The fourth type of experience is the highest experience available to us spiritual experience, and I want you to hear now that this experience has nothing to do with imagination, with mediated experience it has nothing to do with it. It grows out of your direct experience. I also call it the ultimate expression of direct experience. That way, first in practice, we move from imagination, where we are stuck and where our attention is stuck for many days to direct experience, and from direct experience, we, without applying any means, move to spiritual experience. These are very specific experiences, these are very specific practices, and these are very clear states that are testable and repeatable because they are not fantasy. Therefore, there are teachings about spirituality, about mysticism. I want you to understand that these are very precise teachings. I generally call it science, because it meets the criteria that are presented to science, it is repeatable and it is testable. Therefore, spiritual experience is a very clear experience.
The first such spiritual experience, oddly enough, you will not believe, is Love. That is, Love is not a feeling, it is not a sensation; Love is a spiritual experience. In fact, a loving person is already a spiritual person. The entrance to spirituality is the entrance through Love, if we are talking about the first and most accessible experience. Yes, you should be a rather subtle person with an open mind. What is the soul in this sense? The soul is essentially a counterparty to spiritual experience; the soul is the recipient of spiritual experience.
If the mediated experience is received not by the body, not by the organism, not by the senses, then this mediated experience through words is received by the mind, and this is essentially a mental experience, modeled by the mentality, and the recipient of it is the mentality. Do not be afraid to say that this experience is received by the mind, that it is not received by your body. The experience received by the body is a direct experience, and the experience gained by the mentality is a mediated experience. The experience of which the soul is the counterpart is a spiritual experience. And the first such experience is Love. Love is not a feeling, Love is not a sense, Love is a deep spiritual experience, it is a guide to the world of spiritual experiences. So, mysticism is a science that deals with spiritual mystical experiences.
A very important point, which we have already talked about, is the practice of withdrawing attention into direct experience. If you do not learn this and do not begin to distinguish, then all your spirituality may take place in imagination, that is, in modeling, in fantasies, in thinking out. And this is not spirituality, this is pseudo-spirituality, this is mental spirituality, mental fantasies. Therefore, the road to spirituality goes through being in the Moment of Now, in direct experience. You must first stand here. This is where the spiritual journey begins, this is where our spirituality begins and it grows out of direct experience. It has nothing to do with psychedelic experiences caused by all kinds of drugs or exercises that involve changes in brain chemistry. It has nothing to do with imagination, our fantasies. If you hear me, then I will be very, very happy.
I have passed on to you the teaching of the four types of experience. Although it seems very simple, your discernment will have to work and assimilate this information.
3. Worldviews, pre-rational and supra-rational viewpoints
In this chapter, I would like to continue to keep the story up in the same way as it was started in the previous chapters, but now we are going to discuss one very sophisticated issue, which is not spoken at all in modern teachings and mysticism. It is an issue of viewpoints, or worldviews. So what does this mean? A worldview is a view on the world, such a global understanding of the world order, it is precisely the global understanding, not private, and it is not about how some single events take place. It is about the global world order. And I would like to devote this chapter to a story about what worldviews mean and the understanding of world order viewpoints.
As usual, I split this concept a bit. We have three main types of worldviews: pre-rational, rational, and supra-rational. Exactly the same grading is offered by Ken Wilber. He is a very interesting modern mystic who puts forward such a distinction of worldviews. He studies and practices mysticism. We will nevertheless split them into several more subparts to make it clearer what is at stake. The teaching that I present to you in this chapter is the teaching on worldviews. Their distinction is very important, since it is very easy to confuse the levels and mix up the pre-rational worldview with the supra-rational one.
The supra-rational is a mystical and spiritual worldview that surpasses the rational explanation of the world that science investigates. Mystical science is engaged in a supra-rational worldview. It is only a supra-rational worldview that provides answers to such global questions, that are just beginning to arise before leading scientists now, when they reach a certain progress in the study of consciousness and they have already come to the conclusion that all of this is rational. Some people even joke that they will prove God and his existence sooner than the mystics who got bogged down in the pre-rational viewpoints. So, I would like you to understand this issue quite clearly and to be very correct with it, because today we are often faced with one problem: when the pre-rational is taken for the over-rational. Some believe that mysticism and spirituality are some kind of swims in the imagination, fictions, that these are some kind of mythical stories, magical siddhis and so on. But in fact, this is a road in a completely different direction, and rational thinking, a rational worldview serves as the Rubicon in this matter. This is, in fact, a scientific worldview, and, thus, science is closer to mysticism than all this mythical religious husk. You should understand that I mention religion here in the framework of some fairy-tale dogmas only. Returning to the issue, it is oddly enough, but in the modern world we can rarely find a very clear understanding of worldviews, so I would like to acquaint you with a brief summary of this issue.
We are going to make an overview of worldviews: there are several worldviews within the framework of rational views, within the framework of mystical views and within the framework of pre-rational views. I will try to discuss this issue as briefly and as simple as possible in this chapter, even though this issue is very, very global. In fact, it is not even mystical at all, but it is rather an information and philosophical issue, although the mystical worldview levels are comprehended by practice, they are not dreams, there exists some experience behind them. So lets start.
The first type of pre-rational outlook or worldview is a magical worldview, it, like the mythical, refers to a childs worldview, it is immature. When a child does not have any idea of how the world works, about interconnections, about causes and effects, but he wants to explain how everything works here. As an individual, the child places himself at the center of the world. There is some healthy grain in this assumption, since each point of this world can be called its center, due to the fact that it does not have a clearly defined border. But this idea is also fed by egocentrism, namely by an unconditional belief that I am the main one, I am the best, I am in the center, and everything revolves around me and, in general, I am the steersman of this world, the world revolves around me, I have my free will, my choice, I can decide to do something, and everything around me must obey me.