The Central Topic

[AshvinP]

My interpretation of the central topic was: "Let's start with observing our thinking and see what we can say"
We came to the point where we saw that thinking (using small 't' here) isn't fully free. It's operating in something what could be described as a funnel, and the nature/state of this funnel, and in some sense also our thinking's position in this funnel, affects what we think.

That's how far we got, as I remember it.

Disclaimer: I'm purpously using simple words here, in order to not cause any wider associations. (Higher / Lower, etc) In no way whatsoever is my intent to imply any kind of dualism at this point.

Martin, Thank you!

The fact that you used these simple words speaks to me more than volumes of fancy but completely abstract musings.

You go on to say we could evolve towards a “fluid aggregation phase and live there fully consciously and knowingly”. Assuming that is possible, how would you then communicate unambiguously to those who are stuck at the current stage of evolution? Because you would have moved beyond the knowing-experiencing polarity and whatever you say would appear metaphorical to the less evolved.

Shajan, may this post serve also for a hint about your question.....

I have no problem with almost all of what you write here. “We simply reach a point where we can grasp them as a coherent Imaginative panorama of our spiritual journey through this life”. Fine. My disagreement is only about the possibility of communicating (without leaving space for multiple interpretations) what is so grasped.

Isn't that what Cleric is doing? You just gained another deep and meaningful angle on how to approach the spiritual journey. His posts are symbols pointing us to the living experience. If our understanding of where to look for these living experiences is even a little bit enhanced, as it certainly is for me every time I read the posts, and it seems maybe you as well, then the symbols have done their job and it is up to us to make the symbols living principles of metamorphosis in our Thinking organism. Even the posts which tread very familiar territory in familiar ways can work wonders in us if we lend it the power to do so.

[Jim Cross]

Those are different aspects of consciousness. Experiencing can be known, or it may not be known by thinking. The fact that experiencing, thinking, feeling, perceiving and willing are inseparable does not mean that they are equally existential or fundamental so to speak. These are different aspects of consciousness, but these aspects have certain priority relations....

I would stay away from such analysis. This is not being disrespectful or dismissive. What goes on inside our minds are extremely important but mind trying to decipher its own secrets could become an endless loop. How can we trust the mind to examine its contents and produce reliable reports?

So I would place perceiving, willing, thinking, feeling, knowing and every other function of the mind inside a black box. In my view the way to (indirectly) figure out what goes on inside the black box is to study its evolutionary past. I would begin with the history of ‘objective knowing’ because that should be the least controversial mental function. Of course the black box play a crucial role in generating objective knowledge but knowledge, once out of the box, is free of subjective 'contaminants'.

How did we come to possess this black box? What exactly are its contents? How is it able to produce reliable knowledge? Why is the universe comprehensible? All these are deep questions but we should begin in shallow waters before moving on to the deeper end.

Excellent. We don't know anymore about our own thinking than we do about the thing-in-itself.

When we try to explain or examine our own thought processes, we easily grasp onto concepts (mostly based on 19th century psychology) that probably have a very skewed relationship to what is actually happening under the covers.

There still is value in meditative exercise, I feel. We must do something. In fact, we can't avoid it.

[Eugene I.]

There are several basic positions:
1/ We declare that the body is of completely different nature that can only be modelled (symbolized) through various finger-gestures but never known in its essence (materialism)
2/ We assume that our finger is of the same essential nature as the body lying within the sheets but the finger decides that it can't survive the passage through the hole - it dissolves. Thus there's finger-thinking above the surface, which in the same way as the materialist, deals with finger-gestures abstractly symbolizing things about the unknowable depths. The depth itself can only be experienced as inexplicable aesthetic/mystical feeling. There's no cognition there (Schop-like mysticism).
3/ We assume that the body is of spiritual nature, that it consists of meaningful spiritual activity but say that the sheets are there for a reason and we need to wait for death in order to know our own deeper spiritual nature.
4/ We recognize that we can know the reality of the body by following the spirit in the reverse direction - from the finger, through the hand, to the body.

Now I know that you are taking 3/. This already offsets everything you think, feel and do in a very specific way. You live in a mood that this current state of being is only provisional and can't in itself lead to truth. Thus you speak of feeling, willing, thinking, perceptions and so on but these are only temporary manifestations of something which you've decided that can be approached only after death. From this perspective you ask "Why focus on thinking? Why give special priority to thinking? Everything else is no less of a conscious phenomenon" This can be only answered if you're looking for a way, here and now, not after death, to approach the reality of the spirit-body. If you're not interested then that question is asked in the wrong context. It's like being placed in a submarine and some of the divers speak often about the airlock. You ask "Why so much attention to the airlock. Look around, there are pipes, levers, buttons, engines, batteries, sleeping bunks". The divers say "Of course, we see all that, we use it all the time. But only through the airlock we can go out and do our work in the water."

Cleric, I understand that, from idealistic standpoint, the perceptions and feelings are epiphenomena of meaningful spiritual activity/thinking. The question whether we want to open the "airlock" or not and uncover the causal connection between them (i.e. choose 3/ or 4/) is a different question, and it's a practical question of whether or not we practically can open the airlock. Because if we can then there would be no reason why we should not. The problem is: nobody has demonstrated so far that opening the airlock is actually possible, Steiner included. The airlock is locked from outside, not from inside. And so far the idea of "opening the airlock" remans just a wishful thinking.

"Let's open the airlock!" - "Sure, show me how" - "You turn this handle and open it" - "Well, try it. I tried and could not, but show me how if you can" - "Steiner opened it so it must be possible, so let's open it" - "And what did he see there in the ocean?" - "Blood pumping itself" - "Well, that's nonsense. I think he fooled himself into believing that he indeed opened the airlock" - "So, what can we do, just stay locked inside?" - "We still have windows, we can not see much and very clearly through them, but we can still see something and we can navigate the submarine in the right direction based on what we observe"

However, that alone does not answer my question, because my question has a broader scope. There are other aspects of spiritual activity other than perceptions, feeling and thinking of meanings, and it is still not clear if they can all be reduced to thinking. For example, such aspects as willing and experiencing, and also thinking itself. Can thinking be a result of a meaningful activity of thinking? Can Thinking produce itself? Can thinking produce the conscious experiencing of all phenomena? Is willing part of the thinking and reducible to it? The fact that all these aspects "can be thought about" does not mean that they can be entirely reduced to thinking or be epiphenomena of thinking, that would be an entirely unwarranted assumption.

[Eugene I.]

I would stay away from such analysis. This is not being disrespectful or dismissive. What goes on inside our minds are extremely important but mind trying to decipher its own secrets could become an endless loop. How can we trust the mind to examine its contents and produce reliable reports?

So I would place perceiving, willing, thinking, feeling, knowing and every other function of the mind inside a black box. In my view the way to (indirectly) figure out what goes on inside the black box is to study its evolutionary past. I would begin with the history of ‘objective knowing’ because that should be the least controversial mental function. Of course the black box play a crucial role in generating objective knowledge but knowledge, once out of the box, is free of subjective 'contaminants'.

How did we come to possess this black box? What exactly are its contents? How is it able to produce reliable knowledge? Why is the universe comprehensible? All these are deep questions but we should begin in shallow waters before moving on to the deeper end.

There is of course a lot of value in studying the "black box" of consciousness using neurophysiology, evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology approaches. It's just pretty obvious that they will not give us all the answers. The study of conscious activity from the 1-st person insight perspective is also necessary and can give us a lot of insights. So. it's not a question of "this-or-that", both approaches should be employed.

[AshvinP]

Those are different aspects of consciousness. Experiencing can be known, or it may not be known by thinking. The fact that experiencing, thinking, feeling, perceiving and willing are inseparable does not mean that they are equally existential or fundamental so to speak. These are different aspects of consciousness, but these aspects have certain priority relations....

I would stay away from such analysis. This is not being disrespectful or dismissive. What goes on inside our minds are extremely important but mind trying to decipher its own secrets could become an endless loop. How can we trust the mind to examine its contents and produce reliable reports?

So I would place perceiving, willing, thinking, feeling, knowing and every other function of the mind inside a black box. In my view the way to (indirectly) figure out what goes on inside the black box is to study its evolutionary past. I would begin with the history of ‘objective knowing’ because that should be the least controversial mental function. Of course the black box play a crucial role in generating objective knowledge but knowledge, once out of the box, is free of subjective 'contaminants'.

How did we come to possess this black box? What exactly are its contents? How is it able to produce reliable knowledge? Why is the universe comprehensible? All these are deep questions but we should begin in shallow waters before moving on to the deeper end.

How could what your mind discerns about its "objective evolutionary past" possibly be more reliable than what it can discern about its own thinking activity? This is real simple. Everything you call "knowledge" is mediated through your perceiving and thinking. There is no theory of evolution which simply manifested independently of those mediating activities. You are trying to skip right over the immediate and transparent point of contact between your perception and thinking, which we find in the observation of thinking, and fashion a worldview of abstract intellectual concepts you have inherited from elsewhere. The only thing that can inform these concepts are your own unexamined preferences (sympathies and antipathies), because you have already removed your own perception and thinking from the process at the outset. The black box reflects your own preference that conscious experience be inaccessible to Thinking, and that is the same exact dynamic that has been occurring with practically everyone commenting on this thread except Dana and Martin. It also seems as some people are skipping right over Cleric's subsequent posts, because he elaborated and illustrated on this same underlying issue in every single one of them, from many different angles.

[Cleric K]

Cleric, I understand that, from idealistic standpoint, the perceptions and feelings are epiphenomena of meaningful spiritual activity/thinking. The question whether we want to open the "airlock" or not and uncover the causal connection between them (i.e. choose 3/ or 4/) is a different question, and it's a practical question of whether or not we practically can open the airlock. Because if we can then there would be no reason why we should not. The problem is: nobody has demonstrated so far that opening the airlock is actually possible, Steiner included. The airlock is locked from outside, not from inside. And so far the idea of "opening the airlock" remans just a wishful thinking.

"Let's open the airlock!" - "Sure, show me how" - "You turn this handle and open it" - "Well, try it. I tried and could not, but show me how if you can" - "Steiner opened it so it must be possible, so let's open it" - "And what did he see there in the ocean?" - "Blood pumping itself" - "Well, that's nonsense. I think he fooled himself into believing that he indeed opened the airlock"

However, that alone does not answer my question, because my question has a broader scope. There are other aspects of spiritual activity other than perceptions, feeling and thinking meanings, and it is still not clear if they can all be reduced to thinking. For example, such aspects as willing and experiencing, and also thinking itself. Can thinking be a result of a meaningful activity of thinking? Can Thinking produce itself? Can thinking produce the conscious experiencing of all phenomena? Is willing part of the thinking and reducible to it? The fact that all these aspects "can be thought about" does not mean that they can be entirely reduced to thinking or be epiphenomena of thinking, that would be an entirely unwarranted assumption.

Eugene, this ain't fun anymore. You're practically just ignoring everything you're being told and keep asking the same questions all over again. I specifically wrote in the previous post (because I knew that you'll snatch at it):

And this should not be mistaken for reducing the perceptions to thoughts.

and yet you keep speaking about reducing everything to thinking.

You ask "Is willing part of the thinking and reducible to it?". Not only that you've ignored what I said about reducing but you have completely ignored the last and every other previous explanation:

The last time this was explained was only a few posts ago here.

Jim says that I'm acting like some superior authority and I'm calling others prejudiced. OK, the Central Topic speaks about simple observations of our thinking process and how it relates to its context. The conversation goes like this:
J: Your descriptions of thinking don't make sense to me
C: Because you're not even trying to observe how you're willing the thinking process. You don't try to grasp your true, real-time thinking, you're simply thinking about some imagined thinking in the same way you're thinking about computation in a CPU.
J: No, I know what you mean. It looks like mindful meditation to men. I do that all the time. I know these things in and out.
C: So what do you observe in mindful meditation? Thoughts or thinking?
J: Neither. It wouldn't be mindful meditation if I were observing those.
C: ...

Seriously.... And this is supposed to be conversation between adults.

Look, people. I'm perfectly fine if you tell me "We don't care about these things". It will save everyone much energy. But what's the point of arguing that things don't make sense when you don't make even the most elementary step towards it? I'm stating it loud and clear: these things will never make sense unless one makes the thinking process the living object of investigation. At this point "No, thank you. I'm good." is perfectly fine! If you want to argue then simply tell why you don't investigate your own thinking process. Not mine, not God's or anyone else's but your own. But stating that 'no one has ever demonstrated that this is possible' simply misses the point. If we don't demonstrate it to ourselves, no one else can demonstrate it for us. No one else can 'prove' it to us. Even if I try, in the end you'll say "Aah what do you know? You're just a floating appearance in my consciousness, buzz off".

[Soul_of_Shu]

Thus bringing this to a close ...

At this point "No, thank you. I'm good." is perfectly fine!

(triple-strength prayer)

[Eugene I.]

Eugene, this ain't fun anymore. You're practically just ignoring everything you're being told and keep asking the same questions all over again. I specifically wrote in the previous post (because I knew that you'll snatch at it):

And this should not be mistaken for reducing the perceptions to thoughts.

and yet you keep speaking about reducing everything to thinking.

You ask "Is willing part of the thinking and reducible to it?". Not only that you've ignored what I said about reducing but you have completely ignored the last and every other previous explanation:

The last time this was explained was only a few posts ago here.

That's fine, it's just that in the past you have always been talking about Thinking and saying that "Consciousness is an abstraction". Now in that post you said " These four iterations exist in relative freedom to each other and like complicated mirror system produce the infinitely complex fractal of Consciousness, of which currently we experience only a tiny aperture. " So that's great, we are all talking about Consciousness as a whole but multi-aspect (not in abstract terms, but exactly how we experience it from 1-st person perspective), and we both admit that Consciousness has multiple aspects, and Thinking is only one of them with the role to transform the conscious activity into fully meta-cognitive, transparent and meaningful form. At this point I fully agree with you, and this is the transformation process going on globally as well as on the species and individual levels.

However, it is only one of the global processes and developmental dimensions in Consciousness and not everything that is going on can be reduced to it. This is the "spiritual science" part of the wholistic life and activity of Consciousness, but not all life is reducible to science and gaining knowledge, there is also esthetical/artistic, creative, agapic (Love-manifesting), there is exploration and actualization of the infinite variety of conscious forms and so on. So, again, it's not a question of "this-or-that" but a question of allowing and embracing of all venues of spiritual development and expansion of Consciousness, both on global and individual levels, including the spiritual science but not limited to it.

Now, going back to the "airlock" discussion, my feel is that in the human form we are rather limited in the extent to which we can apply the spiritual science due to the "veiled" form of our existence. This does not mean we should not try it, it just means that we should be realistic about it and don't confuse our wishful thinking with what can be realistically achieved. IMO we are here to accomplish more in those other spiritual activities that I mentioned above and for which the human form provides a catalyzing environment. Once we are back to the noncorporeal form, we can employ the spiritual science much more productively because the "veil" will not impede us anymore, but what we experienced and learned in human from through those other venues and activities (and which could not be accomplished in the noncorporeal form) will help us a lot in the overall process of the development of Consciousness (which, as I said above, can not be reduced only to spiritual science alone).

[AshvinP]

Thus bringing this to a close ...

At this point "No, thank you. I'm good." is perfectly fine!

(triple-strength prayer)

Not so fast!

The thing is, once this thread closes, the same exact thing will play out again on every other thread related to TCT, PoF, Thinking or Western spirituality at large. That is because there are a few people who like to assume they understand what is being said when they absolutely do not understand, even though the people saying it keep telling them they do not and illustrating why they do not. At this point, Eugene could be copying and pasting his comment from the 1st page and it would be no different in form or content than what he is still writing now.

So, instead of praying for this thread to close, I say we start praying the Spirit showers some light on this thread and on this forum in general . I think a few people have already seen glimmers of the deeper profundity of meaning at play here, as I myself did not too long ago. Hopefully this can be nurtured and nourished into more organic Thinking for all us who are open to that possibility.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Thus bringing this to a close ...

At this point "No, thank you. I'm good." is perfectly fine!

(triple-strength prayer)

Not so fast!

Clearly I still have a lot to learn about effective praying