There has been so many interesting things going on in this reading group, but this is something that I wanted to highlight. Because this sort dreamlike flow of symbolic images is something that describes my inner mode of cognition very accurately. I have recently found a very satisfying term for it, called "eidetic vision". For me, this has nothing to do with the eidetic memory, which is a related thing. I found out about this term when reading about William Blake in a book by Leo Damrosch, called "Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake". Damorsch writes that Blake was eidetic, and I really related to that. So Blake did not have hallucinatory visions (although he sometimes joked around with people, and pretended to paint some vivid vision that was right before him), but edetic visions, which are more like a dream or film that plays before the inner eye, and though the vision pregresses with certain inner laws, it is not an involuntary thing, and one can put it off one's mind or concentrate on it as one chooses.Nefastos wrote:"Astral" is most probably THE term for many different interpretations & associations. In a way that also is a part of astral's nature, and thus a good thing to note. Different parties see astral working differently, and may either use this and/or other words, or use the word "astral" in many meanings. Overall, it is good to just read "psychic phenomena" whenever astral is mentioned, and understand that with "psychic" is meant something not spiritual, but parapsychological (possibilities of pathological not excluded). The word spiritual has a connotation of ethical, pure and lofty, while "astral" is "spiritual" things without those connotations. Something being perceived "astrally" does not mean that the thing perceived is true, and this is one of the clashing points of theosophical ethics of absolute trutfulness and many other schools of occultism (e.g. New Age "everything goes" mentality) which do not seek Truth as their priority, but magick abilities instead. The latter means that the whole Work is based upon sand, not rock, which is also why our philosophy behind SoA is essentially theosophical, even though it often uses very different methods & mindsets.Yinlong wrote:Since lately I have been starting to work more (or again) with inner images through meditation, which at least on my mind or what I have understood is what astral world broadly refers to. As a side note, I often find the related terminology confusing - and I also find especially confusing the debate what is what, and what should be called astral etc. according to one or the other tradition. This almost leading me to just not care too much.
Yes, this is a good example of neutral astral working. It is not "good" (spiritual) or "bad" (egotistical, forced or fanatical) by itself, but a psychic tool which brings either good or bad results depending how, when and by whom it is handled.Yinlong wrote:Writing that here just in case somebody is confused as I am with the terminology to describe and make somehow clear to other readers that I basically meditate the appearing inner images or dream-like landscape without being actually asleep.
In his letter, Morya mentioned that the problem was of the "forced visions": the very point of "yoga" had been to bring about this kind of results. So, once again, we see that it is the intention that counts. Seeing astral landscapes can be very invigorating, helpful, restorative, uplifting & inspiring, but if we seek especially to see beautiful landscapes, we are basically occult tv-viewers, and thus will be also exposed to the influences of the astral "advertises" - those being even more subtle & manipulative than the ones in and between our tv programs.
This mode of thinking has many uses. For example, I use it to comprehend and memorize complex interactive wholes. In the early days of scinece, people used thechiques like the "Theatre of Memory", that I think are still very good methods when connected to this kind of eidetic thinking. I have sometimes thought how the world would be like, if consensus had sided with the "Theatre of Memory", and not, as it happened, had it actively disrecared it. I think that when words fail, you can still express complex ideas quite accurately by, for example, series of mandalas and other such devises.