Will idealism ever become part of the mainstream?

[SanteriSatama]

Scientific approach needs to specify the meanings of 'soul' and 'consciousness', before we can discuss possible answers in greater detail. Have you tried lucid dreaming? It's not something I have talent and/or patience for, but to my understanding could be well suited for the kind of exploration you are talking about.

[Astra052]

Scientific approach needs to specify the meanings of 'soul' and 'consciousness', before we can discuss possible answers in greater detail. Have you tried lucid dreaming? It's not something I have talent and/or patience for, but to my understanding could be well suited for the kind of exploration you are talking about.

I lucid dream pretty reliably. I remember the other night I was walking down the street in a dream while lucid dreaming and was amazed at how real everything felt. A thought crossed my mind that went like "I wonder if feeling things in a dream really does feel like touching it" so I ran over to a tree and just started feeling its bark and absorbing the feeling. To my surprise, it really did feel like touching a tree and not some rough approximation. It was retty interesting but I don't know if I came away from it with any metaphysical insights.

[Cleric K]

You see, the things you're saying make sense to me from a spiritual perspective. I've had enough experience with esoteric practices for the things you're describing to line up pretty well with the spiritual truths I've encountered. My issue comes in with science though. Where is the soul? How does the soul interact with the physical body? Is the soul the same as consciousness? If so, is the soul reliant on the brain? I see you describing the formation of a subtle body which maps very well onto the Hermetic teachings I've read as well as the spiritual alchemy involved which is all fine and good but doesn't this all come down to consciousness? I just don't feel like I've come across anything that really makes me feel like consciousness is not just a product of the brain.

You are right to feel that consciousness is related to the brain - to say the least, you feel your thoughts in the head. But the idea that the thoughts are the product of the brain is not something that you perceive as a fact. The only certain thing is that you experience thoughts and they are felt in the area of the head. Try to observe what you are doing in your mind when you say "the thoughts are produced by the brain" - you make a thought picture of a brain, then apply some magic and imagine how other thoughts "somehow" emanate from the thought of the brain. You see? You never actually touch anything else than thoughts - you're simply putting the thought of the brain into imagined casual relationships with other thoughts. You never reach 'the real brain' and observe how thoughts emerge from it.

So it's all good and valuable to learn about brain structure, about the different lobes, etc. But there's no need to jump to conclusions and decide that your thoughts are produced by your thought about the brain.

This is why I'm interested in psychedelics, it seems to be a reliable way for people to shake that view and somehow have an experience that tells them consciousness is not just a phenomena created by our brains but is something more fundamental. I need to have that direct experience that can help me understand how to come to that conclusion.

It will most certainly shake that view but don't be so sure that this will give you the certainty you seek. As a matter of fact you may return more confused than you are now. In the end you'll still return with some experiences, bunch of more fluid-like memories and you'll have to think about them, to decide what they mean. Don't expect that psychedelics are a pill for reality. Your mind will still need explanation. Nothing will stop you to seek physicalist explanations of the psychedelic state if you're so inclined. Take someone like Anil Seth. He clearly had plenty of psychedelic experiences but he's still convinced physicalist.

The true answers can only come when you address the question of what is it that thinks in you, can you trace the source of your thoughts? But this is something that takes time (age). So it's best to keep open mind and have patience. No one is forcing you to place your bet just so that you can say you have an opinion on the subject. It's not shameful to say "All I know is I have perceptions, feelings, will and can think about them. Where they come from I still don't know." If you are open that the answer can come even from the most unexpected direction you'll have a much greater chance to find it compared to if you only expect it from a limited domain.

[Astra052]

You see, the things you're saying make sense to me from a spiritual perspective. I've had enough experience with esoteric practices for the things you're describing to line up pretty well with the spiritual truths I've encountered. My issue comes in with science though. Where is the soul? How does the soul interact with the physical body? Is the soul the same as consciousness? If so, is the soul reliant on the brain? I see you describing the formation of a subtle body which maps very well onto the Hermetic teachings I've read as well as the spiritual alchemy involved which is all fine and good but doesn't this all come down to consciousness? I just don't feel like I've come across anything that really makes me feel like consciousness is not just a product of the brain.

You are right to feel that consciousness is related to the brain - to say the least, you feel your thoughts in the head. But the idea that the thoughts are the product of the brain is not something that you perceive as a fact. The only certain thing is that you experience thoughts and they are felt in the area of the head. Try to observe what you are doing in your mind when you say "the thoughts are produced by the brain" - you make a thought picture of a brain, then apply some magic and imagine how other thoughts "somehow" emanate from the thought of the brain. You see? You never actually touch anything else than thoughts - you're simply putting the thought of the brain into imagined casual relationships with other thoughts. You never reach 'the real brain' and observe how thoughts emerge from it.

So it's all good and valuable to learn about brain structure, about the different lobes, etc. But there's no need to jump to conclusions and decide that your thoughts are produced by your thought about the brain.

This is why I'm interested in psychedelics, it seems to be a reliable way for people to shake that view and somehow have an experience that tells them consciousness is not just a phenomena created by our brains but is something more fundamental. I need to have that direct experience that can help me understand how to come to that conclusion.

It will most certainly shake that view but don't be so sure that this will give you the certainty you seek. As a matter of fact you may return more confused than you are now. In the end you'll still return with some experiences, bunch of more fluid-like memories and you'll have to think about them, to decide what they mean. Don't expect that psychedelics are a pill for reality. Your mind will still need explanation. Nothing will stop you to seek physicalist explanations of the psychedelic state if you're so inclined. Take someone like Anil Seth. He clearly had plenty of psychedelic experiences but he's still convinced physicalist.

The true answers can only come when you address the question of what is it that thinks in you, can you trace the source of your thoughts? But this is something that takes time (age). So it's best to keep open mind and have patience. No one is forcing you to place your bet just so that you can say you have an opinion on the subject. It's not shameful to say "All I know is I have perceptions, feelings, will and can think about them. Where they come from I still don't know." If you are open that the answer can come even from the most unexpected direction you'll have a much greater chance to find it compared to if you only expect it from a limited domain.

To answer your first point, I just keep thinking of the lightswitch thing. The idea that if we came across a lightswitch and had no idea how it worked other than that when its flipped on there is light and when it's off there isn't. Why do we come to the conclusion that the lightbulb is somehow apart of a field of consciousness or that when the switch is off the light isn't gone it just went back somewhere else? Like back to the "light at large" for example. It just feels like by going through Occam's razor it makes far more sense to say "the lightswitch and the light are somehow connected, even if we don't know how, and if the lightswitch isn't on there is no light". I am not convinced by materialism but I'm not convinced by idealism either. I'm having a very difficult time with all this but it keeps seeming like physicalism has the most consistent answer with science thus far for consciousness. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm just holding out for something from either side that can make me go "yup, that makes enough sense for me to hang my hat on".

[SanteriSatama]

I lucid dream pretty reliably. I remember the other night I was walking down the street in a dream while lucid dreaming and was amazed at how real everything felt. A thought crossed my mind that went like "I wonder if feeling things in a dream really does feel like touching it" so I ran over to a tree and just started feeling its bark and absorbing the feeling. To my surprise, it really did feel like touching a tree and not some rough approximation. It was retty interesting but I don't know if I came away from it with any metaphysical insights.

Veridical lucid dreaming / OBE can be direct experimentation - and falsification - of the brain reduction hypothesis. I remember one dream, when I was a young man and just moved from home to big city and was staying at my aunts place. In the dream I saw a certain object (don't remember what) on top of book shelf, where it couldn't be normally seen, and when I woke up, I climbed to check and there it was.

Speaking about trees, much later a (very!) old school professor of forestry taught a group of ecovillage people to feel the bioenergy fields of trees with palm of hand.

Scientific process in general is very much about learning to formulate what you consider interesting and meaningful questions as carefully as you can, and then coming up ways to test and experiment hypothesis related to the questions. And to be prepared for the unexpected!

[Soul_of_Shu]

Cleric wrote: ... to say the least, you feel your thoughts in the head.

Maybe I'm atypical, but I've never felt thoughts in my head, but rather from some much deeper untraceable core. When as a child, and dear old dad told me to get silly ideas out of my head, I wondered what he was talking about. But it's a notion so embedded in the language, it's hardly even questioned by most. One has to wonder if that has always been the case for humankind. I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was not, but not sure now.

[Astra052]

I'm beginning to think what is going to happen in the future is the rise of panpsychism. The inability of our current mainstream views is going to become so clear that it can no longer be held and panpsychism will become what's in vogue. I'm not a panpsychist and I think most of us would be positive towards the change but largely ambivalent towards the outcome. This would be a good thing though honestly because panpsychists seem to be far more respectful and open minded towards alternative explanations of consciousness. I think once panpsychism becomes widely accepted the ability to explore alternative views of consciousness will become much greater and intellectual debate will be more open and respectful. Perhaps this is just me being hopeful but the fact that Chalmers, Koch, Kastrup, Hoffman, Muller, and many others are major forces in today's intellectual debate is good portends in my view.

[Cleric K]

Maybe I'm atypical, but I've never felt thoughts in my head, but rather from some much deeper untraceable core. When as a child, and dear old dad told me to get silly ideas out of my head, I wondered what he was talking about. But it's a notion so embedded in the language, it's hardly even questioned by most. One has to wonder if that has always been the case for humankind. I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was not, but not sure now.

Yes, here we should distinguish between the supersensible thinking activity and thinking perception. The further back in time we go the more we encounter consciousness that was feeling that "the soul thinks" and thoughts were only emerging as dream images. We can still see traces of this in expressions like "But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart."

Through the course of humanity's development the spiritual activity in the soul is slowly becoming more and more 'in focus'. Like passing sunlight through lens and slowly adjusting the focus - going from large fuzzy blob towards laser-precision point. It is natural that modern human feels the perception of thoughts within the head area even if it's felt that the forces that think are not in the head. This has to do with certain soul differences which were also at the core of the arguments of the Greeks who couldn't agree if the seat of the soul was in the brain or the heart. It has to do with inclination to identify more with the process of thinking or the perception of thinking.

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.

[Cleric K]

I think once panpsychism becomes widely accepted ...

Unfortunately humanity's development doesn't proceed in this way. Never in history it is the case that something is developed intellectually then accepted, and then applied in practice. All human evolution proceeds from hidden spiritual impulses. At the age of Enlightenment it was not some intellectual consensus that the age of Reason should be commenced. It was the spiritual urges of humanity that were trying to break free, the Spirit was trying to be born, to undress the cocoon of religious dogma, which has already played its rightful role. Materialism was not grounded theoretically so that people thought about it, found it reasonable and decided to adopt it. It was that the direction of life, what the hearts and minds wanted, led them there.

Spiritual impulses find their expression first through the most advanced souls. Take German idealism of the 18-19th century. These beings - Fichte, Schelling, Hegel were simply ahead of their times. They are as heralds of something that is making its way into general human life - first in the most prepared, where it becomes very beautifully expressed, then more and more in the general consciousness. So it is today. There's something that is trying to break its way into human consciousness and it's our task to accommodate it. Idealism today is only a symptom of this. And this is also the reason that trying to ground and prove idealism through purely physical means simply misses the point. It's not about convincing people that idealism, panpsychism, etc. are superior world views. They are only useful as the language of the higher human being that is trying to become conscious today. Not simply an isolated biological unit programmed for cooperative survival but a being that is fully conscious of the way it is put together by the forces of the Cosmos and decides to work in alignment with them.

[JustinG]

Unfortunately humanity's development doesn't proceed in this way. Never in history it is the case that something is developed intellectually then accepted, and then applied in practice. All human evolution proceeds from hidden spiritual impulses.

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.