This branches off of the chakras thread. (Arguably it would be better suited for a spiritual growth forum, but I don't know of any good ones, and it has 'beyond dreaming' tie-ins.)

Quote Originally Posted by sivason View Post
Physical law says animals must eat, free will allows them to eat other creatures. God is no less present.
A challenge we face of course is that having chosen to eat other creatures (assuming that's how that started) we create a condition where for a time we no longer have a choice. Moreover, as individuals we're affected by choices that other people make. I'm vegan, but I depend on an environment where I can find adequate nutrition that way, and that depends on other people.

For me there's a huge gap between my moral vision and my actual condition. The moral visions of most religious philosophies seem watered down to me, and don't adequately address my core concerns. More radical philosophies often over-simplify and over-reach, creating more harm than good if practiced in earnest. So I seek a more effective synthesis of my vision with my current state.

I don't think that seeking spiritual development is the whole solution, even though such seeking is a natural and necessary part of life. In a world where animals don't eat other animals, if such a world is possible, I think there will still be a variety in depth and type of development. I think that if we just seek to develop spiritually, without making other essential changes, in the short run we will seem to progress in power and knowledge, but in the very long run what we build up will fall again, and something like what we have now will arise from the ashes. Tentatively, I think that insincerity, in all its forms, is a core issue.

On the subject of Chakras, which map in a fairly straightforward way to a zodiac (top chakra is at aries, bottom one is at libra.) The principles of creation, preservation, and destruction that you mentioned seem fairly natural and fundamental to me, a little more than just a human construct, even though there are other ways of thinking about it also. The zodiac seems to me to be two nested cycles from unmanifest to manifest and back again, unrolled across 12 points. Its symmetries are instructive, and I think the basic pattern is even built into the human body, hence the chakras for instance. I don't think its a pattern that's fundamental to the design of the universe though. As I have suggested before, this is one reason I've been seeking alternative descriptions of 'higher planes' and 'astral matter' - those are ideas that come out of cosmologies built on the zodiac. Since chemistry and physics on the 'lowest' plane clearly do not map to the zodiac, it seems implausible to me that the 'higher worlds' would. At most, our zodiac consistent experiences of higher worlds would reflect the design of our bodies, which is the way it is for practical reasons and for some aspects of our education.

I've brought up the topic of sex before, but haven't gotten anything yet that I recognize as useful feedback. From your 'energy' understanding (sivason), certainly you can see how sexuality affects our spiritual experiences? My awareness of God and the universe is strongly qualified by my understanding of power, which metaphorically that understanding is phallic. When I think a thought, on any subject, my awareness of power in that thought is phallic, so to speak. I'd like to find other ways of thinking about this. If possible I would also like to change my tendency to involuntarily astral project succubi when sleeping. I can see that there are karmic consequences of that which aren't in the direction I would like to go, plus it interferes with my other thinking.