FEBRUARY 20, 2014 THURSDAY MORNING
Good morning, Honey Bun.
I slipped into a bit of despair yesterday after walking several miles on a combined exercise and exploration tour. I walked from the apartment at Northside Manor to Midland Park Road, down it and under I-26 to Stall Road, down Stall to Ashley Phosphate Road, then over I-26 to Rivers Avenue and on into Walmart where I bought a few canned goods and went to the bus stop where I caught the #10 back to the stop nearest this apartment, where I sleep but no longer think of as home. I carried my two bags into the complex right behind the white truck belonging to the neighbor, Raymond, who lives next door to me in #104. I also noticed the landlord stopping his business discussion with some men at another of his nearby properties to watch me walking into the complex. Usually he takes no notice but now he watched.
I had discovered lots of places to rent, trailer parks and small apartment buildings, on my walk down Midland Park and Stall Roads. Most of them looked well kept. I wrote the phone numbers and address of one particular modular home park as I passed it, because it had a sign out front advertising a rental. But I decided not to write down others yet for this was just a scouting tour to get a general impression. The impression was rather good.
My despair started a little later after I wrote down the rental information, probably due to fatigue as I walked all those miles. I had started out with a pretty good meditative consciousness. Good observation of my thoughts processes and the sensory images that make up my perception of my world. As I walked, I consciously probed into the combined sensations that made up the experience of walking, of feeling the sun shine on me, of hearing and smelling and seeing the automobile traffic around me and the pedestrians and bicyclists who passed by.
I realized that, as George Berkeley pointed out in his A Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, our world is composed of sensory impressions, specific impressions such as touch impressions and sight, hearing, smell, etc, all working in various combinations to appear to our conscious perception as single objects. But they are multiple things in actuality, separate impressions from separate senses combined together to look like one whole object to our perception. In other words, we build our material world mentally by subconsciously and semi-consciously putting these different separate sense impressions together to form the objects of our world. (I can remember beginning this process 63 years ago when I was an infant looking at the world around me and slowly discovering patterns and correlations of recurring sensations; of course back then, in my virgin mind, I had no idea of what it would all become in time).
Now back to this present letter to you, my Love.
In this sea of free floating sensory data, and while I walked along on my tour of the area yesterday, I kept submerging my observation, trying to get below the sensations and objects that came together to compose the familiar objects of my perceived world. I kept trying to dive deeper, to go beyond this world of familiar forms into pure spirit, the pure consciousness or soul that uses this sense material as material for expression but is the true living intelligent will beyond it. I kept diving and probing in this vast sea looking for you, Chris.
But my growing fatigue kept making it harder and harder to maintain this probing into the depths of experience. And it is very difficult anyway because, as George Berkeley and other strong intellects have pointed out over the years and centuries, pure spirit or soul knows many things via the sense impressions but it is not a sense impression or combination of impressions itself. It is pure spirit. It is unlike the sensory materials it uses and acts on. These sense materials are lifeless data and objects. The real living being is the soul which uses them intelligently.
This is similar to the living human being who is the life of the car he drives. When he stops the car and gets out, the car is inert, lifeless matter. The person walking away is the life leaving the car, the soul of the car leaving it behind.
So searching for you, Chris, from the illusion to find what is beyond the illusion is difficult at best because the soul in its purity cannot be defined but only represented by words like soul or spirit. Searching for you during my long meditative walk seemed somewhat successful at the beginning. But growing exertion and fatigue pulled my conscious down from higher perceptive modes as my walk lengthened until I began to feel that I had lost you. At this stage I began to feel faint wisps of doubt about the immortality of our souls. This doubt is much easier to erase when I have enough energy available to contemplate and cogitate about the deeper levels of physics principles and well established philosophical thought. But yesterday, at the end of the long, tiring walk despair began to weigh upon me.
Therefore before bedtime I dug up an extract from Deepak Chopra's writings that mentions astral bodies which are alleged to be beyond physical limitations and mortality. I want to paste an extract of that right here and now, because I think that it is uplifting and helps one rise above the illusions of loss of a dear person or soul (in this case you, Honey Bun) just because the temporary physical body had finished it's usefulness. So here is the extract:
"Just as there are different planes of material things, there are also different spiritual planes, a shocking notion to the pious Catholic brothers, mostly Irish, who were my teachers at school. To them the only spirit was the Holy Ghost that lived in Heaven. We children were politic enough not to disagree, yet in our cosmos it only made sense that if the Earth was a dense spiritual world, there must be higher spiritual planes, known to us as Lokas, which in Western mystical circles became known as "astral planes." There are an almost infinite number of astral planes, divided into a higher and lower astral world, and even the lowest ones vibrate at a higher frequency than the material world.
"Long ago the West gave up trying to hear the music of the spheres, but in India it is believed that a person with finely tuned consciousness can go inward and actually hear the vibration of various higher planes. In the astral plane you can see your own body, for instance, yet it might change in age from moment to moment."-- Deepak Chopra, Life After Death: The Burden of Proof, pg4.
Honey Bun, if that is not good enough to awaken a degree of new hope, here is another interesting extract for a different author:
"According to Martinus a living being has a double analysis. It is a physical being, but it is primarily an electrical being. Because it is first and foremost an electrical being it is also more than its physical body. Today there is probably nobody who will deny that the human body is surrounded by a field of energy. This field of energy is not restricted to the boundaries of the body, but it transgresses the body and surrounds it as what has become known as the aura. The aura consists of different energies, which organize themselves in a field around the body. Martinus denominates these energies as ray-formed matter. It is irrefutable that the energy field around a living being exists and as it is not “nothing”, but “something” which can both be photographed and measured it can be referred to as a type of matter. Energy is not “nothing” in spite of being both invisible and intangible, and as its existence is irrefutable, we may go as far as saying that it is a type of matter. It is a massless type of matter, but still it is matter because it is not “nothing”, but “something”, and this “something” is both useful, measurable and manipulable." -- Else Byskov, "The Survival of Consciousness", deathisanillusion.blogspot.com.
Of course there are some differences in virtually everybody’s ideas of reality, soul, and immortality. But the good news is that they are all headed in the same direction.
I love you dearly and, believe me my precious Love, I will never give up the work toward reuniting with you. See you soon!
