Yes, it is definitely possible that other people in the human realm or other beings in other realms already discovered those solutions and what is left for us is to adopt them (or discover them for ourselves)AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 8:04 pm So now the question becomes - is it possible that someone (or a few people) have already discovered the best "possibilian" approach when it comes to spirituality? Is it possible that developing higher cognition in ways that have been made public and specified could reveal the possibility space of spiritual exploration most clearly and usefully? At the end of the day, that is what meets the most resistance - the basic idea that this already established approach could even be a possibility, let alone the best one. Then there is no question of keeping an open mind and seeing where it leads - it is never considered as a viable option and therefore the most basic steps towards it are never taken.
OK, so for that part I need to tell about another side of the engineering and scientific process, namely: the scrutiny. So, the process, roughly speaking, consists of two stages: the innovative "a-ha" stage where wild imagination, innovation, creativity, open-mindedness are the drives, and then, once that stages brings some new solutions, there comes the "scrutiny" phase: defending it against all possible criticism (which includes being open to criticism and to admit any faults and drawbacks of the new solutions), rigorously testing them, finding all their drawbacks and potential pitfalls as well as all possible benefits. There is usually a long path from conception/invention to the practical realization, and if one wants to succeed along the projects like this, one needs to be prepared for all those hard work and troubles. It's a real challenge and requires a lot of persistence.Put another way - Cleric will repeatedly write posts here saying "we can know X, Y, Z via spiritual training of Anthroposophy, because I have experienced it". Then that same question of X,Y, Z will come up on the forum and you or someone else will say, "it is impossible to know X,Y,Z right now, so all we can do is speculate". What that indicates to me is you are not truly adopting your engineering approach to the spiritual approach. If you have already tried to develop imaginative thinking and it simply led nowhere, then I am definitely curious to hear your accounts of those attempts. Otherwise, I must simply conclude you want to keep spirituality in a separate, more heavily restricted (conservative) domain than your engineering practice in terms of exploring new possibilities.
Now, going back to the spiritual paths, I've personally been exploring them over my whole life and made a lot of discoveries and progress. At the same time, I also saw a lot of false paths and spiritual practices, at best just useless led by dishonest gurus and cult leaders, and at worst quite dangerous and spiritually destructive. With the lack of the objective, practical and experimental measures that we use in science and engineering, it's even more challenging to exercise care and scrutiny in the areas of spiritual exploration. So, if one wants to make a safe progress along the spiritual path, a combination of open-mindedness and willingness to explore new paths, and at the same time much care and scrutiny, is needed.
So you should not be surprised that when you propose new ideas and approaches in the spiritual of philosophical areas you may not see much acceptance and enthusiasm right away and people jumping in large crowds on your spiritual/philosophical wagon. Yet, if there is certain truth in your path then there will definitely be people with whom that truth will resonate and who will eventually come along.