The Four Universes

Oh dear; it seems that my fifth blog (A Spiritual Cosmology) left some people feeling more confused than they were before. In this post, therefore, I will try to make what I was attempting to say a little clearer…

I was taught at Sunday School that there was Earth, Heaven and Hell. You lived on Earth, and when you died, you went to Heaven or Hell. Heaven seemed to be somewhere 'up there' beyond the stars, and hell was 'down there'.

Then I came across the following saying by a mystic (I paraphrase): "Why do people ask where the soul goes when a person dies? It doesn't have to go anywhere, it's already there." I found this puzzling, but then I realised that maybe it was like asking where the body goes when you wake up from dreams. It doesn't go anywhere - it's been there, all along, in bed, while your mind was off all over the place, imagining all sorts of scenarios. All that happens when you wake up is a change of consciousness - in this case from dreaming to waking. This is somewhat like changing channels on a TV; one minute you're on one frequency, the next you're on another. I suppose that one way of describing spiritual development is that you become capable of experiencing finer and finer "frequencies". 

What I am going to describe now is not something I have pulled out of thin air. The scheme of things I set out below is often referred to as 'the perennial philosophy', because mystics from all religions, and from many different times and places, have experienced this reality for themselves. Details might differ, but the 'great chain of being' that I'm going to try to explain does not vary in its overall order or principles: the Absolute brings a Divine universe into existence, which in turn produces a spiritual universe (made of denser 'stuff'/energy). In turn the spiritual universe produces a mental universe (the universe of mind), again denser than its predecessor, and which in turn produces the most dense universe of all- the universe with the most 'rules' and conditions- the physical universe.

While we're alive, most of us identify with the densest frequency, that of physical matter. We think that the body is us. Materialist scientists say that the mind is just a result of electrical activity in the physical brain. What the perennial philosophy states is that it's actually the other way around. The world of mind is responsible for the material world. Something has to exist 'in mind' before it can exist physically. You and I existed as mind before we took on bodies. As far as I can tell, once we've 'incarnated' as a physical body, most of us are firmly attached to it. 

Others, however, claim to have 'OBE's - out of the body experiences. I know one person who claimed that she used this ability to see over people's heads at the theatre (she just 'rose up' out of her body, and her ability to see 'rose up' as well.) However, it did make her epilepsy much worse. I have since read a suggestion that epilepsy might be the result of the mind not being seated as securely in the physical brain as most people's. 

I personally believe, from various experiences I've had, and that other people have described, that our higher minds are capable of roaming free all over the place while we're asleep, though most don't go very far. We do not remember a thing about it in the morning, any more than we can remember former lives, or being newly born. Spiritual 'adepts' (of which the philosopher KenWilber claims to be one - see his book 'One Taste') can stay conscious even during sleep, and they do remember.

There has also been a lot of argument about 'NDE's - near death experiences, where people who have physically died (i.e. are brain dead) are somehow resuscitated, and can describe what had been going on around them while they were dead. Materialists will say that this is all down to the brain producing all sorts of chemicals to reassure itself as it dies. But it seems much simpler to me just to accept that the mind survives physical death, and to remember that if you are with someone when they die, they can see and hear you, before they move on to the next part of their particular journey.

So, to summarise, the mind pre-exists the body. And according to the perennial philosophy, spirit pre-exists mind. (In the Kabbalic version of the perennial philosophy, what you would think of traditionally as your individual soul exists where spirit overlaps with your particular mind. See the diagram above, and the diagram is the next post 'The Human Being'.) The important thing is that you can use your higher mental functions (the ones that do more than make your brain work properly by, e.g. firing up your central nervous system) to access the spiritual universe, and indeed the Divine universe. An example of a higher mental function is your imagination, which is used in visualisation, creative activities and so on.

As I've said before, I think the most useful thing we can do is line up our own will with Divine Will. This is difficult if nobody's ever told you about the existence of Divine Will; (I've talked about the practices that help to line up 'will' with 'Will', in earlier posts). One thing that needs to be said here is that, across these four universes, distance cannot be measured by miles or any similar unit; distance is measured by degree of similarity. The more 'spiritual' you are, the closer to the spiritual universe you become, i.e. to lining yourself up on the same frequency. Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to line up solely with the dense physical body (though it seems as if many people have,) given the temporary nature of that physical body. 

According to the perennial philosophy, our souls are not trapped in the physical body until we die. Our souls continue to exist in the spiritual realm even while we inhabit a physical body. If our souls are not getting the sort of stimulation and sustenance they need, they withdraw back to exist purely in the spiritual realm again, leaving behind a body and mind working purely on 'automatic', i.e. one which is soul-less. I personally believe, though, our soul will come back if we start showing an interest in it. We can be 're-souled'.