Criticism

[Eugene I]

One of the most valuable extract that we can take from one such experience is to appreciate that this understanding is not really something that is added on top of other intellectual ideas. It's actually the opposite. It's as if we've been caught into some corner case. Leaving this corner actually feels as if we gain an inner degree of freedom. If we use QM analogy, it's like previously we experienced a collapsed state of meaning, which made it that we see only a certain perspective, while now we see the superposition. That's why we feel we've gained a degree of freedom. It's a completely spiritual experience - previously we were locked into some cognitive pattern, now we feel how we can zoom in and out of it at will. This zooming out of the pattern is the inner experiences which we imaginatively describe as "I've been programmed". This is simply to say "I was phase-locked with that cognitive pattern". But now we're free.

Please note that the above is not always the case. Sometimes a person may simply assume or believe that there's inherent meaning in every state of being, without really understanding it. In this case the idea is simply patched upon the intellectual being of the person but it doesn't fit very well there. The act of understanding the ideas coincides with its coherent embedding into the totality of the thinking organism. Only then it really becomes an inner degree of freedom. This is the distinguishing factor. When ideas are taken up in purely mechanical way, they are experienced as weight. Every such idea simply makes our state more difficult to bear. On the contrary, when ideas are understood in the real sense, they become degrees of freedom for our spiritual activity. If we use again the no-arm-movement analogy, if we simply take up in purely abstract way the ideas about the various ways the hand can move, we're weighed down by dry facts. It feels as if we're forced to memorize a long list of random dates and numbers, they don't fit organically with anything. But if the idea is internalized, then it unlocks degrees of freedom. Now the idea doesn't weigh us down but opens up new potential. Our wave function becomes much more richer, we can unfold our activity from a richer palette. Previously we've been locked in specific colors of the palette, now we move freely between them.

Right, so in this example what I did is I identified (with your help) and questioned one of my unconscious beliefs that turned out to be just an unwarranted assumption. And I did it by testing it against my actual 1-st person experience. So now the belief that the phenomena and meanings are separate turned out to be simply an assumption that does not contradict with experience, but neither it can be proven by the experience. As we discussed above, the fact of the experience is that the meanings are indistinguishable and inseparable from any conscious phenomena. But the fact that they are indistinguishable does not automatically mean that they are identical. The experience is inconclusive about whether they are identical or not and leaves the door open to interpreting them either way. So, the experience indeed does support the assumption that they are identical, and so enables us to adopt such assumption. But the experience does not prove it and still leaves the other alternative still possible.

The bottom line from this is that the "phenomena are identical with meanings" is still an unprovable assumption, but it is a legitimate assumption to adopt that complies with experience, and so we can adopt it as a working hypothesis to progress in our spiritual practice.

But the above is a good example of how spiritual science should be applied: we should always identify and question all our implicit beliefs as only assumptions and test them against our 1-st person experience to find out whether the experience can support them or not. This approach should be applied without exceptions and include the beliefs and assumptions of any worldviews including the one that we are actively using as the basis of our current spiritual practice.

The whole point is that, as Ashvin reminded of the no-arm-movement, there are things that we can verify only by stepping into the experience. You, as an engineer should be able to appreciate that mathematics is one such example. In the light of the above you'll see how inappropriate your objections are. You gain nothing if you simply accept the Pythagorean theorem as unquestionable truth. You must live through it with your thoughts. If you stand outside and want to prove its truthiness through non-mathematical means, in order to avoid falling in the trap of a math-sect, you'll forever remain outside the reality of mathematical thinking. It's the same with PoF. The thoughts are not to be assumed, accepted or believed. This will simply turn them into weight that will crush us down. They are to be experienced. Then if they are true, they will be understood and will turn into inner degrees of freedom.

That is definitely the right practical approach with the disclaimer that in most cases living through the thoughts/ideas will not prove them true in any absolute sense, but can only prove them to be pragmatically and conditionally true as practically useful hypotheses/assumptions.

[Martin_]

The Mandelbrot fractal is the boundary between the areas where the iterations diverge and where they converge. All the extraordinary complexity emerges in the interplay of the two poles.

Or maybe this quote only points at an (abstract) example to illustrate complex emergence from the interplay of poles, and you're not saying that fractals in general / the Mandelbrot set specifically is to be found in the structure of higher thinking?

[Soul_of_Shu]

"at all other levels we have ideas in the process of being", "biological life is only a decohered shadow of more fundamental forms of growth", "Inspirative realm", "a small bacterium is the interference of countless beings", "in other places we have meaningful being", "the interference of these beings we perceive only in the flattened experience of our Earthly state".

In these statements, you are appealing to areas quite outside my experience, so without an unjustified leap of faith, I couldn't personally construct a worldview out of them. Beings in other realms are no more real to me than Yogananda's enjoyable romp, "Autobiography of a Yogi". (Nice, but, you know...imaginative fiction).

The idea of a Cosmic Mind, however, is something I can relate to, because, when I empty my mind, I experience an unbounded, expansive awareness.

So I guess our minds cannot meet at present, Cleric. I hope you are well.

I understand that Ben, I can clearly see why our minds can't meet. In fact, if you expand in the Cosmic Mind and find there only emptiness, it's clear that you can't find not only my mind by anyone else's mind - human or otherwise. I would be suspicious about beings in other realms, just as you are. But if you are really expanding in the Cosmic Mind, why shouldn't it be possible to find there the ideating activity of beings? Not in other realms but in the same realm of the Cosmic Mind that you expand into. Or probably you conceive of activity to be found only within opaque spheres of consciousness, while the Cosmic Mind serves only as the cold vacuum within which the spheres flow?

Suffice to say, this psyche has a ways to go in the unlearning of what has been taught via indoctrination into the dominant paradigm about what comprises thinking, such that, like Blake, will come a day whereupon: “What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises [sic], do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’

[Cleric K]

Does this ocean of living meaning have Structure?
Because if it does, I have a hard time envisoning this structure without it bringing (due to the Nature of Structure) various modes of dualities. (Or maybe Polarities is a better word)

But then again, maybe my question is of the same nature as "How many sides does a Moeibus strip have?"

Yes, there is structure and there are polarities. All existence flows between polarities. Time flows between a polarity.

Polarity should not be equated with evil, nor with ego/dissociation/etc. Polarities are the poles between which creative potential unfolds. The Mandelbrot fractal is the boundary between the areas where the iterations diverge and where they converge. All the extraordinary complexity emerges in the interplay of the two poles.

would it be prudent to say that Structure and Polarities are two different ways of speaking of the same thing? Without polarities , no structure. Without Structure, no polarities?

Mandelbrot fractal is the boundary between the areas where the iterations diverge and where they converge.

That is the exact definition of the Mandelbrot set. Specfically for (recursive) iterations of the complex function f_c(z) = z²+c. Where f_c() is the complex function which we check for convergence / divergence.

I have had thoughts myself that some of the foundation of which we experience is fractal in nature, so i'm curious.

What "iterations"? are we iterating in other dimensions than time? is there an ongoing (i know, temporal word.) iteration between all poles?

All the extraordinary complexity emerges in the interplay of the two poles.

in the poles of concergence and divergence? That feels right.

Furthermore, are there Poles that are more fundamental than others? As an example, the polarity btw. convergence and divergence fels like it would be a polarity which drives almost everything. Much more fundamental in a sense than let's say the mind/matter polarity.

Fractals are arguably one my favorite source for metaphors. But in my experience they are too strong for the mind of today. They act like crack for the intellect. They are too rich and the intellect becomes overly intoxicated - that is, it tries to build theories instead of using them as images for higher order processes. So we should use them today in homeopathic doses and hopefully in the future we'll use them much more safely.

What's the kind of danger that I'm talking about? Let's consider what we talked about - there are poles within which reality unfold. But what exactly are we doing when try to understand reality in this way? First and foremost - we're thinking. What do we see if we try to observe our thinking. What exactly are we doing with our thinking when we take the polarities in our mind? It's very difficult to tell. How do we imagine these polarities? What we're picturing in our mind. Usually something very vague, completely nebulous. Where is the human form in relation to this polarity? What about consciousness?

It's clear that before diving into speculation which we don't even know how to imagine, we should be clear about our starting conditions. Kant rightly wanted to protect metaphysics from the artificial third-person perspectives of reality which are nowhere to be found. He wanted to anchor Reason to what is certain - the human perspective. Of course we all know that this resulted into the isolation of the intellect within the soul. The thing-in-itself remained off limits. It was not yet the time for the intellect to break through the veil.

You asked recently why take the trouble to look into PoF. Well, here's precisely the reason. We need to clear the ground, to find the givens of the riddle of existence and what has been overlaid through fantastic thinking.

I won't repeat the core positions here because they are reiterated in almost every post. It suffices to say that we need to trace back everything to thinking because whether it is subject, object, matter, mind, polarity, fractal - all of this is already the product of thinking. So we either throw beans, choose some random elements and begin building our towers in the air or we investigate the nature of thinking which stands behind every tower building.

As far as we're grounded in the given, the main polarity within which thinking manifests can be recognized as perception and meaning (idea). If we investigate closely we'll find out that we can naturally see the world as something that confronts us through manifold perceptions. By world it's meant the totality of perceptions, separating them in inner and outer world is already a subsequent categorization performed by thinking. So colors, sounds, feelings, thoughts - all of this confronts us as a riddle. Against it stands thinking which seeks meaning that make the perceptions whole.

Note how different this polarity is compared to the abstract polarity in the beginning. Here we have something completely concrete. When we speak about perceptions we can immediately turn our attention to the totality that we experience - this is something completely concrete. It's not imagined abstractly. When we think about the perceptions we experience meaning - concepts, ideas.

These are the two great poles between which our thinking spiritual activity unfolds. It can be said that with our thinking we're exploring the fractal boundary where perception and meaning meet. The goal of thinking is to completely imbue the world content with meaning - to unite the two poles.

So this is only an example how we must transform our inner perspective if we are to step on solid foundations. From these foundations we can expand on the fractal boundary and understand more and more the totality of the world content. And yes, there are iterations. I already mentioned in the previous post to Eugene that one such polarity is balanced in the head organ - the two-petal lotus. We approach this balancing through active concentration on properly chosen thought-image.

The thinking based on rigid concepts in the mind, and perceptions of seemingly independent world out-there, manifests when spiritual activity is polarized in the head. This polarity is like an octave within an even higher order polarity. From our ordinary perspective this higher polarity can be conceived as sympathy and antipathy but once we're in the higher realm, when we overcome the polarity in the head, this higher order polarity is once again polarity of cognition. So in a sense it's again a polarity of idea and perception but now not in purely intellectual sense. Sympathy and antipathy are actual cognitive soul forces in the higher realm. They are not simple dim feelings. They are powerful currents which are immensely more dense in meaning that our ordinary thoughts. If our normal thoughts are words, in the higher realm we think with sheets of text, even books. We're moving through rich potential that it would take hours to put into a linear sequence of words. What we experience as sympathies and antipathies are only dim shadows of this rich world.

This higher polarity is an octave (iteration) within an even higher one. In all cases there's something of the archetypal polarity of meaning and reflection. The higher the polarity, the more spiritual the character is. In our ordinary consciousness we think in point-like concepts and that's why we sees the world as made of things (ultimately reduced to matter). Life, for example, seems only as movement of matter to the intellect.

In the soul realm there's no longer mineral element. Everything is in constant metamorphosis. The experience of these metamorphoses is not like seeing the movement of matter but it contains within itself the law which rules the transformation. If we see a still frame of a flying ball there's no way to predict where the ball will be in the next frame. In the soul realm we perceive also the inner lawfulness of the way everything moves. The only thing from our ordinary consciousness that we can compare this to, is our own thinking. In normal thinking if we imagine a flying ball it makes no sense to ask where it is going because we encompass the time within which the imagined ball moves. It moves within our own idea so we know its past and future. It is similar in the soul realm. There everything is of thought-like nature. Things not only move and metamorphose but we experience these movements as resulting from meaningful intents. The intents are not always clear but it's perfectly clear that there's nothing of mechanical nature there. Everything results from the spiritual activity of beings.

So there you have it. Fractals, polarities, iterations. It's all there but our urgent task is to develop the proper cognitive habits, such that all of this can be approached from solid foundation instead of building fantasy air towers.

[Eugene I]

Everything results from the spiritual activity of beings.

Cleric, I hope we settled on that discussion about the "assumptions" and can put it now to rest. I'm reading your posts with much interest.

This statement above I think is the most concise and precise formulation of the "meaningful idealism". I would may be even expand it to:
"Everything results from the meaningful and intentional (purposeful) spiritual activity of beings."

And that is the key difference form BK's version of idealism where the world we perceive is the result of meaningless and non-metacognitive unintentional (purposeless) activity of MAL driven by blind instinctive "Will". It is this difference that makes the BK's idealism entirely naturalistic and essentially not much different from materialism. In both of these paradigms the world (as it appears to our sense perceptions) is meaningless.

[Martin_]

Fractals are arguably one my favorite source for metaphors. But in my experience they are too strong for the mind of today. They act like crack for the intellect. They are too rich and the intellect becomes overly intoxicated - that is, it tries to build theories instead of using them as images for higher order processes. So we should use them today in homeopathic doses and hopefully in the future we'll use them much more safely.

What's the kind of danger that I'm talking about? Let's consider what we talked about - there are poles within which reality unfold. But what exactly are we doing when try to understand reality in this way? First and foremost - we're thinking. What do we see if we try to observe our thinking. What exactly are we doing with our thinking when we take the polarities in our mind? It's very difficult to tell. How do we imagine these polarities? What we're picturing in our mind. Usually something very vague, completely nebulous. Where is the human form in relation to this polarity? What about consciousness?

It's clear that before diving into speculation which we don't even know how to imagine, we should be clear about our starting conditions. Kant rightly wanted to protect metaphysics from the artificial third-person perspectives of reality which are nowhere to be found. He wanted to anchor Reason to what is certain - the human perspective. Of course we all know that this resulted into the isolation of the intellect within the soul. The thing-in-itself remained off limits. It was not yet the time for the intellect to break through the veil.

You asked recently why take the trouble to look into PoF. Well, here's precisely the reason. We need to clear the ground, to find the givens of the riddle of existence and what has been overlaid through fantastic thinking.

I won't repeat the core positions here because they are reiterated in almost every post. It suffices to say that we need to trace back everything to thinking because whether it is subject, object, matter, mind, polarity, fractal - all of this is already the product of thinking. So we either throw beans, choose some random elements and begin building our towers in the air or we investigate the nature of thinking which stands behind every tower building.

As far as we're grounded in the given, the main polarity within which thinking manifests can be recognized as perception and meaning (idea). If we investigate closely we'll find out that we can naturally see the world as something that confronts us through manifold perceptions. By world it's meant the totality of perceptions, separating them in inner and outer world is already a subsequent categorization performed by thinking. So colors, sounds, feelings, thoughts - all of this confronts us as a riddle. Against it stands thinking which seeks meaning that make the perceptions whole.

Note how different this polarity is compared to the abstract polarity in the beginning. Here we have something completely concrete. When we speak about perceptions we can immediately turn our attention to the totality that we experience - this is something completely concrete. It's not imagined abstractly. When we think about the perceptions we experience meaning - concepts, ideas.

These are the two great poles between which our thinking spiritual activity unfolds. It can be said that with our thinking we're exploring the fractal boundary where perception and meaning meet. The goal of thinking is to completely imbue the world content with meaning - to unite the two poles.

So this is only an example how we must transform our inner perspective if we are to step on solid foundations. From these foundations we can expand on the fractal boundary and understand more and more the totality of the world content. And yes, there are iterations. I already mentioned in the previous post to Eugene that one such polarity is balanced in the head organ - the two-petal lotus. We approach this balancing through active concentration on properly chosen thought-image.

The thinking based on rigid concepts in the mind, and perceptions of seemingly independent world out-there, manifests when spiritual activity is polarized in the head. This polarity is like an octave within an even higher order polarity. From our ordinary perspective this higher polarity can be conceived as sympathy and antipathy but once we're in the higher realm, when we overcome the polarity in the head, this higher order polarity is once again polarity of cognition. So in a sense it's again a polarity of idea and perception but now not in purely intellectual sense. Sympathy and antipathy are actual cognitive soul forces in the higher realm. They are not simple dim feelings. They are powerful currents which are immensely more dense in meaning that our ordinary thoughts. If our normal thoughts are words, in the higher realm we think with sheets of text, even books. We're moving through rich potential that it would take hours to put into a linear sequence of words. What we experience as sympathies and antipathies are only dim shadows of this rich world.

This higher polarity is an octave (iteration) within an even higher one. In all cases there's something of the archetypal polarity of meaning and reflection. The higher the polarity, the more spiritual the character is. In our ordinary consciousness we think in point-like concepts and that's why we sees the world as made of things (ultimately reduced to matter). Life, for example, seems only as movement of matter to the intellect.

In the soul realm there's no longer mineral element. Everything is in constant metamorphosis. The experience of these metamorphoses is not like seeing the movement of matter but it contains within itself the law which rules the transformation. If we see a still frame of a flying ball there's no way to predict where the ball will be in the next frame. In the soul realm we perceive also the inner lawfulness of the way everything moves. The only thing from our ordinary consciousness that we can compare this to, is our own thinking. In normal thinking if we imagine a flying ball it makes no sense to ask where it is going because we encompass the time within which the imagined ball moves. It moves within our own idea so we know its past and future. It is similar in the soul realm. There everything is of thought-like nature. Things not only move and metamorphose but we experience these movements as resulting from meaningful intents. The intents are not always clear but it's perfectly clear that there's nothing of mechanical nature there. Everything results from the spiritual activity of beings.

So there you have it. Fractals, polarities, iterations. It's all there but our urgent task is to develop the proper cognitive habits, such that all of this can be approached from solid foundation instead of building fantasy air towers.

You asked recently why take the trouble to look into PoF.

I don't recall saying it exactly that way. I do recall saying that it's inefficient for me. I just simply don't understand him well enough. (At the moment at least). No biggie though.

Fractals

Yes. Totally cognitive crack. I do wonder, since they haven't been around for long in our perceptual world, what kind of effect they have had on our situation since their introduction. Then again; They have been available to discover in Nature for a long time.

[AshvinP]

Everything results from the spiritual activity of beings.

Cleric, I hope we settled on that discussion about the "assumptions" and can put it now to rest. I'm reading your posts with much interest.

This statement above I think is the most concise and precise formulation of the "meaningful idealism". I would may be even expand it to:
"Everything results from the meaningful and intentional (purposeful) spiritual activity of beings."

And that is the key difference form BK's version of idealism where the world we perceive is the result of meaningless and non-metacognitive unintentional (purposeless) activity of MAL driven by blind instinctive "Will". It is this difference that makes the BK's idealism entirely naturalistic and essentially not much different from materialism. In both of these paradigms the world (as it appears to our sense perceptions) is meaningless.

Eugene,

Consider the deeper difference at play when Cleric says "everything results from the spiritual activity of beings". Right off the bat, we can say, "everything in my inner world of thought-forms also results from my spiritual activity!". Here let's just agree "spiritual activity" means Thinking. It's not an assumption we are asking you to accept on blind faith. I am asking you to grant this equivalence for the sake of argument and see where the logic goes. So we find a clear overlap between the thought-forms reflecting meaning which we create within us and what higher order beings create through their spiritual activity, which is reflected in everything we call the 'external' sense-world.

As you point out, we have already departed significantly from BK's instinctive MAL idealism. But the real pragmatic difference doesn't lie anywhere in the sphere of intellectual theories, whether philosophical or scientific. There is no pragmatic difference between one person saying "instinctive MAL causes outer Nature in way a, b, c" and another person saying "spiritual beings cause Nature with their Thinking in way x, y, z". They are equally abstract intellectual theories, and I think you perceive that, so you say ultimately it's a matter of personal preference which one to choose. But Cleric is saying the real pragmatic difference resides in the concrete implications of the "Thinking idealism" IF it is true.

He is not asking you to accept it as true without question, but whether you see the logic of these concrete implications unfolding IF there is truly a microcosmic overlap with the Macrocosmic processes in our own Thinking activity. IF this is true, then do you see why the objections you are putting forth are now irrelevant, because we have a clear path of verification of all that SS claims, and the only thing stopping us from verifying or debunking the claims is our refusal to set out on the clear path? There is no point imagining SS to be something other than what it claims to be - a method of expanding cognition so that normally invisible realms of spiritual beings can be directly perceived. A method which, if developed properly, allows experience in this lifetime what we would normally only experience across the threshold of death.

If that's the core of SS, then one cannot say religious "dogma" accounts for its claims and the confidence of those who are claiming it. Instead, one could say either a) higher cognition is impossible in principle (Kantian divide) or b) higher cognition is possible but people like Steiner and Cleric are mistaken that they have attained it, or c) higher cognition is attainable and reveals a state of affairs much different than what SS claims. The main point being, if one treats SS as yet another intellectual philosophical model of how the Cosmos comes to be and operates, like BK's idealism, then that is the equivalent of assuming SS cannot possibly be what it claims to be, which is simply another expression of the Kantian noumenon-phenomenon divide.

[Eugene I]

Eugene,

Consider the deeper difference at play when Cleric says "everything results from the spiritual activity of beings". Right off the bat, we can say, "everything in my inner world of thought-forms also results from my spiritual activity!". Here let's just agree "spiritual activity" means Thinking. It's not an assumption we are asking you to accept on blind faith. I am asking you to grant this equivalence for the sake of argument and see where the logic goes. So we find a clear overlap between the thought-forms reflecting meaning which we create within us and what higher order beings create through their spiritual activity, which is reflected in everything we call the 'external' sense-world.

OK. Other people call it "Consciousness", but the term here does not really matter as long as we understand what 1-st person experiential reality it is pointing to (which is our own conscious activity of willing, thinking, feeling and conscious experiencing/awareness of all of those).

As you point out, we have already departed significantly from BK's instinctive MAL idealism. But the real pragmatic difference doesn't lie anywhere in the sphere of intellectual theories, whether philosophical or scientific. There is no pragmatic difference between one person saying "instinctive MAL causes outer Nature in way a, b, c" and another person saying "spiritual beings cause Nature with their Thinking in way x, y, z". They are equally abstract intellectual theories, and I think you perceive that, so you say ultimately it's a matter of personal preference which one to choose. But Cleric is saying the real pragmatic difference resides in the concrete implications of the "Thinking idealism" IF it is true.

​
As I said before, they both can be understood as abstract theories, or as certain interpretations of the 1-st person perspective direct experience. It depends on the person interpreting it.

He is not asking you to accept it as true without question, but whether you see the logic of these concrete implications unfolding IF there is truly a microcosmic overlap with the Macrocosmic processes in our own Thinking activity. IF this is true, then do you see why the objections you are putting forth are now irrelevant, because we have a clear path of verification of all that SS claims, and the only thing stopping us from verifying or debunking the claims is our refusal to set out on the clear path? There is no point imagining SS to be something other than what it claims to be - a method of expanding cognition so that normally invisible realms of spiritual beings can be directly perceived. A method which, if developed properly, allows experience in this lifetime what we would normally only experience across the threshold of death.

There are two claims here. One is the above "everything results from the spiritual activity of beings", or in its negative formulation "there is noting in the entire Reality that is not a result of spiritual activity" (not the reality available for us to experience or cognate, but reality in its entirety). This is an ontological statement. Ontological claims are in principle impossible to prove, disprove, verify, of falsify. Therefore, we can only accept this claim with an "IF" attached to it ("if it is true"). I will not discuss it anymore, we spent enough time on that.

Also, there is a catch-22 problem here. Is Thinking itself a part of "everything"? If yes then can spiritual activity itself be a result of spiritual activity? Or Thinking is a "source" of spiritual activity but not a result of it? In the latter case the statement should be reformulated as "everything is spiritual activity of beings and all that results from the spiritual activity of beings".

The second claim is that "SS provides a method of expanding cognition so that normally invisible realms of spiritual beings can be directly perceived. A method which, if developed properly, allows experience in this lifetime what we would normally only experience across the threshold of death." This claim can definitely be experientially verified from the 1-st person perspective experience, no question about that.

If that's the core of SS, then one cannot say religious "dogma" accounts for its claims and the confidence of those who are claiming it. Instead, one could say either a) higher cognition is impossible in principle (Kantian divide) or b) higher cognition is possible but people like Steiner and Cleric are mistaken that they have attained it, or c) higher cognition is attainable and reveals a state of affairs much different than what SS claims. The main point being, if one treats SS as yet another intellectual philosophical model of how the Cosmos comes to be and operates, like BK's idealism, then that is the equivalent of assuming SS cannot possibly be what it claims to be, which is simply another expression of the Kantian noumenon-phenomenon divide.

Higher cognition is possible and it is verifiable by experience, I don't argue against that at all. But this is not an ontological claim, it is only experiential and pragmatic (something can be done and experienced), and therefore it is experientially verifiable.

[JeffreyW]

Very few have ever considered me unserious. In the quote above I was addressing a mischaracterization of my thinking, not going into Goethe or Schiller. Yes, I have read both extensively and in the original German, although not since my undergraduate years. Neither really interested me. But if you want to have a discussion on them, I’ll be here for it.

Sure... I would like to know your precise reason(s) for disagreeing with their epistemology as you indicated below, and perhaps your own view of how sense-reality comes to be represented, with as much detail as possible (specfically I am interested in the meaning of this phrase, "not totally created in the mind"). Thanks.

Without the influence of that dualism, we can perceive how what we bring to the outer appearances from within in the form of concepts belongs to those appearances as much as their color, shape, size, etc., which we call sense-perceptions ("percepts").

3. I vaguely see your point, but of course completely disagree. I should clarify that I resolutely do not see representations as totally created in the mind, but conditioned by the energy impeding our senses, with its own character.

I might not bring the specificity of detail you request, as I don’t now have the time to review a vast body of work I’ve left dormant for decades, but perhaps I’ve retained enough of the substance. I see Goethe as the opposite of Kant in many ways. In the Critiques, Kant wrote the closing argument for an era coming to an end simultaneously with his own life. Goethe announced a new era in his youth. As such, Goethe is a transitional figure, as seminal in his own way as Kant, but yet in the early steps into no-man’s land. It wouldn’t be until the end of the 19th Century that the closing argument for Romanticism would be given.

Goethe’s notions of Morphology and Polarity are themselves descriptions of the world of Goethe’s intellect. On the one side is his rejection of metaphysics and the promotion of esthetic knowledge. This is seen in his rejection of the noumenal and insistence that nature reveals all in appearance and experience with nothing hidden behind it; rejection of atomization in favor of nature as endless becoming ,and with that rejection of the static nature of systematic philosophy typified by Kant and Hegel; and most importantly - esthetic expression of nature to challenge purely scientific objectification as seen in his claim that he could describe the becoming of a plant dramatically as validly as a scientific explanation.

At the other end of Polarity is his naive continued acceptance of Reason. The irrational underbelly of nature seems never to have appeared to him. That would come a bit later with the younger Schopenhauer, and with that he was led by rational understanding to his idea of Morphology, with nature guided by Bildungstrieb as an expression of “genetic” Urphänomenen. These Urphänomene revert back to metaphysics, however, in which Ideal forms find their manifestation through this Bildungstrieb.

And so in Goethe we find the competing forms of Werther and Farbenlehre - The poet who would be a scientist.

And with that ends my thoughts of Goethe. He came too early to bear fruit - that stage of development wouldn’t ripen for another 60 years or so, but he was a necessary transitional phase. My area of academic study was Western Intellectual History seen from the perspectives of philosophy and physics, and my attention was drawn to major stages, which in this period is best understood from Kant’s closing argument for The Enlightenment and Nietzsche’s closing argument for Romanticism - both in fully ripened bloom.

But our understandings of Goethe, Heidegger, or even Kastrup for that matter, shouldn’t be the prime concern here, but rather a presentation of our own views. I have tried to give an account of mine, which are not those of any other writer, and am prepared to discuss that further. As to your question of “not totally created in the mind”, I mean that our awareness is a an event of entanglement in which we experience relationship. To be conscious means an event in which we become conscious of something. Entanglement means there is no elemental subject/object relationship, but rather an entanglement of equal partnership. Music is the purest from of this, where in the entanglement there is sympathetic vibration equally occurring within the entangled partners.

In return, I would be interested in your justification for the applicability of Reason to a fundamentally irrational world.

[AshvinP]

JW,

Thank you for the elaboration. To be clear, I also am only interested in our own views which we have reasoned through. I bring up Goethe as an example of an epistemology that directly challenges Kant's and all other implicitly dualistic epistemologies. That is really what I want to hone in on here.

I might not bring the specificity of detail you request, as I don’t now have the time to review a vast body of work I’ve left dormant for decades, but perhaps I’ve retained enough of the substance. I see Goethe as the opposite of Kant in many ways. In the Critiques, Kant wrote the closing argument for an era coming to an end simultaneously with his own life. Goethe announced a new era in his youth. As such, Goethe is a transitional figure, as seminal in his own way as Kant, but yet in the early steps into no-man’s land. It wouldn’t be until the end of the 19th Century that the closing argument for Romanticism would be given.

Goethe’s notions of Morphology and Polarity are themselves descriptions of the world of Goethe’s intellect. On the one side is his rejection of metaphysics and the promotion of esthetic knowledge. This is seen in his rejection of the noumenal and insistence that nature reveals all in appearance and experience with nothing hidden behind it; rejection of atomization in favor of nature as endless becoming ,and with that rejection of the static nature of systematic philosophy typified by Kant and Hegel; and most importantly - esthetic expression of nature to challenge purely scientific objectification as seen in his claim that he could describe the becoming of a plant dramatically as validly as a scientific explanation.

The bold does not seem correct to me. Goethe was a highly spiritual thinker, so it's likely that he at least thought there was a spiritual reality 'behind' the appearances of Nature. What you are describing actually sounds like naive realism to me, unless we are counting our careful reasoning activity as "experience" of Nature (which I would, because there is no good reason to exclude it).

At the other end of Polarity is his naive continued acceptance of Reason. The irrational underbelly of nature seems never to have appeared to him. That would come a bit later with the younger Schopenhauer, and with that he was led by rational understanding to his idea of Morphology, with nature guided by Bildungstrieb as an expression of “genetic” Urphänomenen. These Urphänomene revert back to metaphysics, however, in which Ideal forms find their manifestation through this Bildungstrieb.

And so in Goethe we find the competing forms of Werther and Farbenlehre - The poet who would be a scientist.

And with that ends my thoughts of Goethe. He came too early to bear fruit - that stage of development wouldn’t ripen for another 60 years or so, but he was a necessary transitional phase. My area of academic study was Western Intellectual History seen from the perspectives of philosophy and physics, and my attention was drawn to major stages, which in this period is best understood from Kant’s closing argument for The Enlightenment and Nietzsche’s closing argument for Romanticism - both in fully ripened bloom.

But our understandings of Goethe, Heidegger, or even Kastrup for that matter, shouldn’t be the prime concern here, but rather a presentation of our own views. I have tried to give an account of mine, which are not those of any other writer, and am prepared to discuss that further. As to your question of “not totally created in the mind”, I mean that our awareness is a an event of entanglement in which we experience relationship. To be conscious means an event in which we become conscious of something. Entanglement means there is no elemental subject/object relationship, but rather an entanglement of equal partnership. Music is the purest from of this, where in the entanglement there is sympathetic vibration equally occurring within the entangled partners.

Related to what I said above, Goethe's acceptance of Reason is exactly what allows him to avoid naive realism of Nature's appearances. You have mentioned this several times before and I have generally been confused about it. It sounds like you think Kant was also defending Reason, even though he is most famous for his critique of it. Do I have that wrong?

Apart from that, as I have mentioned before, I think it is your abstraction of "idea" which makes you feel the plant-Urphänomenen was a reversion back to metaphysics, when Goethe himself speaks of it as a living, breathing, dynamic and concrete reality which he could perceive. If one a priori denies the possibility of Thinking as a sense-organ, then of course we must say anyone perceiving anything beyond what Nature immediately presents in particular forms is metaphysically speculating or hallucinating. That is why I want to hone in on the epistemological method which considers Thinking as a sense-organ. Do you disagree with that and, if so, can you elaborate some counter-arguments (apart from the mere fact that most people don't think of it that way)?

In return, I would be interested in your justification for the applicability of Reason to a fundamentally irrational world.

I don't think it is a fundamentally irrational world. You see how that is a metaphysical conclusion when you add in "fundamentally", right? This is where I may actually agree with Rovelli - all of these terms are relational. From the perspective of our current intellectual cognition, yes there is A LOT about the phenomenal world, especially human experience, which can be called "irrational". But that is a function of our own limited cognition. We can't take this relational dynamic and reify it into a fixed law of Reality, so that what we call the "subconscious" is forever "irrational" and that's just the way it is. That sort of claim is a combination of abstract metaphysics and naive realism, exactly of the sort Kant and Schopenhauer employed in their epistemologies.

Reason will only take us so far before it must be transfigured into Imaginative cognition to make sense of the currently subconscious dynamics of experience, but there is no fundamental discontinuity between them. It is a qualitative leap in cognition, but not a leap into something of a fundamentally different essence than logical reasoning. They both serve the same underlying function - uniting Nature's fragmented appearances into ever-more coherent wholes of experience and thereby moving the human spirit-soul in the direction of its primordial Origin, in full clarity of consciousness. Cleric has posted extensively with illustrations of Imaginative cognition here, so you may want to browse some of those when you have a chance, to get a better idea of what I am referencing.