Dear Sun Toon ´
I accept your invitation to this discussion, or at least part of the discussion.
Your invitation was in the form of assuming all kinds of things about me.
Let me start with my original post about defining and re-defining the Brahman concept.
What you are actually talking about is Brahma, the Hindu god, which could be defined as the Power of the Divine, which creates the worlds by the Word. He is part of the so-called trimurti (having three forms), the hindi trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva (or Rudra), representing the creative, preservative and destructing processes of the cosmos.
-By the way Shiva’s body as represented in my avatar at the left is black because he ‘siphones’ the poison of the world, kind of your local garbage man.-
For Brahman a complete different defining exists next to it’s meaning of the creative Word going in the direction of: the Eternal; the Absolute; the Supreme Being; the One besides whom there is nothing else existent, the one Reality which is not only the spiritual, material and conscious substance of all the ideas and forces and forms of the universe, but their origin, support and possessor, the cosmic and supracosmic Spirit.
Or in a poetic way:
He is the Maker and the world he made,
He is the vision and he is the seer;
He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known,
He is himself the dreamer and the dream.
-Savitri
In this paradigm there is as you can see no place for an ‘outside’, as I tried to explain in my post above, although it leaves ample room for negations, oppositions, contradictions, ‘impossibilities’, etc
Then let’s go back to Baxter’s redefinition of Brahma as the pantheon of hindu gods that are just using and abusing their powers to feed on humans. (Maybe not entirely precise, but that is about what I got from it.) My immediate question then is where did she get the discernment from to know whether what she was dealing with where these very gods, or appeared to be these gods? And here we get confronted with this immense problem, towards you also rightfully point, that things are not always what they appear to be. Spiritism, channeling, guides, voices. Hoe can we really trust them, should we immediately fall for their flattering and high sounding words or their half-truths. I understand your reserve there and share it. And here Baxter is right, it is not only malevolent, but also so-called benevolent entities that try to use the human for their purposes.
From the Intermediate Zone
http://www.projectavalon.net/forum/s...ad.php?t=12017
Or there is the opposite danger that he may become the instrument of some apparently brilliant but ignorant formation; for these intermediate planes are full of little Gods or strong Daityas or smaller beings who want to create, to materialise something or to enforce a mental and vital formation in the earth life and are eager to use or influence or even possess the thought and will of the sadhak and make him their instrument for the purpose. This is quite apart from the well-known danger of actually hostile beings whose sole purpose is to create confusion, falsehood, corruption of the sadhana and disastrous unspiritual error. Anyone allowing himself to be taken hold of by one of these beings, who often take a divine Name, will lose his way in the yoga.
You might also take a look at the anecdote of the being that guided Hitler, that I posted in the Savitri-thread.
http://www.projectavalon.net/forum/s...ad.php?t=12115
What Baxter has named Brahman in my terminology would be called the Titan.
Obviously I have not studied Baxter, but an irony creeps up that she is exactly embarking on the way she is scoffing at. The way of the Titan. Again from Savitri:
Haste not towards Godhead on a dangerous road,
Open not thy doorways to a nameless Power,
Climb not to Godhead by the Titan’s road.
Against the Law he pits his single will,
Across its way he throws his pride of might.
Heavenward he clambers on a stair of storms
Aspiring to live near the deathless sun.
He strives with a giant strength to wrest by force
From life and Nature the immortals’ right;
He takes by storm the world and fate and heaven.
He comes not to the high World-maker’s seat,
He waits not for the outstretched hand of God
To raise him out of his mortality.
All he would make his own, leave nothing free,
Stretching his small self to cope with the infinite.
Obstructing the gods’ open ways he makes
His own estate of the earth’s air and light;
A monopolist of the world-energy,
He dominates the life of common men.
His pain and others’ pain he makes his means:
On death and suffering he builds his throne.
In the hurry and clangour of his acts of might,
In a riot and excess of fame and shame,
By his magnitudes of hate and violence,
By the quaking of the world beneath his tread
He matches himself against the Eternal’s calm
And feels in himself the greatness of a god:
Power is his image of celestial self.
The Titan’s heart is a sea of fire and force;
He exults in the death of things and ruin and fall,
He feeds his strength with his own and others’ pain;
In the world’s pathos and passion he takes delight,
His pride, his might call for the struggle and pang.
He glories in the sufferings of the flesh
And covers the stigmata with the Stoic’s name.
His eyes blinded and visionless stare at the sun,
The seeker’s Sight receding from his heart
Can find no more the light of eternity;
He sees the beyond as an emptiness void of soul
And takes his night for a dark infinite.
His nature magnifies the unreal’s blank
And sees in Nought the sole reality:
He would stamp his single figure on the world,
Obsess the world’s rumours with his single name.
His moments centre the vast universe.
He sees his little self as very God.
His little ‘I’ has swallowed the whole world,
His ego has stretched into infinity.
His mind, a beat in original Nothingness,
Ciphers his thought on a slate of hourless Time.
He builds on a mighty vacancy of soul
A huge philosophy of Nothingness.
In him Nirvana lives and speaks and acts
Impossibly creating a universe.
An eternal zero is his formless self,
His spirit the void impersonal absolute.
Take not that stride, O growing soul of man;
Cast not thy self into that night of God.
The soul suffering is not eternity’s key,
Or ransom by sorrow heaven’s demand on life.
O mortal, bear, but ask not for the stroke,
Too soon will grief and anguish find thee out.
Too enormous is that venture for thy will;
Only in limits can man’s strength be safe;
Yet is infinity thy spirit’s goal;
Its bliss is there behind the world’s face of tears.
A power is in thee that thou knowest not;
Thou art a vessel of the imprisoned spark.
QUOTE=sun-toon´
Explain...you're the one, who by his own admission, has surrendered.
No, I said I have taken the path of surrender, it is not something you do once, it is part of an attitude and progression, and not at all as easy as you suggest. It is often confused with sacrifice and loss of individuality, but true surrender can only be accomplished in full freedom, there must be an exclusive self-opening to the divine Power; there must be a constant and integral choice of the Truth that is descending, a constant and integral rejection of the falsehood of the mental, vital and physical Powers and Appearances that still rule the earth-Nature.
Surrender is to give room to the Divine Powers to help you to become more and more what you really are, what we really are, That, That expressed in a multiple of forms and beings a creation full of endless possibilities living out the potentialities hidden in Avyaktam, the Unmanifest. I am a human becoming, help me become. So if help arrives you should at least give it room, that means surrender.
To understand better what place surrender takes in this path that is called Integral Yoga you can listen to the three mp3’s that are uploaded in the Savitri thread.
I won’t start now on the problem of freedom, karma and other matters you brought up, to keep this post within reasonable length.
The discernment of what is good or bad, true or false, divine or undivine is one of our jobs here for which we can only find the answer within. We have a great freedom to choose every second what we accept and what we reject. Freedom is an essential attribute of this Manifestation, victory and defeat are possible at every turn. A challenging game, would’t you prefer that after a couple of billion universes. A future more interresting than a choir of harp playing angels.
I hope you appreciate my contribution just as I appreciate yours, Milk and Honey’s, Czymra’s and Dakini’s.