Examine Real Being
Riffing on Eternity #4
“Examine real being first by exploring reasons, and use them as steps upwards through levels of belief.”
We are drawn upward. But this is not an immediate transformative process. There is a stepwise expansion and such steps are a necessary part of the process.
To expand past our limitations step by step means that nothing is left behind to draw us back downward to take care of unfinished business. It means we are not to take for granted the gifts and processes along the way, for each has its place in the purpose and poetry of the unfoldment of the soul. It means we are to explore all the various aspects of being that reveal themselves in their limitations. These are seen to be our own limits of vision. The wholeness can be known in this way.
We are in search of the real, of the truth, of the pure gold, and all the aspects that first come to view must be necessarily tested, tried and examined with all our abilities.
Here we use reason in its highest sense, and at its best use, to find the way each aspect that comes to view is present as a teaching, as an example, or as a marker along the way. It may be in the form of a symbol to be decoded, or an icon to be known, or an experience to be understood. A dream, a vision, or a real life event, all combine within the soul to expand its purview, to draw it forward and to bring us toward the ineffable.
We come as close as we can to this solar being before we burn in its presence, to disappear into that which has been calling us all through our earthly lives.
We are encouraged to examine real being, which is to say to define it through our intellectual activity around and through it. As we do so, something remarkable happens. That being, so to speak, turns to examine us. It turns its face to us, and shows us more of its profound intelligent radiant love.
You are welcome here, it says through this action. There is a warmth to the welcome, and through this radiance more of the real being can be defined to us. It is a light drawing us upward.
This philosophical path is not one of cold intellect separated from the heart of life and its purpose. It is one of infinite joy and profound satisfaction. As each step is enthusiastically taken upward, the joy that draws the soul to the next step is so great that the step which is left behind, with its former belief structures and half-seen ideals, now seems like child’s play.
The boundaries which that old belief had held us in had seemed to be vast, unknowable. At the glimpse of the light of the sun, these show themselves now as confining controls, like the bars of the baby’s crib. When the toddler is old enough she can just climb out and explore the bedroom. Then over time, the rest of the house, then the yard, the neighbourhood, then take the bus into the city.
This path of the unfoldment of the soul and the examination of Real Being comes in the same natural way, not by external influence but from an internal inherent desire to know, to understand, to see, and ultimately to BE. This process leaves behind all that had been known as near-truth, and opens the beautiful pathway forward and upward toward the One.
Step by step, the expansion of the reasoning intellect, in its highest sense, becomes more brilliant, more of a light in itself. Less dependent on conjecture and the influence of others, the reasoning intellect is mysteriously led toward contact with greater ideas and forms, with higher intelligence than what had previously been thought of as the human mind, and enters the cosmic mind, the soul of the universe and past these into realms of highly refined abstraction of light and sound, beyond which Real Being dwells.
More of my notes on Plato study here, at Riffing on Eternity.