The Texts of the Convivium
THE PATHS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Towards a synthesis of spiritual experiences
by Filippo Liverziani
C O N T E N T S
Foreword
Part I
LISTENING TO THE ABSOLUTE THAT IS PRESENT WITHIN US
1. The Absolute is our real being. It encourages us to become aware so as to really be fulfilled. And speaks to us from the depth of our being on condition we are capable of listening.
2. To really listen we must silence in us all vain anxiety and every inclination to become distracted. Hence the obvious need for inner silence.
3. It means reducing to silence certain of the sensitive nature’s impulses and the continuous work of the ratiocinating mind. One can thereby release intuitions and inspirations arising from our most profound dimension. Hence the need for specific psychic techniques.
4. It is best as a first step to enter a particular state of awareness definable as “hypnotic”, or perhaps, even better, as “hypnoid” or also “sofronic”. For this purpose one may need a particular suggestive technique to allow oneself to relax.
Part II
DISCOVERING GOD AS PURE SELF
5. Now one might extend this relaxation technique to one’s feelings, thoughts and sensations: to all that forms the real mind. Hence the meditating person de-identifies himself from his body, and not only also from his mind and all that is not pure Self. And hence he discovers the Self: the only reality he will end up by identifying with.
6. This technique is also found in the mental techniques used by the Indian Upanishads, Vedanta and Yoga schools of thought. Here the ascetic de-identifies from all that is not the Self. Since he acknowledges himself only in the Self, it is only with the Self that he attempts to establish a full and perfect unity.
7. Upanishads, Vedanta and Yoga see the Self as the only Reality and the only ultimate End. The substance of the creation the values of humanism and the religious relationship face to face with the living God appear belittled. A more careful analysis however and a better integrated consideration indicate a far more complex and articulate reality.
Part III
THE DIVINE DIMENSION OF THE ONE-ALL
8. A more careful analysis indicates that the world’s beings are anything but illusory. Four-dimensional realities, in which the totality of events and beings are all contemporary in an eternal present, form all together the One-All, and nothing is illusory or in vain. The One-All is a particular level or way of being of the Absolute that is completely distinct from the pure Self. Studies concerning the parapsychology of precognition, relativist physics, and the philosophy of Parmenides and Spinoza all converge in this vision.
9. In following the premises already established within Buddhism of the Great Vehicle Zen also converges in a vision of an absolute and eternal One-All. And Zen comes to us in its experiential and irrational particular manner that nonetheless confirms the essentiality of the discovery of this new and different dimension of the Divinity.
10. We can consider the One-All dimension as the Divinity’s particular way of being that remains totally distinct from the more original way of being in which God presents himself as pure Self. In this second way of being, God is present as the absolute, eternal Consciousness all-inclusive of all the beings of the universe and the entire series of temporal events. Within the perspective of a present that does not change, beings and events are present all together in full and perfect unity.
11. The absolute dimension of the One-All can be of inspiration for authentic artists who communicate something of this in their work. Analogous experiences can be had when taking certain drugs. Aldous Huxley bears witness to this analysing experiences obtained using mescaline and comparing these to those of the artists. He says that art consists not only and not simply in having these experiences but in being capable of expressing them happily.
12. The concept of an All-One eternal absolute Consciousness is shared by the doctrine of the "Cerchio Firenze". In this perspective both finite and becoming beings achieve reality only in God. All their separate existences and becomings are an illusion. This illusion ends when, at the end of the evolution of each one, the separate consciousnesses flow into and identify with the divine Consciousness.
13. We have already seen in what ways gaining awareness of the Self can be acquired and intensified through yogic meditation. We will now address the problem of a noetic meditation, through which one can acquire and intensify the awareness of the One-All.
Part IV
THE PERSONAL GOD OF RELIGIOUS PEOPLE
14. The search for God, on the other hand, pursues the religious experience of a transcendent God that is also totally other. Religious experience is a gaining awareness that is totally distinct from and specifically irreducible to those resulting from the search for the Self or from practising Zen. We can consider the transcendent God of religious people as a third level of the Divinity: as God in his way of being the creator.
15. Religious gaining awareness evolves through a series of stages: from primitive animism to the monotheistic revelation-revolution. And it is par excellence in monotheism that God reveals Himself as the Creator: He Who from nothing creates us for the all.
16. Religious meditation takes place within the experience of I-you relationship with the living, transcendent, creator God. Therefore it has specific contents totally distinguishable from those of yogic meditation that takes place within an experience of God as pure Self and also distinguishable from the contents of noetic meditation taking place when experiencing God as the One-All. That said, we should attempt to outline with a series of points the possible contents of a religious meditation with monotheistic characteristics.
17. For the moment we have characterised the possible contents of monotheistic religious meditation in the strictest sense such as takes place in Hebraism, Christianity and Islam. It is now worth analysing the contents provided by Hindu religious meditation in its imperfect and tendential monotheism.
18. Still in the same monotheistic backdrop we will now try and see what the best method for praying meditation might be.
Part V
RELIGIOUS LIFE AND PSYCHIC TECHNIQUES
19. Gaining religious awareness is encouraged by immediate and total immersion in the reality of a religious commitment.
20. Gaining religious awareness and more in general all forms of religious fulfilment an receive great help from mental techniques. Such a use of these helps not only to promote within us the attitude of faith but also intensifies it and strengthens it until it becomes a second nature for us.
21. How it is in practice possible and also advisable to apply autogenic training to religious life.
Part VI
HUMANISM, ART AND SCIENCE
22. Humanist activities present themselves as irreducible to both the search of the Self and the religious search for the living God. Each of these activities pursues a specific form of sensitivity and gaining awareness.
23. A specific moral sensitivity derives from moral experience and all that is an ethical gaining awareness.
24. It is possible to refine and deepen in a specific manner social and political experience, sensitivity and awareness
25. One should now consider historical experience, sensitivity and awareness.
26. There are also an aesthetic experience and sensitivity and an aesthetic gaining awareness.
27. Science itself involves both gaining awareness and experience, to be studied in depth with a particular sensitivity. All this applies both when understanding “science" as philosophy in the most traditional sense deriving from the Greeks, or whether addressing the “modern science” inaugurated by Galileo, or, finally, when referring to “human sciences" or those “of the spirit”.
28. In each of these various forms of humanism the problem always consists in promoting a specific experience, sensitivity and gaining awareness. This is confirmed in many different concepts and then also in an entire terminology one finds in discussions on the role played by human sciences.
Part VII
KNOWLEDGE AND CONTROL OF THE PSYCHE
29. We will now address psychological experience, sensitivity and awareness.
30. Finally, one must not neglect the experience, sensitivity and gaining of awareness that can be acquired through paranormal perception.
31. By exploiting the power of imagination it is possible to remould the personality.
32. Repetition to also be used for the same objective is equally effective
Part VIII
HUMANKIND’S ASCESIS AND TRANSFORMATION
33. Human beings feel the need to renounce oneself and all egotism to be transformed into a pure vehicle for divine manifestation, hence into God’s “angel”, God’s man, into a “saint”. This is achieved through an ascesis that cannot but be extremely exacting. Such an ascesis (from the Greek áskesis: “exercise”) can of course make use of psychic techniques, but it basically arises from an ardent love for the Divinity that becomes offering and total oblation.
34. The transformation of man is what each person implements within himself and promotes in others and in the whole of humankind finally extending this to the environment he lives in, and the universal reality. Hence the deified man can bring the kingdom of God to the entire creation in all dimensions and at all levels.
Foreword
“The paths of consciousness” may be a beautiful and suggestive title, but what does it mean precisely? The subtitle “Towards a synthesis of spiritual experiences” starts to provide a vague explanation.
What else could one add using only six words? One regrets the days in which one could confidently give books a title followed by subtitles that were half a page long!
What I mean with that word “paths”, is the various forms of humankind’s spiritual experiences, or in other words, various forms of “gaining awareness”.
I wish to provide brief and extremely incomplete list of these.
I could start by distinguishing a number of ways of experiencing God. There is one very special one that perceives God as pure Self. This results in what one might describe as the “God of yogis”. Hence what is described here concerns a “yogic form of gaining awareness”.
Experiencing God as One-All and all-inclusive, absolute, eternal Consciousness, is a different experience, providing with meaning all realities by thinking of them. This is what Pascal would call the “God of philosophers”. This results in a “noetic form of gaining awareness”.
Most monistic philosophies such as of those of Parmenides and Spinoza mainly reach this conclusion with a God conceived (and, I would add, experienced) in such a manner. However, as we shall see, new relativist physics and the parapsychology of clairvoyance in the future also converge in this as well as Mahayana and Zen Buddhism. Among the various expressions of mediumistic literature this is confirmed by the messages of the Cerchio Firenze. In their own way we also have the particular experiences deriving from artistic creation, and, in a deviant albeit significant form, also those resulting from the use of psychedelic drugs. A rather curious “plot”!
A third form of experiencing God is the one in which He is perceived as a “living” and “personal” God. Or, in other words, as a You, to whom one speaks and addresses prayers and adoration. He is seen as a totally Another. As One who becomes manifold and whose “glory… penetrates through the universe and is resplendent more in some places than in others”: like the Eternal One who over time works and continues the creation of the world through cosmic evolution and the history of humankind. What is revealed in such a “religious form of gaining awareness” can be called the “God of religious people”.
Have we seen, here, the presence of three Gods, or perhaps are these not rather three different aspects of one single God experienced at three different levels? If God is one and the same, then the three aforementioned forms of gaining awareness require humankind to no longer regard them as separate and antithetic, but, on the contrary, as one integrated within the other.
We have abandoned any idea of a search for the Self that considers devotional religion as an inferior stage; as a sort of primary school compared to university. Such an analogous exclusivist attitude no longer seems tolerable even within the context of a philosophy of the absolute.
The three forms involving a search for God have equal dignity, just as within a correct theology the three divine Persons of the Christian Trinity, they seem to correspond to, also have this.
Compared to the Father, the Holy Spirit is not a Sub-God, as is instead the Hindu Lord Ishvara compared to the Brahman; or, respectively according to Plotinus as is the Soul of the World compared to the One.
A multiform spirituality therefore corresponds to a multidimensional God in His unity.
This in turn does not intend to be a spirituality of escape, of getaway from the world, but on the contrary a well incarnated and committed spirituality.
This means that it yearns to a new synthesis with humanism, so that this too may be accepted and incorporated within a spirituality to be understood in the broadest and most inclusive sense possible.
The yogic, noetic and religious forms of gaining awareness will therefore be joined by many other forms: humanistic, moral, political-social, historical, aesthetic, scientific, psychological, paranormal and so on, with all their possible articulations.