Intuitive Idealism vs. Analytic Idealism (Part II): An alternative formulation of idealism

[Soul_of_Shu]

Mark my words, for I am the Nostradamus of these matters

Perhaps ... or maybe Eugene will put it to rest now, just to prove your prediction wrong out of spite

[AshvinP]

Mark my words, for I am the Nostradamus of these matters

Perhaps ... or maybe Eugene will put it to rest now, just to prove your prediction wrong out of spite

"If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!"
-Underground Man

[Soul_of_Shu]

A paranormal explanation would be telekinesis. Only you would know if something was going on in your mind that might have created this effect. I myself have witnessed three events in my life that have convinced me there is something to paranormal phenomena. One incident did seem to involve telekinesis.

I could be wrong, but my limited understanding of telekinesis is that it involves that the focus of attention be purposefully fixated on the object with the intention of moving it, which was not the case in this instance. So whatever it had to do with my state of mind, I'm at a loss to know how or why that would be.

[Soul_of_Shu]

"If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!"
-Underground Man

Underground Man clearly needs to raise is WTF frequency above ground, and indeed much higher still into the empyrean realms to preempt such a fate.

[Lysander]

In reading through this thread, I see Eugene defending a form of Sophia Perennis albeit unknowingly or without naming it, in the vein of Schuon, Coomaraswamy and Nasr. This is a view that I defend on different forums where most of my activity is at. It would - theoretically - be more clear if he stated that this was his position.

And I see Cleric defending a kind of Steiner Anthroposophy albeit without forthrightly stating it exactly to be so. Instead Eugene wants his position to be noncomital to any existing tradition (in my view, his substantive statements would be safe behind the Perennialist School) and Cleric also wants to 'softly' dissociate (pun intended) from any existing tradition and advance something which can - by definiton - never be limited by the words 'interpretation' and instead connotate a Truth (e.g. spiritual science). Eugene also implies the same thing in his replies, he also avoids any contamination implied by coming close to the word 'interpretation'.

Maybe its because we're in General Discussion and not formal argument? It seems, if not only more honest to the eyes of others, but also just technically easier to detach to a school of thought and work from there. My takeway is that advancing undeniable Truth (if only you do what I did/what I say!) based on pure gnostic mystic experiential-knowing blahblahblah riddles it with unfalsifiability, which is the classic critique of Gnostic mysticism as I understand it. For example, "if you phenomenologically engage with your own experience in such-and-such a manner, eventually you will discover the truth of such-and-such tradition (esoteric Christianity, or reincarnation, or divine planes of existence, and so on)". Each tradition will say "You are doing it wrong if you didn't see the such-and-such (i.e. Macrocosmic Sun Being". I think the way to reconcile this isn't with more gnostic mysticism (i.e. phenomenological tracing of experience into higher orders of cognition), that it isn't to refute the revelations therein, but to bridge it such as accomplished by the Perennialists.

That being said, I am also aware that Cleric is very carefully speaking of an objective structure inherent to human cognition. And he doesn't emphasize the content (i.e. of Anthroposophy) as much as, what I can only call, the scaffolding of experience itself, especially in greater and greater meta-levels (i.e. vertical axis). This then, wouldn't need be part of any tradition per se. And ideally the intention is moreso of heuristic or pedagogical value. And this too then would never lend itself to dogmatism and paves the way actually for greater inter-faith dialogue.

For what its worth, I never saw Ashvin or Cleric claim that their view is mutually exclusive with other world religions. If so, then all of Eugene's complaints of dogmatism are totally unwarranted. And, it also opens the door, I would argue, to a reconciliation via Sophia Perennis.

[Adur Alkain]

In the first part of this essay, I tried to show the problems inherent in Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism. My critique has been based on direct intuition, but also on the study and practice of Eastern and Western wisdom traditions, which (at least in my view) provide a much deeper insight into the nature of consciousness than anything contemporary Western philosophy and science can deliver.

The alternative formulation of idealism that I’m proposing here (Intuitive Idealism) shares a same basic tenet with Analytic Idealism: consciousness is fundamental; it is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible. It also shares the recognition that all reality exists only as experience, and that experience is excitation in the boundless field of consciousness. There is no subject-object separation.

However, I depart from Analytic Idealism in two crucial points: I reject the notion of dissociative boundaries. And I reject the idea that the physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of something else, or a simplified user interface, or anything other than what it appears to be.

I’m rejecting those notions not only because they are counter-intuitive: they are also, as far as I can see, completely unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to explain from an idealistic perspective all fundamental facts about reality in an intuitive and straightforward way, with no need to resort to any sort of far-fetched mental contrivance. This is Intuitive Idealism.

The main facts that need explanation from an idealistic perspective are these three:

a) Why do we all (seem to) share the same physical world?

b) Why does physical reality (our sense perceptions) follow regular, predictable patterns?

c) Why is there a close correlation between conscious experience and brain activity?

Am I missing something here? What about some comprehensive explication for how the sole uncaused, irreducible, Cosmic Consciousness (or M@L if preferred) comes to be the apparency of myriad inter-subjectified loci of consciousness engaged in an evolutionary, relational dynamic with its objectified idea constructions—which is idealism in a nutshell. BK concedes that he doesn't really offer any such comprehensive explication of that process-at-large, but only offers the DID analogy, limited hint that it may be, as an example of how a psyche can apparently fragment into multiple seemingly segregated identities. And as far as I can tell, there are no models that do actually offer much in the way of any comprehensive explication of that process-at-large, but they all pretty much just take it for granted, and then from that starting point proceed to address how these subjectified loci of consciousness become problematically egocentric, fall under the spell of separation, are then prone to segregative self vs other-than-self behaviour, deprived thinking capacity, shadow projection, abasement of love, etc, with all of the attendant misunderstanding and existential suffering that entails—which all spiritual traditions attempt to rectify in one way or another, albeit with varying degrees of success. In any case, why is some explication of that process-at-large not addressed? Is it just simply beyond the purview of any given finite perspective of mind to know how it arrived in that condition?

That is a very good question! Which means, it is a very difficult question to answer.

In the quoted text I was adressing the questions we need to answer to make sense of the physical world from an idealistic perspective. I mean, those are the questions we need to answer to get some understanding of what the physical world is. What you are asking here goes beyond that: you are asking why the physical world is as it is, and why it exists in the first place.

This is the kind of question that scientists systematically avoid or reject, but it certainly doesn't lie outside philosophical speculation.

Following A. H. Almaas, I would say that to understand that "process-at-large" you are describing, we need to introduce an intermediate level of reality between Universal Consciousness (or M@L) and ego-consciousness (what Rupert Spira calls "the limited mind"): this intermediate reality is what Almaas calls individual consciousness or soul.

Most nondual teachings (like Rupert Spira's, or like most forms of Buddhism) don't contemplate the human soul as a fundamental reality. They see individual consciousness as an illusion, inseparable from ego-consciousness. Bernardo's system is consistent with this view. His DID analogy entails that individual minds are "alters", and therefore are fundamentally illusory. In this view, when the physical body dies the individual mind dies with it, and only universal consciousness remains. This is, I believe, Bernardo's view.

Other spiritual traditions, like Sufism, see the human soul as real and fundamental, and they make a clear distinction between individual consciousness and ego-consciousness. In this perspective, only the ego (which is based in a sense of separation) is an illusion. The individual soul isn't. In these spiritual teachings (Sufism,Gnosticism, Christian mysticism) the soul awakens to her fundamental identity with universal consciousness (or God) without being annihilated. The individual soul continues her journey after the death of the physical body. (This is a very different perspective, as you can see.)

I didn't mention the soul in this essay because you don't need it to understand physical reality. You can perfectly explain the physical universe starting from universal consciousness and the physical bodies of living organisms (which in my essay I explained, quite satisfactorily in my opinion, as "localizations of qualia"). But if you want to go beyond explaining the nature of physical reality and try to understand the whole "process-at-large", I think you need to introduce the individual soul.

This would take another long essay, but in a nutshell the explanation would go more or less like this: in order to know itself, universal consciousness needs to become an individual soul. Only an individual soul can have a sense of "I am this", "I am that", etc. This individual soul is not separate from universal consciousness, there is no boundary encircling it, and yet it has the capacity of differentiating itself, like a wave in the sea is not separate from the sea and yet is different from other waves.

We can imagine an infinity of individual souls existing prior to any physical reality. In this hypothetical scenario these individual souls would have feelings, thoughts, dreams, but no sense perceptions. Maybe they would communicate with each other telepathically. At some point, with the rise of the "law of consistency", sense perceptions and the whole physical universe would arise.

It is possible to understand the evolution of life as Nature exploring itself in all possible ways of physical experience. The ultimate form of self-exploration made possible by physical reality would be the human brain, capable of constructing these complex models of reality we are playing around here. It seems to be an unavoidable fact that, as part of those mental models of reality that the human brain builds, the ego arises. The ego is just a mental model of the self. The soul or individual consciousness tries to know itself via this brain-made computational model, and it ends up identifying with the model, with the mental construct.

All (or almost all) human beings go through an ego-identity phase. Most people die still identified with that mental construct. Only through spiritual work (or in rare cases through spontaneous awakening, maybe caused by extreme suffering, a profound near-death experience, etc.) can the soul wake up from the illusion of ego-identity and realize its fundamental identity: universal consciousness. But once awakened, the soul doesn't dissolve in universal consciousness: she continues her journey, now with the capacity for complex thinking. As an hypothesis, we can propose that by learning to use the physical brain, the individual soul acquires this new capacity for sophisiticated thinking, a capacity that she can later (after physical death) employ without need for a physical brain.

All this is highly speculative, obviously. I guess we will have to wait until we die, to see what it is like. But some spiritual traditions maintain that only through years of dedicated spiritual work can the soul acquire the capacity for retaining cohesion and a sense of individual identity after physical death. This would mean that most people would dissolve back into universal consciousness, or maybe not dissolve but forget everything about their past life (and maybe be reincarnated), and only a few highly developed souls (those who did a lot of work on themselves) would be able to continue their journey of exploration, without forgetting the lessons learned.

Then again, for Buddhists the goal of spiritual work is not to continue the journey, but to reach a state of total annihilation or extinction (nirvana) of all individuality.

Anyway. This clearly is a topic for endless exploration!

[Cleric K]

In reading through this thread, I see Eugene defending a form of Sophia Perennis albeit unknowingly or without naming it, in the vein of Schuon, Coomaraswamy and Nasr. This is a view that I defend on different forums where most of my activity is at. It would - theoretically - be more clear if he stated that this was his position.

And I see Cleric defending a kind of Steiner Anthroposophy albeit without forthrightly stating it exactly to be so. Instead Eugene wants his position to be noncomital to any existing tradition (in my view, his substantive statements would be safe behind the Perennialist School) and Cleric also wants to 'softly' dissociate (pun intended) from any existing tradition and advance something which can - by definiton - never be limited by the words 'interpretation' and instead connotate a Truth (e.g. spiritual science). Eugene also implies the same thing in his replies, he also avoids any contamination implied by coming close to the word 'interpretation'.

Maybe its because we're in General Discussion and not formal argument? It seems, if not only more honest to the eyes of others, but also just technically easier to detach to a school of thought and work from there. My takeway is that advancing undeniable Truth (if only you do what I did/what I say!) based on pure gnostic mystic experiential-knowing blahblahblah riddles it with unfalsifiability, which is the classic critique of Gnostic mysticism as I understand it. For example, "if you phenomenologically engage with your own experience in such-and-such a manner, eventually you will discover the truth of such-and-such tradition (esoteric Christianity, or reincarnation, or divine planes of existence, and so on)". Each tradition will say "You are doing it wrong if you didn't see the such-and-such (i.e. Macrocosmic Sun Being". I think the way to reconcile this isn't with more gnostic mysticism (i.e. phenomenological tracing of experience into higher orders of cognition), that it isn't to refute the revelations therein, but to bridge it such as accomplished by the Perennialists.

That being said, I am also aware that Cleric is very carefully speaking of an objective structure inherent to human cognition. And he doesn't emphasize the content (i.e. of Anthroposophy) as much as, what I can only call, the scaffolding of experience itself, especially in greater and greater meta-levels (i.e. vertical axis). This then, wouldn't need be part of any tradition per se. And ideally the intention is moreso of heuristic or pedagogical value. And this too then would never lend itself to dogmatism and paves the way actually for greater inter-faith dialogue.

For what its worth, I never saw Ashvin or Cleric claim that their view is mutually exclusive with other world religions. If so, then all of Eugene's complaints of dogmatism are totally unwarranted. And, it also opens the door, I would argue, to a reconciliation via Sophia Perennis.

Thanks Lysander, for your observations.

I just want to clarify that neither I, nor Ashvin have ever engaged into discussions of the sort "This is the Truth, you have to believe it, otherwise you are lost sheep". The reason for the periodic heating up in conversations results always when our arguments are being misunderstood / misrepresented, intentionally or not. At least my approach is to always give information on how Initiatic Science elucidates given questions. For example in the Beyond the Flat M@L essay I've tried to show how relatively simple change in perspective gives coherent answers (or at least the direction where the answers can be sought) to practically all scientific, philosophical and spiritual mysteries. These concepts and their dynamics are not intended to build a closed intellectual system, a theory of everything, but serve as helping wheels, intellectual scaffold so that Thinking spiritual activity can assume its upright stance and continue its development. I understand that most of what I say sounds assertive, authoritarian, etc. This only because I describe practical experiences and it would be unnatural for me to prefix every sentence with "What if ... Could it be that ... Isn't it possible that ....". Instead of playing theatrical roles I prefer to speak honestly and directly. No one is expected to agree or, God forbid, blindly believe what I say. It's all meant to set our Thinking in motion, well beyond the comfortable bounds of the local intellect.

As said, discussions only get heated up when what we say is grossly misunderstood and attacked for completely irrelevant reasons. Such is the common scenario like we saw in this thread. If Eugene would say "I get what you say, but I personally don't feel crossing the threshold in order to verify these things is an option for me, so I stay open to all possibilities", the conversation ends on the spot. But even after I've put much effort to describe in the finest details, the process of crossing the threshold and rising into higher realms, attacks continue of the sort "yeah, everyone does that, it's just the interpretations of your fantasies, that become self-reinforcing beliefs". It's natural that I would respond to this with something like "You don't read carefully. Once we cross the threshold we live within the very spiritual processes out of which the intellect precipitates as a more restricted form of spiritual activity. To claim that the higher cognition is just a mistaken interpretation of the intellect is like a being that only knows visual perceptions, to claim (if that was possible) that intellectual thinking is merely an illusion made of exotic combinations of colors, which are being mistaken for thinking activity."

[Cleric K]

That is a very good question! Which means, it is a very difficult question to answer.

...

Following A. H. Almaas, I would say that to understand that "process-at-large" you are describing, we need to introduce an intermediate level of reality between Universal Consciousness (or M@L) and ego-consciousness (what Rupert Spira calls "the limited mind"): this intermediate reality is what Almaas calls individual consciousness or soul.

Adur,

I already mentioned this in one of my previous posts to Eugene. What you've written above actually shows that as we deepen our understandings we begin to meet problems, thus we face as necessity to recognize some intermediate level of reality. When this process goes even further we find out that there are really much more such intermediate levels. For example, in the above scenario we have Universal -> Soul -> intellectual ego. Through higher forms of consciousness we can observe that the human soul is not yet fully differentiated. It is entangled with even higher entities called National (Folk) Spirits. Souls nested within these entities have some similar group characteristics, language being one of them. Languages have gone through many purely mechanical transformations but the initial differentiation of the proto-language has been directly inspired by the Folk Spirits. Even higher than this we have beings which rhythmically alternate in their activities and inspire the spiritual impulses in humanity that unfold in consecutive epochs of evolution. All these layers then have their additional reflections in the elements, the mineral, plant, animal kingdom, the planetary spheres, etc.

In the spirit of my previous post above, I repeat that all this is not meant to assert some truth that I expect to be believed. It's enough that we think about these things. Otherwise we presuppose way too much creative power into the human entity (as it is today). We imagine that all there is is already before our spiritual eyes and it's just a matter of consensual refinement (as of the Law of Consistency). But then when we ask a question like "Why the kingdoms of Nature? Why minerals, plants, animals, man? Why not only Earth and Man who breathes Light? (similar to the question in the other thread "why alters have to eat?") Mystical conceptions don't offer answers to such questions. Similarly, if we base ourselves only on the Law of Consistency we would have to answer in very generic way "There's no specific reason, it just happened so. In the same way there could be only minerals and man or there could be ten different kingdoms. It's just the particular way the fantasies of the alters have filtered each other out". And this is OK for people who are satisfied by explanations like "The World is just a flat dream, there're no deeper layers of the screenplay. It's just a consensus of sensory sculpting." Yet in our spiritual life as humans we constantly find layers over layers of meaning in the most varied fields. Take a movie like Star Wars. There's the most superficial layer of flat jokes and action that children can enjoy. There's the layer of personal relations, love affairs, fear, greed, betrayal, that adults can appreciate. Then there's a layer of galactic politics, balance of peace and power struggle. There's even deeper layer of the questions of Good and Evil, the Force - the spiritual essence of be-ing. These layers form a kind of hierarchy, where the higher order layers serve as contexts for everything that differentiates and enters into more complicated relations in the lower layers. The child is conscious of the most superficial layer but has no conception of the higher levels, even though they are what shape from within the outermost layer. Similarly there can be people that understand the human (aliens) relations layer but don't grasp the layers of global politics and the Force, and so on.

So these are my remarks to the essays in these threads: from the perspective of higher cognition, this looks like a flattened view of reality. As a matter of fact, most of the examples and principles (even the very principle of Consistency) I'm in much accord with. But just as we need to introduce the Soul level in order to be in harmony with the facts, so it will be found that there's a whole gradient of intermediate levels between our sensory consciousness and the Universal. The basic intuition remains the same - it really is the Universal One that looks through every being. But this 'looking through' really happens through a hierarchical system of spiritual lenses. In our sensory consciousness we have only the flattened projection of all this. Human evolution has in its course that consciousness will grow along the verticality of this Time-Consciousness spectrum, gradually revealing how the Cosmos has come into being, what are the forces that support it, and how in the course of evolution Man will take on the job of spiritualization of reality, thus gradually re-cohering the decohered physical world (the physical world is nothing but decohered Cosmic Imagination) and reintegrating the Universal perspective, out of which new waves of evolution issue, where new perspectives will have their unique journeys.

Adur, I hope you don't take the above as harsh criticism. I really enjoy your work because this is what we really need - strenuous and dedicated work to uncover the secrets of existence. Only in this way we can attain to the needed wisdom and freedom to conduct our metamorphic development in harmony with the World Process.

I also put effort to extract basic principles that can serve as intellectual scaffold, helping in the proper orientation of Thinking. I don't know if you have seen this post of mine. It's a minimalistic framework that grasps the essential dynamics of be-ing. As I've written in the post, for me these basic principles remain to this day of such character that they can serve as navigational lines in the higher modes of consciousness. Many other concepts as atoms, linear time, etc. collapse when we cross the threshold but these principles, in my experience, survive and help me translate experiences into concepts. Of course, we must guard at all costs to avoid turning such principles into purely abstract theory and then try to build reality out of it. That would be catastrophic. Currently we need vocabulary for the essential living processes of reality. This has been largely charted in Spiritual Science but we still need to integrate the concepts of modern science (and many other things of course. It's an endless process). The above metaphor is one such attempt.

[Soul_of_Shu]

So what do y'all make of 'Seek first the Kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you?'

Is the transfigured Thinking the actual Kingdom, or one of the add-ons?

Are the Kingdom-steeped Bodhisattvas hanging about in forums such as this one arguing over the sure-fire route, or instead using the add-ons to the benefit of the still spellbound suffering-prone ones who still await their destined encounter with the Revelation, however many lifetimes it may take?

[AshvinP]

In reading through this thread, I see Eugene defending a form of Sophia Perennis albeit unknowingly or without naming it, in the vein of Schuon, Coomaraswamy and Nasr. This is a view that I defend on different forums where most of my activity is at. It would - theoretically - be more clear if he stated that this was his position.

And I see Cleric defending a kind of Steiner Anthroposophy albeit without forthrightly stating it exactly to be so. Instead Eugene wants his position to be noncomital to any existing tradition (in my view, his substantive statements would be safe behind the Perennialist School) and Cleric also wants to 'softly' dissociate (pun intended) from any existing tradition and advance something which can - by definiton - never be limited by the words 'interpretation' and instead connotate a Truth (e.g. spiritual science). Eugene also implies the same thing in his replies, he also avoids any contamination implied by coming close to the word 'interpretation'.

Maybe its because we're in General Discussion and not formal argument? It seems, if not only more honest to the eyes of others, but also just technically easier to detach to a school of thought and work from there. My takeway is that advancing undeniable Truth (if only you do what I did/what I say!) based on pure gnostic mystic experiential-knowing blahblahblah riddles it with unfalsifiability, which is the classic critique of Gnostic mysticism as I understand it. For example, "if you phenomenologically engage with your own experience in such-and-such a manner, eventually you will discover the truth of such-and-such tradition (esoteric Christianity, or reincarnation, or divine planes of existence, and so on)". Each tradition will say "You are doing it wrong if you didn't see the such-and-such (i.e. Macrocosmic Sun Being". I think the way to reconcile this isn't with more gnostic mysticism (i.e. phenomenological tracing of experience into higher orders of cognition), that it isn't to refute the revelations therein, but to bridge it such as accomplished by the Perennialists.

That being said, I am also aware that Cleric is very carefully speaking of an objective structure inherent to human cognition. And he doesn't emphasize the content (i.e. of Anthroposophy) as much as, what I can only call, the scaffolding of experience itself, especially in greater and greater meta-levels (i.e. vertical axis). This then, wouldn't need be part of any tradition per se. And ideally the intention is moreso of heuristic or pedagogical value. And this too then would never lend itself to dogmatism and paves the way actually for greater inter-faith dialogue.

For what its worth, I never saw Ashvin or Cleric claim that their view is mutually exclusive with other world religions. If so, then all of Eugene's complaints of dogmatism are totally unwarranted. And, it also opens the door, I would argue, to a reconciliation via Sophia Perennis.

In addition to all that Cleric said, another frustration for me is, not only our views being misrepresented, but also a person misrepresenting their own view. Our view is sort of co-opted to avoid addressing the most pressing points for whatever reason, and the disagreement is reduced to "sectarian vs non-sectarian" or whatever. This happens frequently with the metamorphic progression i.e. evolution of Spirit-Consciousness. I think people do not want to question that too much because the evidence for it is plain, especially under idealism. But people also dislike the implications of that process, which are everything Cleric has been illustrating here (we are fortunate to have a living example on this forum, although he would never say so himself : ), so it is attacked indirectly or completely ignored. One implication is the perennial Wisdom you mention - but how you associate that with Eugene's position, I have no idea. He said that he has experienced the deepest levels of spirituality in Eastern and Western traditions alike and came to realize they are all incompatible with each other in terms of an objective spiritual realm. That is the opposite of perennial Wisdom, which is really only sensible under the metamorphic view, where later Wisdom traditions have evolved from earlier ones.