How Many 'Alters' Per 'Organism'?

[AshvinP]

There is an implicit assumption that you bring to bear on a lot of posts, which is that hierarchies are exclusively about power over others. All hierarchies can be contaminated by corruption/power, and often they are, but in essence they are about distinctions of value. They are not simply one thing, and if we mistake a cognitive placeholder for that which place its holding, we are engaged in idolatry/ideology. That is why Cleric must write about "higher" cognition, as he explained well. It's also why I can write about the individual organism as distinct from the Earth organism. I'm sure that sounds pretty plain and obvious, but "the obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it." (Barfield)

Nope! I fully accept the notion of multiple hierarchies functioning in a systemic process of checks-and-balances. OTOH, I resist the notion of a single overarching hierarchy as more accurate than a vast multidirectional and multifaceted network of interbeing. A merkaba is for me a better symbol than a pyramid and much less open to the abuses of power.

BTW, this is also true: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something powerful that wants our love.”

But if we are always subtracting just as much as we add, we end up with zero. Practically, that negates the utility of specifying hierarchies in the first place. That's all I'm saying.

[Cleric K]

You're on to something. Obviously, 'state' is a noun and an object of thought, so when an object arises, so does also subject and the whole subject-object dualism. Also question "how many" requires thinking number-objects, quantification is firmly inside the frame of subject-object metaphysics.

Of course we can think and experience and even talk also without the subject-object division. Thinking and experiencing are verbs, processes. The biggest problem of Western thought is that it considers nouns and states more fundamental than verbs and processes. And that goes back to Plato's biggest mistake in his otherwise brilliant discussion in Sophist.

Yeah. The trouble is not that we attach words to perceptions. It's only when we abstract out the concepts and try to derive existence solely from them that we get into the biggest problems. Subject and object are not a problem. There's something within our experiences that 'locks in' with the concepts. In the same way there's something in the perceptions of blue and red that locks in with the concepts of 'blue' and 'red'. We can envision some fundamental undifferentiated color but this doesn't mean that immediately blue and red become illusionary and we can think them away. That's where nondualistic schools become even more abstract than the already abstract philosophies. It's only that the singleness of this abstractions makes it look that we are dealing with Divine simplicity. We smear out all concepts and replace them with the ultimate abstract One. It's only the trust of the mind that this single idea 'somehow' includes and explains everything else. But it explains it just as much white explains red and blue. If I only know red and blue, no amount of combining them in my mind will lead me to the experience of white. And vice versa - if I only know white, no amount of combining white with itself will lead me to red and blue. But if I see white going through a prism then I know how to relate the colors. I still need to take all white, blue and red from the world of perceptions but now I also have an additional idea which brings higher unity to them.

It's the same with the spiritual world. As far as we are human beings on Earth our intellectual state will be our baseline conscious mode (for quite some more thousands of years). We go nowhere if we conceptualize the primordial One and then seek to derive from it all the diversity of experience. We can take the diversity only from reality. Only from reality I can get blue, red and white. It is higher order ideas (in contrast to immediate one-to-one perception-to-concept ideas) that introduce unities. These ideas turn out to be living metamorphosing beings in the higher worlds. The intellect can only grasp them in their mineral-like projections. That's why we don't go anywhere when we simply imagine the cultures, animals, plants, etc. as being all one with the abstract One. If we have never seen the plants and animals we would never be able to extract them from the abstract One. The fact that we are able to distinguish something that justifies the idea of 'plant', 'animal', 'Germans', 'Slavs', 'Nords', shows that our intellect is grasping something from the world of ideas. In the higher realms these mineral-like concepts become living beings and we find the plant spirits, the animal group souls, the Folk Spirits as living beings. In the intellect we experience the same these Beings but we grasp only their mineral-idea shadows within thinking.

[Lou Gold]

There is an implicit assumption that you bring to bear on a lot of posts, which is that hierarchies are exclusively about power over others. All hierarchies can be contaminated by corruption/power, and often they are, but in essence they are about distinctions of value. They are not simply one thing, and if we mistake a cognitive placeholder for that which place its holding, we are engaged in idolatry/ideology. That is why Cleric must write about "higher" cognition, as he explained well. It's also why I can write about the individual organism as distinct from the Earth organism. I'm sure that sounds pretty plain and obvious, but "the obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it." (Barfield)

Nope! I fully accept the notion of multiple hierarchies functioning in a systemic process of checks-and-balances. OTOH, I resist the notion of a single overarching hierarchy as more accurate than a vast multidirectional and multifaceted network of interbeing. A merkaba is for me a better symbol than a pyramid and much less open to the abuses of power.

BTW, this is also true: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something powerful that wants our love.”

But if we are always subtracting just as much as we add, we end up with zero. Practically, that negates the utility of specifying hierarchies in the first place. That's all I'm saying.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'd suggest that the cognition of the empyrean domain being inherently unconstrained, is immanently impelled, as per the ontological imperative, into a self-limiting involution process of more and more constrained cognition which is integral to the experience of the evolving corporeal domain ~ along the lines of Aurobindo's involution><evolution model. To describe it in a relative way as going from higher to lower, and then from lower to higher, ultimately seems a moot point, if this process can't be precluded, and where any given stage-specific alter happens to be in this process is integral to the process. Somehow, what they all share in common seems paramount over some relative descriptor of its place and purpose.

[Lou Gold]

Nope! I fully accept the notion of multiple hierarchies functioning in a systemic process of checks-and-balances. OTOH, I resist the notion of a single overarching hierarchy as more accurate than a vast multidirectional and multifaceted network of interbeing. A merkaba is for me a better symbol than a pyramid and much less open to the abuses of power.

BTW, this is also true: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something powerful that wants our love.”

But if we are always subtracting just as much as we add, we end up with zero. Practically, that negates the utility of specifying hierarchies in the first place. That's all I'm saying.

I get that would be a valid objection from your pov. From my pov, going deeper is not a subtraction. It's an additional or expanded awareness of the whole. I suspect that at bottom you might have a product view while I have a process view. I'm not really equipped to express this in philosophical lingo but it's what it intuitively feels like to me. Where we do seem to agree is that at some point, after the Cartesian rebalancing away from limiting church dogma, its original liberating thrust became a new dogma as new powers of creativity were made manifest. Thusly, the perennial issue of truth vs power reemerged in new technological forms. Given that the carpenter rather than the hammer builds the house, it's just as important to know when not to use the tool as it is to use it. However, it is quite easy to overwhelm those who act with restraint (humility). Why? Because the tool is powerful and can easily distract from the larger perspective. Gautama and Jesus both faced the test along the way toward Buddha Mind and Christ Consciousness, of saying no to power. They showed the Compassionate Way and we are still waiting for the species as a whole to get it. We deal with excessive population/technology/consumption with war-like use of vaccines, aerosols, and dikes rather than adjusting our personal balance between truth and power. Rather than solving problems at small scale individual levels, we hurtle toward the systemic solutions of Nature batting last. The redeeming Grace is that expanded awareness breeds compassion. We are all sinners and we are all suffering. Healing is the hope. May it be.

[SanteriSatama]

There's something within our experiences that 'locks in' with the concepts.

Yep. A common English words for that something is 'hunger'. Thinking is primarily a hunting weapon. That's how we shop our food with money nowadays.

We can envision some fundamental undifferentiated color but this doesn't mean that immediately blue and red become illusionary and we can think them away. That's where nondualistic schools become even more abstract than the already abstract philosophies. It's only that the singleness of this abstractions makes it look that we are dealing with Divine simplicity. We smear out all concepts and replace them with the ultimate abstract One.

As I commented in another thread with a wiki quote, the fundamental difference between Advaita Vedanta (Brahman = Atman) and Mahayana Buddhism (anatman), is that former is substance metaphysics, latter process philosophy as anatman is denial of permanence and inherent, independent self. On historical note, there were especially close connections between Greek and Indian philosophy during Hellenistic era, influences going both ways, and similarities between Pyrrhonian skepticism and Nagarjuna are especially apparent. Plato's dialogues offer much food for both substance advaita ('hen kai agathon') and process advaita ('dynamis').

It's the substance advaita that gets very abstract. Zen, as well as process philosophical animistic-shamanic traditions tend avoid abstractions to a high degree. Also, only the substance advaita requires metaphysical postulation of quantification and existential quantifier usually called "One", and is inseparable from monotheist theology of metaphysical solipsism.

Interestingly, solipsism (aka "there's no other") is something we - at least me and some of my friends have attested to the experience - go through during "psychotic" experiences, meaning spiritual transformations, to know the 'thing as such' of solipsism and what it feels like to be the Lonely God, but don't stay stuck in the sickness of such sick god, because it's not a nice place to be and there's available peer support from friends who've gone through similar experience.

We go nowhere if we conceptualize the primordial One and then seek to derive from it all the diversity of experience. We can take the diversity only from reality. Only from reality I can get blue, red and white. It is higher order ideas (in contrast to immediate one-to-one perception-to-concept ideas) that introduce unities. These ideas turn out to be living metamorphosing beings in the higher worlds. The intellect can only grasp them in their mineral-like projections. That's why we don't go anywhere when we simply imagine the cultures, animals, plants, etc. as being all one with the abstract One.

Feeling same spirit/breathing beneath our appearances of skin, fur, bark etc. is sensual and sentient, not abstract thought of a number. "New animism" of Viveiro de Castro et alii is based on perspectival multinaturalism of fundamentally peer-to-peer relations. Spirit is not an object, breathing is verb for movement of expanding and contracting. At abstract level we can think of breathing between infinity and infinitesimal, and emulate such abstraction in our meditations and spiritual practices, as well as mineral metaphore of 'Universe in a speck of sand' etc.

Though anatman denial of inherent self makes plenty of ontological sense, a great ethical teaching is that all unique has inherent value, and hence out of love and freedom all is unique. In our hunger for uniquely experiencing we are both food and feeding.

[Lou Gold]

Feeling same spirit/breathing beneath our appearances of skin, fur, bark etc. is sensual and sentient, not abstract thought of a number. "New animism" of Viveiro de Castro et alii is based on perspectival multinaturalism of fundamentally peer-to-peer relations. Spirit is not an object, breathing is verb for movement of expanding and contracting. At abstract level we can think of breathing between infinity and infinitesimal, and emulate such abstraction in our meditations and spiritual practices, as well as mineral metaphore of 'Universe in a speck of sand' etc.

Right on!

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

In my view this is not metaphor. It is equivalent to Ramana saying, "I see God in tree because I see the tree as a tree."

[SanteriSatama]

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

In my view this is not metaphor. It is equivalent to Ramana saying, "I see God in tree because I see the tree as a tree."

If you want to postulate (actual) infinity and eternity as something else than poetic metaphors, as philosophically, scientifically, spiritually and ontologically valid concepts, you are welcome to try to argue your position in this little debate club of ours, without referring to poetry.

If you give a try, I promise to shoot down your arguments as well as I can. If you don't want to, then keep it simple sentient, and make no mention of highly complex and abstract metaphysical concepts of eternity and actual infinity.

[Lou Gold]

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

In my view this is not metaphor. It is equivalent to Ramana saying, "I see God in tree because I see the tree as a tree."

If you want to postulate (actual) infinity and eternity as something else than poetic metaphors, as philosophically, scientifically, spiritually and ontologically valid concepts, you are welcome to try to argue your position in this little debate club of ours, without referring to poetry.

If you give a try, I promise to shoot down your arguments as well as I can. If you don't want to, then keep it simple sentient, and make no mention of highly complex and abstract metaphysical concepts of eternity and actual infinity.

Just telling it like I feel and experience it bro. I'm happy to leave the math to you. I do rather prefer the imaginal but the real seems to me as in the ever present now.

[SanteriSatama]

I'm happy to leave the math to you.

You really shouldn't be. People tend to be god awful trusting and naive about math.

What if the Subject in possession of math turns out to be Saruman? Or final stage of Frodo, but without Gollum to bite off his ring digit?

How do you, or anybody, suggest to share math in a responsible way, better way than the current old math of arcane monk latin of axiomatic set theory? In a way that works as medicine instead of poison?