God Perception

I borrowed the phrase "God perception" from Sri Yukteswar, because it seems to capture the ultimate simplicity of the process of union with God.  Perception is a matter of seeing, not going through complicated paths of reasoning.  It is not a strenuous exercise of the mind, but more a matter of relaxing the lower mind, its binding to the senses, and its skepticism so that a higher faculty may emerge.

Simplicity does not always imply ease, for how difficult it is for a man of excessive sense-tinged desires to live simply.  There is something built into an earthly mind that seeks to contort itself into complications to pursue its desires and ignore primordial laws.  Shortcuts from Divine Laws, seeming to be the easy way, in fact lead to the tangled way.  With apologies to Shakespeare, "O what a tangled web we weave, without a practice to perceive."

St. Paul may have been thinking of this complicating faculty of the lower mind when writing his second letter to the Corinthians (11:3)

But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.

The word perception comes from the intensive "per", one meaning of which is thoroughly, and "capere", meaning to grasp or take hold of.  In English we have an expression to "get a handle" on an idea.  Alan Kay, a famous computer scientist, said

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

For example, consider a little game where two opponents take turns moving a number from a pool of 1 to 9 to his own separate pool.  The first player that has three of his numbers adding to 15 wins.  An arithmetic view looks a little complicated, but with a change in perspective it can be related to the familiar game of tic-tac-toe, where all possible ways of adding three numbers to 15 is very visual.

I highly admire aspects of Jewish thought - their classic writers are thorough interpreters of the Old Testament. But there is a side to some of its more materialistic ones that tries to understand revealed scriptures by exhaustive lists of how they apply in hundreds of varied and often confusing circumstances.  I commented on this to Jonathan, who said (approximately), "Yes, a few hair-splitters merely engaged in complications designed to obscure the spirit of the law while appearing to fulfilling the letter."

The Hebrew race gave us science, a tremendous source of good for the world.  Material science, though, is only a reflection of a greater spiritual science.  The philosopher Bertrand Russell said that in science, we seek to break things down into principles that are so simple that no one doubts them, and then use those same principles to prove things so astounding no one believes them.  So do simple Niscience truths have the power of the atom when they are split open from their bound state.

There will be a spiritual science, which Niscience is a part of, but the application of its principles does not demand complicated mathematics, and the even greater complications trying to use it outside the physics of very confined laboratory environments.

The Maha Chohan, in his telepathic directives to Ann Ree, said of Maya

Just as man's feelings begin to be nullified, his senses to be deadened, more and more will he fall into the intricate schemes in matter ...

Science but reflecteth the archetypes of the Higher Worlds, and hath not the heart of the living life within it.  Science is a temporal means through which men experience and experiment.

There is nothing wrong with experiment unless it is needlessly prolonged with a stubborn clouded view.  It is in the aftermath of experiment that we need to promote a relaxation of our stubbornness, and a calmness of mind - even if it has to be the calm that follows the storm of our emotions or the storm prompted by our wrong choice.  Carl Jung, who could be pretty hot headed, nevertheless was able to let the storm pass and then look back with calm insight.  He wrote of an incident when he was younger and his school teacher accused him of cheating:

My grief and rage threatened to get out of control. And then something happened that I had already observed in myself several times before: there was a sudden inner silence, as though a soundproof door had been closed on a noisy room. It was as if a mood of cool curiosity came over me, and I asked myself, "What is really going on here? All right, you are excited. Of course the teacher is an idiot who doesn't understand your nature-that is, doesn't understand it any more than you do. Therefore he is as mistrustful as you are. You distrust yourself and others, and that is why you side with those who are naive, simple, and easily seen through. One gets excited when one doesn't understand things.

And Yogananda wrote of a time early in his discipleship where he tried to meditate, but found himself unable to still his thoughts.  His guru intervened and tapped him in the area of the heart and gave him a stilling of the mind and the breath.  He wrote,

As often as I silenced the two natural tumults (mind and breath), I beheld the multitudinous waves of creation melt into one lucent sea, even as the waves of the ocean, their tempests subsiding, serenely dissolve into unity. 

A master bestows the divine experience of cosmic consciousness when his disciple, by meditation, has strengthened his mind to a degree where the vast vistas would not overwhelm him.

All of us must at times have experienced on a smaller scale the peace which comes from a trusting, simple naive openness to the Divine.  It is precisely this peace which lets our higher mind function and inform us.  St. Paul wrote of it:

the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

I had an experience in my early teens where in a dream I was looking through the view finder of my camera, accompanied by my father, who in the dream had a kind and benevolent peace to him.  When I put my camera down he said that he thought my camera was a good one and had a similar manufacturer to his own.  He then led me past a cylindrical vortex of water, talking to me about dream interpretation.  He warned me not to go into the vortex, but I disobeyed and found time inside to be very, very slow - glacial in tempo.  I found it hard to free myself or move much, but my father reached through the wall of water and pulled me out.

Ann Ree interpreted the dream and said that my father was really the master.  Looking through the view finder of the camera was a Third Eye experience.  My father telling me that my camera had a good manufacturer, meant that I was a good perceiver.  (I presume now that if it had a similar manufacturer to the Master's it indicated my being on his Light Stream.)  The vortex, she said was my higher mind, but that I needed preparation to not be overwhelmed by an over intense and premature exploration of it - even as Yogananda mentioned that we would be overwhelmed by premature opening to the vast vistas of spirit).

Years later, I came upon this fine description of how the Masters' minds gaze into the world, from one of the Master's letter to A. P. Sinnett.  It was a bit of a vajra for my seemingly less than developed perception:

Quarrels and even discussions we leave to those who, unable to take in a situation at a glance  are thereby forced before making up their final decision to anything to analyze and weigh one by one, and over and over again every detail ... That which is regarded by most men as a "fact" to us may seem but a simple RESULT, an afterthought unworthy of our attention, generally attracted but to primary facts. Life esteemed Sahibs, when even indefinitely prolonged, is too short to burden our brains with flitting details - mere shadows.  When watching the progress of a storm we fix our gaze upon the producing Cause and leave the clouds to the whims of the breeze which shapes them.

We may not have the perception of the Masters, but we have the legacy of their instruction, which gives enough of a focus to lead us out of the labyrinth maya confusion.  It is simply a matter of, through calmness and humility, making a daily and with time hopefully a momentary application of the compact and essential truths they brought through Ann Ree.  I would like to close with some excerpts of Ann Ree's magnificent mantram, Simplify and Glorify:

In crisis falterings, call forth the simples of the spirit ... Peace is thine authority, no other giveth authority as peace giveth it.