Post 5 The Ladder of Development

In the last post we spoke about the ladder of development.  The term development is relative to ones state of consciousness.  There really is no development there is just process.  However if you are identified with a particular level of consciousness then development is very real.  So let's get the big picture and then we will drill down to our level. 

In the beginning was the word.  I think you heard that one before.  The word in this context refers to vibrations.  Next comes the three aspects of this process which we may describe as -

1. Fist Aspect - undifferentiated energy
2. 2nd Aspect - Energy differentiated into patterns  [ Electrical and magnetic fields ]
3. 3nd Aspect - Configurations of units of energy  which we label plants, animals etc.

In the 19th Century Helena Blavatsky who was the founder of the Theosophical Society  coined the phrase  "as above so below" to emphasize the repeating nature of forms which the major characteristic is that any part is a replica of the whole.  In the 20th century this was further defined by Benoit Mandelbrot who defined a new geometry called fractals which are often found in crop circles and are called Mandelbrot sets.  The snow flake is another example of a fractal.  Each arm of the snow flake is a replica of the whole flake. 

The most common energy forms in our reality is the spiral.  As we look into space we see spiral galaxies and on earth we see spirals in nature such as sea shells, plants and vines, branches and leaves in trees.  We also notice the spiral as we see water flow down a drain it quickly resorts to a spiral form.  So as we try to get a handle on a picture of our world spirals certainly is a major part of it.  We call this spiraling process  the 'cosmic process'. 

David Wilcox calls these spirals torsion waves in his book The Source Field Investigations which by the way is a great book and can be found at www.divinecosmos.com.

We need to understand this process so that we can make changes that will inure to our benefit.  If we remain unconscious of the process then we make choices based on whimsy and chance which is more like playing Russian roulette. 

So the first step in the practice of the way is the practice of non identity.  This is not easy and takes time but is crucial in ones ongoing.  To start we have to become aware of what we are identified with and of course the answer to this is we are identified with images that appear in our mind as substantive and 'real'.  I put real in single quotes to emphasize that the word real is an undefined term.  It's a fiction.  Real is what we decide it to be not some place that is strictly defined and available to all.  Our language is full of these fictions and occur naturally in our abstracting process.  An example would be the word tree. Tree is a second order abstraction.  The first order being the conversion from a light wave to an electrical signal after it impinges on our skin.  The electrical signal is then processed to an image and if processed in a normally healthy individual presents a well defined image.  We then label this image, in this case tree, for purposes of communication with other individuals of the same species.  We then further abstract to label a large group of trees a forest.  As we go farther and farther into the abstracting the process the farther we get away from the reality.  Forest is a fiction.  What is the reality in forest?  It's tree.  Forest is a self created convenience.  The idea here is to be very conscious of the abstracting process to avoid errors in evaluation.  Alfred Korzybski called it "Consciousness of Abstracting".

 

As mentioned previously the term abstracting or to abstract means to 'draw from'.  Another words we live in a cosmic sea of vibrations but we as humans can't process all of them at the same time so we abstract certain vibrations that are natural to our state of consciousness.  Even these vibrations are moving so fast that we can not register them so we 'sum' them and the result is presented to our mind as a picture.  This process is similar to the movement of a fan with multiple blades.  We can see the individual blade as the fan begins to rotate, but the faster it rotates [ frequency ] the less we are able to differentiate the blades as separate and the rotation speed finally builds to a point that we can no longer register the blades of the fan as separate so our nervous system sums the frequency and presents an image of a flat plate to our minds. 

This action applies to everything in nature.  In the eastern tradition this was referred to as illusion and that we live in a world of illusion.  The translation from the original Sanskrit word to the English word illusion sometimes gives the wrong impression.  Our world exists 'out there' but not in the way we perceive it.  To say that it is an illusion implies that it doesn't exist at all.  There may be something to that but for our purposes let us say that there are vibrations, we do perceive them [ not all of them ], but the resulting vibrational presentation to the mind is self created. 

J. Krishmurti was a great Indian rishi who lectured quite a bit on college campuses during the 1970's and his tag line was "you are the world" and "you create your own reality".  I'm quite sure that most people in the audience really didn't get it but all clapped and agreed.  The fact is that he was correct and before this post gets too long we'll pick up the practice of non identity in the next post.