Jack said:
Tbh I believe any and all kinds of outside influences are impediments to spiritual success, unless your doing specific void meditation upon them for a goal. The ancient texts say the state of total power is achieved when you have single pointed focus in deep trance, beyond your sense organs. In trance you gradually withdraw your consciousness from your physical senses. By focusing only and only on the breath the consciousness withdraws from the other physical senses connected to the material world. And after inducing the falling down effect, the consciousness withdraws from the breath as well. As we fall deeper and deeper into trance we need an object to concentrate on otherwise we'll simply start dreaming. The object can be a symbol, a signal etc. When you reach that deep trance where you can only feel consciousness at one point, I.e the symbol you have reached a point of total control. From here using your power of will you can change reality using subtle means.
The instruments such as material objects like a burning flame, a diagram, or music for that matter is simply used as a tool to better hone the sadhana for deeper levels of practice. All such things are meaningless in deeper elements of the Sadhana.
A warrior doesn't react unconsciously to either pain or pleasure, happiness or sadness,anger or hatred. He always has control over his actions because he is in control with his consciousness. He will is not separate from his consciousness and he acts accordingly to his conscious decisions not unconsciously by his emotions. He is truly free of any social, emotional or any kinds of chains that might bind a common man. That state of equanimity I believe can only be developed through years and years of meditation. Its not a simply job.
You know our gods and demons can get pissed off right and feel sadness, despair and desperation even in severe cases? I'm sorry but if I was a tens of thousands year old god who worked hard to get to where they are and someone tried to bind me in a most cruel and brutal fashion with extreme disrespect, I'm not going to disassociate myself from rage to be the 'higher man'.
Do not forget that our emotions also fuel us as emotions are energy, this is why we are encouraged to be reminded and fueled with hatred for our enemy when doing RTRs because it makes the RTR far more damaging to them and their curses.
And on the contrary of what you are saying, a true warrior knows to strongly utilize anger and hatred even to the point of berserker states to fight against a hostile attacker. Planetary Squares even are the utilization of an outside influence beyond the self to enable our advancements and strengthen our resolves as well as to correct and bring strength where we fall in such spiritual endeavors.
To deny the outside from the self and the self from the outside in advancement is essentially like telling the physical body to sustain itself on it's own oxygen instead of breathing. In the mirror of the astral and physical, just as we need to physically eat and drink and consume things outside of ourselves to sustain our physical bodies, so too must our souls on the astral via astral means of 'consuming' and utilizing the outside materials. All energy infinitely exists, when we raise our energies we are not creating it from nothing, we are drawing it from an outside source.
I have a feeling your 'ancient texts' you constantly talk about have largely to do with Buddhism, which is enemy corrupted in that they strongly enforce people to meditate on the same matters of unhealthy-levels of control and discipline that you're always talking about in order to destroy themselves by disassociating from the universe, because to deny the universe and disassociate the soul from all of it's influences is to deny the very soul in the end, which disconnects you from what makes you a sentient and thinking being. It roboticizes you for the enemy because you deny the feelings that make you hate them of which such hatred is what fuels your opposition to them in the first place.
There is such a thing as too much control. This is the stagnation of astral matters with too much focus on the logical factor of discipline which is of the lower vibrations of the physical realm and lower chakras, to be solely of this factor in control is to raise these energies far too high within ourselves which unbalances the scale and strength of the upper chakras and higher vibrations of emotions and the freedom of unbound and free-flowing creativity, because it is the denial of free experiences which is how we receive joys and pleasures.It is also the denial of the very energies that enable us the creativity and emotional imagination so that we can actually even create and come up with the visuals and means to
plan our energy of which we
then use discipline and control to direct.
With nothing but discipline and control, you don't have that creativity and emotional imagination of experiences and therefore don't understand how to even plan the astral energies to even
have something to direct with discipline and control in the first place. Too much focus on too much discipline and control does not strengthen the soul, it confines it and tightens it, weakens it from the freedom of creativity which has to do with the higher free vibrations and energies that are not bound by discipline.
With these unbalanced forces with too much focus on logical discipline and control, you start to behave and perceive things more like a machine, artwork of a beautiful scene suddenly looks like it's just a logical set of 1s and 0s and mathematical factors to create a visual image... instead of simply seeing it as the beautiful and blissful wonder that it's supposed to make us perceive from our upper chakras. You become very unfeeling, a very distant emotionless being that simply states logic for logic with seldom any empathic sense behind it. This is something I've been evidently seeing in your posts a lot recently Jack, you say everything in a very stiff manner as you don't really feel anything in what you're saying and are simply stating everything like a set of data points.
I'm pretty sure you subtly admire robots, computer points and machines for their unfeeling and logical disposition towards matter around them, disassociation from emotions and feeling. This perception is not a good thing. It does no benefit to anyone to feel nothing and to confine your own feelings into a prison of discipline when it is not necessary to do so by any sensible means. We are not robots. You will eventually feel a 'hunger' in the back of your mind that something in you is missing, something you desire but you struggle to quite pinpoint what it is exactly, and it will ironically depress you in your soul. What's missing is emotions and you may even become desperate and want to 'feel' like other people can deep down and wonder why for some reason you can't.
You don't have to take my advice, it's up to you, but I would suggest tuning more into your upper chakras and feminine aspects of the soul and to stop focusing so much on discipline and control. In a universe of duality you cannot focus on one side, you must balance both... and maybe stop reading these 'ancient texts' without knowing exactly where they come from first.
I don't understand what it is with members here deciding to rope themselves so deeply into books and 'studies' to the point they let it consume them before they even find out the sources and what it could potentially to do them. We all know the enemy manipulates virtually all outsider information, it's kind of common sense to be wary about what you read and study before devoting to it so strongly that it influences your soul and psyche and what you tune into.