/lit/ - Literature

>>18971404
>>18971459
> To explain these concepts I've made a three-part, uneven division of our consciousness. The smallest, the first attention, or the consciousness that every normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily world, encompasses the awareness of the physical body. Another larger portion, the second attention, is the awareness we need in order to perceive our luminous cocoon and to act as luminous beings. The second attention is brought forth through deliberate training or by an accidental trauma, and it encompasses the awareness of the luminous body. The last portion, which is the largest, is the third attention. It's an immeasurable consciousness which engages undefinable aspects of the awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies. The battlefield of warriors is the second attention, which is something like a training ground for reaching the third attention."

--don Juan Matus, The Eagle's Gift

>>18971422
Like the Platonic plane of ideas, yes, I made that connection.

Theosophy by itself is shit but it’s useful shit. Do you get what I mean? Guenon makes valid critiques of it but Guenon is a perennial philosopher coming at religious truth at a very similar angle from the Theosophists. He just had an axe to grind because he found himself to be a far deeper person than Blavatsky, who was, in many respects, an occultist quack, charlatan, and fraud who didn’t and couldn’t really lead people to enlightenment herself, but still had some surprisingly good sources and made some interesting correspondences between various religious traditions for the devoted researcher. She was a quack, but a very learned one.

Imagine investigating Sufism, Zen, Theosophy, and Yoga, then finally seeing there’s something beyond just brainy comparing, quoting, and or arguing about their similarities and differences. Do you get what I mean?

Suppose I ask you, “What in you is reading this question right now?” and this question succeeds in getting you into a state of higher awareness. This state of higher awareness is itself neither caused nor owned specifically by either Zen, Yoga, Sufism, or Theosophy, but it could hypothetically be that you could investigate all these traditions deeply to learn what you could about self-inquiry and from the self-realized people affiliated with these traditions, to get pointers about how to get into these higher states of consciousness by yourself more and more frequently, bursts of satori (instant enlightenment) which eventually coalesce into permanent enlightenment, a state of samadhi.