Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Sep 18, 2021 7:20 pm
Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Sep 18, 2021 5:19 pm
We can never find the the Angel's consciousness
within our mind sphere, no matter how many false beliefs we dismantle.
Therein lies the challenge to know the difference: A real Angel, or a false belief?
Such is the power of belief that some will risk the death of the corporeal form for some random one found on the internet of beliefs. And once locked in to that extent, undoing it seems a huge challenge. And when has any locked-in believer ever freed another locked-in believer? All that can happen is to convince some other to exchange one prison for another. And while no doubt one may be less restrictive and/or less suffering prone than another, none of them are actual freedom. Actual freedom has nothing to do with beliefs. What it has to do with Angels, well, one may yet be won over.
This is quite pessimistic way to put it. In the above sense there's also no way to know if the Realization is real. It could be simply a false belief of a brain.
There's one common thing though - whatever we choose to believe of disbelieve, we're using our thinking.
Once we find what is truly certain - namely the self-evident thinking activity which precedes any philosophy - and we start out from there, we stand on different ground. Our thoughts are no longer attempts to build abstract picture of what reality is and how it works but they are direct testimonies of the cognitive experience itself. I won't repeat PoF here.
To go to the higher forms of cognition only the above kind of thinking is not enough. We also need the mentioned soul disposition polar to our ordinary intellectual. Clearly not everyone is willing to walk that path for himself but, as Ashvin wrote above, these things can be completely experienced in thinking and one can gain confidence by the clarity and soul strength that they provide. Even the nature of higher cognition can be very well understood by normal thinking. One simply has to use the full spectrum available to normal human consciousness.
"A real Angel, or a false belief?" This question contains a whole implicit judgment about what higher cognition is. If we have a
vision of a winged creature, then this question would be valid. Vision is visual-like perception. Could it be optical illusion? Malfunction of the eye? Malfunction of the brain? A dream? These are reasonable questions. It is completely possible that we can encounter angelic being through such visionary experience - this is how it has worked through all history. What exactly were the beings that the man from the video has experienced in his vision - I don't know. They could be from the rank of the Angels although I don't know what the blue color would signify.
But what I spoke of in the previous post has to do with the modes of higher cognition. I don't think people here really take the word 'higher' in its full significance. It's true that it is impossible to convey with words the actual nature of higher consciousness (this is true even for far more trivial things from ordinary consciousness, such as conveying a feeling that the other person has never felt) but it can be quite well approached through living heartfelt thinking.
Let's look at the transition from completely instinctive state of being to that of thinking man. The intellect changes the very nature of the spiritual experience of man in ways that simply lay outside of the sphere of reality for the animal-man. While living in instinct we feel drawn by pleasant things, repelled by painful and dimly will towards one and away from the other. The intellect adds a whole new layer of being where the spirit can ask questions about the nature of reality, to raise above the instincts which were previously his only driving force. Today we're at a point where we can question if the intellect is the final word of evolution, if it is the ultimate tool for knowing reality. It's completely arbitrary decision to consider the kind of consciousness presented by the intellect to be sufficient for the understanding of the deep nature of reality. It's quite reasonable to say "Just as the development of the intellect changed the instinctive state into something that allows consciousness to experience itself in a completely new way, to experience something that we call 'understanding', to have completely different needs, goals, why couldn't it be the case that the intellect is also only a specific stage of development? Why shouldn't it be possible that another form of cognitive activity awaits us, from whose perspective our intellectual state looks as dim and limited as the instinctive when seen by the intellect? A new form of activity that once again completely changes the way we find ourselves placed in reality, which opens up completely unsuspected forms of understanding revealing aspects of reality that simply don't register in the mechanical intellect and new goals that this higher activity can pursue."
This analogy can go a long way if we give it thoughtful consideration. But as the whole topic of this thread is - such a consideration is seen as pathological from the standpoint of those who have hegemonized the intellect and have chosen to believe that it represents the final and ultimate achievement of evolution.
Now we can consider this. Does it make any sense at all to speak of the intellectual state as some kind of 'false belief' or as an illusion? The tragic thing is that modern humans have been driven into exactly such ideas - this is how devastated the ability to think is today. It takes nothing but healthy and unprejudiced thinking in order to realize that it simply doesn't make any sense for the instinctive state to claim (if that was possible) that all those talks about a higher intellectual state are just instincts mistaken for something else. This is absurd of course, because when we rise from instinct to thinking, we find ourselves as a completely different being, something which simply doesn't exist in the lower state. The very activity of thinking is the mirror in which we recognize ourselves as that being. Similarly, when we transform our current thinking mirror, we find the reflection of another being which simply doesn't exist within the intellectual state, just as the ordinary thinking ego doesn't exist in the animalistic state. It is in this transformed state that we can know the consciousness of an Angel, just as an animal can know the consciousness of a human only if it rises to the intellectual state. When the higher state is experienced it comes with its own form of spiritual activity which in itself is the proof of its reality, just as thinking is the proof of its own reality.
Really, this analogy can go a really long way but who wants to give it the thoughtful consideration needed? For instance, Eugene's example that there are forces of fragmentation and unification implicitly imagines the same intellect everywhere but either in more individuated or more unified form. This completely misses the true meaning of 'higher'. If we translate this into our analogy it will sound like "There are forces responsible for instinctive life and other that lead to the intellectual and even higher. Yet every being is free to go in whatever direction it wants." But this doesn't make sense. What would be the point of going from the intellectual state back to the instinctive if after this in the instinctive there wouldn't be any possibility to even have the awareness that a thinking ego has decided to succumb into an animalistic state. Just as time can be experienced to flow only in a direction in which memory integrates, so consciousness can experience knowingly only its evolution, since every higher stage puts into perspective the previous. Here an animal might say "But I don't want to evolve. I want to experience endlessly the dim willing towards what gives me pleasure and away from what hurts me". And this is possible - this is what we witness today - people don't want to evolve and find all kinds of clever arguments for it (like that the idea of a state higher than the intellect is sectarian).
