Eugene I wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 10:56 pm
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?
I'll continue here what I intended about the 'higher order'.
What you write above concerning the Eastern traditions is much similar to scientist today saying "no matter how finely we slice up the brain, we still can't find the stuff of consciousness". The reason thought is not found, no matter how deeply it's meditated, is because the only place where its living and self-evident explanation can be found - thinking itself - is by definition avoided.
We must make a distinction here. When I say that in actively willed thinking we find its self-evident cause, I really mean the 'tip' of that thinking activity. For example, in the meditative exercise I mentioned with moving our thinking concentrated in a light dot into a circle/spiral, the light dot is completely explained out of our spiritual activity - we will the movement of that dot. In other words, the Creative Dynamism of the Universe meets the reflection of its activity.
This, of course, is laughed at by both mystics and materialists. Practically they say "you're deluding yourself, entering into a self-reinforcing loop, creating the illusion of an ego that has creative role". Materialists are hard to argue with because they at least declare from the very onset that the true causes lie in the real physical world, while the contents of consciousness are like the final output, the pixels on the screen. If consciousness believes that it has creative role in thinking it's like believing that one pixel is causing another, instead of the underlying hardware and software causing both. Paradoxically it's exactly the materialist who effectively tries to show that one pixel (for example neurons) causes other pixels (conscious phenomena), while forgetting that he does all this speculation through the only kind of phenomena in the World Content for which the cause is intuitively known - thinking. As said in the previous post, the mystic fares no better because at the moment he discards the experience of consciously willed thinking, he also cuts himself from the possibility to experience
any causation in the supposed One Consciousness. Is there then any surprise that meditators see only thoughts popping in and out of existence at the event horizon of subconsciousness?
One can say "But there are countless factors at play here! The light dot is not completely mine because this exercise was suggested externally to me". This is the second part of the distinction. Indeed there are countless contextual layers that condition our thinking. But the fact remains that even if we're led to the vicinity of the light tip by unconscious forces, we still experience the tip as the result of our spiritual activity. So, as said, we have at least a tiny point where the Creative Dynamism finds its reflection. If we grasp this point we can follow it's direction of origin. This is like being in a cave and noticing a small illuminated spot. Some will say "oh, these are just one of these light spots that come and go". Others will put their hand at the spot and start moving as not to lose the light on their palm. After many reflections and refractions they finally reach the Sunlight outside the cave.
After this allegory we can step into the practical aspect of it. What does it mean to trace the light ray? First, let it be clear that the essence of the Light is
one and the same outside and inside the cave. What changes is that more and more of the reflecting and refracting layers are overcome as we move out - these are contextual layers that condition perceiving, thinking, feelings, willing.
Let's get to the realistic examples. We start simple. Let's take a sentence, any will do, for example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". I invite the reader to read the sentence several times and really feel it's meaning. It's very helpful if we build pictorial image of this meaning too. Once we feel comfortable with the contents we can make the following meditative exercise. We turn away from the written text, calm our mind and slowly produce its words in verbal thoughts, while livingly experiencing how we innerly pronounce every word.
We should have experienced very clearly the verbal thought perceptions, much like we would hear sensory sound. Now the question is where in consciousness is the meaning of the sentence itself? There's no doubt that we somehow held its meaning and out of it produced the words. The words we perceive clearly but what about the meaning of the whole sentence? Generally there's
no clear perception for the whole sentence. In fact, the very attempt to turn attention to such a thing as 'the whole sentence' can cause nothing but confusion and vagueness for some readers. The materialistically inclined may downright reject that there's such a thing, they'll say that the only real thing is the succession of brain-consciousness states where each one causes the next like domino pieces and the feeling for meaning of the whole sentence is only an illusion.
If we don't dismiss the given experience of meaning of the whole sentence in such a prejudiced way, we'll realize that what we have consciously observed in the exercise happens practically all the time. We live in such complex meaning all the time and we constantly verbalize it, which people generally call thoughts. If this was not the case we would experience only disconnected words and not the meaning of a whole sentence, let alone of a whole book. Anyone here can reflect on the experience of writing a post in this forum. One starts with some meaning that is to be expressed. This meaning is not itself perceived, it's not a sound or color. Then the meaning is serialized into keystrokes.
Those who try to grasp more clearly the complexes of meaning which we verbalize, because of their elusive nature could say that they are shaped at the horizon of the subconsciousness. It's easy to focus, for example, on the word 'fox'. We have a nice compact word and meaning that goes with it. But the meaning of the whole sentence is not something that people can generally grasp
as a whole.
Yet this is exactly what we must do if we are to gain consciousness in the deeper strata of being. How can this task be approached? First we can invent for ourselves a symbol, something that we can comfortably hold in our mind as a holistic perception - sound, visual symbol, etc. Then we consciously decide that this symbol embodies the meaning of the whole sentence. At that point we simply begin to exercise
concentration on the symbol without deviating our focus to anything else. This shouldn't be confused with simply assigning symbols/words to phenomena, that the intellect then juggles with. Our goal is not to abstract the complex of meaning as a shorthand for the intellect. This could never lead us in the actual stratum where the meaning exists. As long as we are thinking verbally or symbolically (math for example) our spiritual activity is locked within a certain rhythm of unfoldment. We're busy serializing the vaguely experienced meaning. We build the symbol for concentration for the sole purpose that our spiritual activity has an anchor point, so that we can eventually stabilize around it the vague meaning itself and experience it as something whole.
When these exercises are practiced sufficiently we begin to really feel the meaning of the sentence as if packed in a whole. This feeling becomes almost tactile. But what is more interesting is that we begin to feel also whole constellations of such meaning complexes that flow into our initial symbol. This is very critical point of spiritual training because we must resist with all our force the habit to immediately serialize everything into words. In the beginning these meaning complexes are very delicate, very fragile. Our verbal thoughts are like loudly breaking glass in comparison. As soon as we begin to verbalize, the complexes are completely outvoiced. We must resist the temptation and let the complexes grow and strengthen, even though in the beginning they are very shadowy and confused.
Gradually, as we strengthen our activity, the complexes begin to speak more and more clearly. For example, if we have started with concentration on the symbol for the sentence in the example above, when the meaningful complexes begin to emerge, we begin to see in them the most varied relations that our symbol and its meaning have with them. For example, some of the complexes are experienced as the meaning of the whole post that you're now reading. Other complexes have the meaning of the whole forum. Others may be about wildlife and so on. Remember - at this point the intellect is completely concentrated, there's no movement of our verbal or symbolic thought. All these complexes emerge as if from the background behind our 'intellectual face', once they are no longer outvoiced. They unfold as mighty panorama, living, dynamic. We behold processes that occur at any given moment of our life but normally we're phase-locked to the rhythms of serialized thought. It should also be stressed that this panorama emerges in its fullness
only because we're engaged into consciously willed spiritual activity. The fact that our intellect has been anchored into a point doesn't mean that our cognition has been paralyzed. Precisely the opposite - thanks to this stabilization of our activity, we were able to phase-unlock from the serial rhythms and resonate with the
higher order ones. The meaningful complexes at that level become for us
clear language just as our ordinary verbal thoughts are clear language for the intellect. We are both receptive and active in this domain, we learn to Think in a higher sense with these fluid complexes. Unlike the intellectual thinking where we feel quite authoritative and single-voiced, the spiritual activity at this level is much more like a fluid
dance. We're active but in the same time must be receptive because the whole world of living processes that now surrounds us has also dynamics of its own.
As we learn to live comfortably in this state it becomes possible to crystallize concepts from it even without leaving it. In fact this is one of the most important skills that we have to develop because not only that we translate cognition in this way but we also learn from direct experience how processes transduce between levels. That's how we learn to know ourselves from a higher vantage point. What has previously been subconscious and we could only serialize the vaguely experienced meaning into thoughts, now is living reality spread before our Spirit's eyes. We see in what we live and move all the time while in the ordinary state of consciousness.
The above can be understood (and even achieved!) even by sufficiently open-minded materialists. As long as the complexes of meaning within the higher stratum of consciousness are related to the happenings of the sensory world, the materialist can explore comfortably this state. But as his horizon expands it will be more and more difficult to support the materialistic ideas. And the reason for this is not what many would guess. People think that one becomes convinced in a spiritual realm after they experience something so inexplicable that it just doesn't fit into the materialistic conceptions. But this is not what happens here. The former can be described as 'switching beliefs' but the intellect itself still has no real understanding of itself. It is simply no longer satisfied with the explanatory power of the physical model and seeks other models (spiritual, religious, mythological, idealist, etc.). When we live fully consciously in the realm of meaningful complexes we have something completely different. One simply witnesses how the the ordinary thoughts precipitate from the currently experienced spiritual stratum. The contrast is as stark as it is between clipped nails and the living fingers. From the higher perspective we experience somewhat the following (of course without the need to verbalize it like this): "I witness the rhythm patterns within which my intellectual self has been previously phase-locked. What I experience there is nothing more than the nail clippings of the real life which I breathe and cognize now. All those attempt to build the Truth out of combinations of these nail clippings have been so futile. It really is a matter of spiritual development and progressively gaining consciousness of the higher strata which alone can explain through direct cognitive experience all the shadow-happenings in the lower". In this sense we no longer need to believe in a spiritual realm, just as we don't have to believe in the intellectual life in the ordinary state. In both cases they are the self-evident reality of the specific form that our spiritual activity takes.
This post is getting too long I'm worried people already hate me because of this
I intended to continue this description to even higher orders but the length will have to at least double. If there's interest we can continue.
