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jnani and spirit worlds Throughout history only small numbers of individuals have claimed the ability to enter or to have communication with spirit worlds, and their accounts vary enough to raise the question, are they all describing the same thing? On balance the evidence suggests that the answer to this question is yes. If we examine the writings of the mystical Qabalah and esoteric Yoga, or those of Emanuel Swedenborg and Rudolf Steiner, to take just a few examples, we find substantial correlations. We also find that the occult is presented as a science, that is a systematic enquiry into the domain (of the spirit world), with a body of knowledge and practice. These four occultisms just mentioned have large followings, though followers rarely have the ability to directly verify the propositions in the teachings. The significant propositions of all occult science can be summed up as follows:
Let us examine these four propositions for their significance to the jnani perspective. One could see the idea of a 'disembodied' life as a form of transcendence, because the body at least is transcended. This is probably the most common reason to confuse the occult and the transcendent, or to deny any significant distinction between the two forms of spiritual life. It provides in fact a valuable opportunity to refine the concept of transcendence, as used here. For the jnani the transcendence is of all manifest phenomena, that is a direct engagement with the unmanifest or imperishable (a possibility denied by Mahatma Ghandi for example, but at the heart of the teachings of all the great Masters of transcendence). The disembodied life, according to all occult traditions is not a disengagement with the manifest, but a shifting of one's engagement to a different world or plane of being. For the serious jnani it may be best left at this: that the occult life simply involves a different type of body (some occultists call it the 'body of light'), but possibly just the same emotional and mental life. In other words not a transcendence at all. The second point, that the spirit world is 'better' than the material world, is also worthy of debate. If we look at the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg for example, we find descriptions of extraordinary beauty, with heavens made of light, rainbows, or precious stones. The most appealing part of his account is the all-pervading quality of love to be found in these spirit worlds. Surely love alone is a transcendent quality? No simple answer can be given, though perhaps the appeal of these spirit worlds depends on one's instinct towards via positiva or via negativa. William Blake attacked Swedenborg's teachings on the grounds that they contained only angels and no devils, meaning perhaps that without the risks and dangers of the material world, there could be no real meaning to these heavenly realms. For the Nature mystic, any forest, wood, or even a small clump of trees and bushes is heaven enough, and all the more poignant because it contains death as well as life. What about the third point, that knowledge from the disembodied life can instruct and guide us in the material world? We only have to look at the impact that the work of Rudolf Steiner has had in fields as far apart as medicine, art, architecture, farming and pedagogy, to accept that this proposition is well-founded. However, it has to be said that a close examination of his teachings show nothing that is directly related to the transcendent, or to jnani. Put another way, the occult 'project', as so masterfully carried out by Steiner, is quite different to the transcendent 'project'. The fourth proposition, that of some kind of reincarnation, will be dealt with in the next section.
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