Eugene I wrote: ↑Thu Sep 02, 2021 5:40 pm
There are only two options here:
- You can actually yourself directly experience the state of Alpha and Omega right now as encompassing the full infinity. Can you confirm that that the actual infinity and the Alpha-Omega states are in your direct experience? Can you experience not just an idea of infinity (everyone can do this), but the actual infinity of moments in time, or points on a line?
- If you can not, then these Alpha-Omega are simply your abstract concepts that you chose to believe in. (Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with having beliefs, as long as one honestly admits that those are his personal beliefs and does not present them as universal truths or direct experiences).
I can see you had a party here in the last 12 hours
Following the discussion, I doubt that anything I say will make any difference but I'll nevertheless write few things.
First, if someone told me that we could stand at a point
outside A and O and encompass it's totality, I'll be raising eyebrow just as you. Such a claim has the same fallacy as the conception that we arrive at the final state of existence, as a train that arrives at the last station, where though, consciousness continues to tick along in frozen boredom.
Saying the above you'll immediately say "then it's all an abstraction!". Not quite. We should really investigate the way our intellect formulates its questions and what kind of answers it expects. As even secular wisdom finds, most of the time we can't answer because we're asking the wrong (that is, inherently impossible) questions.
For example, as I can see it has been commented, the only truly certain thing in reality is the conscious becoming at the tip of our thought process. As we have spoken many times, this kind of certainty doesn't result from logical conclusions but from immediate Intuition. As a matter of fact we can never find this kind of certainty in any form of
arrangement of thoughts. The arrangement itself is certain experience, irrelevant of what the contents are but the truthiness of the arrangement we can only measure through its resonant relations to the fact of experience. This is an inherent characteristic of intellectual thinking that closes itself into formal system (or simply language). No arrangement of words is the 'truth'. It only can lead us to truth if it can
help us expand the becoming tip of Intuition, where we find self-evident reality.
Take a look back just a minute ago when you started reading this post. Are you really, really, really sure that this moment actually
happened? What if some God arranged the Universe from scratch, arranged fake history and pressed the 'play' button in right this instant and actually you have never experienced for yourself the beginning of the reading of the post but are simply believing an implanted fake memory? There's no way we (the intellect) can be certain. The fact that it sounds highly implausible doesn't mean that it's in principle impossible (again speaking purely from the abstract intellect perspective).
Now these are the kinds of traps that the intellect sets for itself and falls in them. I thought we have settled this once and for all when we discussed
Platonism. It's completely irrelevant whether the intellect speculates if the moment we remember from a minute ago was really experienced of is just an implanted fake memory that never happened. As long as we're able to build a coherent picture that has the
practical consequences of allowing our Intuitive core to grow, it doesn't really matter what the intellect speculates about what 'the real stuff' is. The intellect can never anyway transition by means of chains of words/math symbols, from the words themselves into the 'real stuff'. Similarly we can never add apples and hope to get pears as a result.
This is critical. We need to understand that the intellect is not bad - we simply need to understand its place. We can only look at it as a kind of assessment of the
harmony of the facts. If this assessment is correct, it is proved in real life through the way the unfoldment of our spiritual activity is modified. This doesn't mean that we have to assume the Kantian mood that 'we can never know'. No, we can know with certainty but only in the way of our expanding Intuition at our core. I remind - Intuition is not the vague feeling that something might be right, even if we don't know how and why (my heart tells me ... ). Intuition in its true essence is that part of the conscious experience which is at the same time
direct knowledge. For man of our age the only place we can find a spark of this Intuition is at the fact that livingly experienced thinking exists.
This spark can be fanned into a flame. It's an expanding horizon of direct knowing where we experience the World Content from the creative perspectives of beings. From these perspectives the Cosmos is experienced in the way we experience our thoughts - as reflection of our spiritual ideal (meaningful) intents. This is the highest form of cognition. The secrets of existence are revealed only gradually. We first pass through Imagination, then Inspiration. When I say that 'we first pass ...' this is only partly true. As said, at any moment of existence we have something of
all forms of cognition. To repeat the example, we already experience something of Cosmic Intuition within the spark of our own thinking. So it is not like these are disconnected stages where we must first master completely Imagination so then we step into Inspiration. No, they are overlaid. Yet we are asleep for each of them in different degrees and the awakening happens gradually, much more easily for Imagination, less so for the higher forms, yet they exist simultaneously.
So I hope that we have cleared to a certain extent the place of the intellect in the picture. The question now is how can I be certain about the A and O? The answer is that the intellect cannot be
absolutely certain just as it can never be certain a moment few minutes ago really happened. Yet as we rise to higher Intuition we know directly something of immediate existence which allow us understand the big picture.
When we experience our thinking activity in deep meditation it really becomes something quite different. I remind that it is not about thinking about thinking with more and more words. Thinking must be
concentrated into a single thought-image. Then we patiently and humbly wait, just as we wait for a planted seed that we actively nurture, to grow. Gradually our efforts are rewarded. We begin to experience concealed behind the thought-image our actual spiritual activity that has so far been unknown to us. We begin to feel ourselves as something more that running chain of thoughts. We understand through Intuition how we energize and support the thought-image.
In this state we can already experience the polar nature of Time-Consciousness quite clearly. The center of our spiritual activity is like the standing wave pattern formed by two waves travelling against each other. These are two Time streams. When we experience this flow with our 'back' towards the future and our 'face' towards the past, we experience the pole of Thinking. We experience directly how our spiritual activity continually sheds like a snake skin and becomes imprinted in the World Content which is not only the current state but also its accumulated depth that we call Memory. If we turn with our back towards the past and face towards the future we experience active becoming - the pole of Will. As usual there's always an interplay of these two poles.
So at this point the two poles are no longer just an abstraction in the intellect but actual dimensions of experience. Just like up and down is a real dimension along which our spiritual activity can move. Please note - I'm not asserting any claims about the reality of some external 'real' spatial world. I'm only presenting the immediate facts of spiritual experience. It's an immediate fact that our thinking can move along a spiritual axis that we can call up/down. Whether we fantasize that this axis is a 'real' dimension of the 'real' physical world somewhere 'out there' is completely different matter and quite irrelevant to our discussion. In a similar way, when we delve into these meditative states where thinking becomes fully concentrated, we can experience how our state of being unfolds as if in the interference between two polar streams. This is absolutely immediate experience of Intuition. When I use words like streams, poles, etc. I already use Imagination in order to cast the Intuition into images, but the Intuition is immediate reality waved of direct meaning.
I've showed this before:
This is an image I drew some 16 years ago. If I'm to draw it now I would change few things but the essential idea is still the same. For example, the circles would have to be double, rotating in opposite directions, symbolizing the two polar flows. The other thing is that all these circles are actually concentric, they share a common center. In this sense, we humans, are not dots at the outer periphery, far away from the core but at any point of time we belong to the whole structure. It's only that our sensory thoughts belong to the periphery. As soon as we can turn our attention to our spiritual activity we already can grasp the archetypal nature of the circles and even conceive how at any point we have something that is
self-similar to the grand circle. This gives a whole new reading of the Elohim saying "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". It's not about physical likeness. It's the self-similar unfoldment of spiritual activity, which is fractally embedded into the higher order circles. Each circle is a simultaneous idea (these things I've wrote about from another angle in the Time-Consciousness essay). The idea creates out of itself the Time for its experience in bits of integration. Ideas don't need time themselves but time is created by experiencing how ideas can be cohered out of decohered subharmonics.
So thanks to this self-similarity of the fundamental becoming on different levels, we can actually have a pretty good idea about the A and O. The more we penetrate into the non-linear structure of reality, which is not something mechanical but living ideating activity of hierarchy of beings, the more we realize that Time us
curved. It seems as infinite arrow only when we extrapolate our intellectual hopping from thought to thought into infinity in both directions. The same fallacy as the flat Earthers imagining than only because the landscape looks flat in the vicinity they can extrapolate that far beyond the horizon. As we probe from more and more directions the deep non-linear structure of Time-Consciousness, the more the A and O poles become fleshed out. As said, we can already feel their reality even in properly experienced thinking, even though initially the two polar streams may still be experienced as endless
linear streams that move against each other. We discover their curvature only gradually as we accumulate more and more experiences within the depths.
Here your objection can be "But this is only approaching some limit that we can never experience. We don't know if beyond certain point things are not altogether different." To this it can be replied in the same spirit as in any scientific endeavor. We're after the harmony of the facts. Intellectual conjectures about things beyond the horizon of the immediately experienceable, simply don't serve any purpose. Things are clear. The more we deepen our experiential knowledge into the non-linear spectrum of reality, the more everything fits together. The harmony of the facts is reinforced with each additional step.
Ashvin can probably give good examples from his practice of people who begin with a lie and then as the true facts constrict them more and more, they are forced to fabricate increasingly absurd explanations, with the sole purpose to support the initial lie. This is the general situation of humanity today. We should realize that our desire for the free-electron paradigm is fueled entirely by the desire for independence and having-nothing-to-do with the general course of evolution of humanity.
This is questioned even by the most elementary observations. Even our physical life is structured in rhythms within rhythms. The alternation of sleeping and waking is especially significant one. When we move to spiritual matters we can acknowledge the incarnational rhythm. It's only logical that the latter is embedded into even higher order rhythms, by the principle of parsimony, if you will. We know that rhythms within rhythms exist from direct experience, yet we place the conjecture supported only by belief that at certain point this no longer holds true and ego-atoms are free to explore the candy shop in any way they want. Luckily we're not left only to speculation. We can really investigate the depths and there we find exactly that which is completely logical even on the surface. There really are even higher orders of living idea-rhythms, which span the Time for the lower order experiences. These findings gradually add up into a magnificent panorama where we behold the harmony of the facts and light is thrown on every aspect of human life. At this point if we want to support the free electron paradigm we must come up with increasingly absurd explanations just in order to cling to that initial belief of ours. The typical approach is to simply push the limits further and further and say "Well, maybe A and O really seem to curve and come closer and closer to each other with every next step but this doesn't mean that at some even further point there won't be a threshold and the truth turns out to be completely different." Well, OK. Even if we hypothetically assume that this is the case, we're still left with our pressing local and global problems which are completely solvable through the harmony of facts that we discover
up to that hypothetical threshold. So the argument sums up to something like "Even though in the deeper non-linear spectrum we see all the causes of pain, disease, lies and so on, and even though we see there also the solutions to all these problems, we still don't know if beyond some other hypothetical threshold these things won't be seen just like a random dream. So all our efforts would have been in vain!" Well... I don't have much to comment to something like this. Maybe just a comic strip: