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

[Adur Alkain]

The notion of a spiritual evolution is a very ethnocentric one: it assumes that contemporary Western thought is at the forefront of this supposed evolutionary movement.

How so, as it seems to be a prevalent theme in Aurobindo's cosmology, and certainly even predating him in some schools of Vedanta ...

I didn't know that. Interesting video. Thank you!

In my comment I was thinking mainly of Owen Barfield, who I think was quite ethnocentric.

[Soul_of_Shu]

In my comment I was thinking mainly of Owen Barfield, who I think was quite ethnocentric.

You realize you're going to be lambasted for misrepresenting Barfield. I would suggest that we are all to some extent or another 'conditioning'-centric, in that we all are interpreting through a conditioned mindset, which predisposes us toward certain views, for example, your own view that Barfield is ethnocentric, or that your guru Almaas is a cut above the rest ... Let anyone who is without conditioning cast the first stone

[AshvinP]

In my comment I was thinking mainly of Owen Barfield, who I think was quite ethnocentric.

You realize you're going to be lambasted for misrepresenting Barfield. I would suggest that we are all to some extent or another 'conditioning'-centric, in that we all are interpreting through a conditioned mindset, which predisposes us toward certain views, for example, your own view that Barfield is ethnocentric, or that your guru Almaas is a cut above the rest ... Let anyone who is without conditioning cast the first stone

I am tempted to give Adur a pass here, because it seems he is a super busy guy and doesn't follow any of the other threads and has not read my essays on these things, and I presume he has not really looked into Steiner or Barfield yet. That being said, I am going to paste my comment to Justin here (who actually read Saving the Appearances and still grossly misrepresented Barfield) and I really hope Adur will reflect on it and therefore, equipped with more insight from people who are clearly more familiar with Barfield, stop misrepresenting the "spiritual evolution" Barfield, Cleric, and myself (and Scott when he comments) are all speaking of.

Although this particular point should be evident from the concept of "the evolution of consciousness" itself. He is in no way "applauding scientism", but recognizing the natural unfolding of these new conscious modes from earlier ones. Original participation was not destined to last forever and it is indeed counter-productive for modern society to long for a return back to the mother's womb, so to speak (I discuss this a lot in last mythology essay in connection with Prometheus-Epimetheus and Genesis accounts in the Old Testament).

If you take the view that socioeconomic events determine or even take equal share in determining modes of consciousness, which I have seen you argue for previously, then you will continue to completely misunderstand Barfield's sentiments. It's not as if he fails to express similar if not even more critical sentiment with the rationalism and logical positivism of the modern age, because he does that at length too. All of these intellectual or over-mystical worldviews, if clinged onto by the abstract intellect, inhibit spiritual growth and therefore the realization of "final participation" (which is not used by him to indicate the absolute end of spiritual evolution or anything similar).

Barfield does not think "collective practices", by which you mean socioeconomic and political arrangements, had anything to do with the 'liquidation' of OP or the metamorphoses into scientific mode of consciousness. These things all followed as naturally in his view as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It did not at all depend on what "collective practices" the caterpillars adopted. Once we internalize his actual view, we realize how silly it is to read him as "applauding" these developments in isolation, like he is glad that a bunch of people got together and decided to do away with OP and mechanize the world with materialist science. That is simply an absurd reading of Barfield.

Does he applaud the holistic Wisdom of this overall metamorphic progression of the Spirit? Yes, of course - he was a Christian-Anthroposophist and they tend to think the incarnation of Christ in the world, i.e. the Spirit taking on flesh, was a positive development. Does he applaud the Hope that our current "dark night of the soul" in rationalism, scientism, etc. will give rise to our future spiritual freedom? Yes, of course. That is what is meant by "scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit". He does not think it's good because the spirit is gone forever, rather because it was only through that scouring of the appearances that the Spirit can really take root within the souls of individual humans, and grow from the bottom-up to meet itself from the top-down. Like Steiner, he envisions man becoming Spirit-Man in the millennia to come

[Soul_of_Shu]

I am tempted to give Adur a pass here, because it seems he is a super busy guy and doesn't follow any of the other threads and has not read my essays on these things, and I presume he has not really looked into Steiner or Barfield yet. That being said, I am going to paste my comment to Justin here (who actually read Saving the Appearances and still grossly misrepresented Barfield) and I really hope Adur will reflect on it and therefore, equipped with more insight from people who are clearly more familiar with Barfield, stop misrepresenting the "spiritual evolution" Barfield, Cleric, and myself (and Scott when he comments) are all speaking of.

I suspect you're warranted in giving Adur at least a bit of a pass ... I would also highly recommend anyone interested in a far more nuanced take on Barfield to check out Mark Vernon's series of youtube videos, and read his book about Barfield's ideas, The Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness. In that regard, as Barfield seems to be seeping into a lot of discussions, I'm now tending to agree with you that a deeper dive into how to interpret Barfield is worth pursuing here, and needs a thread dedicated to that endeavour, wherein councils for the defence and prosecution can have it out, if so inclined. So I'll get to posting such a topic asap.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

I took the time to read this long post, since you said it has direct relevance to my work.

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Hi Adur,

thank you for taking the time to read.

I won't go through your remarks individually because as a whole they stem from a common source. We need to clarify the place of Thinking in our scientific-philosophical-artistic-spiritual endeavor.

I'll just address the complexity issue first. We've been through that recently with Eugene. I don't like complexity. Then how do I explain that my posts seem complex? First let's distinguish between two types of complexity.

1. The first is complexity which issues from the large quantity of processes that can hardly be encompassed in some kind of unity. Turbulence is a good example. So I take it that my explanations seem in others' eyes like a very complicated philosophical system, similar to turbulent flow, which needs endless rules and sub-rules, types of entities, etc., in order to be grasped.

2. The second kind of complexity is again real complexity but with inner unity. Just look around your room. Imagine that you have to explain to someone over the phone every little detail, every piece of furniture, every object, every fluff of dust. The other person after a while will be like "wow, dude, slow down". Why does this happen? Because one received pieces of disconnected information. It would be like being told a sequence of 10 000 random numbers. Since there's no logic in the sequence we have to explicitly memorize every number individually and this is overwhelming. This is how we feel with any kind of novel knowledge that we still can't grasp as a whole and only see disconnected thoughts. Imagine that instead of describing your room, you describe some of the chapters in mathematics. The person will initially see disconnected math terms but at some point he'll say "wait a second, I'm getting it" and he'll even be able to find math relations on his own - we're now probing together the same mathematical ideal landscape.

I maintain that the complexity experienced regarding Spiritual Science is of the second type, except that it is not about getting the hang of an abstract (closed formal or discursive, as you call it) system of thought. It's about gradually metamorphing our inner perspective. This really takes hard work, since there're so much things to be undone, which we've inherited unconsciously from our materialistic culture, and even more, completely new, that we have yet to develop, but once we begin to assume our upright spiritual stance within, speaking the facts of the inner and higher realities is as describing one's room contents. Except that this room is the living Being of the Cosmos and everyone can attain to the proper perspective of it, just like everyone can probe the same mathematical truths.

We all know that Ptolemy's system of the Solar System was complicated. He had to account for all the strange behaviors of the planets, their retrograde motion, etc. which introduced many constructs such as deferents and epicycles.



Yet things become much more simpler when we switch to the Heliocentric model. This is only a geometric analogy but it's a great metaphor for our spiritual life. Things become comprehensible when we find the right perspective.

This is understood fairly well in popular spiritual teachings. One of the problems of modern man is that his own point of view is not stable, he always moves on the trains of his thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, etc. How can we expect to have a faithful picture of the World Content when our anchor point itself is constantly oscillating? Is there any surprise that we can't make any sense of the world? Everything looks much more complicated than the Geocentric model above - we try to grasp one thing but we lose track of everything else.

That's why Enlightenment teachings put emphasis on the Here and Now, detaching from all contents of consciousness so that we can see clearly. You already mentioned this:

The abstract thinking that most humans find themselves trapped in is in my view the result of automatic information processing happening in the brain. The way to liberate the soul from this automatic thinking is not to focus on those automatic thoughts to try to find out how that information processing works, but to disidentify from those automatic thoughts and realize that our true identity lies in the underlying consciousness. This consciousness is where the real knowing, basic or direct knowing resides. Discursive knowing is ony a distorted reflection of that basic knowing. (All this is my personal understanding of Almaas's view on knowledge.)

Yet this is only part of the work. You also mention:

I think this "higher order" responsible for the harmony and orderliness of reality (not just physical reality) is what Almaas calls the logos or Creative Dynamism, one of the boundless dimensions of true nature. It is infinitely creative and dynamic, and it can't be captured by discursive thought.

But what does this 'infinitely creative and dynamic' really mean? Since you embrace the Universal Consciousness, I take it that this Creative Dynamism exists within us. While I agree that this Dynamism can't be captured (in the sense of completely contained) by discursive thought, the opposite is most certainly the case - the Dynamism is what creates the discursive thought. Now I'm not sure if you'll agree with this since you say "... ordinary or discursive knowing (which is what I would call thinking, and I believe is the result of brain activity)". I agree that we succumb all the time through the day in trains of automatic thoughts but what about when we fully consciously think? When we engage all our Creative Dynamism within ourselves and experience how we produce thoughts?

I'm not sure what your answer will be but most mystically inclined non-dualists quickly become quite dual at this point. They may speak of Creative Dynamism or the likes but when we reach thoughts they say "these just pop in and out of existence, we need to deidentify with them". But if we deidentify with them then who's responsible for then? "The Creative Dynamism, of course!" OK, but now we have placed this Creative Dynamism outside of ourselves and if we really were one with the Creative Dynamism (non-dual) it's only natural that we should experience the creative responsibility for the thoughts. The state of mystical union doesn't help either. No mystic says that "yes, in the beginning we deidentify with the thoughts but then, in the mystical union we once again feel creatively responsible for them".

This is a recurring theme on this forum, yet such that one stares right into its face and still can't awaken to its Divinely simple Truth.

So we should really find the place of Thinking within the World Process. As long as see discursive thinking as proceeding from the brain and true reality (the perspective of the Universal Consciousness) as completely opaque to it, we're creating for ourselves two irreconcilable worlds. We're condemning Universal Consciousness (which we assume is our true nature) to have part of itself forever unknowable - in this case, the brain (or whatever) activity which thinks discursive thoughts on behalf of the Universal Consciousness. I hope the fundamental and irreconcilable dualism is plainly visible here. The only way this dualism can be overcome is if Universal Consciousness (we) take creative responsibility for thinking. Then thoughts are no longer foreign elements that pop in and out of existence but the immediate expression of our Creative Dynamism.

The reason why people versed in Enlightenment teachings can't awaken to this simple fact is because they see thoughts only in their inert nature which can't capture the essence of reality. They don't like to approach them because that would be the opposite of what their ideal is - to deidentify with thoughts. But what we said above doesn't suggest that one has to identify with thoughts. One must simply find within himself the Creative Dynamism that brings the thoughts into existence. The difference is huge.

Next I would like to address the 'higher order' because this is another stumbling stone here, but I'll do it probably tomorrow.

[Eugene I]

Cleric, it is a common condition of human form not to have a direct access to the origins of our thoughts, perceptions and feelings. The meditators of Eastern traditions are simply being honest - they just admit that no matter how deeply they meditate, they can not dive and reach into the very roots of those phenomena, even though they can observe the patterns and interconnectedness and sense the trends and underlying subconscious drives. Buddhists call this realm where the conscious phenomena originate with the term "Alaya-Vijnana". In modern psychology (Jungian included) it is simply called "subconscious".

But there are people who claim to have the answers. For example, there are many people who claim that our thoughts are controlled by aliens, and they even claim that they telepathically communicate with the aliens and their communications confirm that fact (believe or not, I actually met such guy). And their experiences seem to be objective because many of them have very similar experiences, so they must be reporting something real and objective, right? I do not think psychiatrists would agree with their claims, but who cares what psychiatrists say?

[AshvinP]

In modern psychology (Jungian included) it is simply called "subconscious".
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But there are people who claim to have the answers. For example, there are many people who claim that our thoughts are controlled by aliens, and they even claim that they telepathically communicate with the aliens and their communications confirm that fact (believe or not, I actually met such guy). And their experiences seem to be objective because many of them have very similar experiences, so they must be reporting something real and objective, right? I do not think psychiatrists would agree with their claims, but who cares what psychiatrists say?

Not Jungian included. Jung specifically recounts his visionary experiences in The Red Book and they can be 'mapped' onto all that we find in esoteric spiritual tradition. He remarked in a letter that these visionary experiences informed all of his subsequent psychology, which clearly envisioned the "objective psyche" as amenable to empirical and verifiable investigation to a degree that goes well beyond normal cognition. BK included this quote at the beginning of Chapter 2 of DJM for a good intuited reason:

There are three heavens … These follow in sequence and are interdependent … The deeper levels of the human mind and disposition are in a similar pattern as well. We have a central, intermediate, and outmost nature. This is because when humanity was created the whole divine design was gathered into it, to the point that as to structure, the human being is the divine design and is therefore a heaven in miniature. For the same reason we are in touch with heaven as to our inner natures … The outside and the inside in the heavens (or in each particular heaven) are like our own volitional side and its cognitive aspect. … The volitional is like a flame and the cognitive like the light that it sheds. … We may therefore conclude that the state of our inner natures is what constitutes heaven and that heaven is within each of us, not outside us.

Like Arthur from Inception, you lack Imagination of the objective sort. As you develop that, you will see how all of these mythos of the modern age, including telepathic communication with aliens and what not, are variations on archetypal spiritual realities clearly identified by thinkers such as Steiner and Jung, clothed in modern symbols. That is the gist of Jung's essay on UFO visions and encounters as well. We can only figure that out because these objective spiritual realities were previously experienced and can still be experienced in full consciousness. The person without Imagination writes these things off as "hallucinations", "fantasies", products of the insane mind, etc. The person embracing Imagination identifies the clear patterns, becomes curious, and desires to investigate them further so as to reveal their secrets, i.e. the spiritual realities underlying their patterned symbolic manifestation. Jung kept a somewhat tight lid on his spiritual insights while he was still alive and working because he had a lofty academic reputation to maintain. So what's your excuse?

[Eugene I]

I do not know what "objective" means here, but sure, those are definitely collective shared psychic structures/archetypes residing in shared unconscious layers. There are archetypes of global human collective, as well as more local archetypes associated with cultures, religions or other groups of interest (even including scientists and philosophers). Buddhist have their shared archetypes and structures, Christians also do, Anthroposophist do, UFO communicators do and every other group does. But why the Anthroposophist archetypes are any more "objective" than the the archetypes of other groups?

[AshvinP]

I do not know what "objective" means here, but sure, those are definitely collective shared psychic structures/archetypes residing in shared unconscious layers. There are archetypes of global human collective, as well as more local archetypes associated with cultures, religions or other groups of interest (even including scientists and philosophers). Buddhist have their shared archetypes and structures, Christians also do, Anthroposophist do, UFO communicators do and every other group does. But why the Anthroposophist archetypes are any more "objective" than the the archetypes of other groups?

Take a look at Cleric's last post, which I presume you were responding to, where he writes:

As long as see discursive thinking as proceeding from the brain and true reality (the perspective of the Universal Consciousness) as completely opaque to it, we're creating for ourselves two irreconcilable worlds. We're condemning Universal Consciousness (which we assume is our true nature) to have part of itself forever unknowable - in this case, the brain (or whatever) activity which thinks discursive thoughts on behalf of the Universal Consciousness. I hope the fundamental and irreconcilable dualism is plainly visible here. The only way this dualism can be overcome is if Universal Consciousness (we) take creative responsibility for thinking. Then thoughts are no longer foreign elements that pop in and out of existence but the immediate expression of our Creative Dynamism.

You are going a step further and creating irreconcilable worlds for every single spiritual tradition or belief system or "interest group" down to the level of "UFO communicators" (which can't help but remind me of materialists positing an infinite material multi-verse to explain all those facts we observe, like fine-tuning, that they cannot explain by way of natural science). For you, the word "archetype" has become merely a synonym for a single "discursive thought" or maybe a couple joined together. Beyond that, Jung quite clearly demonstrates throughout his work that the archetypes of the collective subconscious are shared throughout all cultures and spiritual traditions, from the ancient past to the present. He figures this out from actually studying the symbols of the mythological and spiritual traditions of the world, in very high detail, as does his student Erich Neumann, but also from the dreams of his varied patients. That shared essence is precisely what makes them archetypes. Your approach is identical to the materialist reductionist approach - "sure, there are trans-cultural moral values, but some of them are "universal", some of them are "local", and they all really boil down to evolved mindless material processes, so the deep meaning we find in them is really just subjective fiction that most people have agreed to live by for convenience". That not only defies all our basic reasoning and higher intuitions, it is extremely fragmenting and therefore dangerous.

[Eugene I]

there are trans-cultural moral values, but some of them are "universal", some of them are "local", and they all really boil down to evolved mindless material processes, so the deep meaning we find in them is really just subjective fiction that most people have agreed to live by for convenience

And where exactly did I say that?

Simply speaking, we are talking about multiple spiritual and philosophical traditions that (through myths, archetypes, paradigms, practices etc) were able to reach to some facets of divine-level truths. But then some paradigm (someone called it Anthroposophy) suddenly claimed - "yes, and we are the most advanced paradigm because those truths are revealed to us at much higher degree compared to all other paradigms. Those other paradigms and traditions only see a leg or an ear of the elephant, but we see the whole elephant, there is no doubt about that. And if anyone is in doubt about that, that's because they are reducing the reality to mindless material processes (what else can lead people to doubt such obvious universal truth?) ".