How is there a world that remains when not being perceived?

[Eugene I]

I was talking about causality purely within the area of physics and materialism - see Causality (physics)

[dkpstarkey]

The reason questions like this come up is, to me, the incompleteness of all the descriptions of idealism (analytical or otherwise) we seem to be able to come up with. We can't describe the unfathomable depths of the soul, nor the limits of our perceptions that tell us everything in such a literal mode. Getting beyond that literalism is perhaps the greatest task, the most comprehensive goal of idealism.

[Lou Gold]

The problem is that ontology requires one impossible-to-explain miracle, whereas reality is probably comprised of many unexplainable miracles.

VIVA! THE GREATER MIRACULOUS VIVA!

[dkpstarkey]

If you are a solipsist m@l separates between object and subject, if you are an idealist it doesn't.
I do not know if the word consciousness is the word I would use for m@l since our consciousness experiences reality not only through thought and will, but also through senses, sight hearing and so on. We have no idea how M@L experiences reality and hence the contradictory statements between idealists themselves regarding its nature

If you've read BK's Decoding Jung... you may wonder about Jung's use of Psyche (in the fullest sense) being possibly equivalent to M@L. There are three segments of the full spectrum of Psyche for Jung, with the individual psyche in the middle. To me, this would be, if BK would have it so, a maturation of M@L, given a more fully-realized treatment in the form of Jung's Psyche.

Then the question is, would BK have it so? How can he not have been moved by this book, himself?

[AshvinP]

If you are a solipsist m@l separates between object and subject, if you are an idealist it doesn't.
I do not know if the word consciousness is the word I would use for m@l since our consciousness experiences reality not only through thought and will, but also through senses, sight hearing and so on. We have no idea how M@L experiences reality and hence the contradictory statements between idealists themselves regarding its nature

If you've read BK's Decoding Jung... you may wonder about Jung's use of Psyche (in the fullest sense) being possibly equivalent to M@L. There are three segments of the full spectrum of Psyche for Jung, with the individual psyche in the middle. To me, this would be, if BK would have it so, a maturation of M@L, given a more fully-realized treatment in the form of Jung's Psyche.

Then the question is, would BK have it so? How can he not have been moved by this work, himself?

I think I agree if I am understanding correctly. Jung famously remarked that he would never call himself "a Jungian". Which I take to mean that he was focused on exploring the psyche in a way that went far beyond academic and clinical psychology, down into the roots of philosophy and metaphysics and mystical thought, down into the soul of the entire cosmos. BK recognizes that in his new book on Jung and does an excellent job of presenting his metaphysical and spiritual orientation. It truly blew my expectations out of the water.

So I think BK understands Jung deeply, certainly more deeply than myself, even though I have been reading a lot of Jung in the last few years and especially the last year. But BK is also trying to keep the M@L framework as analytical as possible for his audience. He does not seem very eager to imaginatively expand on the concept too much, bringing a finer resolution to it like a Jung or a Steiner did. Perhaps because he prefers that people view his own work through a thoroughly 'Eastern' philosophical lens rather than a Western one, and he knows it could rather easily push any serious academic types away from his work.

It's a very tough landscape to negotiate the more popular one gets... I know I would not be up for the task myself. But maybe that's what we are here for, to expand on his ideas in a way that he simply cannot right now. To take BK's model, to absorb it's contents and make it more concrete within ourselves. And who knows, maybe one day soon a BK or, more likely, a collaboration of thinkers including BK (i.e. Essentia Foundation) will rise to the status of a Jung, except not being as dependent on mainstream institutional spheres as Jung, which did seem to inhibit him from relatively 'wilder' speculations until much later in life. Then they can truly let loose and see what happens.

[Jim Cross]

That is exactly the point of the Eastern non-dual philosophy of consciousness (Advaitic/Buddhist). The subject/object distinction is only a concept, a hypothesis, a model. We habitually use it in our everyday life as a simplistic scheme to model or explain the patterns of phenomena, but we have no evidence whatsoever that it also applies to the reality on the metaphysical level and that it corresponds to any metaphysical realities. In idealism we have to give up on our fabricated concept of subject/object distinction just like we have to give up on our concept of absolute space and time in relativity physics.

Nope. Actually you haven't and that is exactly my point. As long as you are talking about mind/consciousness you are still wedded to duality. If there is only one thing, then it can't be mind because mind is a concept (your word) that only makes sense in a framework of duality. As long as you think that saying reality is mind or consciousness is a meaningful statement, as long as think that the distinction between materialism and idealism is anyway meaningful, you are attached to duality.

[Lou Gold]

Nope. Actually you haven't and that is exactly my point. As long as you are talking about mind/consciousness you are still wedded to duality. If there is only one thing, then it can't be mind because mind is a concept (your word) that only makes sense in a framework of duality.

Yup and the same is true for what you just said based on concepts (words) from duality. There are no rules, including this one. Insight can be marketed either by duality or non-duality, which are both myths. So be still and _______

[SanteriSatama]

Nope. Actually you haven't and that is exactly my point. As long as you are talking about mind/consciousness you are still wedded to duality. If there is only one thing, then it can't be mind because mind is a concept (your word) that only makes sense in a framework of duality. As long as you think that saying reality is mind or consciousness is a meaningful statement, as long as think that the distinction between materialism and idealism is anyway meaningful, you are attached to duality.

These are superficial problems of European language.

1) In English etc. subject-object division arises grammatically in each sentence. In Finnish we can speak also asubjectively, e.g. 'Ollaan mieltä/tajuntaa.'
The meaning is roughly the following: Being indefinitely inclusively participates in(to) mind/awareness.


2) The interval of a gliding scale between co-dependent concept pair, often referred as 'polarity', is not a duality in the philosophical sense.

[Eugene I]

Nope. Actually you haven't and that is exactly my point. As long as you are talking about mind/consciousness you are still wedded to duality. If there is only one thing, then it can't be mind because mind is a concept (your word) that only makes sense in a framework of duality. As long as you think that saying reality is mind or consciousness is a meaningful statement, as long as think that the distinction between materialism and idealism is anyway meaningful, you are attached to duality.

Jim, you have a wrong understanding of duality/non-duality. The assumption that there is no duality on the ontological level does not negate the fact that there is a diversity of forms, including a diversity of thoughts and their meanings. In fact, materialism is no different in that respect: in materialistic paradigm everything is made of fundamentally the same material "substance" (because if there would be multiple fundamental substances that have nothing in common, they could not interact with each other), yet, there is a diversity of material forms within a universe made of the single substance. Every particle has its EM and other fields and its wave function spreading to the whole universe, so there are essentially no boundaries between objects on the ontological level, the whole universe is a single material "mess", united in its ontologically fundamental substance, yet diverse in its forms. Therefore it is in principle impossible to define any boundaries between material "objects", all the boundaries we define are only imprecise mental abstractions. Where do you find subjects or objects in such universe if all divisions into subjects and objects are only our mentally fabricated abstractions? Such abstractions are still practically useful, yet they are ontologically irrelevant and do not represent any realities. Idealism is no different in that respect, just substitute "consciousness" in place of "material" substance, and we arrive at the same diversity of forms unfolding within a single ontic fundamental of consciousness. In each of these metaphysical schemes there is a variety of forms but no ontological duality because everything is fundamentally the same "substance" (whether it is matter or consciousness). A presence of the variety of forms does not lead to duality, unless we imagine in our thoughts that the forms represent some metaphysically separate entities ("subjects" and "objects"), so duality only exists in our imagination.

There is yet one important difference between materialism and idealism: in materialism we have no way to directly experience matter as the ontological substance of the universe, so for us matter always remains a mental abstraction. In idealism we pose that the content of our direct conscious experience, including the awareness/experiencing itself and the forms that are experienced, is exactly the substance of the universe - the consciousness. In idealism we only assume the existence of ontic fundamentals that we directly experience in our conscious experience, so we do not need any abstractions about ontological fundamentals. Idealists are not solipsists and they still assume the existence of other individuated minds (or more exactly, other individuated fields of conscious experience), including the MAL in some versions of idealism, however, in that assumption we do not assume the existence of any additional fundamental realities different from the reality of our direct conscious experience, we simply extrapolate our direct experience to other minds and assume that other minds represent qualitative conscious experience of the same "kind" of awareness/experiencing of qualia. Based on that, the concept of "mind" does not require a duality (if duality is understood as the existence of multiple entities on the ontological level, but not as the existence of the diversity of forms), the "mind"/"consciousness" is simply an abstracted linguistic pointer to the experiential fact of the presence of our direct aware conscious experience here and now.

[dkpstarkey]

I think I agree if I am understanding correctly. Jung famously remarked that he would never call himself "a Jungian". Which I take to mean that he was focused on exploring the psyche in a way that went far beyond academic and clinical psychology, down into the roots of philosophy and metaphysics and mystical thought, down into the soul of the entire cosmos. BK recognizes that in his new book on Jung and does an excellent job of presenting his metaphysical and spiritual orientation. It truly blew my expectations out of the water.

So I think BK understands Jung deeply, certainly more deeply than myself, even though I have been reading a lot of Jung in the last few years and especially the last year. But BK is also trying to keep the M@L framework as analytical as possible for his audience. He does not seem very eager to imaginatively expand on the concept too much, bringing a finer resolution to it like a Jung or a Steiner did. Perhaps because he prefers that people view his own work through a thoroughly 'Eastern' philosophical lens rather than a Western one, and he knows it could rather easily push any serious academic types away from his work.

I do see what you mean about the M@L framework being more tolerable for some audiences. The most unsatisfying thing about M@L for me is its lack of symbolic content; it's almost a perfectly empty symbol. This is in sharp contrast to Jung's descriptions of psyche, which acknowledge the richly symbolic character of its native language. So the new Jung book is perhaps one way of bridging that rather large gap in the analytical narrative.

And yes, I heartily agree that BK leaves a great deal open for experimentation and elaboration in a forum such as this one. Idealism without a full accounting of psyche is strangely unsatisfying. Endless elaborations on the theme of non-duality do not accomplish that for me, despite the depth of knowledge that is evident in them.