Soul Mind Transcendence!

Hi, Mary. As I let myself follow your trajectory, I find myself apparently in a newish area of mind that sounds full of beauty and goodness. The word heavenly comes to mind. To follow you, I need recurringly to let go of my usual thoughts, parsings, and critiques that want to engage. I could find myself feeling as though floating a bit in the beauty of your images that seem so alien to me.

I did need to engage actively my thinking somewhat to find a connection with you, where I remained present, and with what you are proposing; otherwise I felt split off in an untethered way or surrendering to the sweetness of a lovely story. Me doing this make take away from the beauty of your expressed vision, but it gives me a way to express and maybe connect.

By activating my meager integral vocabulary of possibilities, what came to mind for me was that you seemed to be making a case for "involution" (as distinct from evolution) into soul, body and human social set-up that doesn't forget the proposed original "light". You sounded to me that you were making a case that your evolutionary unfolding as human animal was ultimately so unsatisfactory and yucky feeling that you are giving that up, jettisoning that trajectory to be guided into a new way of being from higher ideas and possibilities that you have experienced and heard with some relief about. You are not going to enfold too far into the density of man's apparent characteristics as you descend; you are stopping short of the very unpleasant dualities.

I don't understand this involution from spirit idea/possibility very well, so I may not be explaining it correctly. I don't even know if it is actually true; I have felt some skepticism as I've heard Ken and Michael Murphy and maybe Rupert Sheldrake speaking of this, partly via Aurobindo's proposals in the past. But as I hear you, I can allow the possibility that you may be being informed by such possibilities. And when I hear them this way, I do feel different.

I too wonder if you are also making a case for your "evolution" and that you have experienced so much of the activity and mental fabric of our normal perspectives of human path, visible, assimilable, and also what is in shadow. Of course by definition what is in shadow is not seen and known, but you have seen and known plenty. From that huge inclusion of what life is, from these ordinary inherited perspectives, you have transcended the mess. You have a higher more beautiful perspective that is good and perhaps true (I really don't know).

From our usual realities, duality apparently is built into how we function as body/minds. I don't know if duality is part of soul and it's surround, or if it is, whether the dual aspects that present themselves are more comfortable or livable.

From an evolutionary standpoint, apparently the way we sense and perceive the world from the outset involves discrimination, perhaps discernment of duality, this and that, self and other. You mention "good and evil, love and fear" that are partly high level mental abstractions, but also have roots in these very basic dualistic functions that according to the model that I have been taking on are what allow us the beginnings of 'coming online' mentally to the extent that we can even speak of things such as Spirit, soul, mind, light, duality, evil and so on.

In the book that I've mentioned here in ILC, The First Idea, the authors' modeling of individual development and evolution points out where and how along the way perception of duality gains traction in our lives. For example, in elaborating some of the critical early transformations of emotion that occur in a baby, in your and my pasts, "3) These types of sensations or 'emotional' experiences, now make it possible for the infant to double-code experience according to its physical and emotional properties; for example, mother's voice registers physically, in a certain frequency range and 'feels' pleasurable, secure, or frightening." (p. 50)

To continue, as you know, babies (and to some significant extent, even fetuses) sense and perceive input through various of the senses. You also probably know that there is the task of integrating these dualistic bits and patternings of reality into a multi-modal knowing of what is going on around them and us. We also know that early precursors of pattern discernment of this from that coalesces increasingly into a "sense of self", Mary and Ambo, which is perceived as sufficiently distinct from other objects and selves.

There are so many examples from our developmental and evolutionary legacy of dual perception that usually allows us eventually to become fairly advanced feeling, thinking, communicating, functionally acting beings and people. Another factoid from The First Idea before I let this case for duality being part of our fabric go: in the same broad fourth stage of functional emotional/cognitive development in infants and toddlers, when these babies are getting pretty good at mood-regulating, and operating from a more cohesive sense of self, their interactive emotional signaling skills (as with mom and others) and their related basic pattern-recognition and problem-solving skills are developing through four levels of increasing complexity. The third of these proposed sub-levels is called a "Polarized Level". "Organized patterns of emotional signaling expressing only one or another feeling state, for example, organized aggression and impulsivity; organized clinging; needy, dependent behavior; organized fearful patterns."

I find it interesting to consider that sometimes our attempts at higher reasoning are limited by, or try to dribble around without full mastery and integration, some early and fundamental perceptual/emotional/cognitive/behavioral patterns such as this one, or others at higher levels of reasoning. "In other words, as the complexity of new challenges and experiences expands, an individual may lose the ability to use gray-area thinking, multiple-cause thinking, or an internal standard." (p. 81) And on the same page, "The reason we see so much pseudo-reflective thinking at seemingly high levels, and why truly reflective thinkers are rare, is because of the difficulty in mastering these combined cognitive and emotional skills." As an aside, the proposed fourth sub-level of this fourth stage where infant/toddlers are growing in leaps and bounds is called the "Integrated Level", that resonates poetically with the theme of an Integral forum.

End of my blurb for understandable uncertainty as to our own clarity as we dualistic beings long for, search for and speak of transcendence of duality.

Coming back more specifically, Mary, to the way that I have partly been able conceptually to follow you and feel into what you have expressed is that you are exploring and articulating possibilities that lay at the intersection and maybe overlapping/interpenetrating of our apparently inherited life dynamics of evolution and involution. I personally feel some con-fusion at this complexity, so I suppose I too am exploring, though in my more earth-bound, bottom-up ways. I hope I haven't taken too much shine off of your beautiful proposals and that I didn't go too far afield as I sometimes do. Thanks for presenting this and allowing me the chance to riff a bit.

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Thank you, Mary Linda, for expressing so clearly your understanding of the unfolding awareness in those that are willing to surrender. I noticed in the comments that there is still so much fear in people when facing change. The holding on to the old familiar ways is still very implanted in people and it take a few dedicated souls, the few that are done with living in the dream, to start inhabiting that way of life as an example. When you start inhabiting and expressing who you fully are, a creative being, beyond ego and separate self sense, you become this beacon that at first creates a curiosity and then you become a magnet. Others are drawn to you and wonder who you are. At first they just want to be with you. They don't want to know what you do or what you know, but would like to live in that same vibration.

Speak your truth at all times, don't waver and eventually, those that are still around, they will hear, and their unveiling will start.