The World and the Myopic Despair of Materialism

[Elias]

If you compare God-in-man with man-without-God, you have to notice that man-without-God is in a hopeless situation. A man without God is a life "full of sound a fury" but ultimately going nowhere.

Knowing God, having one's foundation in God, is to be born of God -- and to become a "dropout" from the materialist-atheist school of the world.

No matter your origins, you will likely start out with enthusiasm to embrace the world, like a child who projects his joyful spirit into his toys. "The spirit of play" they call it. As you grow -- assuming your family situation doesn't impede you -- you give yourself to life full of expectation. You immerse yourself in learning, adapting to the world, and taking responsibility for your own survival. It is the natural way, even the ancient way of responding to your environment. So you take it up not reluctantly, but with gusto.

One fine day during this growing process you see that the game doesn't go on forever -- you are going to die, and that inexorable doom becomes very clear to you. So you begin to contemplate the temporary situation in which you find yourself -- your "impermanence". From that point onward, if you are honest, you start looking for the legendary "God" or some other answer to death.

You may look for God in many ways, and you may or may not find Him. It almost doesn't matter, because fortunately God is also looking for you and knows exactly where you are. One fine day, without warning, God makes Himself known to you, and suddenly you enter a world of an altogether different kind. And this too is a world to which you must adapt, a world where you will learn, a world where you can (and must) take responsibility. It is the most ancient environment, the inner world, a world of form and formlessness, a world of ever-expanding knowledge and self-awareness.

You may (one hopes) identify the essence of this other world as consciousness itself. That's a terrific breakthrough, when it happens. I remember the very moment when I first fell out of the "sound and fury" of the mind into a direct realization of the nature of consciousness as the essence of our lives. It was in San Francisco, sometime in the early 1970s, sitting in the backyard of my house. I had had visions before, and seen the "other reality" before, and even spent almost three years in a Benedictine monastery coming to terms with those visions and that reality. But this experience was the one they can't put in books, the one the scriptures can only point to: it was the primordial mystical experience of the most exquisite truth of our existence.

Many of you have had the same experience, I know. It is certainly your birthright, so you ought to have had it by now. (I am sad for you if you have not been fortunate enough to have this experience.)

When you do finally have it, you are alone with it, because it is a solitary unbroken experience, undivided by relations and external appearances. It simply is. It changes the way you live, forever. It is the beginning of dissolution of the machinery of the world as it has impressed itself upon your brain.

In a way you could call it a "reprogramming" of the brain -- the gray matter in the skull being a kind of computer that has been operating on a provisional "beta" software system in order to survive. This "beta" operating system was evolved out of a need to adapt to outer experience, society, and "the world". It tends, in modern times, to work in dissociation from the necessary process of adaptation to dying and to the reality of the Living God.

But the brain, you will learn, evolved over millions of years not only as an instrument of the "survival of the fittest" game -- but also as an instrument of exquisite communication with the "mystical" Reality that exists before and after all temporal existence. And consciousness is its medium, the "bath" in which the brain is born and immersed.

The materialists are dead wrong when they assume that consciousness itself is a byproduct of physical evolution. I know this. You know this. We know this because we are consciousness, and as consciousness we realize the nature of consciousness. Our "data" is the experience itself -- the direct experience of seamless and unmodified consciousness.

You would find it difficult to measure such an experience. Although there have been interesting EEG studies of meditating Buddhist monks, all such experiments can only point to extraordinary states of brain activity. They are not evidence of the nature of consciousness. Only consciousness can know its own nature as the sourceless and unborn Self.

And you are consciousness. Only you can know your own nature. It can't be told to you by an external graph or a description in a book. You can only know yourself directly, as that which you are. And you do know that.

Now, I am quite disappointed that mankind, in general, has not made much of this self-knowledge. Indeed, it appears that there is even a resistance to real self-knowledge -- a refusal to know God directly, if you will. Or, put another way, the "beta" software is arguing defensively against its own ultimate obsolescence.

This refusal can get quite fierce at times, to the point of become a kind of orthodoxy, with its own authorities and canonical statements of "fact". This refusal has worked very hard to become the "officially approved" software for young and impressionable brains.

It is as if, in the country of the blind, blindness was made into a law, taught as such in the universities, and the very idea of sight was declared an impossible fantasy.

The attack against seeing isn't made directly, most of the time. The teachings of sages like Ramana are mostly ignored. Instead the religion of simple folk is set up as a strawman to be shot down by the materialists. So, for instance, the arguments of the "neo-Darwinians" are all directed against "creationists", or believers in dogmatic scriptural poetry. Folks like myself are not even allowed in the classroom. We're invisible.

As a direct knower of God, I can see quite clearly that the human brain has evolved in two directions. I know from experience that its cells and synapses have adapted to a higher kind of experience, an experience that transcends death. The "omega" operating system is already functioning in me. (Hopefully it has taken charge in your brain as well.)

So it's rather funny and sad to see the partisans of the old "beta" software fiercely defending its limitations by using evolution and natural selection as blunt instruments with which to bludgeon those of us who see humanity as containing and expressing the profound Reality beyond our individual living and dying.

But the "beta" advocates rule the educational culture, and they have their deleterious effect, even on those who have had some variation of mystical experience. I cite an example from Broken Yogi, quoted from his recent blog writing: