Spirit – Harmonia Philosophica

Meditation going wrong? Watch out what you look for…

Meditation is increasingly being marketed as a treatment for conditions such as pain, depression, stress and addiction, and while many people achieve therapeutic goals, other meditators encounter a much broader range of experiences – sometimes distressing and even impairing ones – along the way.

Meditators reported multiple unexpected experiences from across the seven domains of experience. For example, a commonly reported challenging experience in the perceptual domain was hypersensitivity to light or sound, while somatic changes such as insomnia or involuntary body movements were also reported. Challenging emotional experiences could include fear, anxiety, panic or a loss of emotions altogether. (1)

As any powerful tool, meditation can also turn against its practitioner.

Any knowledge comes with personal pain.

Remember what happened in the forest with Midas.

The abyss is not for everyone to look at.

Not just because it may stare back.

But because you might realize that you are (creating) the abyss.

Every fear, every emotion, every pain is yours. Every experience which you have lived or which you will is yours. Every life and death in this world is yours. You are the creator of life. You are the destroyer of the worlds.

Do you like you?

Ayahuasca for the many…

From Brooklyn to Australia, there is a growing demand for ayahuasca, a tribal, hallucinogenic tea said to have both spiritual and curative properties. But, like any globalization fairy tale, the world’s embrace is threatening to suffocate the tradition at its source. The herbal tea, made by combining a rare vine and shrub found in the thick of the Amazon, has become the “it” drug for celebrities like Sting and Lindsay Lohan, who rave about its spiritual properties. But for the Amazonian tribes that have used ayahuasca for 5,000 years to communicate with God on matters ranging from politics to medicine, the trend is dangerous.

“The sacred art of Indians has been transformed into entertainment”, said Moises Pianko, a member of the Ashaninka tribe of northern Brazil.

The ayahuasca tourism industry grows exponentially. An estimated 40 therapeutic retreats around the world now specialize in ayahuasca, according to Carlos Suarez, an independent researcher who writes about economic development and cultural change in the Amazon. Some researchers see the global commercialization of ayahuasca as inevitable, and think the tribes should focus on getting a cut of profits. Some tribes want to get on board, but demand for ayahuasca is surging too fast to keep up.

At the same time, the rush for ayahuasca has tribes questioning the sustainability of their own ceremonies. Because extraction of the plant is largely unregulated, foresters have found that amature ayahuasca brewers wandering the jungle often cut off a piece of the rare vine and leave the rest to rest rot. Finding the once abundant vine in Peru’s Iquitos region, where most centers are located, now takes days. (1)

Spiritual world for sale.

The epitome of western civilization.

Once again the ignorance of the many leads to misconceptions about the knowledge of the few. Shamans used this vine for their spiritual rituals, but that does not mean that whoever drinks it will have the same experience or the same spiritual journey. One needs to be prepared for the higher realms of spirit and soul – what difference would it make to drink a tea like this if your “god” is money and sex?

Prepare yourself to enter the cave.

Yes, you will see things inside.

But only what you take with you…

Naked humans. Frightening earthquakes…

Foreigner arrested as Malaysians blame nude mountain pictures for earthquake? (1)

Authorities in Malaysia have arrested a foreign national for allegedly posing naked for pictures on the country’s highest peak, Mount Kinabalu, an act some Malaysians have said angered the spirits of the mountain and caused an earthquake.

News reports said those involved in the incident had been barred from leaving Sabah, to allow police to investigate. Some reports said two Canadians in the group were stopped from leaving the country.

Finally, they were freed. (2)

In a world of spirits we live in.

In a world where we breathe alive and yet we believe we are dead.

I do not say that posing naked on a mountain causes earthquakes.

But believing that everything is just dead matter causes something much more deadly: the extinction of our very existence and making the cosmos void of true conscious meaning. In a world filled with… us, we only see things.

Silence is frightening.

Not the rumble of an earthquake.

We humans always find the most stupid things to be afraid of…

Schizophrenia. Voices. Spirits…

People with schizophrenia may hear either hostile voices goading them to jump off a bridge or a mother’s soothing words of advice, depending on the cultures in which they live, a new study suggests.

In the United States, schizophrenia’s symptoms include hallucinations of disembodied voices that hurl insults and make violent commands, says an international team led by Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. But in India and Ghana, schizophrenia patients often report positive relationships with hallucinated voices that they recognize as those of family members or God. The findings will be published in the January 2015 British Journal of Psychiatry.

“Learned cultural expectations about the nature of mind and self may encourage Americans with schizophrenia to pay more attention to negative, hostile voices”, Luhrmann says. (1)

The western man has been alienated from his own soul.
The western man has been alienated with the spirit world.

So it is more than logical that when he comes across these entities he is afraid.

Only if we accept our true spiritual nature, will we not be afraid of our spiritual nature…