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Martin Lass: S.O.L.A.R.®
Beyond Materiality. Beyond Spirituality.
Toward the Complete Human Being…
Ideas Are Not Gods
But They Have a Place and a Purpose Nonetheless
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by Martin Lass |
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In today’s world—a world increasingly ruled by perspectives and a worldview given to us by science—the intellect is king, and ideas are the king’s currency.
Although this situation has brought us many of the comforts and miracles of the modern age—to name a few: modern medicine, the communications and information revolutions, gadget heaven, affluence for an ever larger proportion of the planet, and a fertile melting pot of ideas more diverse than at any other time in human history—it has also contributed to the destitution and fragmentation of the human spirit and of our potential to become more complete human beings. Let’s explore why this might be so.
Recapping Material Nature
In previous columns, we discussed the complete human being in terms of a collection of different Natures. (See the archives.) To briefly recap, our ordinary state of consciousness consists of what we have called our Material Nature. Material Nature is comprised of our Physical, Emotional, and Mental Natures, each of which perceives ourselves, our lives, and the world around us through different filters. Each is effectively a different “organ” of perception. Moreover, the perceptions of each Nature are often at odds with, and separate from, the perceptions of the other Natures. Put simply, we can be physically sensing one thing, emotionally feeling another thing, and mentally thinking about something quite different, all at the same time.
Not only this, but each Nature can and mainly does operate on autopilot. We previously gave the example of driving to work each day while daydreaming about things having nothing to do with driving and while feeling a semi-conscious residue of recent emotional upsets. We arrive at work, having no conscious recollection of the details of our journey other than to know that we have arrived.
We cannot call this state—which, by the way, defines most of our lives—true consciousness. True consciousness, as we have defined it in previous columns, consists first of nothing less than the alignment and unification of these three aspects of our Material Nature: Physical, Emotional, and Mental Natures. And this alignment and unity can only take place in Presence—by being Here, in the Now, mindful, “remembering self,” aware of ourselves as the Seer, Seeing the Seen, simultaneously. We have previously defined this complete state as enlightenment, among other things.
The result of having relatively simultaneous and aligned awarenesses in three basic Natures—in our three “organs” of perception—is, first, the birth of a higher unity of consciousness that we have called Caretaker Nature. Caretaker Nature consists of all those “pieces” of ourselves—we have called these pieces personas, which are all our disparate sensations, emotions, and thoughts—that have been brought together in our Hearts in greater alignment and unity by the action of Gratitude and Love and are pointed, in the main, toward Spirit, Truth, Light, Love, and Oneness. The pieces/personas of ourselves orbit our growing Caretaker Nature in the same way that, holographically, the planets orbit the greater unity and consciousness of the Sun or electrons “orbit” the nucleus of an atom.
In turn, the further development and growth of Caretaker Nature opens the door to our higher functions—our higher Natures, which, as a whole, we have called Spiritual Nature.
This, however, is a very long way away for most of us. We actually know little of what Spiritual Nature entails and includes. Unfortunately, though, because our unaligned and un-unified basic Natures are subject to gross distortions of reality (the distortions of a dualistic or polarized worldview based on the perceptions of our material senses, which we discussed in previous columns), each according to its particular filters, each according to its particular collection of polarized personas, we tend to think we are much closer to our spiritual nature than we actually are. And we think we are more aligned and unified than we actually are. And we think that we are more conscious and awake than we actually are.
Our unaligned and un-unified Material Nature is generally incensed by such assertions. Each persona of each Nature considers itself the whole of us for the time it temporarily holds the reins of our waking consciousness. Each persona thinks it is already awake, conscious, aligned, whole, and balanced. Many personas also think that they are already very spiritual and are quite quick to tell others all about it, or, at least, to put on the face of what it regards as spirituality.
Given the preceding, it is already a challenge to present new ideas that might contribute in positive ways to attaining true higher consciousness, true alignment, true unity, and true spirituality, because Material Nature thinks it knows it all already. And even when an idea that Material Nature is unfamiliar with is presented, Material Nature tends to pre-judge it by measuring it against what’s already in its library of ideas, reactions, beliefs, and conditioning.
So, with open minds, let’s now explore one of the issues that perpetuates and exacerbates the aforementioned Material Nature illusions and that represents one the major hurdles we are up against if we wish to live a more truly spiritual, conscious, aligned, and unified life. That issue is the modern world’s infatuation with the intellect (Mental Nature) and its “currency,” ideas.
In what follows, remember that our Mental Nature—our intellect—is only one of our three basic “organs” of perception. Physical and Emotional Natures are equally valid, despite modern science’s devaluation and minimization of these aspects of ourselves. Granted, the intellect has its place and we could not exist without it, but each Nature’s gift and use of this gift is limited to what it does best. Trying to become more complete human beings using only the intellect—trying to understand and know who we are and why we are here (spiritually speaking), trying to gain a greater sense of meaning and purpose, and trying to connect with the larger Picture of our spiritual lives—is comparable to using a chainsaw to perform brain surgery or a pair of tweezers to move a mountain; it is misplaced, destined for failure, and there could be a lot of blood.
The Origins of Ideas
There are two kinds of ideas. For the sake of clarity, let’s call the first kind “ordinary ideas” with a small “i” and the second kind “higher Ideas” with a capital “I.”
Ordinary ideas come from ordinary life, from casual observation, from deliberate experimentation, from associative mental activity and conjecture—both in the sense of undirected association and in the sense of directed logic—and from the empirical methods of modern science. These ideas are then “broadcast” to society at large, both randomly and imitatively as second-hand knowledge and relatively intentionally through education. In both cases, the ideas, once loosed into the winds of the collective consciousness, so to speak, then cross-breed in a random interplay that produces, at best, random results—relative fact mixed with relative fiction.
Ordinary ideas are the currency of our Mental Nature when operating relatively divorced from the rest of our Material Nature. In fact, in a certain sense, ordinary ideas are the fragmented personas of our Mental Nature, because we identify with them one at a time and divorced from each other every time we say things like, “I know such and such,” “Such and such is a fact,” and “I know such and such to be true.”
In contrast, Higher Ideas do not have their origins in the ordinary world. These Ideas come from a higher state of consciousness that precedes our Material Nature “organs” of perception. In other words, higher Ideas came first, wordlessly, from a higher functioning of more unified Being. Our ordinary “organs” of perception came second, as part of our descent into the dualistic material world. And ordinary ideas came last—the result of the automatic functioning of our “organs” of perception trying to make sense of the world.
Higher Ideas come from wordless and direct Knowing and are the currency of our potential Spiritual Nature (which awakens and comes into operation after we succeed in aligning and unifying the components of our Material Nature); and they are the currency of teachers and seekers connected with living traditions or Ways.
Once released into the world, though, when separated from their conscious and intentional sources, such Ideas often become diluted and distorted. After a time, they generally devolve into ordinary ideas, cross-breeding in the undirected and unfocused collective consciousness with other such ordinary ideas.
Given the preceding, common views about ordinary ideas and their capacity to elevate us into higher consciousness are upside down, to say the least.
Ordinary ideas cannot take us to higher consciousness, no matter what their origin is. We play with ordinary ideas like kindergarteners play with blocks, seeing how they can be put together and what kinds of interesting and exciting structures can be made out of them. To the kindergartener, there is no conception of where the blocks came from, how they were made, or what is actually possible with them beyond making simple structures. Moreover, as in a real kindergarten classroom, many of the blocks are missing, damaged, or borrowed from other unmatched sets. The jumble of the collective toy box says it all about ordinary ideas.
Regardless of this, people still believe that ideas have some kind of magical power and that this, combined with how we put the ideas together and what we “create” out of them, gives us the power to do and be anything we like. The common assertion that ideas give us the power to change the world is an example of such distorted beliefs.
The Truth of the matter is very far from this. We don’t yet even know how to distinguish between ordinary ideas and higher Ideas, much less know the value and use of either. Many things are necessary in terms of our evolution of consciousness before even this becomes possible, not the least of which is wresting ourselves away from our infatuation with ordinary ideas in order to make room in our consciousness for the receipt of higher Ideas.
On their own, ideas have no power. Ideas plus a human being may or may not have power. The power of an idea depends on the manner in which it’s applied, meaning for what conscious purpose, how, when, and where. Without these intentional factors, the results of employing an idea are random at best and will play out automatically upon the stage of the collective consciousness, even while the idea’s “owner” erroneously thinks that they have somehow produced the results intentionally.
Our infatuation with, and illusions about, ordinary ideas are perhaps best illustrated with a story. The story is a modern homage to the Sufi tradition of teaching through humorous but telling stories about the fictional “fool,” the Mullah Nasrudin.
The Mullah Nasrudin attended a philosophers’ convention on the meaning of life. At the opening cocktail party, a colleague of his came up and asked, “Have you talked to anybody yet who has discovered the meaning of life?”
Nasrudin, having been eyeing off the wife of a particularly renowned philosopher, pointed to her and declared, “I’m sure she has the answer!”
“What do you mean?” the colleague asked, taken aback. “Have you talked to her?”
Nasrudin replied, “No, but just look at her! She’s so beautiful! And she’s married to that renowned philosopher!”
Truth and Ideas
Ordinary ideas are dislocated, distorted, and lost fragments of greater Truth. From this perspective, any single idea, when taken separately, is at best a half-truth and more likely an illusion or even a lie.
Higher Ideas, although more “complete” than ordinary ideas and closer to the conscious and living source of higher Knowledge, are not Truth in themselves, but rather point to Truth. All ideas/Ideas are at best examples, approximations, illustrations, and analogies of something that can’t be pinned down but which remains intangible: living Spirit.
Ideas, ordinary or higher, present single facets of a larger Picture, and are, as such, inherently incomplete and polarized toward one perspective or another. When we take the jumbled toy box of ordinary ideas, we get a mish-mash of random, overlapping, and conflicting perspectives—the Mental Nature personas of the collective consciousness, so to speak, holographically mirrored in the Mental Nature personas of each one of us.
Conversely, when we take many overlapping higher Ideas, many of which may on the surface of it appear to contradict each other, we approach greater Truth—the intimations of the Spiritual Nature of the collective consciousness, holographically mirrored in the Spiritual Natures of each one of us.
Regarding the apparent contradictions between certain higher Ideas, Truth is paradox. Not all paradoxes are Truth, but all Truths are paradoxes, because everything in existence has two complementary opposite sides that initially appear to be at odds with each other, but which are actually two sides of a greater coin of Truth. Mental Nature cannot understand this, though, because it deals in dualities, in either-or logic, in dissection, empiricism, and reductionism. This is why we need the aligned and unified perceptions of all our “organs” of perception—Physical, Emotional, Mental, and, eventually, Caretaker and Spiritual Natures—in order to discern greater Truth.
Higher Ideas and Their Proper Context
There is a big difference between higher Ideas taken within the context in which are initially given, such as in a living school of consciousness, and higher Ideas taken out of this context, separately and divorced from the larger wellspring of Knowledge from which they came.
When higher Ideas are taken out of their original environment, historical time, and social context, they are, on the one hand, often perceived and presented as panaceas for all ills, as miracles that will change our lives permanently for the “better,” and as singular “answers” to everything. This amounts to the worship of “graven images” or “idols.” It amounts to thinking that a certain inanimate object will bring us enlightenment because it was touched by a supposed saint.
On the other hand, higher Ideas taken out of their proper context are often rejected out of hand by the unenlightened as absurd, illogical, lunatic, insulting, or even blasphemous. Again, this is because the Ideas are being judged primarily or even solely by Mental Nature, which cannot understand anything beyond its own dualistic limitations.
For higher Ideas to be of maximum use to us, they must be received within the context in which they were originally given, which is usually within a living school environment. They must be applied in certain ways and not in others. And they may be applicable only to certain students and not to others. Their purpose as well as their limitations must be understood. And their effect upon our consciousness must be understood in advance. It is no good simply experimenting with such things as we tend to do with ordinary ideas and ordinary thinking, because this may be completely useless or even dangerous to our higher aim. And on the level of Material Nature consciousness, which deals only in ordinary ideas, we cannot reliably discern the difference between the purpose, use, and context of one higher Idea and the next. Better not to tinker with things than can explode until we have a greater understanding of such things; until then, higher Ideas and their management and administration are better left to those who have connected with them consciously and directly, without the filters and limitations of the unaligned and un-unified Material Nature.
Knowing How to Swim
Even when taken in the proper, inclusive context of a living tradition/Way, higher Ideas, concepts, systems, books, scholarship, etc, are still only one side of the greater picture of this living tradition/Way. This is equally true of ordinary ideas. A traditional Sufi story makes this point:
The Mullah Nasrudin sometimes took people for trips in his boat. One day a fussy pedagogue hired Nasrudin to ferry him across a very wide river. As soon as they were afloat, the scholar asked whether it was going to be rough.
“Don’t ask me nothing about it,” said Nasrudin.
“Have you never studied grammar?”
“No,” said the Mullah.
“In that case, half your life has been wasted.”
The Mullah said nothing. Soon a terrible storm blew up. The Mullah’s ramshackle boat was filling with water. He leaned over toward his companion.
“Have you ever learnt to swim?” he asked.
“No,” said the pedant.
“In that case, schoolmaster, all your life is lost, for we are sinking.”
In the case of ordinary ideas, it’s common knowledge that when we separate ideas from practical matters—separate Mental Nature from Physical and Emotional Natures, individually or collectively—we run into all kinds of problems, not the least of which is the potential to lose our humanity. One need look no further than Nazi science to see how this can play out. Less dramatic but equally insidious is the chaotic effect upon humanity of the “pure” ideas that issue forth from behind the reality-filtering walls of universities around the world.
As with ordinary ideas, higher Ideas must be combined with practical matters—in this case, with practical, real life striving toward the higher aims of a conscious Quest, physically, emotionally, and mentally. We must live the Ideas, connect them with the reality of our inner and outer lives, and bring them alive, preferably while connected to a living tradition/Way. Otherwise, the Ideas remain dry, empty, and impotent to move us beyond a certain point. The spiritual destitution of Western society in the wake of the scientific revolution is a testament to this Truth. We can only truly understand Ideas by experiencing them directly, in the context of our day-to-day lives. This requires equal attention to both Ideas and practical “work on self.”
Albatrosses and Pigeons
Further to the preceding, any Ideas/ideas, when clung to mindlessly, automatically, and doggedly (often as a result of the power of our conditioning and of the consensus reality), can become albatrosses around our necks. When we mindlessly attach ourselves to any idea/Idea, and when we succumb to the almost universal human tendency to take new ideas/Ideas and measure and distort them according to our pre-existing ordinary ideas, we close the door to higher perspectives and new understanding. Another Nasrudin story illustrates this point:
One day, the Mullah Nasrudin was in his room when a large falcon landed on his window sill. “What a strange looking creature!” said Nasrudin to himself, having never seen a falcon. After thinking for a moment, he took the bird, clipped its feathers, trimmed its beak, and painted it so that it looked like a pigeon—a bird he knew well. Triumphantly, he declared, “Now that looks like a bird!”
Selective Hearing
When we combine the limitations and pitfalls of encountering new higher Ideas with the fact that we tend to hear and judge these according to our pre-existing ordinary ideas and beliefs, we get the following situation: certain people will selectively hear certain Ideas to the exclusion of others and proceed to take these as doctrine, out of context, and as though they were complete in themselves. Others will selectively hear other apparently opposite Ideas and do the same. Soon, the two groups of people will be clobbering each other over the heads in an effort to “convince” the other side that their “chosen” Ideas, now reduced to ordinary ideas, are true and accurate while asserting that the other group’s Ideas/ideas are false and distorted and were never part of the teachings to begin with.
Most modern religions suffer from exactly these tendencies and results. Science is not immune to this either, except that the ideas they generally argue about are lower, empirically derived ideas, selectively chosen to support each side’s own favored theories.
Ideas Are Not Gods
Ideas, whether ordinary or higher, are not Truth in themselves—not magical gods that will automatically and miraculously transform our lives—but rather are analogies designed to point us in the direction of a greater, wordless Truth. Moreover, even with higher Ideas, without our striving to digest these Ideas through practical methods, given through a living tradition/Way, they cannot truly nourish us and may even give us a stomach ache.
When approaching new higher Ideas, such as many of the Ideas we have presented here and in previous columns, it’s important to keep in mind that each Idea on its own represents only one facet of a larger Picture and can only go so far in describing that larger Picture if taken in isolation. Each Idea overlaps all the others. We may hear the same words, labels, and concepts repeated again and again, but we must be careful not to automatically think that they all mean the same thing or that we understand what’s meant immediately because it looks like something else we’ve seen before. An elephant seen from a distance is not a mouse seen up close, even though, because of the nature of distance, both appear to be the same size.
Ideas, when presented and digested properly, are not just a series of colors painted side by side; rather, they constitute a complete painting—a totality. Moreover, even the complete painting is still a description, a likeness, a two-dimensional representation of something yet larger, something multi-dimensional yet without dimensions, something ultimately wordless, indescribable, pristine, and silent, yet infinitely aware, and infinitely Being.
Truth, Light, Love, and Oneness,
Martin Lass
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Martin Lass,
The first S.O.L.A.R.® Emissary, Astrologer, Author
& Musician
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The first S.O.L.A.R.® Emissary is Martin Lass. His background includes over twenty years spent studying in two separate mystery schools, each with a direct lineage extending back into antiquity—one school coming through Egyptian traditions and the other from a hidden Central Asian tradition combined with the Sufi Way.
He is also a professional astrologer, astrological/spiritual counselor, accredited practitioner of various healing modalities, musician, composer, and published author.)
S.O.L.A.R.®
Beyond Materiality. Beyond Spirituality.
Toward the Complete Human Being…
www.solarjourney.org
info@solarjourney.org
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