both the presence of an image and the presence of certain conceptual postulates. For example, I will take such a concept as “Motherland.” This word may contain part of some conceptual meaning, and part of some figurative one. Someone thinks about birches, someone thinks about beaches, someone else thinks about some other things, but at the same time, there is an understanding that the Motherland is the place where I was born, where I lived. These are such complex, more mixed abstractions.

The fourth type of abstraction is abstraction that has arisen on the basis of other abstractions. You can also collect abstract concepts into some complex abstractions that are already based on abstract symbolic thinking. It is really very beautiful and so we have this fourth type of abstract thinking.

Why am I telling you all these things? I would like you to be aware of the depth and beauty of this mental body. The mental body is one of our individual bodies, so I would like you to know what categories it operates with. Then you will accept with a smile when you are told that someone has “killed his mind” or something like this. They certainly do not mean the lack of the ability to think. In this regard, a lot of profanities have arisen, a lot of delusions have appeared, but in fact all these gurus can still interact quite normally, can still communicate effectively, can describe the world quite well, so they have no problem with their thinking. And if they have any periods of absence of thoughts, then these are specific states in which they immerse themselves for some rest, which are akin to dreamless sleep, when our thinking is absent in the generally accepted sense.

It is often very strange to hear how sometimes the mind becomes synonymous with consciousness, which we accept as a wrong interpretation, and sometimes the mind becomes synonymous with the ego, which is also a great delusion. The ego cannot be called by this word – “mind”. Sometimes it might become a direct synonymous – mind, mind, mind. Mind is here, mind is there, one must get rid of the mind, the mind should die. Guys, let’s be correct, let’s be adults, let’s be educated people. If the mind is our mental body. then why should it die? It should not die at all. Let it work, let it carry out its operations. The point is that what we register as a thought is a specific type of thought. It is the point where the “shoe pinches”, as they say. “There exists thought registration and it is a specific kind of thought, and in the same time there is a background mental flow that occurs by default, and we know where we are now, what is happening around us, we know that snow is snow, that a fence is a fence and that the sky is the sky. We do not register all these thoughts; this is a continuous flow of mental information that absolutely effortlessly serves the current moment. This is our working mind, and the speed of this process is very high.

Now you can even do a brain scan and see the number of thoughts that appear in a particular brain: synapse flashes can be recorded by devices today. So, the number of these flashes of electrical signals that arise in the brain are huge, these flashes turn into a chemical reaction and then they are deciphered as thoughts. According to this research more than a hundred thoughts come to us per second. Tell me, how many of them are registered by us as thought? It’s good if we register one thought. The rest of them just become an endless stream and they are not registered as thoughts. So, very often when they talk that they have stopped their thoughts, in reality they have only stopped the registration of these specific thoughts, do you understand it? They say: “my mind has stopped, there are no more thoughts.” In fact, there is simply no secondary registration, but – everything is in order with their thoughts. A person remains adequate, he has all the completeness of information, he communicates, he interacts. There is simply no secondary loop that is registered as a thought, because this thought is registered within a special neural loop that is present in our brain, which has already been established and defined by neurophysiologists. This thought only when it passes along such a loop is registered as a thought, and it has its own specific features and tasks. As a rule, it is the thought that serves the “thinker”, which means the “one” who has thoughts and this is the ego-structure in thinking. Those thoughts that are registered within this neural loop are often called thoughts, apart from all the thinking process that takes place in this information flow.

Be mature people, be sober people, and be aware of this difference. When the neural loop stops working, it seems to you that thoughts have disappeared. In fact, the registration of a specific thought that serves the “thinker” has simply disappeared. There is this ego-structure in the mind, which is called the “thinker,” and it, of course, can stop functioning. When this ego-structure stops functioning, the ability to think will not disappear, you will still be intelligent, still be smart, still be aware, but you will not have a secondary emergence of the “thinker” in the thinking process. This is the ego-structure in the mind. The appearance of this kind of tension has been the manifestation of ego structure. There appear some questions “What should I think; but I thought this was not what I wanted; I should think more; I am stupid” and so on. This ego structure can go away, but that doesn’t mean that the thinking process has stopped, or your brain has stopped functioning, or your synapses have stopped flickering.

In this chapter, I talked about the thinking process, mainly about its types and about the fact that the “thinker” is one of the specific thoughts that requires registration of other thoughts, and it can really disappear. This is the fourth type of thinking process, which in the first chapter I called the thinking process serving the ego-structure.