Spiritual hierarchy

[candid]

I agree very much with Dobro's comments, but would add that each person's potential grows in a different direction. A rose does not have the potential to become a lily. What matters is that we awaken to our own potential, not that of someone else's potential or what someone else may see as our potential. As for actually doing that, some do and some don't. Some never even recognize that they have potential.

 

[candid]

Let me add also that one reason some folks don?t awaken to their own potential is in 16.3, which Wilhelm expresses as ?Enthusiasm that looks upward creates remorse. Hesitation brings remorse?, and Bradford translates as ?Wide-eyed readiness (is) regrettable. The slow will have regrets ?. People need heroes to look up to, but this can make them too lazy and dim to discover their own hero.

 

[dobro p]

"Um... you're not saying that some people don't have the potential to develop their potential, are you?"

No, not at all. Everybody's got potential. It's just that, one lifetime at a time, and in this here lifetime, some people don't seem to have all that much potential. Or maybe it's that they don't choose to exercise the potential they've got. The net result in either case is the same. But without my being able to put my finger on it, your question strikes some kind of chord somewhere, and it's got to do with how people's essence and worth matches (or doesn't) the principles of egalitarianism and respect for human beings generally.

So, I'm gonna move on a bit and say that everyone is loved and respected. But not everyone gets to be Jesus. And the question at that point is this: can you live with that? I mean, imagine not being able to be Jesus *some day*. Can you live with that? Cuz if there's only one Jesus in an age (and that seems reasonable, cuz if there have been a lot of Jesuses since the first Jesus, how come we haven't heard of them?) what's the proper role for the rest of us?

 

[candid]

Dobro,

Maybe that depends on whether notoriety is an essential part of being Jesus. Thinking on it, Jesus probably would have been better off without the notoriety, and would have been no less Jesus. If that's true, then there may be thousands or perhaps millions of Jesus(s) on the earth as we speak.. or type. As Jeany suggested, he or she might be the bus driver.

 

[micheline]

Excerpted with permission from A Passion for the Possible, ? 1997 by Jean Houston, published by HarperCollins.


The inner realms

My work is to show people how to wake up, how to inhabit parts of themselves that have been left vacant and unexplored. We are told in Christian scripture that "In my Father?s house there are many mansions." As above, so below. In the province of the human condition, there are countless houses, apartments, condominiums, tents and even a few mansions, many of which have been uninhabited for years.

When we move out of the cardboard box we have called home and take up residence in some of these glorious places, our reality heightens dramatically. We begin to live with everyday passion. Things become more real. Colors and shapes and ideas and relationships have more intensity, energy, and pattern.

This acuity brings with it a motivation to "get on with it." Old obstructions dissolve as we discover new ways of being, new forms of enterprise?a new body and a new mind.

Believe that you are more, that you contain an inner self, a true self, that can emerge only if you give it attention. You might consider it the fetus of your Higher Self, an evolutionary being ready to be born.

New birth requires new being. It means laying down new pathways in the senses to take in the news of this remarkable world. It means extending the field of your psychology so that there is more of you to do so much of this. New birth demands that you choose a richer, juicier story, even a new myth, by which to comprehend your life and that you begin to live out of it. And most important of all, it asks that you be sourced and re-sourced in God, Spirit?the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.

Through decades of research and teaching, I have found that all human beings contain these inner realms, but few have more than a passing acquaintance with what they hold. Most are familiar with only the surface dimensions, leaving their inward reaches unexplored.

Yet it is in the world within that these realms of being have their greatest range, variety, and depth. In them are the materials for reweaving mind and body. From them you get marching orders for your soul?s deepest purpose. From them you begin again!

What are these familiar yet alien realms?

The most accessible is the sensory, physical realm, the level of the body and the senses. Next is the psychological realm, the level of personal history and emotions. The third I call the mythic and symbolic realm, the level of story and of universal patterns. The deepest, the spiritual realm, is the Great Mystery out of which we all emerge.

You will be eating ripe peaches and walking on warm beaches in the sensory realm. In the psychological realm you will meet members of your inner crew: elder, child, mechanic, poet. In the realm of myth, you will travel to a time long, long ago in a galaxy far away with a number of familiar characters. Finally, in the spiritual realm you will come Home to who and what you really are.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Dr. Jean Houston is a scholar and researcher in human capacities, and a co-director of the Foundation for Mind Research. She has written some 15 books, and taught in over 40 countries. She holds a PhD from Union Graduate School. Information is available at the Foundation for Mind Research, PO Box 3300, Pomona, NY 10970.

 

[martin]

"if there have been a lot of Jesuses since the first Jesus, how come we haven't heard of them?"

You have heard of them and you see and hear them every day. There is no lack of Jesuses and Buddha's, there are billions of them. Even the big fly that is now irritating the hell out of me (BZZZZZZZ!!) is .. the Buddha.
Who else could it be?
Did the fly realize its potential to become the Buddha? Of course not. It never was anyone else.
How could it be?

Enlightenment is not a goal that one can reach or needs to reach.
Once you understand that you are .. enlightened.

 

[dobro p]

Candid - "Maybe that depends on whether notoriety is an essential part of being Jesus. Thinking on it, Jesus probably would have been better off without the notoriety, and would have been no less Jesus. If that's true, then there may be thousands or perhaps millions of Jesus(s) on the earth as we speak.. or type. As Jeany suggested, he or she might be the bus driver."

I respect your speculation, but I absolutely cannot accept that idea. My understanding of an avatar or enlightened being or whatever you want to call those people is that when one is around, they have a dramatic and noticeable effect on everyone who is in their vicinity. They can't go unnoticed - there's a percentage of the population who are hungry for light and growth, and they notice whenever somebody's got some. It's like Jean Houston, who Micheline quotes - she knows something more than the average person, and she gets noticed. In India, some of these guys hide themselves away in caves in remote places, cuz the Indian tradition is so bent on selflessness and complete absorption in the Godhead that there's much less of the idea that you have a responsibility to serve your fellow beings when you're enlightened - you're allowed to go off and be completely immersed in deity if you want to. But even so, people seek these beings out because they've got something they want or need.

Micheline - yeah, I think Jean Houston's really clear about the inner dimensions - that four-layer map of the inner world is really useful, I think. Now, without reducing the value or importance of that, I'd like to say that it focusses on the potential which everybody has, but still doesn't deal with the question of why only a very few people go looking for it, and why an even smaller number of people find it, and whether there's some sort of either biological or spiritual 'law' at work here which governs the numbers involved. Like I said before, mother nature arranges things so that there's a balance of male and female on the planet; so why not have her arrange the numbers for enlightenment as well? Cuz if that's the case, then 'enlightenment for all' is just silly - it ain't gonna happen.

Martin - that thing about there being billions of Buddhas is a circular argument. If beings are actually Buddhas, but they don't realize it, then they're not *realized* Buddhas. It's the realized Buddhas I'm talking about. The ones you can ask a question of like: "What do I need to know about living my life more skillfully?" and who answer that question with something like: "Well, for a start take on the fact that suffering is a universal law - you can't get away from it as things stand - you're actually the cause of your own suffering if you only knew it. But it does stop, given the right conditions and the right amount of intelligent effort on your part. And as it happens, I know about the path to that cessation of suffering because I've trodden it myself and I can teach you if you're willing to listen up; not only that, but I also happen to have a kind of deep insight into people's personality structure, and so I can 'read' you in a way that will allow both of us to work together more intelligently. But to do that, you have to leave behind everything you know and think you are. It's no small thing to do that. Consider carefully."

The fly buzzing on the wall never says anything like that to me, Buddha though it may be. The people at work never say anything like that to me, Buddhas though they may be. In fact, nobody I know personally communicates anything like that to me in any way whatsoever. If they're all Buddhas, they're slackers lol.

 

[candid]

Dobro, maybe you?re right. I dunno, I?m not Jesus. lol

There?s some interesting things to read that may shed more light on who Jesus actually was, in what little we have left of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. There it speaks of a leader of the Esseians ? a small pacifist religious group - who was referred to as the Son of Heaven. This leader had only one mission: to rid the Temple of its priests who were controlled by Rome. Following the Gospels, it is evident that the temple priests were the only ones who Jesus spoke to in extremely harsh terms ? ?thou brood of vipers!? etc. The only account of Jesus demonstrating violent behavior is when he made a whip of his belt and beat the money changers and merchants in the temple courtyard silly.

My point is, we really don?t know too much about Jesus because he was not especially famous. We do know that he was not a popular fellow, except to those few who followed him. We?re told he was ?a man acquainted with sorrow? and we can pretty easily speculate based on record that he was suicidal when he entered the gates of Jerusalem as a king on a donkey with hopefuls throwing palms before him, shouting before the Roman authorities, ?blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!? During that time of the Sabbath, groups were forbidden to gather, even in the streets, yet he began preaching to the crowd unabashedly. He knew what he was doing and he knew the price he?d have to pay for doing it. Everyone did. There was no god or king but Caesar, and anyone saying otherwise would be killed. Yet he preached of the kingdom of heaven and of the heavenly Father, who he claimed to be one with. His notoriety was posthumous as a result. Other than that, he made stuff out of wood.

 

[mindful_seeker]

Candid - Very nice.

 

[dobro p]

Candid, I don't want to get into details of Jesus' life, and when I talk about Jesus, I'm just using him as a handy representative of any major spiritual figure. The question I'm asking is: can *everybody* attain enlightenment? Can *everybody* even get clear of their personal neuroses by the end of their lifetime? See, it was that thing that Karen Horney said that started me off on this at the beginning - she was talking about her ideal of personal development for *everybody*, and it really struck me as saying more about Karen Horney and her ideals than it did about the way things really are. I don't think life is egalitarian; I think life works in hierarchies.

 

[hilary]

Agreeing to differ. I don't think life works in hierarchies: I think the idea of hierarchies, by and large, is a symptom of our inability to think in enough dimensions at once. (I had a nice argument with the religious education teacher at school when she did her 'look how different animals are from humans; that proves humans are superior' lesson.)

The thought that not everyone is given the potential for spiritual evolution might be hard to take. Or it might just be a relief: not my fault, I was born this way.

The thought that everyone is given the potential to become a 'Jesus' gets more and more unnerving the more you think about it. (And isn't it also more in line with what Jesus himself said?)

 

[lindsay]

I agree with Dobro. I think life does work in hierarchies. I see pyramids of class and status and power in every society. I see an unequal distribution of wealth, control, and opportunity - some have more, others have less. I think anthropology shows us all human groups are stratified, and always have been. In many cases, to have or have not (whether it be wealth, opportunity, status, or "potential") is determined by the random fact of birth. Where were you born? Who were you born to be?

Added to this are the unequal gifts of genetics and chance. Surely these factors arrange people into de facto hierarchies of favor and blessing? Many talented people with huge potentials have had their lives cut short or blighted by disaster or misfortune. We the living are at the top of a hierarchy of all beings that ever were, because we are still alive and know anything is possible. For the dead, little is possible, at least in the realm of the living.

Candid is right that we know little about the historical Jesus, and what we know does not completely explain who he really was. Two points about this: First, it is not the Jesus of history, the actual living person. who matters, but the Jesus of myth. Without the vital myth, Jesus would just be another obscure ancient holy man or shaman. We know the names of many. This is also true of the I Ching. We know very little (by the ordinary rules of historical evidence) about the Zhouyi, but it really doesn't matter. What matters is the living myth of the Yi. The Yi is essentially and functionally a scripture like the Bible or Koran or Upanishads or Daodejing.

Second, as for knowing who people "really" are, who do we know? Do we know who Napoleon or Hitler really was, though we have much more information about them than Jesus? Do we know who our own mothers and fathers really are? Our children? Do we know who we ourselves are? Surely everyone has had the shock of overhearing other people talking about them, and wondering how anyone could see them that way? Are we not all of us misunderstood, even by ourselves?

I do not speak of the spiritual realm. There is so much confusion about what can be known, it hardly seems worth talking about what cannot.

Lindsay

 

[jerryd]

The old saying passed from parent to child is "honey you can be anything you wont to be" is just a myth. No one can always become what thay want to be as they have no idea what that is till much later in life if ever. Unforunately a child wanting to be a jockey grows to be a 200 lb man and this now limits his ability to realize the dream. Higherarchys are a goal placed in front of a philosophical ideal attainable by only a few.

I shy away from any references to spirit or fame here and limit my self to commonalities. Man has a natural habit of protecting and feeding and surviving at all costs. Not many are willing to sacrifice self or family for a belief. To protect if challenged yes but pure belief I am in doubt, it has to be coupled with a survival instinct.
If I am told my soul purpose is to reach the highest level of a higherarchy, the pyramid from bottom to top is unclimable and any rational person will not try, for fear of failure or fear of success.
As Hillary said the higherachy is man made not a metaphysical bond or a product of spirit but one of man and his ambitions.

 

[candid]

The spiritual realm, such as it is or may be, who can measure it? Not sure but I think that's Hilary's point. It's easy to establish hierarchy with social or economic casting. You just add up the numbers and divide by the class of people someone hangs with. I don't think Dobro is speaking of those things but of what amounts to as spiritual casting. And here I agree with Lindsay. Who can measure spiritual wealth other than by the value of their myth?

 

[hilary]

Yes, that was pretty much my point. Of course there are man-made hierarchies of all kinds. But a hierarchy of newborn babies according to their spiritual potential? I think not.

 

[lindsay]

Yes, looking back in this string, I think I misunderstood the issue being discussed. Still, I stress the ubiquity of hierarchies in this world: "every man and woman has a boss," someone they answer to.

As for the other world, the spiritual one, a person could argue "as it is below, so it is above." This may not be true - who knows for sure? - but at least it is based on actual observation and the unity of nature.

I do not think it would be wise to separate social, political and economic issues from spiritual ones. Intimate connections are apparent between these realms. I think such connections also apply to the Yi in general and to this forum in particular. There are identifiable segments of society who are interested in such things. For example, the Yi has little appeal for the vast number of illiterate people in Western society. One must be able to read to use the Yi. To understand it at all requires even more educational background.

With the Yi, as with all other belief systems, one must ask the lawerly question, cui bono? who benefits?

 

[lindsay]

I don't know anything about the metaphysical status of babies, but I would ask this question: what exactly in this world is NOT man-made? Even tables and chairs are the creations of our senses and our brains. No cat or dog knows what a table is.

 

[dobro p]

"The thought that everyone is given the potential to become a 'Jesus' gets more and more unnerving the more you think about it. (And isn't it also more in line with what Jesus himself said?)"

I don't think so. "Those that have ears to hear, let them hear." Which implies that some *don't* have ears to hear, and it implies that what he said was designed to reach and transform the lives of *only* those people who were sensitive to his message. (There are loads of other instances in the gospels of a similar esoteric plan in his message. Didn't he say something to a non-Jew once about not giving the children's food to the dogs? And then she won him over by saying something like: "Yes, Lord, but even the dogs receive the crumbs that fall from the table," or something similar.) He wasn't being egalitarian and democratic - he was reachinng the people who resonated with his being and teaching. And out of those people he created an inner circle who received esoteric teachings. He taught everybody, but he knew he was reaching only a certain segment of the population.

Anyway, I'm not trying to convince anybody, because I'm not convinced myself - it's just the most likely explanation for the way things are, to my mind anyway. And I ran it by this group cuz I value what people here have to say, and I wanted to see what would come of it.

Incidentally, I think the only way this connects with the Yi is via the idea of the 'chief son' or whatever you want to call him/her (Wilhelm's 'superior man').

 

[dobro p]

Hi again Candid

"It's easy to establish hierarchy with social or economic casting. You just add up the numbers and divide by the class of people someone hangs with. I don't think Dobro is speaking of those things but of what amounts to as spiritual casting. And here I agree with Lindsay. Who can measure spiritual wealth other than by the value of their myth?"

Yeah, of course, who can measure it? I don't even want to start to try, cuz I think as soon as you start measuring, that means comparisons, and as soon as you get into comparisons with others, I think you're getting offtrack. But even if you don't measure a mountain, you still know it tapers toward the top. You know there's less real estate up there. You know you're closer to the sky when you're up there, and you know the air's different. You also know that not many people make it up there.

 

[candid]

Hi Dobro,

Assuming 'up there' is an accurate measure of development, I can agree with you. I'm not so sure it is 'up there', though. Besides 'up there' there's also how that translates 'down here', and then it can go deeper than that, 'down there' in the earth from where everything grows from. The value of strength in a tree, for example, isn't only determined by its height. It's also valued by it's girth and breadth, none of which could grow if not for the health of its roots ?down there?. I?m sure we?ve all known so-called spiritually evolved people who commune with angelic beings and spiritual guides - ?light workers? and healers, etc - but who?s feet never seem to touch the ground. Then there are the earthy souls who give little thought to themselves as being spiritual, yet contribute more to the lives of others through their labors of love. So really, which of these is the more evolved, spiritually?

 

[freemanc]

Its interesting to see in these posts how "spiritual heirarchy" and "social mobility" are tangled together. On Earth as it is in Heaven, indeed.

Many people of my parents generation went from genuinely poor dirt farmers to more or less millionaires in one generation. Some of it was luck, some of it was the availability of inexpensive publicly funded education, and the availability of books, and some of it was the times.

I also think some of it was their spirituality.

If you could read, then you could read the word of God for your own darn self.

They didn't have to, didn't care to, listen to religious, spiritual big people, nor for that matter worldly ones. To these folks, the spiritual world was radically egalitarian. It was shaped like

1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1...1,1,1(us) and INFINITY (God)

Coincidence, that they felt they were pretty much as big as anybody? Probably not.

I have a considerable nostalgia for this view of the spiritual world, which I expect will disappear in the next generation or so as social mobility basically becomes a historical artifact in America.

 

[dobro p]

"They didn't have to, didn't care to, listen to religious, spiritual big people, nor for that matter worldly ones. To these folks, the spiritual world was radically egalitarian."

That's how it's shaped for me too. I don't go to church or belong to any denomination, but my view is Protestant right down the line - I don't need no priests between me and God lol. But I'm thinking that if you put all the 'Protestants' in one big experiment that unleashed them into the kingdom of heaven, you'd get what a scientist might think was a random distribution of results in terms of spiritual attainment, and what I think is a sorting according to a law that operates in those realms. You're not going to develop/attain/evolve higher than you're qualified to. Of course, you have potential, and you can develop it if you're lucky and determined - everybody can. But that potential... you know...it's like a ticket for a concert or something - even if you've got it, sometimes it's just for the cheap seats. And who gets to be the conductor? Anybody? Everybody? Nah. Just the one guy.

 

[heylise]

I think I like Martine?s fly most. He never left Buddha-hood. And he teaches everyone who cares to look.
He is what he is, truly and totally. Now isn?t that enlightened? Maybe being enlightened is when nothing darkens the mind. And where no hierarchy matters. I?d love to reach it.

LiSe

 

[dobro p]

Yeah. Plus, when you're on the top, you're on the bottom anyway, right? I mean, who wants to be Jesus anyway? Well...how would I know?

But I returned to the quote that got me going on this one in the first place:

"An integral part of the democratic ideals for which we are fighting today is the belief that the individual - and as many individuals as possible - should develop to the full of his potentialities."

She wrote this during the Second World War, by the way.

You know something? It doesn't irritate me as much as it did the first time. I'd like to tweak it a bit, is all: "...the belief that all individuals should be encouraged and have the freedom and resources to develop to the full of their potentialities."

Amen.

 

[martin]

Meanwhile the fly has moved on, LiSe.
Judging from the noise it is now irritating the hell out of the two pigeons that have their nest in a tree in the backyard.
BZZZZ! RROEKOE?! BZZZZZZ!! RRROEKKKOE! (is that RRROUKKKOU in English?)

The Buddha irritates the hell out of the Buddha

 

[lindsay]

If you were Jesus, we'd just have to kill you anyway. I'd rather be a Greek god, beautiful but irresponsible, sensual but immortal. It would be fun to see humans as toys, instead of being one.

 

[candid]

LOL! I agree with that, Lindsay. And that's (sorta) how I imagine it to be these days. The difference being that my deities are not so vain as those of the Greeks and a bit more serious in their intent to raise noble chill'en, though no less playful than Pan.

 

[mira]

syncroistiy to some of the thoughts expressed in this thread, received in email from my wonderful roumanian friend in india:

...Only this citta is Buddha.There is no difference between Buddha and all creatures.It is only because all creatures are attached to materal shapes,they search so for buddha-bhava from outsides.Their search makes them miss the Buddha-bhava.It is the way to use Buddha to search for Buddha,to use citta to find citta.Even though they try their best for an aeon they cannot attain Buddha-bhava.....
...Our citta and everything around us are the same thing.If we can understand this,We will attain the enlightenment in a single moment.
....If we are not absolutely aware that citta is buddha and we are still attached to material shapes, to duties, to development of wholesome deeds,We still have the wrong understanding,Which is not in line with that path at all.....
...l.p.dunn...

 

[dharma]

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some super-human accomplishment, but the process of enlightenment has no need of 'power' nor 'might'. These are merely the characteristics that the ego-mind, fearful for it's own survival, deems necessary.

Enlightenment is a state of 'connectedness' with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially each of us and yet is much greater than each of us. The inability to feel this connectedness is what gives rise to the illusion of separation, from ourself and from the world around us. We then perceive ourself, consciously or unconsciously, as an isolated fragment. Thus, fear arises, and conflict within and without becomes the norm.

Hierarchies, or power structures, are constructs of the ego-mind's logic which concludes that power over other ego-minds is what ensures survival. And to fear for the survival of one's separate ego-self automatically implies a belief in one's linear experience (birth...death of ego-self) as the reality that really counts. Hence, where there are beginnings and endings, tops and bottoms, there are hierarchies and power structures.

Yet buddha-hood is the AWAKENING to the indwelling divinity - becoming fully AWARE of Self that is at One with ALL. Enlightenment requires a 'surrender' to what is already Present, not a rugged climb up the side of some great mystical mountain that only exceptional persons, by virtue of their life circumstances, are able to aspire to. It can be attained by anyone recognizing that sitting-still regularly and unaffected by one's inner incessant mind-chatter (until THAT becomes the norm) is the key to the Awakening.

Plain and simple, avatars, divine mothers, enlightened masters, the few that are real, are not special persons with unique attributes. These are ordinary people who aspired to a natural state of "felt" oneness with Being, AND who no longer uphold, defend or feed a false self.

Everyone of us can aspire to the state of enlightenment. Indeed, the more masters there are, the more enlightened the planet as a whole becomes. When most are enlightened there is no need for a conductor since there are more who are able to inspire greatness in others by modeling that greatness themselves.

Nor does aspiring to enlightenment mean leaving our regular everyday lives behind. Yet, it IS a decision (one of faithful surrender to that Presence) that one must consciously and deliberately make, or the 'connection' remains merely a latent potential and nothing more; the ability to achieve enlightenment is not some proclivity to greatness that only some are born with, but a 'choice' available to all, at all times.

 

[cal val]

Dharma...

First of all, my eyes just about popped out of my head when I saw your name at the top of the last post... they were pushed open by the huge grin on my face. Yours is the first post in this thread I've read for a few days. All I had to see was talk of 'potential' and 'enlightment' and 'realizing' and I lost interest... until I saw your name... and then I just HAD to see what you have to say about it.

You said:

<blockquote>Enlightenment requires a 'surrender' to what is already Present, not a rugged climb up the side of some great mystical mountain that only exceptional persons, by virtue of their life circumstances, are able to aspire to.</blockquote>

Yup... it's that simple. Enlightment requires a surrender to what is already present.

Yup.

Yup... and what is present and can inspire man to great heights is... again, it's so simple... is love. A wise woman told me years ago... and it has stayed with me... the greatest thing a person can achieve in life is love... is the ability to love and be loved. I have since read it and heard it said by other wise people.

The greatest thing a person can aspire to... is to love and be loved... and it's available right here... and right now... in your universe, in your world, in your neighborhood... in your own home... and in your self.

I love you, Dharma... and I've really missed your input here. It's so good to read your words again.

Love,

Val