My original reply seems to have disappeared somewhere
Greg wrote, in reply to me..
> >the second of these (if an inhabitant of a short world practices
>>extreme mysticism, can they contact the transcendant? Is there then
>>a link?).
>The answer is no, they could not. No link exists. That is part of the
>definiton of a short world. It has no link with the Absolute (the final
>word being used to describe the Transcendent and Mystical realms.)
To me, contacting the Absolute is a state of being. So it seems to make no intuitive sense that your physical location should affect your metaphysical state of being.
However, that's too literal an interpretation. Looking at the 'worlds' as metaphorical for states of consciousness/being, travelling between worlds affects your state of being.
I'm going to take a leap and posit that the major Otherworlds correspond to different modes of full consciousness, while the Short worlds correspond to states of less than full consciousness. The Underworld, which has no direct contact with the Transcendant either, corresponds to death.
To answer my own question more fully, then, you cannot contact the absolute from a state of incomplete consciousness, you have to awaken to full consciousness first. So you in order to practice a mystic path that had the result of contacting the Absolute, it would be necessary to leave the Short World first, to awaken. The affect of mystic practice in a short world is first to make the practitioner leave the short world. Dreamers wake, etc.
Pushing this range of thought, I'd guess that in a Jungian sense, the major Otherworlds all contain elements of all the different human faculties (thinking, feeling, intuition, the senses, etc), but with different modes dominant. The short worlds do not contain the full range.
Comments?
Cheers David ------------------------------
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