Adur Alkain wrote: ↑Thu Aug 26, 2021 8:11 am
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!
If anything, these types of 'heated' discussions open portals into potentially unique questions to consider, as opposed to the standard questions of, "what is an alter? how does dissociation happen? is MAL instinctive or meta-cognitive?", etc. In my experience so far, although those questions could potentially lead to some interesting discussion if pursued in creative ways with some basic imaginative thinking, they almost never do. And I suspect those same questions were being asked long before I joined the forum last year. There are only so many metaphysical differences people can have - materialism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism. The first two don't even factor in here except for Jim and dualisms which are posited unconsciously. After that, there is nowhere to go but the spiritual arena if one wants to discuss details of idealism and non-dualist tradition, without perpetually remaining in the 2-dimensional ouroboros of "MAL-alter" questioning.