There is a fascinating parallel - and progression - in the awakening to Big Mind.

First, it can appear intrapsychic. Then intradivine, or whatever we want to call it.

Intrapsychic

We can have a taste of Big Mind, and interpret it as all intrapsychic.

If we have even moderate psychological sophistication, we realize that our experience of the world all happens - well, in our experience of it. The tree may be out there, but the experience of the tree is right here, in my awareness. So everything, no matter what it is or how far away it is, comes alive in my awareness, right here. It is obvious, as many including Kant has pointed out.

So Big Mind, this experience of everything arising within and as awareness - or consciousness, or mind - can easily be interpreted as intrapsychic. At least in our early excursions into explorations of Big Mind, our early tastes and glimpses of it.

At this level, it quite easily fits into the view of modern psychology. There is nothing really remarkable about it. It all fits into our modern models of the psyche. It is just a slightly different twist to it.

Intradivine

As we continue these explorations, we may have a taste of something else.

Suddenly, it doesn't all appear intrapsychic anymore. That is too narrow. Now, it seems that the whole world of phenomena - the outer and inner world to our human self, all arises from the same ground. And not only in our personal awareness, but in the divine mind.

What we initially took as our personal awareness, is now revealed as the divine mind - that which the whole world of phenomena arises within and as. And it always was like that, although our filter of "I" made it temporarily appear differently.

The whole world of phenomena, this human self and the universe, is consciousness - as it is, where it is. It all appears as a play of forms within the divine mind, within and as the mind of God.

Progression

The beauty of this is the gradual progression, allowing us to test the waters initially and gradually become familiar with it.

And it also allows those used to a modern western worldview to enter the water and try it out, without seeing it as too esoteric and far out. There is, after all, a way to interpret it that fits our modern western model quite nicely.

Then of course, we may be taken into it a little further. And our modern western worldview shatters, or at least gets expanded quite a bit - into the realm described by the mystics.

Labels: big mind, drop and ocean, psychology