Black brother and his fate...
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@Edward Mason said
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I'm just curious what the traps in the path might be that would lead someone to fall into what appears to be a kind of spiritual narcissism, when transcending the mundane self has already been a significant and necessary attainment.
93 93/93,
Edward"I think, at this point, its not about spiritual narcissism or consciously choosing any sort of egoic path, or anything like that (i dont think that's really possible at this level), its usually more a matter of various deep-rooted insecurities and fears that come up at that point, and general ignorance, that hold the individual back from plunging forth into unknown, and which then may, in effect, actually (automatically) reinforce any remaining weakened ego structures that were on their way to annihilation...
IOW, it's not that you aren't ready to give up the ego... it's that there are certain major insecurities that keep you in it's company, that keep you stuck with it... until you basically fall off the track, and the momentum gets pretty much lost.
But i guess, if after such a (more-or-less unwilling) fall, one is consciously working his way out of the remaining ego-maze, working his thought out, and getting a clear perspective on the insecurities that came up in the process, and resolving them, i mean, isn't "climbing back up" only reasonable progression?
I mean, for one who is actually willing to "die", and has consciously done everything he could after the fall to disintegrate himself, has cleared up any confusion that held him stuck, and is not interested in clinging to anything, what does HE ACTUALLY HAS LEFT other than to climb back up and live??
Or am i missing something here...
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Experiencing the freedom of pre-moral states of consciousness is heady wine.
Fear of becoming a psychopath - of stepping beyond/above the moral realm on a one-way ticket is a legitimate fear.
I think counteracting this possibility is one of the functions of the Bodhisattva vow taken at this stage (if I'm not mistaken about when it's taken).
Conversely, seeing the futility of the ego and its priorities, having had a taste of the pleasure and freedom of pre-moral states of consciousness, one may have no desire whatsoever to take the Bodhisattva vow, desiring only to enjoy the pleasure and freedom for oneself. And in attempting to cross the abyss without the vow, one may be rejected by the brotherhood of those who have successfully crossed and be cast down.
Also, functionally, the vow may be the only thing that holds an individual together - or serves as the only stable, viable thing around which to reconstruct(?) the destroyed personality.
Just my own theories.
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@Edward Mason said
"93,
I'm just curious what the traps in the path might be that would lead someone to fall into what appears to be a kind of spiritual narcissism, when transcending the mundane self has already been a significant and necessary attainment.93 93/93,
Edward"I was thinking that it might have something to do with the statement that
"The Brothers of A.'.A.'. are Women: the Aspirants to A.'.A.'. are Men."
Sounds like a little bit more then the ego is being left behind....
And if we look into the evolution of human, we may see in our sex chromosomes how this could play out.
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@gmugmble said
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@Veronica said
"Sounds like a little bit more then the ego is being left behind...."The male adherents of Cybele famously castrated themselves as a sacrifice to their goddess, but I doubt many of them had reached 7=4 by then."
"I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death; peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice." (AL I:57
Guess they didn't know that.....
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I know that post there. But that business and humor is both off topic in a Temple of Thelema and beneath me. I'd hope it was beneath you. But perhaps you have no will in the matter, a mere victim of the times.
(how's that for genuine trolling?)
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@Bereshith said
"Fear of becoming a psychopath - of stepping beyond/above the moral realm on a one-way ticket is a legitimate fear.
"This : Is this the kind of thing that might result in a failure to cross the Abyss or would/should this issue have been dealt with before then?
Honestly, I have a deep rooted fear of becoming a psychopath
To be really honest, it is more a fear of... becoming one again. -
There are a couple of possibilities from experience that I could see leading to the creation of a Black Brother.
First, even (or perhaps especially) in those sincerely seeking to overcome the personal ego, you cannot underestimate the subtlety and dangerousness of the spiritual ego (In Buddhism, the desire for enlightenment is described as the great and beneficent desire; but it is also described as the final desire that must be overcome).
Second, the process of getting to the edge of the abyss is a process of building up in successive works, gaining in amplitude of one's being; but once you get there you find that not only did everything that you did before and everything that served you well before is not going to work here, its not going to function, but also that you have to take a position that is in many ways completely the opposite of what you were doing before, a total surrender (of a very different kind than the "surrender" to the HGA when achieving the K&C).
There are people who can get stuck in the Abyss because of a refusal to let go of trying to get past the abyss by "Doing".
There are also those who can get stuck in the Abyss because they can't get rid of a single idea, a single thing they hold to be true, or a single aspiration. Because like Faust they ask to linger just a little while.93!
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@Swamiji said
" There are also those who can get stuck in the Abyss because they can't get rid of a single idea, a single thing they hold to be true, or a single aspiration."
Oh yeah, that's me... I just couldn't let go of a certain aspiration/"ideal" (although there were all sorts of peculiar messages from the universe clearly pointing that I SHOULD let go of it NOW, i guess), so I got stuck and eventually withered.
Nicely put.
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@Dar es Allarah said
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@x-munki said
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@Swamiji said
" There are also those who can get stuck in the Abyss because they can't get rid of a single idea, a single thing they hold to be true, or a single aspiration."Oh yeah, that's me... I just couldn't let go of a certain aspiration/"ideal" (although there were all sorts of peculiar messages from the universe clearly pointing that I SHOULD let go of it NOW, i guess), so I got stuck and eventually withered.
Nicely put."
Did you eventually let go of it and felt the angel return to you? Not that it actually goes away but it feels like that..."
Seeing you guys and gals speak about the Abyss like that, I have a question if I may:
have you crossed it already?If so, would you be willing to elaborate a bit on the subject, please?
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I could be wrong about this but,
when I just asked myself if I have ever crossed the abyss,
and I reflected on what I thought I knew that to mean,
(which entailed ordeals, tests, and basic ripping to shreads of each molecule of my psyche and rebuilding),
and what I thought I understood as the requirement to be able to withstand and survive the ordeals, ect...I wondered if I was on the otherside,
Because it just seems as if my life can be summed into
The time before the ordeals
And now. -
"Seeing you guys and gals speak about the Abyss like that, I have a question if I may:
have you crossed it already?If so, would you be willing to elaborate a bit on the subject, please?"
Definitely no, I'm still way too full of myself, too many projections, to much bull****, to much me, and not enough OUMH.
I'm very much a beginner.
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I'm not trying to single anyone out here and I'm not necessarily even talking about anyone involved in this discussion, but I've heard so many times (on forums, in certain books and from magicians I've known personally) that they've "crossed the abyss". Which I generall took to be a claim to have attained the spiritual level equivalant to A.'.A.'. 8=3, but upon further questioning it's generally revealed that most of these people have no real attainment in magic or mysticism, and have usually not even attained K&C. It sounds to me like this is based on understanding the Abyss and its Ordeal in very poetic, metaphoric ways rather than as technical terms describing specific events/states/experiences/etc.
For most of them what would seem to be more accurate would be to say "I suffered from Major Depresson and it was a transformational experience." (Though plenty are just full of s**t.) Which is not at all to belittle that experience. I know first hand how intense, painful and ultimately how profoundly life changing it can be. The shamanic concept of a spiritual illness is probably appropriate for many people, but even there it's appropriately seen an early initiatory experience, setting up the conditions that will one day allow one to become a shaman. I also know that the language of being cast into an abyss, or having your ego ripped to shreds, losing everything that you are, and then being born anew on the other side are very appropriate to this experience.
I'm not trying to criticize or deny anyone's attainment here. My real point is that I think it's very dangerous to prematurely believe that you've attained so highly. And tying this back into the main topic here, I imagine that many Black Brothers would be completely ignorant of their condition, deluding themselves into thinking that they had transcended and lost their egos.
Obviously, most of the people who say these things aren't Black Brothers, since they've never made it anywhere near 7=4, but that's not to say that some of them aren't capable of getting there someday...
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@Dar es Allarah said
"I think we need a special space set aside for people undergoing the abyss. Somewhere away from families and children. And this needs to be an international inter-temple effort.
There is a special category newly set aside under the recent review of the DSM that deals with ‘spiritual problems’ that I believe we can use to get funding for such an effort."
Would such segregation prevent them from actually crossing the Abyss? I mean... don't they need to assimilate everything in the end to realize "the end" (which, really... has a lot to do with what you are recommending you segregate them from... ie, everything else that is not "them").
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@Dar es Allarah said
"I think we need a special space set aside for people undergoing the abyss. Somewhere away from families and children. And this needs to be an international inter-temple effort. "
I'd really disagree. I don't think this would really be helpful except maybe in terms of cultivating delusion.
And I think its a mistake to believe that you need to separate yourself from your families and children, job, or any other sorts of "worldly engagements" in order to achieve Enlightenment; you have to do something of this to a certain degree to attain the K&C of the HGA, but that's different. It goes back precisely to what I was talking about earlier in the thread: the HGA can be achieved through efforts like this, crossing the abyss cannot.93!
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@Iamus said
"I'm not trying to single anyone out here and I'm not necessarily even talking about anyone involved in this discussion, but I've heard so many times (on forums, in certain books and from magicians I've known personally) that they've "crossed the abyss". Which I generall took to be a claim to have attained the spiritual level equivalant to A.'.A.'. 8=3, but upon further questioning it's generally revealed that most of these people have no real attainment in magic or mysticism, and have usually not even attained K&C. It sounds to me like this is based on understanding the Abyss and its Ordeal in very poetic, metaphoric ways rather than as technical terms describing specific events/states/experiences/etc.
For most of them what would seem to be more accurate would be to say "I suffered from Major Depresson and it was a transformational experience." (Though plenty are just full of s**t.) Which is not at all to belittle that experience. I know first hand how intense, painful and ultimately how profoundly life changing it can be. The shamanic concept of a spiritual illness is probably appropriate for many people, but even there it's appropriately seen an early initiatory experience, setting up the conditions that will one day allow one to become a shaman. I also know that the language of being cast into an abyss, or having your ego ripped to shreds, losing everything that you are, and then being born anew on the other side are very appropriate to this experience.
I'm not trying to criticize or deny anyone's attainment here. My real point is that I think it's very dangerous to prematurely believe that you've attained so highly. And tying this back into the main topic here, I imagine that many Black Brothers would be completely ignorant of their condition, deluding themselves into thinking that they had transcended and lost their egos.
Obviously, most of the people who say these things aren't Black Brothers, since they've never made it anywhere near 7=4, but that's not to say that some of them aren't capable of getting there someday..."
I'm totally with you on this one, I lose count of the amount of times I've heard people claim Mastery, or claim to have 'crossed the abyss', which to my mind means complete enlightenment, only to then come out with some damned fool thing or other that suggests the opposite. They assert that they have totally lost the ego, only to fall for the same ego tricks and frailties as the rest of us, to be honest it's quite laughable.
Now to be honest I'm no judge, because as I said I'm just a beginner, but the experiences which I am going through right now in my life/practice might once have been construed as abyss/like (Thwarting of ambitions, ego being examined to the point of destruction, deep depressions, introversion to the point of morbidity, and yet a strange detached equanimity in the centre of it all etc etc ad infinitum, ad nausium) But in fact they are classic examples of 32nd path phenomena. As this path is connected in a way to Binah it does share some qualities, and so the confusion is understandable, although not excusable.
It is painful for ego to have to accept the fact that what it thought was real turns out to be not real, that what it thought was definite is in fact only transitory. I am beginning to recognize this, accepting it is a whole other matter.In short, I beleive that often what the ego would like to classify as Abyss experience is simply the opening up into Yesodic/Yetziratic awareness. It is pretty basic psychology that when the ego finds a space bigger than itself it first tries to inflate to fill that space.
Also I totally disagree with the idea of a 'special space set aside for those undergoing the abyss experience'. In a rosecrucian tradition this is completely ridiculous, for the reasons set forth by Swanji and others, basically you can't become the All by hiding yourself away from it all.
I've never met a black brother, that I know of, although I have met quite a few people, often in occult circles, who have their heads stuck so firmly up their own backsides that they spend their whole lives crawling around on all fours looking for the lightswitch.
Or maybe I'm just jealous of other peoples claims and just venting my ego's frustrations? I don't know, best to just tend ones own work.
