October 10th - Your Relationship to Reality

Welcome back to the AW Morning Coffee podcast. This has been three and a half years since last time, but we're back with warming up and hope you are doing well, hope you're having a great afternoon. This is actually an afternoon tea version, but since we are getting back into gears after so many years, we just wanted to make a first episode. And it's probably going to be mostly about Dante today. It's such a big surprise. I'm looking at the old episodes and that's pretty much where we left off a few years ago, but this is still, maybe we can start with this. This is still the morning habit to read and meditate over maybe just one-turses of Dante. We've been doing this for three and a half years now. It still gives infinite richness every morning, so we're just going to keep doing it. It's a kind of a spiritual nutrition every morning habit. And I just wanted to pass this on that it just keeps giving every morning something to look forward to every morning. And then this summer and the last maybe four or five months altogether, we've been looking at Terrace I in the purgatory, the Terrace of Superbia. So we just want to comment on the ending of that because we just finished it. And there's so much to say about this, but we'll just try to make this quite secular as an opening like so, as a portal, and then you can ponder as deeply into the spiritual as you wish to, but you don't have to in the beginning. It's just that the ending when one of these pieces on the forehead of the pilgrim, he has seven pieces like for peccati, meaning sins, mistakes, vices, engraved in his forehead when he enters into purgatory, enters the process in the sense that engraved, but in another sense, you will discover later that they are revealed because they were always there in the pilgrim in the consciousness of this traveler in the sense. So it's just like it's made evident that they're there. And then the goal is to to brush them off with a little, with the wing of the angel or breath, or just like a little swoosh from the angel. But this happens. And then after the first Terrace, the pilgrim isn't sure what's happening. So the question becomes, how can you know if you have been cured, repaired, or fixed, or healed, or cleaned your internal distortions and that you are seeing the world more clearly? Because the problem is that it's not just the axioms, but like it's in the fabric of your own experience and perception, these deep, deep assumptions about fundamental reality. So it's like it's invisible for, especially for rationality itself. Reason can't detect really what's kind of infused into the awareness of the rational process in itself. So it's fascinating that what he says is that you cannot see this directly, which in the sense is then like to use your analytical faculty to just try to analyze it. He says you have to use your hand and feel. The image in the last scene is that he tries to touch his forehead. But internally it means that you try to fumble around inside your own experience. And then suddenly you might notice that things have changed. The way you process or experience reality has started to change. That's how you know that a repair has started to happen. So that's kind of the last, I'm going to say the phrase "crowning moment" for the seventh terrorist because then literally Virgil says that he's crowning him as in that he has finished the whole process and the purgation. But it's still the same. It's a feeling after the first one that now the fundamentals of reality has changed. And just to touch on it, we're going to keep this one short just five, six minutes. But there's one thing that's extremely important, which is how do you see the deepest of reality in terms of what makes things happen and the relationship between the forces? Because the mistake is to think that the virtue, the good is in equal competition or like in a battlefield with devices. This is a very common way to look at it. That you have these two forces and they are constantly battling. Dante says that no, the vast, big, big territory, which is the true reality is virtuous. The devices are at the Urlo, as he says, at the edges of the fundamental reality. It's where dysfunction starts to happen. And he poses this as extremely fundamental to how you experience and process reality in itself. If you at the deepest level think that things happen, like the material reality is an expression of spiritual realities. And then if the spiritual is then seen as a constant pressure from vices, then there's an unrest at the root of your experience. So the idea of the peace of the kingdom to use those terms is about understanding that when you are dwelling in that, there is no pressure. There is no vice there. Structurally, it's impossible. So this is why he says that you have to presence kind of this divine peace, good virtue, truth, through rituals like prayer, like the daily bread, which will then make you dwell in this state of mind and state of being and state of experience, which is free from devices. And then gradually you will inhabit and participate more and more in this fundamental state. And then realize that this is actually the true reality. Devices, the mistakes are distortions of this. Anyway, so that's just the main thing in terms of the substance that changes through this terrace. And if we take down to seriously, this is something we all had to really sense inside. Do we think this or not? He pushes away the idea of like this use like divinity, this all powerful, but completely random, and a whim, totalitarian power that rules the world as extraordinarily damaging to your relationship with reality, but also then to clarify that it's not equal forces. It is the vast, peaceful, virtuous, good state of being again, which is the source of reality. And if you think that your relationship to the world and to reality will fundamentally change. And that's kind of the healing of a base superbia in the sense of distorted idea of reality. Okay, that was eight minutes. We're going to stop it here. Anyways, this was just the first warm-up episode for the morning coffee podcast with an afternoon tea. And also, want to just be a shout out to some friends here. Juan in Philadelphia, he's a fantastic conversation partner. Tom L. A. Books, he's now, he has started new episodes with paradise. So just go to YouTube and check out Tom L. A. Books to get some more nutrition there. And also Sean at Mythos and Logos, he's also having some fantastic episodes lately. So just check that out as well. And then I hope you're having a great evening or morning or day. And we'll be back soon with another episode. Bye bye.