Bernardo's latest essay

[SanteriSatama]

Perhaps metamorphic "return" or "rebirth" may be a more appropriate, less imperialist-sounding term than "progression". Of course, return or rebirth does not entail abandoning science, logic and reason or agreeing with all indigenous practices.

Indigenous peoples and practices can be as insufferable as everybody else.

The mention of Songlines connects with the word we were searching for: Land.

[SanteriSatama]

Nature means everything non-human and non-cultural.

So, "human" and "culture" means here the superego-subject that holds "nature" as it's object?

We have direct experience of this mode with infancy (before "object permanence") and deep sleep. And if we hold to reincarnation, which I do, then we also have experience of past lives. Although it is very difficult for modern humans to remember the quality of such experiences, it is by no means impossible (unless one holds to non-metamorphic idealism or physicalism and therefore never finds any reason to remember them).

I don't quite follow. Infant and a sleeping adult is non-human?

"Experience of past lives"... good of you to bring this up, I've been looking for a way to talk about this. 'Ancestors' can mean also that, integral relation with our bloodlines/past lives. In my experience, meditating on that, what comes up first is the most violent and traumatic experiencing, and that method does not seem most helpful towards healing and integrating the Shadow stuff in our ancestral memory. The volume is just too much, especially in the ancestral memory of peoples who were colonized and assimilated into Europeans, made part of the "Fall" as you say. But as long as the hurt is pushed into the Shadow, it can fester and the mechanism of "passing the hurt" can continue. I don't have any good practical ideas on how to deal with this issue, maybe you can help?

[Lou Gold]

To me it does not matter what term is used as long as people remember the meaning of what is being referred to - an actual mode of instinctive consciousness that our ancestors experienced and was qualitatively different from more recent modes. That is the inevitable conclusion of the metamorphic progression that we also experience in our own lifetimes and even on a daily basis.

I'm curious as to whether or not the narrative called "metamorphic progression" is an assumed ascent/progress or if it is held open to the possibility of being a catastrophic fall/error?

An insightful book I recently read that is relevant to this issue is Songlines: The Power and Promise (https://www.amazon.com.au/Songlines-Pow ... 1760761184) It's co-written by an Indigenous Australian and a physicalist skeptic, who has nevertheless come to greatly appreciate indigenous memory practices and mnemonic techniques (which have similarities to those used in Ancient Greece and in the Renaissance).

Perhaps metamorphic "return" or "rebirth" may be a more appropriate, less imperialist-sounding term than "progression". Of course, return or rebirth does not entail abandoning science, logic and reason or agreeing with all indigenous practices.

Excellent book and, yes, I agree with the usefulness of finding less "imperialist" sounding terms. I believe that an important point is that people have been evolving and progressing along all the lines. Having spent many years in Brazil, I'm impressed with the syncretic folk traditions which mix European, African and Amazonian root content into something more of a both/and rather than an either/or and feel more peer-related than superior-inferior. But this not so easy to describe in what we called rational or analytical language.

[AshvinP]

Nature means everything non-human and non-cultural.

So, "human" and "culture" means here the superego-subject that holds "nature" as it's object?

We have direct experience of this mode with infancy (before "object permanence") and deep sleep. And if we hold to reincarnation, which I do, then we also have experience of past lives. Although it is very difficult for modern humans to remember the quality of such experiences, it is by no means impossible (unless one holds to non-metamorphic idealism or physicalism and therefore never finds any reason to remember them).

I don't quite follow. Infant and a sleeping adult is non-human?

"Experience of past lives"... good of you to bring this up, I've been looking for a way to talk about this. 'Ancestors' can mean also that, integral relation with our bloodlines/past lives. In my experience, meditating on that, what comes up first is the most violent and traumatic experiencing, and that method does not seem most helpful towards healing and integrating the Shadow stuff in our ancestral memory. The volume is just too much, especially in the ancestral memory of peoples who were colonized and assimilated into Europeans, made part of the "Fall" as you say. But as long as the hurt is pushed into the Shadow, it can fester and the mechanism of "passing the hurt" can continue. I don't have any good practical ideas on how to deal with this issue, maybe you can help?

Culture is what naturally happens when human souls sense themselves to be distinct from the soul of Nature. The infant and sleeping adult exist in modes which do not reflect and therefore do not experience any distinction. Eventually, in the modern era, that distinction becomes total division from Nature, which of course is not an accurate perspective. The most common mistake on the other "nature-loving" end, though, is to assume Nature is exhausted by what we perceive in physical forms and processes, rather than the specified spiritual forces bringing those forms forth. One cuts humanity off from Nature from 'below', failing to see how nature brings their physical existence forth, and the other cuts Nature off from higher spiritual beings 'above', failing to see how those beings bring forth nature.

re: past lives - no I definitely do not have any practical ideas about that. I have not experienced any such memories and I do not really expect to for a long time.

[DandelionSoul]

All that to say, I think all the "potential" and "no-thing" talk are just ways to obscure the fundamental paradox intrinsic to positing a Ground of all relational content that itself is neither relational nor content. I would accept a straightforward admission of the paradox like "Its being is nonbeing" or something like that -- at that point, it's posited as non-rational and simply not amenable to the sort of rational investigation Kastrup purports to be undertaking, such that all reason can do is gesture at its own horizon, beyond which is the Whereof We Cannot Speak. I have no problem with a straightforwardly mystical heart of rational discourse, but what I've gotten so far seem to be no more than rhetorical tricks employed to mask the fact that it is paradoxical, non-rational, mystical.

"Potential" (Greek: dynamis) and it's being as nonbeing go directly back to Sophist by Plato, and its discussion of Great Kinds: the interrelations of polarities same-different, moving-still and being-nonbeing. The treatise is as rational as Plato gets - and he could be also very mythical and mystical - a structural analysis of the interdependendent relations of a trinity of foundational polarities.

Heidegger spent loads of time and attention reading, thinking and contextualizing that culmination of Plato's inquiry into Forms. Heidegger's conclusion of his inquiry can be summarized: Aristotle made a mess of it. To make sense of European philosophy, Plato's original is very much worth reading.

The term 'dynamis' translates as potential, power (both Macht and Kraft), force, etc., and by extension also as Will and the en- in Aristotle's energeia. Which physicalism made an awful mess of.

To define 'rational' (English 'relational' is a direct translation of the Latin word) as something in the confines of just static system building by bivalent logic is daft. Plato's treatise moves on two levels: ontology and general linguistics, which are practically inseparable in in philosohical discourse. In that sense structuralism and post-structuralism are just repetition of Plato's relational-rational methodology in Sophist, with more resolution. In ontological conclusion 'dynamis' spells process philosophy. Plato's own fatal mistake was purely linguistic and grammatological: he states that nouns are primary to verbs. Which comparative linguistics falsifies. Aristotle's linguistic turn made Plato's grammatological mistake into ontology of 'substance metaphysics', as Aristotle is to blame for both of those words. And with bivalent "Aristotelean logic", the dynamics of European obsession of bivalent and static system building, and constantly trying to force those over process philosophical ontology, became the main current of European philosophy, as well as Spirit.

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I should really read Plato sometime, what with the whole Western tradition being his footnotes. I have read some poststructural thought (Judith Butler, John Caputo, Catherine Keller), but I haven't read a lot of the founding authors (Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze), nor those of structuralism. In process thought, I've read... several authors who elaborate on a process view and I'm basically sold on a process ontology. With all that said, I was definitely using "rational" in the narrower, "bivalent logic" sense that you mean, because I think that Kastrup attempts to build his case in just such a way -- using the tools of exactly that sort of bivalent reason. And that works for a while, but when it breaks down (as it clearly does) at the non/being of his M@L-At-Rest, he doesn't face that breakdown squarely, but papers over it with what seems to me like empty rhetoric. Then I see that rhetoric repeated here as though that rhetoric means something, but the whole semantic system being leveraged to make the initial case (what I misleadingly termed "reason" without any appropriate qualifiers as you were kind enough to point out) explicitly prevents it from meaning anything at all.

[SanteriSatama]

Culture is what naturally happens when human souls sense themselves to be distinct from the soul of Nature. The infant and sleeping adult exist in modes which do not reflect and therefore do not experience any distinction. Eventually, in the modern era, that distinction becomes total division from Nature, which of course is not an accurate perspective. The most common mistake on the other "nature-loving" end, though, is to assume Nature is exhausted by what we perceive in physical forms and processes, rather than the specified spiritual forces bringing those forms forth. One cuts humanity off from Nature from 'below', failing to see how nature brings their physical existence forth, and the other cuts Nature off from higher spiritual beings 'above', failing to see how those beings bring forth nature.

This is not exactly at odds with what I was trying to say. Luonto rises from the ground, from the below, in this bodily experiencing. Of course also infant and sleeping adult are also wearing their light etc. reflecting costumes. And when an infant comes to this world from mothers womb and opens its eyes for the first time, we can see in its first gaze the ancient wisdom of stars.

Culture - tilling of the Land - can become uncaring and unhealthy relation with Land, carving Land with iron and doing so beyond what is reasonable, the alienating "Fall". And also the near total cut between Above and Below. Which makes me think of the symboll of cross.

As the waveform is very foundational, or most foundational idea in this universe, a field of waveform does not need to be bivalent either-or, but various more-less degrees of Above and Below, weaving our variance. Thus the horizontal line does not signify only cut, but also the heart level, where Below and Above mingle and unite and are felt as pain and joy and other forms of love.

'Land' is a good old Germanic word. It is strong, it has power. From Fall to Rebirth means also and especially reconnecting with Land. Kissing the Ground with your every step, as a poet said.

[SanteriSatama]

I should really read Plato sometime, what with the whole Western tradition being his footnotes. I have read some poststructural thought (Judith Butler, John Caputo, Catherine Keller), but I haven't read a lot of the founding authors (Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze), nor those of structuralism. In process thought, I've read... several authors who elaborate on a process view and I'm basically sold on a process ontology. With all that said, I was definitely using "rational" in the narrower, "bivalent logic" sense that you mean, because I think that Kastrup attempts to build his case in just such a way -- using the tools of exactly that sort of bivalent reason. And that works for a while, but when it breaks down (as it clearly does) at the non/being of his M@L-At-Rest, he doesn't face that breakdown squarely, but papers over it with what seems to me like empty rhetoric. Then I see that rhetoric repeated here as though that rhetoric means something, but the whole semantic system being leveraged to make the initial case (what I misleadingly termed "reason" without any appropriate qualifiers as you were kind enough to point out) explicitly prevents it from meaning anything at all.

Process ontology... I went from Heraclitus to David Bohm in my teens. Who are your most influential names in that process? Whitehead?

To be more exact, Plato's Socratic method does use also bivalent logic also in the discussion of Great Kinds, but in more intuitive way than Aristotelean formalism of LNC and LEM. Plato's proof that non-being is a kind of being, is utililizing bivalent logic in the structural relating of foundationally qualitative polarities.

Heraclitus is also on the stepping stone between oral and litterary traditions. Derrida's text which left deepest impression was Derrida writing Plato who is writing about writing in writing. Plato's Pharmacy is the English title of the essay. It's very prescient in the similar mode as McLuhan's Global Village, in and of our new awareness of trasformative revolution of reading-writing in the age of Internet and massively parallel computation.

[DandelionSoul]

This is not exactly at odds with what I was trying to say. Luonto rises from the ground, from the below, in this bodily experiencing. Of course also infant and sleeping adult are also wearing their light etc. reflecting costumes. And when an infant comes to this world from mothers womb and opens its eyes for the first time, we can see in its first gaze the ancient wisdom of stars.

Culture - tilling of the Land - can become uncaring and unhealthy relation with Land, carving Land with iron and doing so beyond what is reasonable, the alienating "Fall". And also the near total cut between Above and Below. Which makes me think of the symboll of cross.

As the waveform is very foundational, or most foundational idea in this universe, a field of waveform does not need to be bivalent either-or, but various more-less degrees of Above and Below, weaving our variance. Thus the horizontal line does not signify only cut, but also the heart level, where Below and Above mingle and unite and are felt as pain and joy and other forms of love.

'Land' is a good old Germanic word. It is strong, it has power. From Fall to Rebirth means also and especially reconnecting with Land. Kissing the Ground with your every step, as a poet said.

I just want to say that when I can follow your thoughts (i.e. when you're not talking about math ), they tend to be very in line with my own.

Process ontology... I went from Heraclitus to David Bohm in my teens. Who are your most influential names in that process? Whitehead?

Whitehead is on my list, but I haven't been brave enough to approach him yet. I come from a theology background, so my ways into it were John Cobb and John Shelby Spong, but since then, Catherine Keller, Arran Gare, Freya Mathews, and Nicholas Rescher have been influences. And, I'm not sure if he counts exactly since he wrote before the advent of the moniker "Process Philosophy," but Hegel (particularly by way of Stephen Houlgate's work on him).

[SanteriSatama]

Whitehead is on my list, but I haven't been brave enough to approach him yet. I come from a theology background, so my ways into it were John Cobb and John Shelby Spong, but since then, Catherine Keller, Arran Gare, Freya Mathews, and Nicholas Rescher have been influences. And, I'm not sure if he counts exactly since he wrote before the advent of the moniker "Process Philosophy," but Hegel (particularly by way of Stephen Houlgate's work on him).

The only name I recognize is Hegel, and I agree that dialectics is inherent and foundational aspect of process philosophy. Going back to Plato's Akademeia, the founding idea was practice of oral dialogue in a way that can induce the AHA! moments of insight/realization/awakening/enlightenment, etc. terminology. Bohmian dialogue is basically same method, and also Zen stories etc. etc. refer to AHA! moments arising in the course of social interaction. Process philosophy is in this general sense very practically and empirically oriented, not antithetical to static system building, which happens as part of the process, but trying to avoid getting too stuck in any static picture. Also building of deterministic systems is an evolutionary process, and from what I hear e.g. from Lex Fridman's podcast, best minds in that field who excel in computation science, tend to be also very process aware also in the social and even spiritual contexts.

I tried once to open a book by Hegel, only to realize why most consider him way too difficult to read in the original. I'll leave that to Zizek, happy to learn from Youtube philosopher the essence of Zizek's fusion of Hegel, Marx and Lacan as an attempt to find a therapeutic recepy for the ideological alienation of the "liberal individual". Jung, Heidegger, Deleuze etc. are on the same quest from different, and in my view complementary perspectives, voices in a larger process of dialogue.

[Cleric K]

All good. Without this bend in the stream of discussion I would have remained unaware of the old discussion and your mention of Voodoo example, and your normal and common (for Europeans) but all the more deeply mistaken view of our inability to "let in thieves and burglars" in our temples of bodily awareness, where we have the power to transform forms and meanings, and necessity of giving power to fear. There's no such necessity especially in the Spirit World - or elsewhere for that matter.

Power to self-heal without strict separation of internal and external, me and other - is that not your quest also? Thank you for the opportunity to confirm from an empirical experience, yes we can.

We've been here many times already, especially with Lou before. These things are so elementary that the only reason they can't be understood is because there's no will to be understood. In other words, their potential understanding would cause some discomfort, which is being avoided.

As I've written in the mentioned post, we see the need for discernment, everywhere in nature. We would die in septic shock within minutes unless our cells weren't capable of letting only the beneficial substances in and expelling the harmful. Yet when it comes to our spiritual organism all of this is lightly disregarded. Yes, I'm on that quest (bold text). But I simply recognize the elementary facts which life teaches. No great insight is needed for this. In the airplane, in case of emergency, we're instructed first to place our own oxygen mask and then help the person next to us. This is not because of egoism but because otherwise we both can be dead. We can't be useful to ourselves and society unless we first develop certain skills, virtues, strengths.

The flattened spirituality of today deludes people to imagine that as soon as they experience ego disintegration and they feel themselves to be amorphic part of the whole, the secret of existence has been revealed. In practical life we know that for a certain apparatus to work as needed, the lenses must be clean, the joints must be lubricated and so on. The naively spiritual person imagines that they can eat whatever they want, drink whatever they want, breath, think, speak, do whatever they want and it doesn't matter, as long as they dribble in the amorphous waters of 'oneness'. That's why all talks about purity or work on self-perfection are laughed at. Well, just as a physical apparatus, our spiritual organism has its own 'lenses', 'pistons', 'joints'. When the lenses are scratched, blackened, cracked, out of focus, we see an amorphous mess and rejoice that we've embraced the whole world and there's no trace of our ego separation.

I've made this clear in other posts - evil, the shadow, will be reintegrated. But this we can accomplish only by developing our Light core. It's the radiant Sun that at the same time protects us from harmful elements (who can hurt the Sun? Anything thrown at the Sun evaporates instantly) but also transforms, vivifies, ennobles, illuminates everything. That's how evil is transformed. Any parent knows that they are one with their children. If they truly wish the best for them, they know when to be meek, when to be harsh, how to provide the best conditions for them to flourish. This is really what evil is - a misplaced good, a seed that has fallen in inappropriate soil, at the inappropriate time and grows to wreak havoc. We don't need to destroy the seed but only guide it to its lawful environment where it will do good service to the Whole. Whoever wants to transform evil by copulating with it, will test the law on their back. Please note that what is said here has universal meaning but where evil must first be transformed is within our own souls. And this means that we need to set to work on the transformation of our inner soil. We don't transform evil by merging with it in ecstatic orgy but by developing luminous thoughts, loving feelings and virtuous deeds. Only from this position we have the Wisdom that we need for discernment and the Love that gives us the sacrificial strength to secretly work for the transformation of evil, even if the fruits of this work may be borne only millennia from now.