Our intelligence is both intuitive and conceptual. Intuition is the ability to sense the hidden meaning of reality, which then needs to be illuminated with conceptual understanding. Intuition on its own is like a blind person who can sense that someone is standing in front of him but is unable to see who it is. On the other hand, conceptual understanding alone cannot access the deeper meaning behind things. The most common imbalance in human intelligence is between the intuitive and conceptual faculties. Concepts are the building blocks of understanding, but one needs to develop a refined understanding of how to use them. Intelligence is like music. It is composed of different notes, but it takes an artist to join them together to produce a symphony. That which connects words together to present a meaningful picture is not just grammar but imagination. It is imagination that marries intuition and conceptual understanding.
Here, we are not referring to imagination as it is commonly understood, but rather to spiritual imagination. The word imagination comes from ‘image’, and is commonly interpreted as a process of picturing things in one’s mind. But this pictorial type of imagination is only a very basic and undeveloped stage in its evolution. More evolved imagination is not based on creating visual representations of reality or about creating worlds of fantasy. It is a tool through which we can dive into the deeper meaning of spiritual concepts and the reality they point to.
Some seekers undervalue concepts, seeing them merely as words. But are they really just words? And even if so, who would you be without concepts and the words which describe them? You would be nothing. You would not even be able to formulate the statement that concepts are ‘just words’.
Words of a Higher Degree: The Role of Spiritual Concepts
Many religions and folk cultures believe that words have magical powers, but they do not understand why. Buddhists or Hindus mechanically repeat futile mantras, witches cast magical spells. Although all of these activities are ignorant, they nevertheless stem from an intuitive sense that words are imbued with a power that makes them more than ‘just words’.
Of course, on a very basic level, words are merely labels and magic is not conferred simply through labelling things. But even so, the simple action of giving something a name is in itself quite extraordinary. We go beyond the animalistic mind when we see a tree and name it a ‘tree’. Now, we no longer only know a tree to be what it is – we begin to know that we know it, and we therefore create a deeper relationship with that tree.
The danger of concepts arises when a label is separated from what it points to, meaning we lose its connection to the reality underlying it. Then, people live with and by words or concepts, while remaining alienated from their deeper meaning. A parrot can also be taught to say different words, usually triggered by association, but it does not really know what it is saying.
The separation of words from the reality they point to is most evident in the realm of human spirituality. These words, such as for instance ‘consciousness,’ ‘being’ or ‘self,’ are of a higher degree because they have the potential to orient us within our inner reality. But these words have been corrupted, and what we generally have instead are philosophical ideas which are purely mental and confined to the mind. Philosophy is a desperate exercise of a mind trying to give meaning to human life in creation, but without the essential element of spiritual intuition. In philosophy, the mind creates a world of its own, cleverly woven from hollow concepts. But it is all a castle of sand; there is no substance to it; it is empty.
To use these higher words properly, they must be connected to an inner knowing and direct, experiential recognition of their deeper meaning. Used in this way, they can not only illuminate our spiritual experience but additionally point us to our potential experience, something that is evolutionarily speaking, in front of us. For instance, when we say ‘conscious me’ this means nothing to an ordinary person. He might have a mental sense of these two words and perhaps interpret the term to mean a ‘conscious person’. But let’s assume that this person is a seeker and meditator who has some access to the space beyond the mind. We can explain further – using words again – that conscious me is an experience of our pure subjectivity independent from the mind. Invariably, he will still not know what we mean by ‘conscious me’, and will think that it refers to a sense of being or awareness that he has. So, we must now use further words to describe conscious me more precisely. For instance, we can say that it is experienced in the middle of the forehead, which will allow him to go through a process of elimination – everything not experienced in the middle of the forehead is not conscious me.
The basic problem is that initially, he may simply not have conscious me, because it is not there yet. Here, using these concepts is like trying to get to know a child who has not yet been born. So there must be an interplay of two elements, practically awakening the experience (in which words also pay a key role) and understanding that experience once it is there. In other words, conceptual understanding can assist us both prior to an actual experience and after it. Words can be used to describe the practical process of awakening a particular center of the soul. They can describe the meaning of an aspect of our inner reality already experienced, or one which has not yet been experienced but which we have the potential to experience. And they can also illuminate the subtle interconnection and relationships between different centers of our soul, and of the process of her internal evolution.
Words of a higher degree create a bridge for the unfoldment of our potential, but actually crossing the bridge must be rooted in the inner work, because without practical application such precious words have no existential value. When conceptual understanding comes before the experience, it relies on our intuition to sense a certain potential within ourselves. When conceptual understanding is already linked to an actual experience, it allows us firstly to deepen our relationship with the experience and then to actually deepen the experience itself.
Imagination and Spiritual Models of Reality
Another purpose of concepts is to contextualize our experience, allowing us to see it from a higher perspective. This is the higher philosophical dimension of concepts, through which we seek to understand the process of spiritual evolution and its ultimate purpose comprehensively. However, this too must be profoundly empirical, meaning based on experiential knowledge. This is what in phenomenal science they refer to as the meeting between science and philosophy. In our case, it is about the meeting between the science of the self and the philosophy of consciousness.
While direct experience is the bedrock of this teaching, its philosophical dimension should not be underestimated. Any intelligent being must have an intellectual perspective on his raw spiritual experience. One can indeed, through accident, grace, or various shallow practices, awaken one of the dimensions of the inner self or enter the state of samadhi. But such a person cannot be a true co-creator in his realization and as such, his journey will invariably stagnate. An experience without understanding can effectively be regarded as being unconscious. So a person in samadhi can still simply be unconscious. What makes consciousness conscious? It is intelligence. If the conceptual luminosity of intelligence is not integrated into an experience, the experience cannot be called a conscious one. This is why even those people who have shifted into a state beyond the mind still have no right to the claim they are awakened.
Of course, the requirement of a conceptual model has been recognized in most traditions of enlightenment, even ones as primitive as Advaita. But their intellectual juggling with words and phrases, like ‘non-duality’, ‘there is only self’, and ‘nothing can be done, because there is no doer’, are attempts to justify and defend their preconceived model of reality and to conceal their inability to explain how awakening happens. A model of reality focuses our spiritual imagination and points to the direction to our evolution. But the few models that have been created in these traditions are simply very poor, limited, and one-dimensional because of the undeveloped spiritual intelligence of those who created them and because they are over-intellectualized. They are further examples of conceptual understanding detached from intuition. The makers of these models explain things intellectually, but they did not have direct experience and knowledge because they did not have enough imagination for the birth of knowing.
In early astronomy, there were many models of the heavens, but only Copernicus had enough imagination to conceive of the revolutionary model in which the earth was not at the center of the solar system. Even though he was passionate in his observations of the heavens, his heliocentric model of the solar system actually came about because he sought to find the most harmonious explanation to fit these observations. It was the combination of his search for harmony and beauty with what was then still very limited empirical data, which allowed him to make his discovery.
What is the main reason the traditional spiritual models of the inner reality are so shallow and primitive? It is their lack of spiritual imagination, and the fact that people have just kept parroting the past concepts they enshrine, so that they have become nothing more than dogma and clichés. A further reason is the limited direct spiritual experience of both their originators and followers, and that again has been limited because of insufficient spiritual imagination, since it is this imagination that allows us to activate our potential and links us to our higher future. From the perspective of direct knowledge of the knower, we could say that the reason for this universal superficiality of the traditional spiritual models, and the fact that the teachers and seekers using them continue to be fixated on them, is either due to their inner knower being absent or to their outer knower still being very unevolved spiritually.
Some of these models are not even proper ones, but just rudimentary attempts at descriptions, reflecting a combination of both no spiritual understanding and no spiritual experience. There are teachers who are part of the ‘pop-spirituality’ who speak of presence, or being, or awareness, or relaxation into the now – and that is all they can teach. In these cases, we cannot even speak of an imbalance between intuition and conceptual understanding because both are effectively absent. It is only spiritual monkeys who fall for and accept such trivialities as truth.
Spiritual Imagination
Spiritual imagination is more than intuition; it is what completes intuition. For instance, how do you recognize that your awakening is incomplete? Many seekers think that they are awakened, no matter how shallow their realization has been. How can they be so mistaken? There are, of course, many ways to explain this, including insincerity, the ego seeking external and internal confirmation of its worth as an ‘awakened’ person, a general lack of intelligence, spiritual dullness and laziness, and so forth. But we can also say that such seekers simply lack spiritual intuition. As a result, they are completely incapable of sensing that something is still profoundly incomplete inside. One of the roles of spiritual intuition is to identify the areas in our being which are still incomplete and recognize the basic suffering caused by this inner deficiency. Since the inner world is very complex, a seeker needs to receive guidance, he needs to have certain things explained. And then, he has to use his own intuition to recognize and ensure he is resonating with the truth of the guidance he receives.
For our spiritual intuition to work, it must be linked to conceptual understanding. Even if a person in the state of pure consciousness recognizes that there is still suffering due to a continuing fragmented nature of his observer, he will be unable to find a solution unless he has the knowledge of essential me. Once he has this knowledge, he can look inside and say, “Yes, I see that I have no identity in the center of my intelligence, so I must awaken and solidify the one who is behind my thoughts through meditation and other practice, and then I must awaken the vertical depth of essential me,” and so forth.
We can define spiritual imagination as intuition and conceptual understanding working together. This can also be expressed as the inner and outer knowers working together. The inner knower is intuitive, it has a feeling intelligence. When it is absent, we have no access to intuition. The outer knower is conceptual and reflective. If the outer knower is ignorant, he cannot give the correct feedback to the inner knower.
It is not that we have or do not have spiritual imagination from the start. It is a faculty that continues to evolve. In fact, it is an essential part of the path to develop and awaken our spiritual imagination. How is this done? How is our conceptual intelligence developed? Primarily, through having the true desire to understand, to reach clarity, and to gain complete orientation within one’s inner reality. How is our intuition developed? It is from having the desire to sense the subtle, the unseen, and the intangible. This comes about through getting in touch with the intuitive intelligence of the inner knower. Spiritual imagination is the union of these two and it develops through having the uncompromising desire both to feel in this intuitive sense and to understand.
As we explained, spiritual imagination allows us both to understand the subtle meaning of our experience and to create the bridge to our next evolutionary steps. It senses the future before that future has even manifested. Still, spiritual imagination is not infallible and it is not always correct – it is the intelligence of exploration. When Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas, he had a vision (imagination) of the land he wanted to reach, which was in fact India. But despite his inner conviction, he could not be certain that he was on the right track. In the end, his imagination proved to be both correct and incorrect. He reached land, but it was a different continent than he had expected. In fact, he never realized or admitted that the land he had discovered was not Asia. His imagination was creative, but his calculations (conceptual understanding) were erroneous. Our spiritual journey also contains an element of uncertainty, which is why our spiritual imagination must be sharpened; it has to be become increasingly accurate.
It is different here in that those who follow this teaching have the benefit of walking a path that has already been walked. Someone has already crossed the ocean of uncertainty and reached the land of certainty. But how can you know that this discovered land really exists? By confirming in both your intuition and understanding that all the steps of the path can be clearly reflected in your own experiential reality. For instance, the existence of conscious me is something that people who study the teaching from afar can either believe or disbelieve based on a purely mental reasoning. But any student who is personally engaged in the teaching can have the direct experience of it rather easily.
One can ask, “What is the point of having the concept of immanent I am if I cannot experience it myself? When it a goal that is too far from me? Should I just ‘believe’ in it?” You can believe in Jesus Christ, but you do not need to believe in immanent I am – you can know it. It is true that you must still go through multiple evolutionary steps to fully realize it, but this does not mean that you cannot already feel it beforehand. Sensing immanent I am within the essence of your me can happen through creating a higher and more profound relationship with yourself. Here, the concept of immanent I am is inviting you to explore the deepest recesses of your very self. Immanent I am is already there, it is the base of who you are, and you must fall in love with it from the very start of the work with your essential me.
Spiritual Imagination and Energetic Support
You cannot imagine what you cannot sense within your being. So although one of the crucial roles of a teacher is to guide the seeker conceptually, above all he must assist his student to energetically activate these hidden dimensions. His role is to turn the key unlocking the seeker’s inner potential. This activation happens in the intimate proximity of the spiritual guide; it is a transmission of the light of the self. Such transmission cannot bring about awakening or enlightenment on its own. Rather it is a transmission which gives the student energetic and intuitive access to one of the dimensions of his or her higher self. It is then the student’s responsibility to align their spiritual imagination with this access and to do the internal work based on it.
We have many students who are under the illusion that they can study this teaching from a distance. Some more mature souls can indeed progress in this way, though still to a limited extent. This teaching is not just the extensive conceptual guidance given through our website. It is a living teaching from a living teacher, and ones direct presence is absolutely required to follow it fully. Without direct energetic support, conceptual understanding alone, even when linked to the intuition of the inner knower, is not enough to unlock the doorways of one’s spiritual potential and take one to the future that our soul yearns for.
The Practical Applications of Spiritual Imagination
Spiritual imagination requires the inner and outer knowers to work together. The inner knower is the primary identity of our spiritual imagination because one must employ pure attention to activate this faculty. But it is based on the decisions and intention of the outer knower that pure attention is given direction, and it is also the outer knower who comprehends the inner experience conceptually. To put it in simpler terms, the inner knower directly touches and feels all the dimensions of our pure subjectivity and lays the groundwork for intuitive insight into one’s experience. And the outer knower activates the intention to pursue the experience and then looks at it from a certain distance, allowing him to form a more concrete interpretation of it.
Since spiritual imagination is a process in time that links our present to the arising future, it also needs to be in conscious relationship with that future. In this way, through the alignment of intelligence and intention, this future can manifest. So spiritual imagination grants us the power to manifest and create our destiny. As far as reality is concerned, we can only create that which reflects the original design of our evolution. We cannot create the impossible or the unreal, although delusory or false awakenings can be viewed as a kind of negative creativity. But in real terms, we can only manifest that which we have the potential to manifest and which reflects the empirical reality of consciousness. Our soul is like a tree that has the potential to grow big and tall and to produce flowers and fruits. It cannot become just anything – it can only become itself. Of course, the development of a tree is mostly a mechanical process and all trees follow a very basic predetermined design, while our soul has free will to evolve into areas that are inaccessible to other souls. Hers is not a mechanical but a creative and intelligent process, the process of self-manifestation.
This is something that seekers do not realize. Very often, they think that awakening is just a realization of what has already been there, and that it is just made conscious in the awakening. While this is not entirely false, it is false enough that it can be considered untrue. It is more appropriate to say that we realize that which was not there through awakening, but that it enters our present in the awakening. The spiritual path is a process of self-creation; we create our true self, we create our future. Of course, the reason why we can do it is because we are endowed with the original spark of self which is our essence-me, like a tree that must have a seed to begin with before it can become a real tree. However, our evolution can have many possibilities and we can expand the range of these possibilities by applying our spiritual imagination. We can awaken to dimensions of the soul that no one has ever awakened to, or even imagined were possible.
An example is when you awaken fundamental me. Was it there before you recognized it? Of course, it was not. There was nothing where you now recognize it. So how is it possible that there is now something, a someone, where there had previously been nothing? Because you have created it through following intelligent evolution within your essential me. Still, there are limits to what any seeker can manifest within himself, just as there are also limits to his spiritual imagination. And here it is where the role of a spiritual guide must again be noted. A spiritual guide of a higher degree is someone who has the power to manifest the future – and not just within himself but also in others. He opens doors to different possibilities, making the impossible possible. Because he has expanded the boundaries of his own spiritual imagination and understanding to such extent that it transcends everything that other humans could even conceive of, he has the potential of transferring this higher information to others.
This transmission is done on three levels: conceptual, existential and energetic. The existential transfer refers to the information embedded in the higher realization of self that enters the inner knower’s sphere of the seeker to whom this knowledge is being imparted. In other words, it is the transmission of intuitive comprehension of the meaning of the realization. The energetic transfer refers to the transfer of the energetic dimension of the higher realization, or energy-body, of the newly realized dimension of our me. This kind of transmission should not be thought of as giving the other person a complete realization. That would conflict with the requirement of one’s conscious cooperation with one’s own evolution. What is being transferred is the taste, what could be called the DNA, of the higher self, and the energetic and existential information of it needs fall upon the fertile ground of a soul who is mature enough to make use of it. A spiritual teacher is like a midwife who assists the other soul to birth herself.
The three levels of transmission must be fully connected, even though one is more emphasized than the other at times. For instance, the energetic initiation into pure consciousness must be supported by imparting the concepts of pure me, universal I am and horizontal surrender, and by the existential transmission of the knowledge of pure me so that the seeker can realize it as pure subjectivity; here the transmission from the teacher allows the seeker to experience his own internal revelation such as realizing, ‘oh yes, it is me, how extraordinary…’
But, coming back to the practical application of spiritual imagination, since expanding the boundaries of our spiritual potential (including the potential for higher understanding) is not easy, a student must follow in the footsteps of someone who has already made this journey. The spiritual teacher is someone who has already mastered a higher level of the necessary spiritual imagination, and hence he is the source of the force of revelation; his intelligence has been synchronized with the evolutionary intelligence of both transcendent and immanent I am. But following in these footprints is not a passive process, it is a creative process, because the seeker has to realize within himself all that has now been made possible for him by the teacher. No one can be made to awaken, as this would be a contradiction in terms. Any movement of self-recognition or of surrender are acts of free will based on one’s own intelligence and intention. However, since different areas of spiritual evolution are difficult to grasp because of their subtle nature, a seeker must strive to develop his spiritual imagination and capacity to feel and understand. It is based on a teacher’s spiritual imagination that one can learn the art of cooperation with one’s evolution. This explains why those students who are overly passive, who lack the passion to cooperate through exploring their own self, have a hard time making any substantial progress on the path.
One’s spiritual imagination must be linked to inner sensitivity and self-love. For instance, if a student is initiated to pure me of consciousness, he must feel that me as his own deeper self, he must meet himself in it and develop a profound intimacy with this new self which has now become an integral part of his identity and existence. He must use his own imagination to recognize that this pure me is indeed his own very me. Similarly, when we speak of horizontal surrender of pure me, a student needs to have the imagination to feel that which he is surrendering into, which is the universal I am. We often encounter students who, in their practice and experience, cannot differentiate between pure me and universal I am. How can this come about? It happens because they have no imagination. Their imagination, and the sensitivity which comes from it, is not sufficiently developed to grasp the subtle areas of their experience. We should remember that spiritual imagination is the bridge between intuition-feeling and understanding.
Or, to give another example: if a new student, whose observer is completely unconscious, is invited to explore ‘who’ is aware of his thoughts, he must use some degree of this kind of spiritual imagination to orient his attention towards recognizing the center of intelligence. A normal less evolved seeker will have no idea what we are talking about and will just return a blank stare, because he does not yet have enough intelligence. This underlines the principle that there is no intelligence without imagination, and spiritual imagination is an essential part and parcel of spiritual intelligence.
If a student is asked to surrender into the area that must be filled with pure subjectivity of fundamental me, not only must he surrender from his conscious me and pure conscious me into the space below his forehead, he must use his imagination and his sensitivity to feel what is there and to meet himself on that level. Or, when we speak of essence-me being the axle of conscious me, a student must use his imagination to feel that there is something at the center of conscious me that is deeper and even more profound than conscious me itself. He must become so intimate with his me that his imagination can identify such extremely subtle differentiations within his experience.
Or, when we speak about the difference between me and I, how does one truly understand and appreciate this difference? You can be certain that 99.9 percent of the seekers and teachers on this planet, except for some possible mental speculation, are incapable of grasping the difference. This difference cannot be comprehended through your mind, you must feel this difference and this feeling must be supported by your spiritual imagination. Of course, before you can even begin to use your imagination, you must study the teaching and contemplate how it describes and clarifies this difference; in other words, your conceptual intelligence must be aligned with your imagination.
We speak of me as an identity that contains a certain level of objectification which is caused by continuing duality: duality between pure attention and bare attention and between the inner knower and essence-me. All the dimensions of pure me are destined to remain me because the duality between pure attention and bare attention is required for their existence (with the exceptions of pure conscious me and fundamental me, as they are eventually merged with conscious me). The realization of I is possible only on the level of the inner knower, because he is the source of pure attention and he alone has the capacity of merging with essence-me. To understand or imagine the difference between me and I, one must understand the previously described difference between conscious me and essence-me clearly, as well as recognizing the subtle duality present within conscious me itself.
These are just some of the examples of the practical application of spiritual imagination. Spiritual imagination must be supported by conceptual understanding because, without any – or with insufficient – spiritual imagination, only one aspect of that imagination can operate, our intuition. Intuition is important, but for it to gain the requisite inner orientation it must move to the next level of spiritual imagination.
Spiritual Imagination and Pure Attention
The most important activity of spiritual imagination is the intuitive comprehension of pure attention. How can pure attention, the most impalpable and ethereal spirit of consciousness, be imagined if it is not a center of me in itself? While the concept of pure attention sounds poetic, to truly know what it is requires a great deal of intellectual sensitivity and imagination. Because humans are so habitually identified with external attention, it is very common for an average seeker to try to do his spiritual practice from the wrong center – the observer. But activating pure attention is the prerequisite for entering the inner path, and an intuitive understanding of pure attention and how to activate it must be present from the very start, because it is the inner knower who is entering the path. The external attention looks, thinks, and observes, while pure attention feels and knows. It is only pure attention that has the capacity to experience the living body of pure subjectivity as our own true self. Getting in touch with pure attention is also getting in touch with the inner knower. After all, whose pure attention is it? As you feel pure attention, you also need to feel its subject, the feeler, the knower. The differentiation between pure attention and the inner knower is only possible through using a higher degree of spiritual imagination. Pure attention belongs to the inner knower – he is pure attention’s identity and pure attention is his activity.
Of course, one can activate pure attention intuitively without having enough conceptual understanding and imagination to understand how one is doing it or even without knowing what one is doing. This is better than no activation of it at all but, if your spiritual imagination does not grasp the profound significance of pure attention, you will never be able to master it and to know yourself on a deeper level.
One could ask, ‘Why do I need to distinguish between the inner knower and pure attention, if the very fact that my pure attention is active implies that the inner knower is also present?’ The realization of the inner knower is also an act of pure attention. In fact, it is the highest activity of pure attention to awaken its core identity and source – essence-me and immanent I am. Only when pure attention becomes conscious of the source of its emanation can we return to our original home of the root-self, actualizing our immanency and transcending suffering. It is spiritual imagination that leads our way to increasingly higher self-knowledge, freedom and bliss.
So how do you know pure attention? And how do you know that you know it? How do you know the difference between external attention and pure attention? Some students have occasional doubts as to whether they are truly practicing from pure attention or if their external attention is interfering too much. Having such doubts can be positive and constructive, as without them our spiritual intelligence could not develop, but it is also important to transcend our doubts which is an automatic by-product of reaching complete clarity. What does clarity mean? What does understanding mean? Just to understand the meaning of spiritual imagination you have to use your spiritual imagination. Check for yourself now, using your own spiritual imagination, that you are indeed clear what it means. Spiritual imagination is the domain of the outer knower, but for his imagination to be linked to reality he must be experienced from the inner knower.
When we reach understanding and clarity, it means that we have arrived at complete harmony between our inner experience and spiritual imagination. When a full moon is reflected on the surface of a motionless pond, the pond symbolizes the raw experience of our inner knower and the moon’s reflection on it is our spiritual imagination. And what then would the moon represent, whose reflection we see in the pond? The moon symbolizes the outer knower who, in this analogy and through his reflection, is bathing in the calm depths of the inner knower.
But, coming back to the question: how do you know pure attention? You know it by feeling. And by the feeling of what? By feeling me. This means that to be able to feel pure attention truly one must have awakened and have access to at least one of the dimensions of me. When you feel pure me of consciousness, it is pure attention that is feeling it, and bare attention is what is felt. But as we know, pure attention belongs to the inner knower, so it is him who feels all the centers of me. To use a metaphor, pure attention is the light emanating from a flashlight, and the inner knower is the light bulb creating the light; of course, this spiritual flashlight points its light in, not out. Before the awakening of the inner knower, he knows himself through his secondary centers of pure me; he needs the bare attention of pure me to sense his identity, to have a stability of self. By feeling me, we also feel pure attention as the one who is doing this feeling.
The experience of me is a combination of bare attention and pure attention, and the depth of their relationship determines the depth of the experience of me. Pure attention can just gently touch bare attention or it can embody it fully, allowing our identity to shift into the particular center involved. Pure attention is linked to intelligence which gives it direction and conceptual context. Even though the outer knower is not involved in pure attention, it is him who activates pure attention’s intention and who allows us to align it with the principles of intimacy, self-appreciation, understanding and self-love.
To answer the question again: you know pure attention because you feel your me. And how do you know that you know pure attention? By reflecting upon it in your outer knower. In other words, the inner knower knows pure attention and outer knower knows that the inner knower knows it.
The most mysterious acts of pure attention are the awakenings of the outer and inner knowers. It is initially in the self-conscious observer that pure attention is recognizing outer essence-me. What is unique in this is the fact that pure attention is here flowing as if in the direction of external attention so as to meet the observer. It is easy to imagine the internalized direction of pure attention which flows in the opposite direction to external attention. But it is not so easy to conceive of pure attention as moving in what seems to be an outward direction without it ceasing to be pure attention.
However, it is this act of pure attention illuminating the outer essence-me that allows us to experience passage samadhi and awaken both the outer knower and conscious me. In fact, the flow of pure attention is always moving ‘externally’, or ‘outwards’, from essence-me to the other centers, even though different ones of them have different degrees of ‘objectification’, or subjectivity. All the secondary centers of the inner knower are his external layers of identity which are necessary for him to become a multidimensional being. Even in the act of self-recognition in the inner knower there is a subtle objectification as pure attention flows from inside of essence-me into the bare attention of conscious me. Pure attention is only fully internalized and truly flowing into the ultimate within in essence-samadhi and immanent samadhi.
We have digressed a bit from the subject of spiritual imagination, or have we? This is all about spiritual imagination. Without spiritual imagination, grounded in the requisite conceptual knowledge, you would not be able to understand a single sentence here. How do you understand such subtle and profound inner processes and the amazing architecture of your inner self? It is because of spiritual imagination. To understand spiritual imagination itself you must have spiritual imagination.
Blessings,
Aadi
For a definition of the terminology used, please visit the Glossary page. Click here for a printable version of this article.