Wisdom Notes on Spirituality

Morality in the Jhanas

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

The first act of creation was the splitting of the neutral feeling into the negative and positive feelings. Then time was created. Time allows the creation of a universe to occur, because the three feelings now took turns driving change amongst themselves. Without time, there is no universe, because nothing changes – everything is still one. Now God, still centred on equanimity, could watch the unfoldment of reality as it changed into a dynamic process.

God is outside time. Therefore when It creates the universe in time, It knows both its beginning and its end, along with the major stages of evolution’s odyssey. However, the secondary workings are fluid and changeable. Hence, despite controlling the big units of reality, God allows chance to function in the minor units of reality, such as the life forms in a solar system. The big units of reality – star systems, universes, galaxies – function under causality. The small units of reality – solar systems and their life forms – function under a mix of causality and chance/freewill.

In my view, evolution is dialectical. By dialectical I mean that there is a positive advance, followed by a negative retreat, and then eventually the resolution or synthesis of the two positions. The resolution then becomes the positive for the next cycle. Evolution swings back and forth, gradually getting “higher” and “higher”. Nevertheless, the dialectical nature means that there can always be “upsets” on the path to higher evolution.

Evolution is also a dialogue between uniformity and difference. When God wants to shape physical reality, It does so through the positive and negative feelings. If It centres on the positive feeling, then love is expressed to everything. Love develops uniformity in people and groups. If It centres on the negative feeling, then hate is expressed to everything. Hate develops individuality. People become different from each other. Groups become different from each other. In general, hard times emphasise individuals and rebellions; good times emphasise social groups and social movements.

Hence humans always have a dark side to them. Even the dark side can produce good ideas. The good and the dark cannot be separated. Each is necessary for character building. Bad people are necessary in order to explore the dark side of consciousness, which ascetic seekers have no understanding of. Asceticism is good sometimes, but it does not allow for humour. 

The human understanding of life comes from experience. The more that a person wants to explore goodness, the deeper he has to go into non-goodness. Hence his idea of heaven is always dependent on his idea of hell. Put another way, a person’s idea of goodness arises from the badness in both him and society. So when a seeker develops his goodness and approaches enlightenment, the more negativity he has to face. Another way to say this is that the more goodness a person practices, the more badness he can fall into. The tension between good and bad, light and dark, is maintained all life long. Overall, the depth of wisdom that a person can attain depends on both the level of his morality and his moral code.

The Spiritual Ethics of an Age

In the psychic world, I assume that the basic emotion of God is equanimity. Whereas, in the material world, God is love, and God is hate. Love is the answer to problems in jhanas 1 and 2; hate is the answer to problems in jhana-3; and equanimity and acceptance are the answers in jhana-4.

God both helps you and hurts you on the spiritual path. It helps you for a reason, and It hurts you for a reason. My higher self rejected me in 1993; my long-term response was to rebel against all spiritual traditions and seek wisdom, by analysing good and evil, despite warnings from astral guides not to do it. Without that rejection, I would not have undertaken the pursuit of wisdom. So when my higher self rejected me, I pursued wisdom in ethics, no matter what it cost me. And it cost me a lot: the dreary years of the 1990s were the worst times of my life. When I broke my heel in 2012, as a direct consequence of God’s punishment of me, I pursued the understanding of domination and submission, no matter what it cost me. And again it cost me deep sorrow: for the next few years I became very vulnerable and my self-confidence nosedived. Hence my wisdom arose from the harm that both my higher self and God inflicted on me. These two harmful events show that the spiritual ethics of the Age of Pisces is the end justifies the means.

I have been forced to accept that the end justifies the means, as applied to me, but I will never apply it to anyone else. I fundamentally disagree with it. I assume that when people die, those who believe that the end justifies the means will go to a different part of heaven than those who do not believe it. Hence live out your dreams and see where they lead. 

The end justifies the means is the spiritual ethics of Pisces. It accounts for the harsh times that Western mankind has been through for the past 2000 years. It is not the best model of ethics. But it can be the quickest model for developing a person, since it intensifies the subconscious mind in order to maximise difficulties and drive the person to seek greater heights of attainment.

Spiritual Ethics

I present some more of my beliefs. The big picture of the cosmos is under causality. This implies an absolute standard of morality for the big picture. When the morality is focused on small units of reality, which means solar systems and their worlds, it is called karma. In the small units, there is a mix of absolute morality with a relative morality (the relative morality is produced by human life forms in the units).[¹]

I assume that in the jhana-1 flow of ideas [²], moral ideas are psychic ideas and are absolute. In addition, the person also responds to psychological ideas, which are relative; these reflect the ideals and needs and desires of the person. So there is a mixture of absolute and relative ideas going through the person’s mind. 

You would think that the moral ideas should be common to all religious teachers. Since that is not the case, then the basic differences in religious teachings is that they are primarily based on the psychological ideals, needs and desires of individual teachers, with just a little mix of absolute ideas to make the overall bundle fairly convincing.

At its present and past levels of development and evolution, human morality is both absolute and relative. Absolute morality features influences from psychic reality, whilst relative morality features influences from psychological reality. He may experience conflict if he sees the relevance of an absolute idea but cannot accept it psychologically. 

The relative aspects to moral codes arise from the need for justification. Each teacher will find some way to justify his approach to morality, either by selectively quoting from a holy book, or by the influences of his own needs and ideals. Teachers from different societies or different sectors of a society will have different difficulties in youth and young adulthood. Hence they will have different needs and ideals. So their different justifications give rise to the differences in moral rules between the various religions and traditions.

Spiritual Ethics in Pisces and Aquarius

Pisces was a time of harsh spirituality because humanity was developing fast in both good and bad ways. So a strong spiritual ethics was needed in order to control humanity. Hence the ethics was the end justifies the means. This implies that in harsh times, spiritual ethics have to be harsh, so God seems to make it as difficult as possible for a human to evolve into a better person. However, the depths of your life can lead to compensating heights of spiritual attainment (I remember a maxim of my youth: the greater the sinner, the greater the saint). The rapid evolution of mankind in the twentieth century was due to the two World Wars with all the suffering that they produced. However, I believe that in good times, spiritual ethics can be moderate. 

This spiritual ethics of Pisces reflects pride. The correct spiritual response is detachment, which again reflects pride. My view is that spiritual ethics change as each Age changes, that is, God changes It’s approach to humanity as each Age changes. What will the spiritual ethics of Aquarius be?  In general, how does a spiritual ethics change with the Ages?  I use the jhana levels to find out.

Jhana-1: narcissism. Here ethics are of freedom and independence, reflecting the person’s level of self-esteem.[³]

Jhana-2: jealousy. Here ethics are of community spirit, reflecting the person’s level of self-worth.

Jhana-3: pride. Here ethics are of purity and asceticism, reflecting the person’s level of self-discipline.

Jhana-4: equanimity. Here ethics are of harmony and balance, reflecting the person’s acceptance of life. 

In the Age of Aquarius, a person’s drive should be for harmony and balance as the fastest way to progress. The ethics of jhana-4 will be dominant in Aquarius, and thus make the spiritual path much easier than it has been in Pisces.

Karma

In my view, for the Western world in the Age of Pisces, the ultimate spiritual test was that of abandonment. Jesus was abandoned at the beginning of the Age, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and I were abandoned at the end of it (Nietzsche ended his life as a catatonic patient). Abandonment produces bitterness, and so learning to handle bitterness was always the most difficult test of the spiritual aspirant in Pisces.

Qualities like compassion and empathy can only be developed on Earth, not in heaven. Empathy and compassion do not naturally arise in the psychic mind; instead, they arise from the psychological mind. So if an enlightened seeker does not have them but wants them, he has to reincarnate again on Earth so that he can acquire them.

Relative moralities are the scenarios for his journeys through life. So, taking a time span of numerous incarnations, the overall effect of the subconscious mind is to lead the person to eventual goodness. What is bad in one lifetime leads eventually to a complementary goodness in another lifetime. Overall, taking a time span of numerous rebirths, including lives of goodness and lives of badness, the human saga is perfect and divine. In my view, by the end of reality, all badness, all evil, will have resolved itself into absolute goodness. Reality began at a time of goodness, though the goodness was all potential and not actual. Reality’s end will be a time of goodness, with the goodness being actual. Evolution is absolute perfection, when seen in perspective.

Karma is cause and effect. You must be on the receiving end of any interventions (good and bad) that you make in life. To understand something, you have to experience it in all its shades of meaning. If you repress it, then you learn nothing about it, and hence cannot understand it. What you do in relationships will be done to you at some time.
Good experiences enable you to manage relationships.
Bad experiences enable you to learn about relationships.

As each person changes psychologically (learning from his mistakes), so his karmic ties will change as well. Karma can be viewed as perfect justice.

Two important emotions are guilt and bitterness. Guilt is one of the fundamental emotions for man because it turns a person inwards and helps to begin the process of self-questioning. From a spiritual perspective, guilt is a wonderful emotion. The purpose of bitterness is to remove excessive dependence. Freedom is not possible if a person is dependent. So bitterness is a necessary stage to pass through before freedom becomes possible. Hence the seeker finds that he or she has guilt at the beginning of the spiritual life, and bitterness towards the end of it.

If you want to understand some major psychological issue, a suitable disaster will plunge you into the world of that issue. For example, if you want to understand the nature of obedience, you are plunged into the world of domination and submission (in bdsm). This way, you can get by direct experience the understanding of the issue. Most seekers are plunged into disasters and never try to understand why. For example, in my experience, the Dark Night of the Soul is primarily a replay of the trauma of rejection that is experienced in childhood. I assume that the intensity of the trauma for the child is the same as the intensity of the Dark Night for the adult. The difference between the child and the adult is that the adult has to find a better way of handling the trauma than the child did. The mystic over-reacts to the Dark Night because he does not understand it.

I feel that God is unfair. Fairness is not a current spiritual attribute in this Age. As a child, I felt that my punishment by my dad was excessively severe and unfair. Now for enlightenment, the final test is that God treats the aspirant in the same way as the father treated the child, when trauma was created. Hence the adult has to overcome and heal the trauma that he experienced as a child.

If, as a child, you create negative beliefs about the world, then those beliefs will produce your future challenges. As a way of handling the pain of childhood, the child may create intense ideals (either positive ones or negative ones). The way that ideals work is that the positive ideals in the conscious mind are accompanied by negative ideals in the subconscious mind. So for myself, I have intense positive ideals in my conscious mind, and intense negative ideals in my subconscious mind. I suspect that a criminal person has conscious bad ideals and subconscious good ideals.

We need pain in order to progress. Surmounting the pain gives us new abilities. When my higher self rejected me in 1993, I managed by developing qualities of character I never knew I had. This is the healing pain. The good side of pain is that it will eventually heal us, by changing our beliefs and character. So when anything psychological impedes me, if I learn from it then my character changes in some way.

Slow learners experience low intensities of pain and sorrow. Fast learners experience high intensities of pain and sorrow (thus allowing more karma to be worked through in a lifetime). A person’s speed through incarnations is governed by his pain limit. That is, the more pain he can withstand, the more he can learn about himself, and so he needs fewer sojourns on planet Earth. 

As I see it, after dying on Earth, the person goes to heaven. In heaven the positive qualities are stimulated. On rebirth to Earth, the subconscious mind still contains the negative qualities (put on hold after death on Earth in the previous life), but the positive qualities have been stimulated. This is how the person progresses over many lifetimes [4]. A person may skip some lessons of life, and still become enlightened. However, he will lack an understanding of the problems that he skipped.

In the tail end of Pisces, the best spiritual quality to learn is detachment. Detachment brings a counterbalance to Pisces, and enables the person to make “better” choices and follow a wiser path. When practising detachment, you are aware of negative thoughts but you do not get involved with them. For Aquarius, detachment will not be so important. It will be necessary to give up the component of hate in detachment in order to go further than hate can take you. Detachment is based on pride in hatred mode.

Morality

One day, whilst in raised consciousness, I sensed the high level of hate in jhana-3 detachment. The level was much greater than I had thought. It should not have surprised me, since detachment is an intense state, but it did. The hate is the hate mode of pride. This high level of hate explains why a person can develop regular episodes of dizziness, which is a problem in the neck (where the pride chakra is situated). In other words, when the pride chakra is activated, it can produce physical problems in and around the neck. This discovery improved my analysis of morality in the jhanas, to which I now turn.

Jhana-4 equanimity implies seeing and/or understanding all sides of an issue. Therefore issues faced in any jhana from 1 to 3 are only partially resolved in that jhana, since understanding is limited in it. For example, suppose I am in normal everyday consciousness, and I am wrestling with a social problem. The insight which enables me to handle it better comes from jhana-2, whilst if I want to detach from it then the answer comes from jhana-3, whilst the insight needed to resolve it comes from jhana-4. 

Hence a single problem may have several different answers, depending on how you feel about the problem. In my view, there are many routes to enlightenment, since each route classifies the difficulties differently from other routes.

Each jhana has its own level of answers to questions. The knowledge within a jhana level is different from the knowledge in the other jhanas. Each jhana has its own set of ethical ways. Hence by considering what ethical views you accept, you thereby know what jhana is influencing you. So the more ethical you are, the higher you can ascend through the jhanas. 

An accurate understanding of the jhanas is necessary in order to understand the role of any teacher or thinker. Whatever jhana a thinker can understand reflects the limit to his understanding of reality. For example, if a thinker can only access the influences of jhanas 1 and 2, he cannot understand toleration, since that is a jhana-3 attribute. Hence when a thinker gives an interpretation of reality, he needs to state the level of jhana that is influencing him the most, since that reflects the highest level of his ethics.

Increasing one’s familiarity with the jhanas will change one’s system of ethics to higher values and ideals. The more jhanas a thinker is familiar with, the more encompassing his views will be. A thinker who is familiar only with jhanas 1 and 2 can only understand the ethics of jhana-1 and jhana-2. Whereas, a thinker who is familiar with jhanas 1, 2, and 3 can understand the ethics of jhanas 1 to 3. Therefore, going up the jhanas should widen the base of the thinker’s set of ethical values.

Teachers and Moral Codes

Anxiety differs in jhanas 1 to 3. When a teacher promulgates a moral code, that code is shaped by his anxieties. A teacher who can reach jhana-1 will have different anxieties from a teacher who can reach jhana-2, and both will be different from a teacher who reaches jhana-3. Hence their moral codes will be different from each other. I generalise this effect. Different kinds of anxiety will lead to different experiences of life. The difference between one teacher and another one relates to the different spiritual experiences of each person. Different experiences lead to differences in consciousness. Differences in consciousness imply that different teachers teach different things. 

From a wisdom point of view, there is no competition between the ways of exploring God. All achieve their goal, though the goal may be to experience different parts of God. Different interpretations imply different experiences of God. For example, meditation explores one part of God, whilst mysticism explores a different part of God.

Teachers teach a code of morality that is dependent on the highest jhana that has influenced them. They may not be aware of the jhanas. Nevertheless, their inspired writings are dependent on the jhanas as the source of their inspirations. So if a teacher attunes to a “source” that is acceptable to him (however he describes that source, for example, as God, a saint, an angel, etc), the morality that he comes to espouse will have affinity with the jhana the source comes from. 

For non-religious teachers, I tabulate the influences acting on them.

Jhana-1 implies liberalism, such as altruism and giving money to a beggar.
Jhana-2 implies socialism, such as helping the weak and vulnerable.
Jhana-3 implies conservatism, such as self-interest and competition.
Jhana-4 implies co-operation, such as guilds, trade unions, and anarchism.

These are modern values. The liberalism of ancient Greece is not the same as liberalism in modern times. In ancient Greece the liberals owned slaves.

What jhana a teacher is regularly influenced by will affect his ethics. Hard teachers get to jhana-3 and produce jhana-3 ethics. Soft teachers get to jhanas 1 and 2, and produce jhana-1 or jhana-2 ethics. An understanding teacher gets to jhana-4, and produces jhana-4 ethics. A confused teacher may have a hard ethics ( jhana-3) towards its believers, yet have a soft, even promiscuous, ethics towards sexuality ( jhanas 1 or 2). If society wants a hard teacher, then the hard teacher comes. If society wants a soft teacher, then a soft teacher comes. It is rare for an understanding teacher to come. 

My jhana-4 ethics is based on respect for others, and that includes others who disagree with me. I’m not after the interpretation of reality. I’m just giving one interpretation of reality.

Sex in the Jhanas

Each jhana has a different view of sexual pleasure than the other jhanas. I give my views.

Jhana-1: sex is fun and licentious. 
Jhana-2: swinging sex between couples is fun.
Jhana-3: prudery reigns, and monogamy or serial marriage is followed. 
Jhana-4: sex does not matter.

[¹].  My ideas on relativity begin in the article The Meaning of Relativity. [1]

[²]. My analysis of the flow begins in the article The Flow of Ideas. [2]

[³]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [3]

[4]. My beliefs about the process of reincarnation are explained in the article Psychological Mechanics of Reincarnation. [4]

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