Transpersonal Philosophy

  Waking is a form of sleep. In it, as happens every night in relation to our daytime identity, we forget the other identity. In waking life, we forget our Atman in the same way that in daily sleep we forget our masks. Sometimes masks linger in the dream, more like caricatures than full masks. In most cases, we function on the dream side with disfigured copies of the waking masks, barely suitable for a basic histrionics of pleasure and pain in the realm of dreams. Similarly, our waking masks are disfigured copies of other, more far-reaching identities. To awaken is to enter the space in which we can see waking identities as masks. But that is only the first threshold that gives access to a transfiguration of the world. A deeper identity is shown to us when we look lovingly at ourselves in the Labyrinth of Mirrors we call the Universe. Those of you who have seen the Pir Vilayat video have been introduced into that Sufi Labyrinth.      It is ...

  La vigilia es una forma de sueño. En ella, como ocurre cada noche en relación a nuestra identidad diurna, olvidamos la otra identidad. En la vigilia, olvidamos nuestro Atman de la misma manera que en el sueño diario olvidamos nuestras máscaras. A veces las máscaras persisten en el sueño, más como caricaturas que como máscaras efectivas completas. En la mayoría de los casos, funcionamos del lado onírico con copias desfiguradas de las máscaras de vigilia, apenas aptas para un histrionismo básico de placer y dolor en el reino de los sueños. Análogamente, nuestras máscaras de vigilia son copias desfiguradas de otras identidades de mayor alcance. Despertar es entrar en el espacio en el que podemos ver las identidades de vigilia como máscaras. Pero ese es sólo el primer umbral que da acceso a una transfiguración del mundo. Una identidad más profunda se nos muestra cuando nos miramos amorosamente en el Laberinto de Espejos que llamamos Universo. Aquellos que habéis visto e...

  The study of Indian religions is a whole school of the Art of Being Human . The mythopoetic stages of humanity coexist and overlap in a way that is as fertile as it is chaotic. It would take at least a three-year course to initiate us into all the subtleties and doctrinal and devotional variants of those religions, a commitment that the vast majority of you would not be able to attend to due to the practical issues of life. I have been giving you some keys learned and matured in the last 40 years of my life, many of them synthesized in the “Path of Beauty”, a book that I intended to make simpler but that I see now, after several months of your reactions in the Blog, how it requires a whole arsenal of prior knowledge for its complete understanding. I would like the most direct and simple proposal of the book to be clear: let yourself be found by Beauty and surrender to It . I would also like it to be clear what the path of non-dual knowledge (Advaita Vedanta) consist...

  El estudio de las religiones de la India es toda una escuela del Arte de Ser Humano. Los estadios mitopoéticos de la humaidad conviven y se solapan de una manera tan fértil como caótica. Se necesitaría como mínimo un curso de tres años para iniciarnos en todas las sutilezas y variantes doctrinales y devocionales, un compromiso que la inmensa mayoría de vosotros no podría atender por las cuestiones prácticas de la vida. Os he ido dando algunas claves aprendidas y maduradas en los últimos 40 años de mi vida, muchas de ellas sintetizadas en el “Sendero de la Belleza”, libro que pretendí hacer más simple pero que veo ahora, tras varios meses de vuestras reacciones en el Blog, cómo exige todo un arsenal de conocimiento previo para su completa comprensión. Me gustaría que la propuesta más directa y simple del libro quedase clara: déjate encontrar por la Belleza y ríndete a Ella . También me gustaría que quedase claro en qué consiste el camino del conocimiento no dual (Ad...

  We learn by repetition, but we understand by sympathy. Musical harmony, the series of overtones, is the expression of unity in multiplicity that occurs due to sympathetic resonance. The Remembrance, the Dhikr that the Sufis speak of, is that: resonance through sympathy, letting vibrate, allowing life to activate the seed that our soul wishes to express in this existence. The identity mask can hinder that “sympathy vibration”. As you know, the Latin word “persona” literally means the mask of the theater actor. It is through that mask that the actor “sounds” his/her part in the work, “per-sonat”, “through-sounds”, but the actor is not the mask, and she knows it. In the hells of the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions, their inhabitants are completely absorbed in the scene before them, just as the cat fascinated with the ball of wool forgets everything around it, and they do not remember that they are wearing the mask of a person who suffers in a particular hell. This ...

  Let me write a somewhat rhapsodic note on the issue, which I hope we will cover in more detail and depth in understanding non-duality in the second chapter of "Path of Beauty". During the Christian Middle Ages the separation follows the principle of Ratio et Auctoritas. Communication with God is mediated by authority. Auctoritas is founded on Ratio, the priestly knowledge of the proportions that relate the two worlds: authority is the authority of ratio, of reason. It is evident that the practical result is a definitive ecclesiastical control over religious experience that prevents any spiritual flight not sanctioned by its principles. The continuity of the principle of Speech, of the Logos, which united the poet and the Human in general with Nature - the same that the Pythagoreans saw between the natural world and that of the gods via ideal proportions - is now broken in terms of proportions and unbridgeable distances that alienate Humans in the Universe. W...

  Is consciousness independent of conscious organisms or systems? In other words, is consciousness objective? For scientific psychology the answer is negative, and when the entity "consciousness" is spoken of, it is done simply as the abstract reification of the property to which the term is attributed. We immediately find ourselves in the field of the ontological dispute of universals.  (Video on the Universals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYHQf6PFQw&list=PLcX5IdGYTx51I5EGmTgOocAHEAxX5Ir31&index=47 ) Within empirical science, the general position rejects consciousness as objective 1 , as it denies the existence of universals. The paradox that has occurred since the beginning of mathematics and the science that is based on it is that universals are at the very root of rational thought, to the point that it is precisely the reification of properties which has made it possible to develop the powerful systems of abstraction of experience that make ...

 This poem is part of the Navaho Blessing ceremony. It perfectly expresses the psychological spontaneity of the people who live in the Anima Mundi. In these verses I see the fitra that the Sufis speak of, the Original Nature of the Human Soul, seductive, powerful and delicate, like the Presence of newborns.   In beauty I walk With beauty before me I walk With beauty behind me I walk With beauty above me I walk With beauty around me I walk It has become beauty again Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body. I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me. I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me. I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me. I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful. In beauty all day long may I walk. Through the returning seasons, may I walk. On the trail marked with pollen ma...

  Question  “…Understanding our life in a broader, transpersonal way, where meaning is finally revealed to intuition.” This sounds nice Oscar. If I could tap into an intuitive sense of meaning this would be a great buoy to my life. I find that in most traditional therapies there is a great deal of “habit-making” whereby the individual is meant to transform their life by modifying their actions and responses to correct ones written for them. I understand, personally, the feeling of being trapped in my own automatic responses, so I appreciate the goal to grant ourself a more conscious existence through new habits. However, I sometimes feel this approach does fail to address our deeper will; beyond that to reduce suffering. As if to be more conscious of our actions is the end goal of all problems? Would you say that transpersonal philosophy approaches the “problem with being” not from an action or solution position but from a broader curiosity and understanding posit...

  When our thinking proceeds mechanically, we use lexicalized imagination structures, id est, protocolized and fixed representations that for a given input give the same imaginative output, in theoretical structures of various kinds, legal, scientific, ethical, artistic, religious. This form of imagination, already mechanized, lexicalized, fixed in procedures and methods, is also imagination, or rather a dead carcass of imagination, a mummy of what in another moment was something alive and full of potential energy. To the non-mechanical form of imagination we call "creative imagination" or “active imagination” the living imagination that updates its meanings and contents with each of its appearances. I understand this force as an impulse of expansion of Life-Intelligence outside the limits of symbols related to everyday experience, it is a second-order symbolic force, like general abstraction, but endowed with a unique emotional vitality and directed by a princip...