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Counterintuitive has become a popular term in the mass media and journalistic writing.  It is a term that is misused, either not clearly understood by its user, or used as a prop to give the writer (and reader) an illusory idea that they are intuitive to begin with and have suddenly stumbled upon some sort of understanding in a situation that seems to be revelatory.  In both instances a mistake in understanding and awareness has been made.  But, first, let’s examine a little more closely what is supposedly counterintuitive.

      The 30 day period prior to the Hebraic new year called Rosh Hashanah (the head of the year) is a month called Elul, meaning God is in the garden, or God is drawing near.  At the time of the Day of Atonement (at-one-ment) called Yom Kippur, God is fully present with us. Here, the heavenly Book of Life is opened in which each of us may be inscribed for life for the coming year. The tradition holds that we actively participate in inscribing ourselves in this book of life through our acts of kindness, charitable givings, and prayers.

The overarching theme of existence, exemplified now in particular, and human history in general, is murder.  Murder is the active taking of life with intent to gain power and control over others.  It provides an outlet for the human game of domination-subjugation/master-slave that are subsumed under the dark current of the Will to Power. In the Western spiritual tradition, we contract with God to perpetuate life for ourselves and for each other. We are never meant to actively pursue the extinction of our own life or of any else’s.

     The difficulty with the skeptical  world is that it is exclusionary, driven by a materialist philosophy based on this foundational principle:  Only tangible physicality, perceptible to sensory awareness- driven by logic- in the quantitative reality that is measurable, calculable, and quantifiable is real.

Not only is there a genetic transmission, which sows itself in our physical characteristics, but also a psychogenetic transmission. Such transmissions carry the family errors and strengths.  In turn they convey the organizing beliefs that direct our lives. That is to say there is one or two (rarely three, or more) in place from earliest life around which we organize our lives. These beliefs represent the psychogenetic transmission to be fulfilled (strengths) or corrected (errors).

Spiritual thinking is  based in analogy rather than logic. In common parlance and conventional schooling analogy is presented as: This is to this as that is to that, focusing on points of similarity between two ideas or objects. In spiritual thinking analogic thinking seeks out  points of similarity and points of differences. Unlike conventional analogic thinking, we do not rely on logic to reach a conclusion. Rather we look to discover wholeness.

A student at my Institute was trying to define with me the difference between a mental imagery experience and dream imagery, particularly in describing these imaginal events  out loud in a group setting, such as happens in my group imagery and group dream classes held in NYC. 

Indignation is not quite the right word to describe the outcry of a boisterously vocal number of people and groups in response to President Obama’s health care bill to enfranchise the 46,000,000 Americans without health insurance. “It’s socialism,” was the battle cry. A fear swept over them that government would become more intrusive than ever, dominating our lives from birth to death, just as in Scandinavia. Neither Obama or his spokesmen sought to correct this error and correctly reframe the issue as “not socialism but Christianity!” 

Meditations on the Tarot: A Spiritual Journey into Hermeticism, Kabbalah and Western Wisdom

Gerald Epstein, MD
5.17.10 (Audio: 1 hr 17 min)
A leading scholar of Western esotericism explores the synthesis of Kabbalistic and Hermetic ideas and practices in the remarkable and mysterious work Meditations on the Tarot, considered by many to be one of the greatest works of spiritual writing ever penned.

There are two realities existing for us on earth. One is the horizontal, everyday, mundane habitual where we carry out our existence either in the service of truth or untruth; the other the spiritual, the one of the vertical: holiness, truth, carried out in the service of dedication to the One and its application to contributing to the well–being of self and others.

The axis of freedom known transculturally throughout all the world traditions is the vertical. It seems natural to consider this direction as representative of freedom because to this direction is free from the pull of terrestrial gravity that keeps us rooted to the earth. In contrast, terrestrial gravity is connected with the horizontal dimension, the one of unfreedom.