Eugene I wrote: ↑Tue Nov 23, 2021 12:59 am
And you are right about formless and forms - we've been just using different terminology pointing to the same reality all along. I was not sure what you were referring to with the word "Idea", thanks for clarifying. I think the challenge of what we are doing here is to connect the words other people are using with the actual experiential realities that they can experience from 1-st person perspective, and this is what most of the confusion is coming from.
Thank you Eugene. It's a great joy to feel the synchronization of ideas. It is indeed the challenge of our times that it is no longer a question to synchronize the same abstract ideas that are only representations of the supposed world-in-itself, but instead to realize that it is our first person perspectives that must be understood. Relativity, QBism, Rovelli's interpretation, all gradually lead towards this in their abstract ways. The difficulty is that we need to be able to speak clearly about the inner realm, and this is still a matter of prejudice in the secular world, where the inner world is considered intimate and private affair, where we can at most allow some psychologist to have a glimpse, similarly to the way we allow only doctors to examine some parts of our bodies.
Things really begin to gain momentum when we are open for the possibility that the formless is actually
lawful. Lawful not in the way the physicist considers matter to be lawful and the meaning of the laws to exist only in the illusion of consciousness, but lawfulness which is
in itself meaning. The formless is formless only in relation to our intellectual thoughts which are condensed symbols from the dimension of meaning. We can borrow also Bohm's terminology who speaks of
implicit and explicit order. In the GR metaphor I meant the curvature of meaning precisely as the
implicit order of the formless. It is here that opinions may bifurcate. For example, for Adur the implicit order is only the Absolute Nothingness. Human-like egos simply emerge from it ready-made and begin to shape the explicit order (the world content) through their imaginations synchronized by the principle of consistency. As said in a previous post, we can convince ourselves that even our own knowledge, memories, desires, hopes, fears and so on, are experienced only through the tiniest aperture at any single moment. All of these can be considered to belong to the implicit order, the formless, the curvature of meaning. Whether we like it or not, our states of being continually flow along the geodesics of this implicit order. The battle for the souls today is to awaken to the fact that in Thinking we have the only place where we know exactly how the implicit order becomes explicit. In thinking we feel as the active engineers of the curvature gradient which condenses meaning from the implicit order into explicit thought-phenomena.
I often speak about humility and the mood of prayer. I sincerely hope this can be seen now in its proper light. It's not about forming a sphere of ideas within awareness and bow to it. It's the simple realization that from the standpoint of our ordinary consciousness we
don't control the implicit order. We're flowing within it and in general we don't know where it is leading us. The whole question of freedom has to do with understanding the relations of the local curvature gradient at which we feel consciously active, to the Cosmic formless within which we flow. Our life conduct is directly determined through our attitude towards the implicit order. First we must be clear with ourselves if we allow for this formless order to be meaningful. If it is not, we drop into Schop's mysticism, materialism, pan-psychism and so on. If we allow it to be meaningful, things can bifurcate once more. One variant is to accept it as a kind of theism where, however, our conscious view of the explicit order is completely opaque to the implicit. The other variant is to understand that there's really only one side of existence, which we experience polarized into explicit and implicit order, and where our thinking is the gradient of their transduction.
If this is understood, there also naturally opens the possibility for the higher forms of cognition where spiritual activity can live in the higher order curvature of the implicit order and investigate how the intellectual states of being normally flow along its geodesics. We need the humility and mood of prayer because it is beyond the power of the intellect to trespass into the implicit order through its own forces. There's no such train of logical thoughts where the last thought in the line somehow turns to
be the implicit order. This can never be the case. Adding pears can't produce apples. Drawing lines in a plane can never somehow protrude into the third dimension. Intellectual thinking is like a specific "state of aggregation" between the implicit and explicit order. States of being are allowed to transition only along concrete nodes of the formless 'crystal lattice'. No amount of jumping along the nodes can change the mode. The only way is to realize thinking as the expression of spiritual activity which is active along the gradient between the implicit and explicit order of meaning.
To approach this, we concentrate the intellect and live continually in the very stream that condenses the formless meaning into the symbol of concentration. We can imagine this as a vortex. In intellectual life we experience a thought as the tip of this vortex and we jump from one such tip to another. Through concentration we stabilize one such vortex and try to live in the very act of condensation of meaning into the point of concentration. The vortex is infinite, it swirls around and expands into the periphery of the formless. Yet through concentration, around its apex gradually expands a panoramic image - which is still only explicit content in awareness, it's just an image, we should never forget that - which however begins to reflect the meaning of more and more of the implicit order. Initially this order elucidates primarily the phenomena of our individual life of thinking, feeling and willing. But as it becomes richer and richer it reflects more and more of the ways our flow of being is embedded in the Cosmic implicit flow.
I'll take a break now from the forum, as writing here has paused my other writing. But in a way I'm glad that it happened in this way because hopefully we've cleared the ground some more. I realize that my slow progress with the essays build up unnecessary suspense. Please don't expect anything spectacular in order not to be disappointed. These are all ideas that are 'in the air' of our epoch. We're not really inventing anything revolutionary here. It's much more a matter of realizing the stumbling blocks which, just as with Goethe realized, otherwise prevent us to see things in the right way.
