Martin_ wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 4:00 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 3:40 pm
Martin_ wrote: ↑Fri Nov 26, 2021 2:47 pm
Right. You don't think that flipping the arrow will bring people closer to seeing the Unity. I do. Is that correct?
Also, the "things are moving along" refers tho the full essay, in its power to convice regarding the fallcy of Materialism. I should have specificed that.
Probably it's better to say I don't think BK is flipping the arrow at all. He is simply substituting one set of abstract concepts we find in materialism with another set. He
knows that "dissociation" is not consistent with idealism, but he doesn't want to admit that there is no hard dissosciation in our
current life with "sealed" boundaries, because there are many philosophical and spiritual implications downstream of such an admission, so he says it goes away after death. Then he speculates on vague ways in which it might go away, according to whatever suits his own spiritual preferences. In short, it is completey subjective and arbitrary, not appropriate for any genuine philosophical or scientific approach to the most important phenomena in our living experience. To be clear, I am
not suggesting he does any of this consciously. I think most of it is done subconsciously, although he consciously makes sure what he is doing subconsciously will never be revealed to him, i.e. refusing to seriously discuss it with anyone informed on the matters.
Right. I get it, although i see it a different way. Out of curiosity, from where do you get his claim that the boundaries are sealed and the dissociation is hard? That's not at all how i interpret his model. If that's been discussed before i've missed it.
BK says - "
It is conceivable that newly emerging alters, with dissociative boundaries not yet sealed, could incorporate those contents in the process of their development." So he is claiming that at some time before some de-individuated soul is reborn into "newly emerging alter", dissociative boundaries are formed and are "sealed". And that is how we go about existing between birth and death, until the boundaries are "unsealed" again after death. This is a dualistic, reductionistic, and atomistic view of human souls between birth and death without any warrant.
In fact, there is a passage in the topic essay which indicates a model of "permeable" boundaries:
Kastrup, p50 wrote:Let us first consider telepathy. Under idealism, reality consists of excitations of a spatially unbound field of subjectivity—i.e., one universal mind. Therefore, what needs to be explicitly accounted for is why we can’t read other people’s thoughts all the time; after all, we are all—ex hypothesi—part of the same mind. Idealism accounts for this by inferring that dissociative processes spontaneously arise in the universal mind. But no process in nature is perfect or ideal. Combustion never burns everything there is to burn. Rain fall never precipitates all air humidity. And so it is not only conceivable, but expectable, that dissociation won’t prevent all cognitive traffic from crossing dissociative boundaries. That telepathy should occur now and then, especially under conditions related to impaired metabolism (i.e., weakened dissociation), is indeed a prediction of idealism.
Let's break down what is happening in the above passage:
"Under idealism, reality consists of excitations of a spatially unbound field of subjectivity—i.e., one universal mind. Therefore, what needs to be explicitly accounted for is why we can’t read other people’s thoughts all the time; after all, we are all—ex hypothesi—part of the same mind."
Absolutely correct. This is the view necessitated by a consistent idealism.
"But no process in nature is perfect or ideal...And so it is not only conceivable, but expectable, that dissociation won’t prevent all cognitive traffic from crossing dissociative boundaries."
Here he has suddenly switched to describing the very structure of the One Mind with "dissociative boundaries". He imagines himself standing apart from MAL and seeing how there are bubble-like boundaries surrounding each "alter" (which is only a possible 3rd-person perspective under dualistic thinking). Once in awhile, according to BK, and for no apparent reason we can identify, one of these boundaries becomes more permeable and lets ideations cross over to other "alters". That is what explains the phenomena of "telepathy" for him, and presumably all other phenomena which involve shared ideations.
There is a much more simple, intuitive, and logically sound explanation -
our own localized cognition has subconsciously veiled most of the One Mind and therefore we ignore most of the ideations which are
always interpenetrating each other within the unified 'space' of the One Mind. We see the
results of these interpenetrations everywhere in our experience, i.e. shared percepts/concepts, communication, planning with others by way of logical reasoning, empathy, etc. - but we have completely forgotten why and how those results come about. We just take them for granted and have no expanation for them apart from speculating "boundaries" arbitrarily become permeable once in awhile.
Instead of projecting our own personal cognitive limitation onto the structure of Reality itself, we are simply recognizing that we are
incomplete beings who are not yet knowledgeable or cognitively free, yet with the capacity to move towards genuine knowledge and cognitive freedom
in this lifetime, between birth and death. This recognition is how we start to overcome abstract, dualistic, and reductive materialism AND idealism alike. Without this recognition, we have overcome neither, even if we claim that we no longer "believe" in material things which give rise to consciousness. Until we discover the logic of this recognition from within, our abstraction and reductionism is functioning
exactly the same as it does in the mind of an explicit outward materialist.