Will idealism ever become part of the mainstream?

[Cleric K]

I think that is only half right in terms of Hegelian idealism - For Hegel, it is social practices (the manifestation of Geist or Spirit in the world) that predominantly shapes intellectual developments and spiritual impulses, rather than hidden spiritual impules shaping intellectual developments and social practises.

Agree, all these are milestones. Hegel never went beyond thought, although he was open that this work would be continued after him. It could be said that in Hegel, intellectual thought went as far as it can possibly go - thinking reaching for its foundation and conceptualizing itself. That's also why he's considered difficult by many. If we are used to look at philosophy as a selection of primes and then show different combinations of them, it's very difficult to grasp Hegel. He doesn't postulate primes, for him thinking itself is the ground reality. While for philosophies of the past thinking was a tool to conceive of reality, for Hegel thinking itself becomes the ultimate reality and its own object of investigation. In this sense in Hegel we find the zenith and the end of philosophy. From this point we either bounce back and continue to reshuffle the thoughts in hope for some ingenious combination not yet discovered or we accept that intellectual consciousness is only a stage and we become open for higher forms of consciousness from which it can traced how thinking itself comes into being from more fundamental stratum of reality.

[SanteriSatama]

In all cases, in spiritual development these must be united. This can initially happen in the truest sense only in the head. The grounding that Lou often speaks about is not that much about feeling sympathetic for the Earth but about finding our inner point of contact with it. We can love the Earth while at the same time still experience it and our own physical body in a dream like fashion. There's a place in the head, sometimes called the floating eye of the soul. It's an area that feels most natural to concentrate an image into. It's neither too up, nor too down, neither too left, nor too right, neither too front, nor too back. For most people it's about the level of the eyes and slightly behind the skull. When we concentrate a thought there we should feel it 'weightless'. Any other spot is recognized by the fact that it requires additional effort to support the image there.

Through concentration like this, the soul finds a piece of 'real estate' within the physical world that really belongs to it. This is the point of real grounding. Not only we feel sympathetic for the Earth but we find a spot where our spiritual nature actually penetrates the physical. This point later becomes the 'seed' from which higher cognition begins to grow as expanding sphere. Then we again find the spiritual forces that are responsible for thinking - outside the head - but not as vague feelings of untraceable core but as actual cognition - the untraceable becomes in the most real sense traceable. That's how we are led from the head, then through the larynx and then the heart organ. Here we find what is called 'thinking of the heart' which is neither intellectual chains of thoughts, neither a vague feeling as in 'follow your heart'. What we experience in 'follow your heart' in ordinary consciousness is only a vague dream image of the processes and beings that we reach in full consciousness within the heart organ. There we perceive the workings of Karma, how destinies are brought together, how we are embedded in the evolutionary stream of all humanity, how our soul has goals very often quite different from what we experience on the surface.

Are you familiar with the Headless way?

https://www.headless.org/

I think the exercise is really about balancing visual sense with others, not denying bodily awareness of also head.

There's a good Earth meditation a friend taught, and I like to pass it around. Focusing on Ajna chakra for the visualization part to make it more effective sounds like a good addition.

Visualize holding miniature Earth on your palms. After you are satisfied with the visualization, bring Earth with your palms to your chest and place it your heart chakra.

Heart is also the seat of empathy, and deep fear of opening heart chakra seems fairly common and understandable, as empathy requires balancing with "skillful action" so you don't totally crushed by all the pain in the world. Only comfortably crushed .

The ascending-descending dialectic goes of course both ways ("as above, so below"), energies flow both up and down in the chakra and nadi systems. A meditation that was very meaningful for me was positioning the flows between core of the Earth and Sun.

Staying grounded is very important, and the caution against starting the process from Crown chakra is well justified, as that tends to lead to severe pee-in-the-head issues. A guru business cult focusing on Crown from the start scores very high on the cult victims lists. "Pee head" is expression in our language with same meaning as English "Asshole" when referring to a certain kind of behavior and attitude, but I claim our expression is much more anatomically and spiritually exact and correct. Good bowel movement is very healthy and wholesome.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Another expression dear old dad like to use, when I was having silly ideas in my head, or unable to follow is claims, was to say I was a 'pea' brain ... somehow this seems better than 'pee' head.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Cleric wrote: Yes, here we should distinguish between the supersensible thinking activity and thinking perception.

Cleric ... the way you explain it does make sense. As a young child, I did tend to spend a lot of time out-of-body, so to speak, which still seems to involve thinking, but somehow not the same as thinking involving a head. In any case, as always with your posts, much to ponder.

[Jim Cross]

Jim ... the issue I'm having is with the statement: "However, nonlocality and other QM strangeness are physical." How does this not presume an ontology of physicalism as a matter of fact from the get go, and thus contradict your saying that "there's nothing about nonlocality that proves any ontological position." In which case, why take as factual any ontological position?

All I mean is that the QM itself is a description of physical properties. It measures and predicts the behavior of atoms and particles. See Wikipedia definition.

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.

However, whatever is underlying the "physical properties" isn't really a matter for science. Smolin's view would preserve causality with nonlocality. Whether his view becomes accepted remains to be seen.

In a broader sense, I am also saying that Nature is weirder than our ordinary experience suggests. This is why we are fooled by optical illusions and want to see hidden forces in ordinary events. We can somewhat model a light wave from our ordinary experience with waves in a pond. However, even that model failed when the existence of the medium for propagation (ether) was disproven. QM in particular presents behavior that isn't easily modeled from ordinary experience so it is tempting to read into it things that may not be. But in any case the theory itself is about physical properties.

[AshvinP]

Jim ... the issue I'm having is with the statement: "However, nonlocality and other QM strangeness are physical." How does this not presume an ontology of physicalism as a matter of fact from the get go, and thus contradict your saying that "there's nothing about nonlocality that proves any ontological position." In which case, why take as factual any ontological position?

All I mean is that the QM itself is a description of physical properties. It measures and predicts the behavior of atoms and particles. See Wikipedia definition.

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.

Yet we know that "atoms" and "particles" are representative abstractions, even if that knowledge has been mostly forgotten by materialists. There is no reason to say the abstractions are more "physical" than mental in their essence, and clearly all abstractions have a mental component, many without any separate physical component.

[Cleric K]

Are you familiar with the Headless way?

No, I was not, thanks. There are good exercises there. Not many for going beyond the zero point but whoever seeks will find them

A meditation that was very meaningful for me was positioning the flows between core of the Earth and Sun.

Very good, yes! Very powerful extension to this is if we visualize that the Sun has pulse and breathing rhythm, a cosmic living pacemaker, and we visualize how our pulse and breathing become synchronized with that of the Sun.

Cleric ... the way you explain it does make sense. As a young child, I did tend to spend a lot of time out-of-body, so to speak, which still seems to involve thinking, but somehow not the same as thinking involving a head. In any case, as always with your posts, much to ponder.

Interestingly, in the soul realm we can think much better with our ... hands. Not the physical but the spiritual forces that we project into the hands. From the standpoint of spiritual evolution, the human hands became what they are because, long before the body reached the rigidly formed mineral state, the spirit was projecting its activities within the Imaginative substance, transforming it in various ways. As the world of Imagination was gradually decohering and becoming more and more rigid, these spiritual streams of activity rigidified in the human hands. In certain sense the hands took the shape which even though they were becoming more and more rigid, they could still retain as much as possible of their essential character of creative streams. In higher cognition we can experience the liberated etheric hands. They become more of a creative fields, through which we can project shapes in the Imaginative substance much more versatilely. These streams are felt as extending from the head organ, in certain sense we dip our spiritual hands in the Imaginative panorama in the head. Unfortunately hitting keys on the keyboard doesn't do us much favor. Things like sculpting are especially effective for reconnecting the physical hands with the creative streams.