Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[Soul_of_Shu]

Alright, well, I was just coming off the bench and trying to knock down a few jumpers to keep us even and give Cleric some rest... it looks like he is well-rested and taking it strong to the rim

I dunno, I think Cleric might have gotten away with a travelling call there ... the ref's a bum ... oh wait a sec

[Cleric K]

Wow, Cleric, you described almost exactly how the Buddhist compassion works. It's exactly when we empty ourselves from the self-centered and ego-centered garbage, and spiritually develop to become ultra-sensitive and responsive on the subtle levels of intuitive consciousness, we can resonate with and feel what and how others are feeling. And you are right, the problem we were discussing here whether the shared experienced are original or only copies/resonances is actually irrelevant.

Yes, Eugene,
I've always tried to show that the great evolutionary impulses don't invalidate each other but build upon each other.

If we recognize the Kantian trap we should really exert effort to evade it at all times. I'll give some descriptions that derive from the Imaginative consciousness which we either can develop in full self-awareness on Earth or we fall into in unfree 'trip-like' manner after death. Upon entering this state we face solipsism in the most real sense. The situation is very dire especially for materialists who cross the threshold. What I wrote in the previous post already explains why. The moment we lose the firm support of our body and brain we also lose the scratchboard of our imagination (small 'i'). This means that we can no longer support the intellectual picture of the separate conscious spaces for everyone. And since the materialist never bothered with the idea that in his soul life he actually experiences the interference of soul life of others he is left in solipsistic mode. He observes his empty soul and can't find any trace of others. Only if they have felt true love for somebody they might feel their Imaginative impression within their state. But in the way that relationships are handled today, on the basis of purely financial, sexual, etc. grounds, we often never develop real soul connection to the other. These souls are simply invisible for us. It's difficult to imagine how terrifying this situation is. One simply doesn't have the means to fantasize floating content in order to fill the void.

We enter the solipsistic mode also when we step into the Soul world spectrum of consciousness, through self-development. But now we can still relate to our physical body and it's thanks to this 'ground connection' that we can discover the living presence of other beings, revealed in true Imaginations. That's why we begin through learning the concepts of these things. Very often is heard "I don't want to hear anything about the spiritual world, I just want to see it for myself". But this simply reflects a very tainted and prejudiced notion of what the spiritual world is. People imagine that it's something like the physical but more 'refined' and it's just a matter to have 'vision' of this space, so that everything becomes revealed. But this is by no means the case. We must literally fight our way for every Imagination. And we can never do this unless we have first explored the ideal space through pure thinking. We first think about things and then we find the Imaginative experiences of spiritual beings that we've been probing in thought. We can never find anything in the higher world which we have not at least approached in livingly experienced thought. This hold true everywhere. Einstein could have never found his theory by simply seeing it readymade in the spiritual world. He might had strong intuition about it but it still required him to fight with sweat on the brow for every concept that drew him closer and closer. It's practically the same in higher cognition. We are very off track if we believe than one can be 'stupid' and see in the spiritual. He may see mish-mash of visions that he'll never know what to make out of, but never clear and lucid Imaginations that put everything into harmonious perspective.

Why I'm saying this? Because we really need to differentiate what comes from where. The Kantian trap persist in the sensory world because it is fueled by the fact that we see each other as walking separate bodies. We take these sensory pictures of humans and fantasize into each of them some conscious bubble. But this is exactly what Maya is. And we transfer this Maya into the higher world in the most pathological way if we imagine that there are any means whatsoever to support such a vision there. There aren't. As soon as we cross the threshold we are solipsists. Not in the negative sense but as the most real fact of the given. We can't fantasize some external being even if we want to - we need the bodily sensory screen for this. Now if we are ever to discover our relations to other beings we can only do this by perceiving how they impress into our state. And this impression doesn't come from the geometric 'outside'. All such spatial relations cease to exist in the proper Astral world. I say 'proper' because what are today called 'out of body' experiences in popular reports, in reality are almost exclusively very 'in body' experiences. It's true that these people expand their astral bodies and sense something of the wider expanses but the sensory-like pictures of bodies flying here and there, etc. are only dream representation of the Imaginations captured by the brain. It's Maya in even stronger sense than it is with regards to the sensory world.

The only way we can envision things, which is still Maya but at least the most easily reconcilable with reality, is if we imagine that everyone's perspectives are, so to speak, overlapped one over the other. This is the most easy way to imagine how Intuitive knowledge works. When we attune to another being we don't move through space to approach it. Neither we experience that the being is 'out there' and we telepathically and compassionately copy their state into ours. Such experiences are simply nowhere to be found. The hard fact of the given is that in Intuition we are always at our own stable center and the contents of consciousness change as to become as far as possible the same as these of the other being. The least confusing way to imagine this in terms of our spatially-locked intellect is to envision that all beings' perspectives are one over the other around the only center that we ever experience. If we may use the expression, the perspectives are separated only in 'frequency', just as different radio signals coexist overlapped but we attune to one or another. Yet these perspectives are not independent - they interfere and define each other.

This last part is very important. In reality we can never speak of our conscious perspective as something existing 'in itself', as some private container for awareness. Everything that we experience is the interference with all other perspectives. We imagine our own perspective to be a unique bubble because we don't recognize how much we actually owe to the interference with the beings that constitute our physical body. It's perfectly true that each one of us has individual brain and this gives us independent scratchboards for thinking and imagination. But in the Soul world our state no longer interferes with the beings of the physical body - we don't have the scratchboard. Now our state is again interference of beings but only the soul spectrum of beings. We are as spread out in the Cosmos. And we should really make the effort to understand how different this really is from our incarnate state. To put it simply - now we are solipsist whose contents of consciousness are entirely made of the soul and spirit relations with other beings. In other words - the contents of our consciousness is nothing else but our Karma. This is what Karma is - the unique interference with all other beings. (Interestingly this is a valid way to understand it even in the incarnate self - we experience the Karmic entanglement with the beings of our physicals body). It doesn't need to be considered only as 'bad'. In fact if we imagine that we somehow completely clear our Karma this would only mean that all existence would cease for us. We only experience existence because of the interference with other beings. In this state we don't have imagination (small 'i') in the way we have it thanks to our private brain. We can't fantasize, we can't think floating thoughts. Our Imaginative reality is entirely the product of our entanglement with every other being. This realization dismantles the idea that we are somewhat self-contained beings and we'll simply enjoy relations with other such beings in the higher worlds. It's only through psychological inertia that we imagine beings as self-contained entities separated by some 'void' distance, much like we see it in space. This is nothing but projecting our sensory conceptions into the higher world. We are not creative in the higher world in the way we experience this in the sensory. We don't simply take pleasure in creating forms and shapes in the space between the beings. This is entirely a projection of the Maya physical state. In the higher world we are creative only in regards to our soul and spiritual relations with other beings (which on deeper thought is also true in the physical state. We simply don't recognize our own physical state as such relations with beings).

But there's something more. Depending on how we cross the threshold we might not even have the creative force to work upon the relations with other beings. That's what I mentioned - that for most human beings, the sojourn between death and rebirth passes as a completely uncontrollable 'trip'. We are simply carried on the interference waves of other beings until we begin to grasp our center again which we can only find in the seed of our next incarnation. This is tremendously important. We don't at all free ourselves from reincarnations when we feel disinterestedness to the world and compassion to all life. When we cross the threshold we find ourselves at loss, so to speak. We are confused. We imagined that we'll be free, yet now we are carried on Cosmic currents completely outside of our control. We understand how vain our ambitions for 'liberation' have been. The world that we imagined simply doesn't exist. We don't have 'private' life to enjoy. We understand that the real work of creativity is the collective work of harmonizing the relations between the beings. But we don't have the means to do this, we don't understand our relations to the mish-mash of beings because throughout the incarnate life we were fully concentrated only on our own life.

And here's where the Christ-being comes into play. In our physical life we take the creative Life of our "I" experience for granted. We can think and do things. But between incarnations we don't have this stable creative life of the "I" unless we voluntarily integrate it into our perspective. And this integration can't happen there. We're launched on a out-of-control trip. We return to a body because only in this way we have the means to experience the needed stability, the kernel around which to integrate the idea-being of Cosmic Life. And this Cosmic Life is not only about our personal perspective, it's the grand Idea-being that puts all human destinies into perspective.

So that's what I wanted to mention. We project our physical Maya state in the higher worlds if we imagine individual self-contained beings that live in some common 'space' of awareness. In reality all perspectives are one within the other, overlapped so to speak, and fully interdependent. The complete state of my perspective is the result of the interference of all other perspectives, just as my perspective interferes with that of every other being. The grand illusion of Maya (which only results because we copy-paste our physical experience in the higher world) is that we have a personal and independent, self-contained perspective of consciousness which is free to associate with this or that being. Ashvin said "The fact that we cannot enter the same river twice does not mean the ideal essence of the river can be whatever we picture it to be." This is what we'll be forced to realize in one way or another. Whether we like it or not our perspective is the result of the interference with all beings. The fact that our brain allows us to create a safe 'heaven' and to imagine that we are independent creative beings free of any entanglements with other beings, doesn't mean that it is so. Out of sight is truly out of mind but by no means out of reality. Our Karma, Angels, the Folk Spirits, the Sun Spirits, etc., etc. all are part of the interference of our experience - irrelevant if we recognize it or not. If we don't recognize it we are simply launched on a out-of-control ride after death because we have simply neglected to learn what it means to be in control. We are in control not when we imagine ourselves free from the Grand Cosmic idea beings, which give the macro shape of our perspective but precisely when we understand how our perspective comes together, when we discover our relations with these beings. In our physical state we 'hijack' that creative Life of the "I" for our own purposes. After death we quickly dissociate from it and find ourselves as a leaf carried by the winds. Why we dissociate? Because we no longer have personal life, we can't imagine this or that - all we experience is our Karmic entanglement with all beings. If we are to have "I" Life in this state it can only by Macrocosmic Life. And this is why we shy away. We want our "I" life but we want it only for ourselves. When we find ourselves out of the body we let that Life go because we're not yet interested in participating in the Cosmic Life of the "I". Yet in that state it is either Cosmic Life of the "I" or no "I" at all. That's why the Christ impulse is in reality the impulse of Love. We can never experience the Karmic landscape of humanity objectively as long as we are only interested in our own Karma, imagining that once we've settled it we'll be free to do as we please and freely choose to associate or not with other beings. Once we've settled our personal Karma we continue with settling the Karma of all humanity. And this can happen only if we accept the impulse of Love. This means to see every human being as valuable and important as ourselves and to realize that it's not enough to be compassionate. This secretly affirms that we are separate beings, all on their personal paths. We help each other along the way but then we say 'farewell' and imagine the we go to follow our Cosmic voyages. Love is active, creative force. Our only Cosmic voyage is to participate in the unfoldment of the Cosmic organism that we are entangled with - which is what we are. And we can only participate in the true sense if we choose voluntarily to associate with the beings of Life and Love because only from that perspective we can understand our position in the Whole and how to unfold our own creative activity in the best possible way - not for our personal enjoyment but for the work on the Cosmic Organism. This is the only work that results in real Joy. Every other endeavor has a secret shadow of egoism. Only when we give our life for the Whole through Love, we can experience Joy without shadows.

[Eugene I]

If we recognize the Kantian trap we should really exert effort to evade it at all times. I'll give some descriptions that derive from the Imaginative consciousness which we either can develop in full self-awareness on Earth or we fall into in unfree 'trip-like' manner after death. Upon entering this state we face solipsism in the most real sense. The situation is very dire especially for materialists who cross the threshold. What I wrote in the previous post already explains why. The moment we lose the firm support of our body and brain we also lose the scratchboard of our imagination (small 'i'). This means that we can no longer support the intellectual picture of the separate conscious spaces for everyone. And since the materialist never bothered with the idea that in his soul life he actually experiences the interference of soul life of others he is left in solipsistic mode. He observes his empty soul and can't find any trace of others. Only if they have felt true love for somebody they might feel their Imaginative impression within their state. But in the way that relationships are handled today, on the basis of purely financial, sexual, etc. grounds, we often never develop real soul connection to the other. These souls are simply invisible for us. It's difficult to imagine how terrifying this situation is. One simply doesn't have the means to fantasize floating content in order to fill the void.

...We don't at all free ourselves from reincarnations when we feel disinterestedness to the world and compassion to all life. When we cross the threshold we find ourselves at loss, so to speak. We are confused. We imagined that we'll be free, yet now we are carried on Cosmic currents completely outside of our control. ...

Well, Cleric, unfortunately most NDE accounts do not support such limited view of the discarnate state (unless you want to stay in the materialists camp and claim that NDEs are nothing more that hallucinations of the dying brain). They report radically different state of consciousness where communication with other conscious beings is much expanded, as well as the awareness of the multiverse beyond the "bubble" of the individuated space of consciousness, the ability to control the inner and outer environments and the expanded ability to communicate telepathically and cognize far beyond rational and linguistic thinking. Yet, souls still reincarnate and there are reasons for that (which is a different topic). But I understand where you are coming from, the spiritual aim of Christianity has always been the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, which was understood as the destiny of human souls and their role in the creation.

Otherwise, agreed with intuitive knowledge and interference of perspectives, Joy of Life and Love.

Here is a good overview of NDE, you can listen though all episodes, they are short:


And this is quite mind-blowing. But notice when she says "He does not know his origin" and "He is one of the species" (suggestion that our Source is not the only God in the whole multiverse). This is not a philosophy or a fantasy, this is exactly what she experienced and witnessed in her NDE

[Eugene I]

And this is an off-topic, but it's just too beautiful to resist posting here ...

[Lou Gold]

And this is an off-topic, but it's just too beautiful to resist posting here ...

It's not off-topic at all. Indeed, it is the topic. Ask our accounting moderator how many times I have referenced this poem.

[Soul_of_Shu]

It's not off-topic at all. Indeed, it is the topic. Ask our accounting moderator how many times I have referenced this poem.

As mentioned earlier, I stop after about 20 ... and now Eugene felt compelled to augment it yet again, just in case someone missed all the other postings ... I imagine Thich is tickled by it all

[Cleric K]

Well, Cleric, unfortunately most NDE accounts do not support such limited view of the discarnate state (unless you want to stay in the materialists camp and claim that NDEs are nothing more that hallucinations of the dying brain). They report radically different state of consciousness where communication with other conscious beings is much expanded, as well as the awareness of the multiverse beyond the "bubble" of the individuated space of consciousness, the ability to control the inner and outer environments and the expanded ability to communicate telepathically and cognize far beyond rational and linguistic thinking. Yet, souls still reincarnate and there are reasons for that (which is a different topic). But I understand where you are coming from, the spiritual aim of Christianity has always been the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, which was understood as the destiny of human souls and their role in the creation.

Yes Eugene,
the view is very limited because I focused on something very specific. Imagine that you have to describe what a normal human life is in few paragraphs?

The NDEs and OBEs are interesting experiences but we should never forget that these experiences ultimately squeeze through the concepts that the incarnate ego has at its disposal. That's what I meant that spiritual cognition is achieved by expanding the palette of our concepts. Only in this way we have the flexibility to capture the Imaginations and their relations. For example, the woman speaks about energy. Not because God told her that but because this is what she can make of the experience with the conceptual vocabulary available to her. As long as humanity's knowledge of the Spirit is based on anecdotal reports and ancient literature, we're simply dreaming about reality but refusing to experience it ourselves. Not saying that the old texts are wrong, neither that the reports are invalid, but only that both of these will become comprehensible only when we develop our own spiritual cognitive forces. Otherwise the 'other' world will always remain completely alien and based on belief of choice.

For example, when I said that the higher state is kind of solipsistic I can only imagine that most people would habitually imagine this as a kind of limitation, that we feel restricted, as if we positively feel that there's something 'outside' our consciousness but we feel limited to get there. But this is not the case. There's simply no longer a geometric notion of 'outside'. We recognize this only as long as the intellect feels within the 3D geometry of the physical body. There's outside the skin of the body and this makes us feel that there's also outside consciousness. But once outside the body there are no more notions of inner and outer. The Imaginative perceptions of other beings which impress in our state not only are not less informative than the sensory but actually give us much more deeper and living experience of the beings. Just as the the addition to language adds an immeasurably more rich experience of other's soul state, compared to only their visual appearance, so do Imaginations (not the mention the higher forms of consciousness) add immeasurable depth to the experience. That's the reason that we fully justifiably can call the sensory image only Maya, a shadow of reality.

But anyway. These things are difficult enough when one is sincerely striving to comprehend them, what's left when one simply doesn't want to. It all boils down to pointing attention to the spiritual bypass - the imagining that even though we are clearly within the Cosmic context now, we'll somehow be free of it after death. The greatest treasure for us is to know of the different views. Then it is up to everyone's freedom (as far as it is conditioned by Karma).

[Cleric K]

PS: I know that this won't count as anything for most but it's very important that in NDEs, even though the physical brain may be inactive, the etheric body is fully intact although slightly separated from the physical (actually this separation is the cause of the NDE). This makes it possible to transduce the experiences of the higher worlds into the etheric brain which then is experienced as memory when we're back in the physical state. This should be kept in mind. It's thanks to the etheric brain - which is the organizing force for the physical - that the Imaginative contents can be projected into sensory-like images. This is practically the same mechanism as in dreaming but with the difference that in normal life the etheric brain is much more rigidly united with the physical and as such, less open for the more extraordinary experiences, in which we are submerged all the time anyway.

In spiritual development we can very well distinguish the character of what is being formed though the astral and what through the etheric body. This also allows to experience Imaginations that correspond entirely to the astral activity, which we have in the dead, who have left both the physical and the etheric behind. My point is that in NDEs, the experiences are always formatted and colored through the etheric body, which unless the person in question has esoteric training, is adapted only for sensory-like perceptions. That's why all the higher experiences by necessity must pass through such filter and colored appropriately.

[Lou Gold]

As Sisyphus drives
philosophers to more words
and musicians to more notes,
the poet observes
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
All good,
unless you disagree.

[Soul_of_Shu]

As Sisyphus drives
philosophers to more words
and musicians to more notes,
the poet observes
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
All good,
unless you disagree.

Nice one ... some other poet you may have heard of was likewise inspired ...

“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name”