Stand-out passages in a "consciousness and spirituality" book you're reading

Ian Gordon

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And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway

- Lennon/McCartney, "Penny Lane"​

I thought I'd create this thread to share passages you come across that are revelatory, illuminating, etc. I thought about putting this thread in the "other stuff" section, but I was intending it to be restricted to the "extended consciousness and spirituality" general topic. :)

In Robert Monroe's Far Journeys, I'm in the early part where there's an "explorer team" of OBErs set up in the lab in the 1970s who come into contact with extended consciousness (and sometimes beings, much like in some forms of mediumship, who will speak using the explorer's vocal cords, and can interact with the monitor).

Anyway, in this passage one of the explorers (a physicist) is describing his experience and the advanced knowing he's tapping into that I find resonates with a lot of other material I come into contact with - the idea of Source/"God" knowing/further creating/experiencing/expanding itself through a playful Experiment, and Source-parts being co-creating characters in this experiment/play.

I've gotten into all kinds of things, and I've been trying to sort them and put them into some kind of rational order. First of all, I had the impression that physical matter reality - inasmuch of I guess what is normally called reality, not only physical matter, but also a certain amount of our daydreaming and our imaginative intuitive qualities - is part of a, sort of like a large daydream or thought from a higher consciousness. Just as we can daydream and invent characters and situations, we are characters in a situation that was invented or dreamt, quite consciously dreamt by a more advanced sort of consciousness. The part that we have to play in this daydream is one of education, one of learning and bettering ourselves, striving to become more.

Now, I'm not clear why this kind of over-consciousness or over-soul is having this daydream, but I have the feeling that it is for its own education. It learns as we learn. Anyway, we have such limited consciousness to begin because if you are going to set up a situation where you expect certain processes to happen - these processes, of course, are our education, our learning - you don't set up the most complex and involved experiment or situation. You set up a simple one that you can produce, that still has the qualities to get the results that you want. This is the reason that we are seemingly of such limited consciousness. But the reason that we have an option to develop our consciousness more fully is part of the experiment itself. We are to learn and grow and evolve and become and learn through experience in doing, and as closely as we can come to understanding and being a part of, our understanding a part of our creator, our over-soul daydreamer, if you like, then sort of the more power to us. The more of that we can understand, then the more learning that we've acquired. So it's not really - well, I take that back. It's not so much that we are driven to expand our awareness or that we should be, other than it's available, and being available makes it a direction in which we can evolve if we so choose.

Robert A. Monroe. (2001 [1985]). Far Journeys. NY: Broadway Books. p. 51-52.
 
The collective unconscious - so far as we can say anything about it at all - appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious... We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual. (C. Jung from The Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 325.)
 
"All of our means of understanding converge upon a single unified vision of reality. History, sociology, psychology, biology, physics, and engineering - all of the "natural" sciences - are versions of the same reductive program. All are based on laws of historical causality in a world composed wholly of matter in space.

In a world so conceived, nothing can be more real than anything else. In a world so conceived, consciousness is reducible to and explicable in terms of physical, biological, social and historical forces. Such a world is radically incompatible with the existence of persons. This is nihilism. As long as we feel alienated and exiled in such a world, there is hope. But the very real danger is that we will abandon ourselves to this world in our hopelessness, abandon ourselves to those impersonal forces which drive us blindly to our ends, and in doing so, we will disappear: there will no longer be persons.

.....

Thought is not something that is somehow tacked onto some substance, whether that substance is Spirit or Matter. Thought is an expression of a mode of being, of a mode of Presence. Thought is not extrinsic to the thinker. If it were, then it would not matter to the thinker what the content of the thought is. We then would be computers. But we are not. Thought is essential; it reveals the essence of who we are. It is expressive of a moral and a spiritual mode of being. It is not something we do. It expresses what we are."

- Tom Cheetham from The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, pg 1 and pg 46
 
"From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist. Accordingly, this 'I' - that is, the soul by which I am what I am - is entirely distinct from the body, and indeed is easier to know than the body, and would not fail to be whatever it is, even if the body did not exist."
Rene Descartes in Meditations (1641)
 
"The Real does not die, the unreal never lived."

"Once you know that death happens to the body and not to you, you just watch your body falling off like a discarded garment."

"The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death. The body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long."

"Everything causes everything."

from I AM THAT . . . talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
 
The collective unconscious - so far as we can say anything about it at all - appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious... We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual. (C. Jung from The Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 325.)
Thanks for that! Here's another quote for Jung on the archetype of the divine child:
"The child is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the triumphal end, The "eternal child" in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth of a person"..
 
Thanks for that! Here's another quote for Jung on the archetype of the divine child:
"The child is all that is abandoned and exposed and at the same time divinely powerful; the insignificant, dubious beginning, and the triumphal end, The "eternal child" in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative; an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth of a person"..

It was a goosebumps moment reading that.
 
They said, "You have a blue guitar.
You do not play things as they are.

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar"

Wallace Stevens
 
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