Discussion pertaining to old MS forum thread.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Realizing in retrospect that the link I posted in the Middle Way Logic topic, even though somewhat related, has diverted the discussion away from the specific article written by Peter Jones, I'm asking that any further references to the old MS forum thread be carried on here, and I will attempt to move relevant comments over, starting with the comment containing the link to that thread ...

Post by Soul_of_Shu » Fri Jul 30, 2021 8:04 am

Regarding Peter Jones who has contributed to this forum, and more so in its previous incarnation, albeit very rarely ever since this thread from 2017, wherein he and Scott (aka jse...@gmail.com), and others, could not come to terms on Nagarjuna, mumorphism, The Heart Sutra, Rupert Spira, or much else, resulting in PJ deciding to leave the forum. I wonder if it might now be anymore resolvable since then?
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Post by AshvinP » Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:46 am

I browsed that discussion thread - Scott's points were spot on as usual. This one is very important to remember:
Scott wrote:
It is philosophically important because it is important in terms of practice. I believe that is Sri Aurobindo's take on it. I know it is Rudolf Steiner's take on it, as he says mystical practices of a couple thousand years ago, though appropriate then, are not appropriate now. (Don't ask me to detail this -- I am the last person to go to for details on practices, then or now). The reason for the difference between then and now being that human consciousness has evolved.

My essay on mythology and the Gita also spoke of this some - all mythic-spiritual truths are relational. When Krishna said to Arjuna, "I am in all, but not all in me", it was true then for that mythic perspective, but not true in the same way it is now after the Christ impulse incarnated in the world. Here, "evolution of consciousness" is synonymous with "metamorphoses of the Spirit". The Gita itself is a metamorphosed form of three older traditions (Vedic, Sankhya, and Yogic) in One, a Tri-Unity of those spiritual perspectives. So many things are missed when we impose modern age "absolutism", i.e. spatiotemporal rigidity of conceptual thought, onto ancient philosophy-spirituality. It is very difficult for modern intellect to keep that in mind when reading mythic text (and corresponding philosophical texts) and perceiving mythic images, so we must do it anew each time until it becomes a habit. To relate this to BK's idealism, let's look at his comment from that thread:

BK wrote:
The thing is this: to know anything by direct experience while being a human being automatically includes the capacities entailed by being a human being. If a human being is capable of self-reflective awareness, then the direct experience of a human being doing self-inquiry automatically entails self-reflective awareness. Rupert's method is entirely based on direct experience, which is its strength. But then to say what consciousness is or isn't outside of being human becomes very tricky because of the very method of inquiry used. I am totally with Rupert that the most fundamental, pollution-free, ego-free state of human consciousness is pure self-awareness. But I think extrapolating that realization beyond being human is necessarily a question of philosophy, i.e. of extrapolation of direct experience by the use of reason. Cheers, B.

Everything he says is true about the human direct experience, but he still ends up at the faulty bolded conclusion. That is precisely because he limits "direct experience" to what only previous humans were capable of directly experiencing, or what he assumes they were capable of experiencing (I presume he does not really believe there was ancient clairvoyance of spiritual realm, for ex.). We don't need to extrapolate "beyond being human", rather we need expand the human experience-perspective beyond what it is now, back to what it once was but also with the benefit of hard-won clear consciousness through modern scientific era. These limitations of experience are our own spiritual shortcomings imposed on the world of Maya, not anything inherent to the structure of Reality itself.
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Post by AshvinP » Fri Jul 30, 2021 10:59 am

And what happened to donsa...@gmail.com? He seems spot on as well!
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Post by Soul_of_Shu » Fri Jul 30, 2021 11:26 am

That would be Don Salmon who also contributed a lot in the early days of the old MS forum, but at some point, for reasons unknown, eventually faded away—although I suspect like many other bright, insightful contributors who show up now and then, and seem very keen on participating while it lasts, must eventually prioritize other commitments, relationships, activities, with which continuous forum activity is not conducive. Then again, maybe he just became bored of it all, as there is a tendency for it to become greatly repetitive, in the recycling of the same themes over and over again, without evolving much beyond that, which is the very concern you are attempting to address. At least one hopes that their disappearance is not for some reason more fatal.
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Post by Ben Iscatus » Fri Jul 30, 2021 11:38 am

Ashvin, sometimes I think you're not quite of this world. The average man is no more advanced than he ever was. Civilisation appears to have made progress, but progress is just a modern myth. When the Dark Ages return (as they always do), there will be no sense of any spiritual advance. What's more, the Dark Age to come will likely be the longest and darkest ever, as the whole planet will be affected - the bigger the civilisation, the harder it falls. Our Shadow is coming up behind us. Only New Agers think there will be a soft landing.

The Lost Boy

This holiday has gone on long enough -
What on earth do you think you’re playing at?
Well, yes, of course you’re “feeling a bit rough”,
You’ve been behaving like a headless twat -

Look at the state of you! “Just having fun”,
“Because you can” –that’s why you’re doing this?
Don’t you realise the damage you’ve done?
I’m sick to death of you taking the piss -

Take off those mirrorshades and look around,
Come on - OK, so the light hurts your eyes –
So it should, with all this crap on the ground,
Condoms, cans in vomit, half-eaten fries,

You were going to get back on those jet-skis
Pretending all they ever leave behind
Is a gleaming white wake, weren’t you? P-lease!
Are you out of your tiny little mind?

Did you think you had no –come on, eyes wide!-
Shadow? It was there, even at mid-day,
A hunched Caliban always at your side
Like a pit-bull on a lead, small, but hey,

I didn’t sew it on for you and, no,
You didn’t dump it in your room, so look
Behind you now, the sun is getting low,
It’s much more menacing than Captain Hook,

Bigger than the Hound of the Baskervilles,
It’s a planet-destroying stilt-walker
Of a shadow, a Kurtz-creature that kills
Without even knowing it, a stalker

About to rear up over all of us,
So I think it’s time you turned to face it
Instead of skulking back on that airbus -
It’s time you learned to deal with your own shit,

Which is why I’ve cancelled your flight, young man,
No more dreaming you can jet out of this
Or flap above it all like Peter Pan
Or whizz off like the doctor in his Tardis

Or shout, “To Infinity and Beyond”
Like some Buzz-Lightyear-TV-physicist
Telling you the universe is a blonde
Whose legs go on forever and she exists

Purely for you to go on chasing her -
Wake up! The aborigines dreamed too
For forty thousand years no white-fella
Would come with A-bomb tests or grog or flu,

But here you are, salt spray still on your skin
And already well past your dream-by date,
So if I were you, I’d wipe off that grin,
It disrespects your future children’s fate,

It’s time you understood the world is round,
That even the most beautiful rainbow
Curves dutifully back down to ground
And what a drag, it’s Kansas down below,

Because that’s what’s over the horizon,
All that junk you left in your own backyard -
You’ve rediscovered your own arse, my son,
The source of your unfettered self-regard,

So it’s mop and bucket time, and don’t think
For a minute I’m going to bail you out,
I’m warning you, you’ve brought me to the brink,
My reserves are too low, be in no doubt,

However you’re getting home, I can’t pay.
My preference would be for you to row,
Then you could pick up dead fish on the way,
The ones you killed, and eat them as you go,

Or you could sail back off the tourist route
To check out any oil spill that’s on view,
Snorkelling down, if thick black slicks don’t suit,
To catch a bleached white coral reef or two.

The clock’s stopped ticking, son, alarm bells ring,
The croc’s grown bold enough to come ashore.
You can’t escape the final reckoning:
This planet’s not your playground anymore.
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Post by AshvinP » Fri Jul 30, 2021 3:54 pm

The point I made in the quote above was simple, Ben. We have a scientific mode of consciousness now that ancient people did not have. Do you dispute that?

Besides that, your extreme pessimism is caused by the very aspect of the modern age you are critiquing. For one thing, modern people call that period the "Dark Ages" because they are dark from our modern perspective - we cannot understand the immense Wisdom that permeated Western culture at that time because we are so rationalistic and materialistic. Most people don't even know that Wisdom exists, even though much of it is easily accessible to people with computers and internet. Secondly, modern civilization is heading for a hard landing (which I never disputed or claimed otherwise, in any essay or post, in fact I always try to convey a sense of urgency in these matters), precisely because it has lost sight of the spiritual reality behind the world we see. In that sense the materialists are correct, because the Spirit (Psyche) is nowhere to be found in the phenomenal world. But as I said above and in Gita mythology essay - "These limitations of experience are our own spiritual shortcomings imposed on the world of Maya, not anything inherent to the structure of Reality itself." We need to stop thinking of ourselves as passive and helpless observers in the world, which only leads to nihilistic apathy, because nothing could be further from the truth.

Ashvin wrote:
"To put forth full force of Soul in thy own soul!" - this verse reveals the archetypal image of spiritual freedom. It advises the soul to resist dogmatism in all its forms. What is being revealed by Krishna cannot be logically absorbed by Arjuna as a machine takes inputs and translates them directly to outputs. Rather, Arjuna must make the advice his own by evolving the meaning of its inner necessity through the higher levels of his thinking Spirit. It is this process by which imaginative traditions are metamorphosed into inspired revelations, and inspired revelations into true intuitive knowledge of the spiritual. This transition is not guaranteed for any individual soul today - it does not proceed as assuredly as the speaking and abstract reasoning adult human does from the walking and babbling infant. It takes a level of sustained cultivation and practice which, unfortunately, many people in the modern age find it extremely difficult to participate in. That is not for lack of time, however, or even lack of ability, but mostly for lack of knowing such participation is even an option. Krishna instructs Arjuna in this Wisdom which is ever-accessible to all human souls.
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Post by Eugene I » Fri Jul 30, 2021 2:27 pm

BK wrote:
The thing is this: to know anything by direct experience while being a human being automatically includes the capacities entailed by being a human being. If a human being is capable of self-reflective awareness, then the direct experience of a human being doing self-inquiry automatically entails self-reflective awareness. Rupert's method is entirely based on direct experience, which is its strength. But then to say what consciousness is or isn't outside of being human becomes very tricky because of the very method of inquiry used. I am totally with Rupert that the most fundamental, pollution-free, ego-free state of human consciousness is pure self-awareness. But I think extrapolating that realization beyond being human is necessarily a question of philosophy, i.e. of extrapolation of direct experience by the use of reason. Cheers, B.

My comments on that:
- Extrapolation of our first person direct experience beyond the limits of own personal experience is already an extrapolation by reason. In other words, the only way to break from solipsism it to extrapolate by reason and assume an (unprovable) hypotheses that there exist other conscious experiences of other humans that are similar to our own conscious experience. In other words, if BK wants to stay abstinent from extrapolations by reason, then he should have remained a solipsist.
- One of the most distinct and mysterious characteristics of our first-person experience is that it is all "illuminated" by awareness (conscious experiencing). Notice that is different from self-awareness ( which is a very common confusion) - it is not the awareness of "I am", it is simply the fact of the experiential presence of all conscious phenomena. The conscious phenomena can not exist in any other way - they are either present or not. In other words, there can either be awareness, or not. There can not be more or less awareness, or awareness in any other different way. At the same time, the self-awareness can be different, it can be more or less present, can be more or less developed, and presumably there may be different kinds of self-awareness in non-human beings. So I think BK is confusing the Rupert's "awareness" with self-awareness, and so they are simply talking about different phenomena. With regard to the self-awareness, BK is absolutely right - we can not be certain that non-human beings experience self-awareness in the same way we do. However, with regard to the Rupert's meaning of awareness, non-human beings can not be "aware" in any other way - they either have conscious phenomena present/experienced in their consciousness or not.
- In addition, it's the very premise of idealism to parsimoniously assume that there is nothing else existing apart from conscious experiences (experiences of awareness). So, to assume that there are some non-human beings that have a different "kind" of the way to experience is already a break from idealism.
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Post by AshvinP » Fri Jul 30, 2021 4:16 pm

Eugene ... BK is not saying we must abstain from those extrapolations, but rather it is a "question of philosophy", which I presume to mean it is not a question for science, because the latter must rely on direct experience.

I disagree the existence of conscious activity apart from our own (in limited ego-state) is "unprovable" - for one, our direct experience suggests that this is true every single time we interact with others via feeling-and-thinking communication, sympathy, empathy, etc. We need to add an assumption of some sort of experiential-cognitive boundary to eliminate that given of experience. Second, if we do not arbitrarily limit human cognition, then it is quite possible for intuitive cognition to directly experience the perspective of others. Third, even our imaginative cognition can give us shared experience of the perspective of those who produced the images we are contemplating. Everyone experiences this to some extent when they are asleep and dreaming, but those shared images are not experienced clearly and fade quickly without much further spiritual training.
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[Eugene I]

Ah, ok, so here is one more:

Short and sweet article about the illogic that metaphysical extremes, such as being vs. non-being, mind vs matter etc. form valid pairs of contradiction.

I wonder, at the very moment of making such statement, if Peter was at the same time aware and non-aware of making this statement

[SanteriSatama]

Ah, ok, so here is one more:

Short and sweet article about the illogic that metaphysical extremes, such as being vs. non-being, mind vs matter etc. form valid pairs of contradiction.

I wonder, at the very moment of making such statement, if Peter was at the same time aware and non-aware of making this statement

Can we affirm as absolute truth that Peter exists, and assign properties 'aware' and 'non-aware' to inherent existence of Peter?

[Lysander]

I've never had any mystical experience, either with drugs or via meditation. But I have a spiritual contentedness nonetheless which pertains to this discussion. The purest awakening moment I've had is I once saw a photograph of a lizard sunbathing on a rock in the desert. And the thought came: "So long as that lizard exists. I'll be happy." (not happy in a crude way but an ontological contentedness). Then I thought: "But it's not only this lizard. As long as life continues, I will be happy." Then I thought again: "As long existence continues, I will be happy." In other words, as long as Reality doesn't disappear entirely upon my death, I will be happy. In reflecting on those thoughts, I think it was an identification with Reality or Existence itself over my "self".

This anecdote relates to Rupert Spira, whom I am very familiar with him, Francis and BK, because I associate Rupert's "aware knowing" with the intuition of the supra-personal reality which isn't dependent on being actively intuited. There is certainly a self-aware self-awareness with minimal (or close to zero) objects. And within this space, Rupert says, is the totality of experience that we call life and what we call being human. But this is grounded - and I know this is a bold statement - in a beyond to our self-aware self-awareness. [I'm aware if I say that its not-knowable then how to defend it exists. I suppose its irrational faith in anti-solipsism. It's from the heart, a living impulse like love or experience of beauty.]

To me, this beyond is only related to by faith. BK explains in More Than Allegory, if I remember correctly, that faith is a minimal degree of emotional investment to test a hypothesis. In spiritual practice, that means faith in the doctrine, the path, the community, the teachers, and so on in order to experientally discover its meanings, its transformations, etc. Then as more experience, if the faith was sincere, reveals more truths and more wisdom to you, then faith becomes less and less and it gets replaced by first-hand knowing. But there is a point, mentioned in Buddhism, which is most of my background, when "everything cognizeable" (understood as a category and "seen all at once", as J. Krishnamurti would say, "the entire tree of human thought") has been exhausted in perception, imagination, and so on. Whatever is cognizeable is an object. Then there is an emptiness - which reminds us of faith - where the ground is necessarily beyond conceptual preposition and this being understood is let-go because its by definition beyond and thus futile.

Now, I am under no illusion that you can read a few paragraphs and become enlightened or something. All of the impulses that drive this instinctual questioning must be lived with us as open questions and put to the test through the fire of experience in our lives. And the answers that arrive to us yield augmentations to those impulses and more questions and so on, and this seems like the path of wisdom to me. And I think its the same with spirituality, we have to take our realizations and paradoxically live with them in the world back-and-forth, back-and-forth.

The BK part about the limitations of being a human being are related because it affirms this threshold of cognizeability (I forgot the Pali and Sanskrit words). Faith never promises to take us to Absolute Knowledge of Everything, but only to absolute fulfillment of our needs (e.g. intellectual and spiritual), some kind of pure nourishment for the humble. And these needs are met in-process of knowing, being and relating rather than in an imagined end state of conclusive attainment. My gripe with the idea of enlightenment is that its often portrayed - as Verveake put it "having versus being" - on this imagined end state, and that seems totally counter-intuitive with our other experiences.

FWIW, I'm also sympathetic to the theories of cyclic time and that we're living in a Kali Yuga or end times, but that doesn't affect ontology. I am sympathetic to the idea that it affects the spiritual path because of so many corruptions in the environment and loss of credible religious (i.e. mystic) authorities, but I'm not so confident as to be able to argue those points.

[Ben Iscatus]

The point I made in the quote above was simple, Ben. We have a scientific mode of consciousness now that ancient people did not have. Do you dispute that?

I don't know what "scientific mode of consciousness" means. Nor would 99% of the population, I suspect. In the case of another Dark Age, any gains you think have been made would be lost or dormant. By "Dark Age", I imply privation, hardship, difficulty in surviving and no time or energy for studying a "scientific mode of consciousness".

Besides that, your extreme pessimism is caused by the very aspect of the modern age you are critiquing. For one thing, modern people call that period the "Dark Ages" because they are dark from our modern perspective

Far from extreme pessimism, it is simple realism. Ours is a planet of finite resources which are being used and abused. That is not going to stop until a collapse. Do you dispute that? On what realistic basis?

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as passive and helpless observers in the world, which only leads to nihilistic apathy, because nothing could be further from the truth.

This is New Age BS and blind hubris. Of course we are helpless! We can't control the direction of our culture or the rise and fall of civilisations.

[AshvinP]

The point I made in the quote above was simple, Ben. We have a scientific mode of consciousness now that ancient people did not have. Do you dispute that?

I don't know what "scientific mode of consciousness" means. Nor would 99% of the population, I suspect. In the case of another Dark Age, any gains you think have been made would be lost or dormant. By "Dark Age", I imply privation, hardship, difficulty in surviving and no time or energy for studying a "scientific mode of consciousness".

Besides that, your extreme pessimism is caused by the very aspect of the modern age you are critiquing. For one thing, modern people call that period the "Dark Ages" because they are dark from our modern perspective

Far from extreme pessimism, it is simple realism. Ours is a planet of finite resources which are being used and abused. That is not going to stop until a collapse. Do you dispute that? On what realistic basis?

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as passive and helpless observers in the world, which only leads to nihilistic apathy, because nothing could be further from the truth.

This is New Age BS and blind hubris. Of course we are helpless! We can't control the direction of our culture or the rise and fall of civilisations.

Ben,

I am going to ignore the sneering tone in your last comment, but I do expect going forward a dialogue fitting to a metaphysical forum for philosophical discussion rather than an American political convention. We need reasoned arguments, not trite insults and declarations.

By "scientific mode of consciousness", I mean that mode of perceiving and cognizing the world which has allowed the last 500 years of unparalleled technological development, and related developments in philosophy, art, etc. We should not approach these developments with sympathy or antipathy if we want to truly understand them. It is not something we study, it is a quality of consciousness we all harbor within ourselves in the modern world by virtue of being human. That is a conclusion which stems directly from idealism, although far too many idealists fail to notice it. If you disagree, then I am curious as to what you think made all of that scientific-technological development possible?

Yes, I dispute the absolute certainty of your framing and its corresponding apathy - the spiritual realm from which we are draw our existence and strength is not made up of "finite resources". Besides that, the assertion is too low resolution to be meaningful - what does "privation", "hardship", "collapse", etc. entail for you? Clearly there has been no time in human history where some level of those things were absent for very long, and I think its naïve to assume they will be going forward. Yet if we cannot even describe the details of how such things will play out, then I think our time is much better spent contemplating what we can do to transform ourselves and make a positive practical difference in our own lives, and hopefully the life of others as well.

[Ben Iscatus]

I am going to ignore the sneering tone in your last comment

You think you're clever, don't you? First, there was no sneering tone. Second, far from ignoring my purported tone, by mentioning it, you actually suggest it for the purpose of demeaning what I said. I think you're not spiritually advanced, Ashvin.

[AshvinP]

I am going to ignore the sneering tone in your last comment

You think you're clever, don't you? First, there was no sneering tone. Second, far from ignoring my purported tone, by mentioning it, you actually suggest it for the purpose of demeaning what I said. I think you're not spiritually advanced, Ashvin.

"New age BS and blind hubris" is not sneering tone? At the very least its completely inappropriate for any genuine philosophical dialogue, more like the typical response elicited when someone says "climate change is not real" or "climate change is going to destroy us all in 10 years". I was hoping to nip that in the bud, but I guess you have no interest in non-dogmatic discussion.

[Soul_of_Shu]

"New age BS and blind hubris" is not sneering tone? At the very least its completely inappropriate for any genuine philosophical dialogue, more like the typical response elicited when someone says "climate change is not real" or "climate change is going to destroy us all in 10 years". I was hoping to nip that in the bud, but I guess you have no interest in non-dogmatic discussion.

Apparently you're in good company Ashvin, for I once brought up BK's ideas in another philosophy forum, only to have it dismissed as new age BS

[Ben Iscatus]

"New age BS and blind hubris" is not sneering tone?

No, it's not. The suggestion that we are in control of our destiny is just ridiculous and deserves to be called out. I suggest you read the latest post by John Michael Greer.
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-future-is-a-landscape/