Let's try to approach this like so:
Fact 1. We always experience everything from only one conscious space. We have no way to 'prove' if second, third, etc. space exists.
Fact 2. We always experience some totality of perceptions
Fact 3. We always experience ideal content as the meaning of the perceptions.
Let's be bold about this and say it out loud: we have a solipsistic situation. Clearly other humans
seem to have their own conscious experiences. First that they look and act in a way not different than us. Second they report experiences in the same way as we do. There are two ways to approach the problem of other being's conscious experience.
1. We recognize the totality of our conscious experience and conceptualize. We create a symbol for it - say, a bubble, whirlpool, brain, etc. We say "OK, so that represents my consciousness". Then we imagine that the other's consciousness exists in a similar way and we place one more symbol next to ours. Now this is the problem that Kant spotted and tried to solve. He realized that this special position from which we imagine to see the two consciousnesses is nowhere to be found in reality. So he solved the problem by saying that each consciousness can never know anything besides itself. Yet Kant falls into his own trap because even though he denies the third person perspective he (probably without recognizing it) uses
exactly that perspective to consider as a hard fact that there are indeed two separate consciousnesses which can't perceive anything except their own contents. Practically he uses as foundation for his philosophy exactly that which his philosophy tries to prove is impossible. We should learn from history and not fall in the same cognitive traps.
2. If we are true to the fact that we know only one conscious perspective, the only way to ever know something about other being's experiences is if we can experience them within ourselves.
In order elucidate something about this #2 we need to bring something from Spiritual Science - namely, the three higher stages of cognition that are available to modern man.
Here I started to write about the higher forms of consciousness but it quickly began to get long again. So I drafted it and I'll just write few indications here which will be fairly incomplete or even confusing. Then if there's interest I may post a longer post about the three forms of consciousness.
Eugene I wrote: ↑Thu Mar 25, 2021 9:40 pm
But we were also discussing a different problem - unification of subjects into a higher-order mega-subjects, like unification of human souls into Christ Consciousness/Self. This is where the subject combination problem occurs. Do we share with Christ not only common ideas, but also the actual experiences of thoughts? In other words, does his unity of experience fully includes/embraces all our individual unities and all our actual private conscious experiences?
Probably the hardest thing to do is to escape the Kantian trap. And this is so engrained that even if we exercise all effort we almost inevitably snap back into it like a broken record. We must put a large neon sign "We can never experience anything else than our conscious space". This leaves us in the situation that if we're ever to say something about these things they can only come from direct experience.
The first higher stage is called Imaginative consciousness. In that state it can be said that the soul life of other beings impresses into ours. Souls always impress into each other, even if we don't know it but through Imaginative consciousness we recognize this process. We experience entirely our own soul life and we need a lot of Wisdom here in order to understand the impressions because very often they are inverted, just like the wax has the inverted impression of the seal. For example I may experience love for somebody but this may actually produce repulsion in them.
The second stage is called Inspirative consciousness. Here we begin to sense more clearly the inner states of other beings. We do this by purifying to a large extent our own soul life such that it can become receptive for the life of others. The closest thing we can compare this is
comprehending speech. Just as in normal life we allow the words of others to evoke in us certain ideas and feelings, so at this stage we attune ourselves to beings so that ideas and feelings flow in purely spiritual way in us. This is very limited analogy, we are not at all speaking of ordinary ideas and feelings. Now the question is "But are these ideas the
exact same as in the being that we are resonating with?" The answer is "Look at the neon sign" - there's no answer to such a question.
Now here we should make something clear. This answer may make it sound like our 'model' is incomplete, and any model that doesn't give clear answer to the question should be rejected. Is it so hard? Yes or no? But it's precisely here that we should realize something and it's certainly a hard pill to swallow - we have certain
sickness in our cognition. We are infected by the Kantian spirit (actually it's not Kant's fault, this spirit has deeper origin). That's why I tried to show explicitly the #1 and #2 above. Even that we can easily comprehend the logical fallacy of #1 yet something resists in us. It's a very specific feeling. We keep snapping back to it, even in the face of the clear logical error. This is something very deep and part of a mystery within the soul but if we are ever to arrive at reality we need to overcome this disease. If we succeed in this we'll find from a completely different vantage point that we no longer miss the answer of that impossible question. Let me put it like this. When the soul is empty it feels the need to create contents to fill the void. In the course of history, on the way to the middle ages, the human soul became utterly alone, even though it had the sense perceptions of others, it had the church, yet it was very lonely, it was empty. That's why the soul was forced to
imagine the soul life of others. Yes! The soul could no longer feel neither God, nor the real spiritual presence of other humans so it needed to invent it itself! Instead of the heartfelt presence of other souls it began filling the void with
mental images of the soul life of others. In certain sense the soul was forced to do that, otherwise it would suffer great pain because of that unbearable loneliness. This is largely the case also today. People feel impelled to imagine the soul life of others because without this they would experience a great emptiness. What is the cure? It's nothing else but spiritual development. We need to gradually regain our sensitivity for the
real presence of the souls. We need to develop at least something of the Imaginative consciousness. It's not needed that it's developed to stage of real cognition but we really need to look again for the real heartfelt presence of other souls. As long as we imagine that our inner world is completely ours and only open to the outside through the senses, we are completely insensitive to the way the soul life of other impresses into ours. Not that it doesn't but we assume that it's all ours only. We can only overcome this sickness through Love - real, disinterested, heartfelt Love. We need to develop genuine interest into others, to understand that we're not isolated but our soul life impresses into them and theirs impresses into us. Once we begin to feel in this way about other souls, our soul life becomes enlivened as it were. It expands, begins to breathe and pulsate. Now we can easily discard the sickness. Why? Because from direct experience we have something in comparison to which the imaginary soul life of others simply pales. Only now we realize that the question if our experience is completely the same as that of another is simply empty words. Neither yes, nor no can ever replace the heart warmth that we feel when we begin to sense the real soul presence of humans.
The third stage is called Intuitive consciousness. This requires the highest level of renunciation. Now we no longer hear spiritually the inner state of the other being but practically merge with it. Merge in what way? It's like completely emptying our consciousness and filling it with the contents of the other being as if through resonance. We experience the contents as if from the perspective of the being - as far as possible. So are these contents
the same for both me and the being? Look at the neon sign! There's no answer to such a question. When I say that we merge we shouldn't imagine that the "I" of the being comes from somewhere and merges with us. No, there's only one "I". But at that stage this "I" is so purified, so selfless that it's very difficult to compare with anything from normal life. This process is very intimate yet we are aware that we experience the being's perspective, we don't lose out "I"-dentity.
To be sure, to have Intuitive cognition of another human being is very very difficult. We can imagine the reason in the following way. We can only resonate with contents of consciousness that we can accommodate. To put it into a very foolish example, If we have different political views I'll never be able to experience the other's perspective, simply because I'll be resisting it. Only very advanced human beings, who have developed in themselves all the types of temperaments and characters, have the needed Love for this.
Also when we experience through Intuition higher beings than us, say an Angel, we can only comprehend from its perspective, as much as we can relate in some way to our own human consciousness.
The being that is, so to speak, closest to us, of which we can most readily experience Intuitive knowledge, is actually the Christ being. This is so because he has relation to every human being. Actually even at this moment everyone of us experiences Intuitive knowledge of the Christ but in general we don't know that this is the case. We wouldn't have the Life of our "I" if he was not part of our experience. Otherwise we would experience reality with cold impartiality, with complete inner immobility. The more we attune to the Christ-being the more our "I" becomes a real spring of Life and Love.
