Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Jan 05, 2022 9:47 pm
It is a belief that whatever we do here on Earth, we're guaranteed to succumb to our own fantasies.
So there's metaphysical belief, or rather - a disbelief - that there could be such states of existence which give another, higher order certainty which the thinking ego can't even grasp as long as it jumps along its intellectual thoughts.
Yes, it is a belief that whatever we do here on Earth, we're guaranteed to succumb to our own fantasies.
But it is equally a belief that by applying our cognition we can arrive with certainty at the absolute higher order truth (and even the existence of such higher order truth is a belief). The reality of our human condition is that we simply do not know anything with certainty (other than the existence of our own thinking). But that's too much of a brutal fact to accept for most people, they want to know something with certainty beyond their own human thinking, so they invent belief systems and take them as truths (not as beliefs). But again, I have no problem with accepting beliefs, as long as we do it in an honest way.
The asymmetry manifests because the second camp doesn't need to remain with a believing intellectual ego but can simply move forwards and verify things. Of course, the first camp will still reject everything, it will say that the higher certainty is an illusion. Well, at this point the dialog simply ceases. I've mentioned this before. This asymmetry manifests in the whole way the old must reject the new.
The first camp would not reject anything, it would only take beliefs for what they are: as beliefs. The real asymmetry here is that the second camp would claim its beliefs and imaginations to be the truth. Such claim is supported by applying a circular argument that such truth is confirmed by "Reason" (with "Reason" being nothing else than another set of beliefs). So, it is in fact only beliefs confirming beliefs, but it is claimed to be the Truth confirmed by Reason. And declaring the position of the first camp as "ego" is another way of cheating (as I told you many times before), because I can equally claim that your way of thinking is an expression of your own ego (but I would not do that)
Cognitive evolution doesn't go forward by rejecting the old. It's quite the opposite - it fully understands it, extract its essence and moves forward. The opposite is not true. The old can't support itself by understanding the new. It can only do that by placing a boundary, by rejecting the new as something incomplete, optional or even downright illusionary. This is the great difference. And anyone here can confirm this if they are honest. No one rejects the ideas of higher development because they have explored them, understood them and found them to be erroneous. Instead, all effort is put in rejecting the new from as far distance as possible without getting too close.
It is ironic that the nondual approach to the spiritual development is also a path of experiential higher cognition beyond the human limitation and its ego, but it is the path different from yours. And because it is different, you deny it, because you can only accept your version of truth.
For me my nondual path is a belief, I admit that. It is confirmed with my spiritual experience, but I cannot claim with absolute certainty that my nondual experience bears any absolute truth beyond my current human condition, I can only believe in it, and I do, but I believe in it in honest way. I can only hope that it turns out to be true after I cross the death line, and this hope keeps me going along the path.
So let all that stay as an open door. Maybe God is not so cruel that he created humans in such a way that they can only play roulette and pick a random religion. Maybe he has given humans all the means to know the Truth of their own structure and the structure of the Cosmos. It's enough to be open for that possibility. Dismissing this possibility is in no way something we can do with absolute certainty. It's still a belief that we're created in such a way that it's impossible to know Truth reliably while on Earth. It may look as we're being humble in this way, that we're sober, unbiased and so on, but in reality we simply dismiss a very real path of experience just because we believe that it can lead to nothing but illusions. It's OK to be skeptical, even pessimistic but we shouldn't forget that there's nothing in the given which right from the start guarantees that the path of knowledge can never lead to anything more than illusions. This is how we like to see things because of the specific constellation of our sympathies and antipathies but it is in no way a certain fact of the given.
I have no problem accepting the belief that it is possible to know the Truth, and to know it experientially (even though it is still a belief). The problem is that we have many versions of such truths and many spiritual experiences, but your claim is not that it is just possible to know the Truth, but that it is only possible by applying your way of knowing it and that the Truth that you arrive at is indeed the ultimate Truth, and all the truths that other people arrived at by applying their ways to approach the truths are only their own abstractions or at best distortions of the Truth known to you because their ways of knowing the truth are the results of the activity of their egoic human minds. It is again cheating: accepting that we can know the truth does not automatically mean that the truth that you arrive at is the ultimate Truth, but you are trying to smuggle your own version of truth (or the version of your group) together with the belief that we can know the Truth.
If you would only say that you have your own way of cognizing the reality and you have your own set of beliefs about what the truth is, I would never ague with it. Indeed there is a lot of useful practices and insights in Steiner's philosophy and esoteric teachings, and I'm very open to learn about them. But the problem is that you claim it to be the only true approach to the Truth that opened to you the access to the knowledge of the Absolute Truth, while all other approaches (philosophical, scientific, religious, spiritual) are only abstractions, distortions and expressions of the human egoic activity.
We actually repeated these arguments so many times before that there is not much point in continuing here, we are simply going in circles.