A few days ago I found a book called The Daemon by Anthony Peake which describes an inner experience fairly similar to what I described in previous posts. His thesis is that a person has a second, higher center of consciousness, from which standpoint the human experience is a slice of a larger projection. He supports this with a lot of historical examples involving experiences of people like Goethe.

This weekend I also read a portion of Thomas Cleary's translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower. Though this is a Taoist text, it obviously has roots in Buddhist teachings, and it seems to me to be much the same as jnana yoga. In his notes on the translation, Clearly is strongly critical of Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung for their earlier translation and commentary on that book. In his view, Jung interprets eastern meditative experience as being within the framework of Jung's own ideas about the subconscious and archetypes, which distorts and misconstrues those experiences because they are actually outside of what Jung's ideas deal with.

In politics, we have the idea that 'the people' are the final authority for criminal justice. The police can arrest you, but ideally they have to justify the arrest according to laws that were passed by an elected legislature, and they have to convince a jury. They can't just say "we're jailing you indefinitely because we're the police and we think you should be jailed". Of course adherence to this principle has been eroding in recent years in the United States, but that doesn't invalidate its desirability.

In a similar kind of way, I think that its good for 'the people' to have authority over the direction of their own spiritual evolution. Of course what we do affects other people, and we share a common genome, so we can't just go wherever we want as individuals. But we're part of the process, our evolution isn't something that should be imposed by a god, or a board of psychologists, or a religious school of thought. This is why 'the daemon' or muse matters, its not only a source of inspiration, its also an angel of destiny. I think that being more conscious of it and how to work with it is part of what empowers us to decide our own futures. Trying to empower ourselves just by extending our own minds and wills isn't as effective, because that pushes against the power of nature rather than working with it.

An image for this in Wilhelm's I Ching translation is "power depends on the axle of a big cart", as opposed to "a goat butts against a hedge". Ironically, this somewhat summarizes my thought and choice in relation to the Golden Flower. Currently, my awareness includes an arena that may be vaguely akin to Jung's thinking about archetypes. Beyond that is my 'muse', which I'm unaware of except where it extends into my mental realm, so to speak. As I work on understanding and resolving what I'm aware of, the boundary moves and I become aware of more. The mental yoga or Golden Flower practice, as I understand it, advocates forcibly extending my awareness to the 'source', through meditative practice, while not getting distracted by the lesser archetypal forms that I'm aware of now. Then, from that truer standpoint I'm supposed to be able to deal with the forms without losing awareness of the underlying unity. This approach seems too egotistically pushy to me though. I believe that it can be used to take a person's lower 'guest' awareness to the deeper 'host'. But it seems to me to be like forcing open a door rather than going through when invited, as if that exercise of will is what will make me worthy of invitation. Its as if the higher self is like a woman who is only receptive to abusive men who initially prove their devotion and manhood by refusing to take no for an answer. That's a game I'd rather not play. And it seems to me that something is given up, that there are deeper secrets that the muse will not yield to that kind of approach. I'd rather dance with my muse at the outer edge of Jung's world than hammer my way into Cleary's.

So if dream and astral are essentially the same, as discussed in earlier threads, what is it that connects dream to the physical world? When we are awake and seeing, our internal visual astral world echos what is outside of us, as connected through our eyes. But we have only a very limited ability to turn that around and drive the physical world from our imagination. Primarily we do that by using our tactile body models, our astral bodies, to move our physical bodies around. We're not very good at directly affecting things in other ways. But it seems that daemons can affect things in other ways, illustrating connections between ourselves and our outward destinies that can't be accounted for by our actions through our bodies. So how does that work?

Clearly the physical world has a natural law to it, a way that it works in and of itself. And yet, that mechanism is a mere outline, it doesn't fully account for the path that nature takes. Much is left to 'chance', and even much of what is considered hard cause and effect is merely one pattern among other possibilities not imagined.

I'm thinking that the physical world is a dream-like projection by the daemon self that's mostly on the other side of our veil of ignorance. The consistency and universality of physics reflects a similar underlying unity of our daemons, while the chasms in the physical universe reflect distinctions within that shared identity. And our human dreams are individual and disconnected because that's the way we are.

In a lucid dream, the environment extends as far as your attention goes, and doesn't need to go beyond that. For me it doesn't even extend quite that far, my dream peripheral vision is never as good as during waking life, even when I'm directing my attention towards it. Most of us assume that the physical universe is more independently objective, that it extends indefinitely in all directions in fine detail whether we come into contact with it or not. I don't think its really quite that way. The Schrodinger cat in a box, even though it is a macroscopic object that can't be described using a single coherent wavefunction, is still neither alive nor dead from the standpoint of an external physical system until the box is opened to that system. Similarly, other worlds are not real in quite the same way that many suppose them to be. We can see stars in the sky, but still with very limited detail.

I think that identity is also projected by our higher selves, in a way similar to how we project a thought of identity in relation to family or property. 'Past lives' are ours because they're connected to thoughts that are ours by that extension.