INSIGHT AND INTUITION

Metaphysics involves a method of linking the everyday world of body and brain to a reality that exist beyond the physical world, and therefore beyond physics. While metaphysics fundamentally concerns the finite, it also tries to reach an approximate understanding of the infinite. And this can only realistically be achieved by linking up with mysticism. Metaphysics looks without.Mysticism looks within. It concerns the soul, the mind, the inner self, and the eternal. It sees reality in much the same way that Plato taught, as an ideal that transcend all physical manifestation.


We habitually go through life viewing the universe from the inside. We are constantly looking out at our realisation of that environment. until we learn to reverse that process, we will continue struggling through one incarnation after another. The channel to knowledge, to true experience, to realization of our place in the universe, lies within. To comprehend mysticism and the mystical experience, we must realize that mysticism is related to functions that are separate from our day to day activities. Probably the nearest parallel to the mystical experience with anything in the physical world is the aesthetic experience.


For more years i walked back and forth to work every day. As i walked home in the evening,particularly in the late autumn, winter and early spring, i would almost always, face a sunset. We had some gorgeous sunset, particularly in the days before smog was eliminated. Each time i saw one of these beautiful sunsets, it was like a new experience. I would wonder "can there be another sunset more beautiful than this?" and there always was!


As the old saying goes: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." We realize only a portion of what we experience, never all of it. Our realization is always far less than the actual experience itself. This is a progressive condition that continues until the time comes when we reach the point where we can comprehend the idea itself, to which Plato referred. The comprehension of the ideas that lie behind manifestations is the equivalent of mastership which is the eventual realization of complete Cosmic Consciousness.

Our experience of beauty is usually related to an emotional as well as a rational experience.

We becomes emotionally involved every time we perceive beauty. It usually comes suddenly, rather like a surprise that we are not particularly seeking. It overwhelms our consciousness and cause us to momentarily realize that there is more to existence than the physical world.

The mystical experience is very much like the experience of perceiving beauty. When we have a mystical insight, it is if a veil is lifted and we see or comprehend a fact or experience. The veil is dropped so quickly that the experience is over before we realize it. Only those who have gained a degree of mastery in this area, and are alert enough to seize the moment, are able to hold onto and preserve that experience over a period of physical time. Such ability comes through practice, as well as acknowledgement and realization of the transitory conditions that exist in an experience like this. It is solely because most of our time is directed in the exact opposite direction, that we just do not have patience to build up the necessary experience to be able to hold onto and grasp the intuitive and mystical impressions that comes to us- constantly - if we could but hold onto them long enough to become objectively conscious of them.

There is one common factor in the mystical experience. Those who have had even the slightest of mystical experiences realize that there is always a nostalgic feeling about it, a feeling that one was once upon a time more familiar with, more in touch with. One feels very sad at having to come back to the physical , everyday world again. But the reason for this nostalgia is that we are reaching the reality that metaphysicians speak of we are contacting the source, a part of the Absolute, the I, which is the way to absolute mastery of life.