Eugene I. wrote: ↑Fri Jan 07, 2022 1:30 am
OK, Cleric, so we now agree that all our views (except for the basic facts of the existence of our thinking activity and its phenomena) are only beliefs.
The question now is: how do we assess the truthfulness of these beliefs? How do we know and verify if our beliefs or views about reality indeed have any relevance to it and not our mere imaginations? You seem to suggest to "find the thoughts which reflect the harmony of the facts", but that seems to me a very vague criterium prone to cognitive and subjective biases. This is the major problem of epistemology (not only in philosophical or scientific sense but in spiritual sense too). Science developed its own criteria, philosophy has somewhat different and more vague criteria (depending on the branch), but in spiritual domain these criteria are even more vague and subjectively-biased. But that belongs to a different subject and more relevant to
this thread.
Let's take the bolded question. The mindset of our age is such that we want to build a complete mental model (theory) of reality and then
map it to perceptions. This is the correspondence theory of truth. It's only natural that this can only asymptotically perfect the
appearances of conscious experience in the same way
video games become more and more photo-realistic. Whatever we do, we still remain with our thoughts which mimic appearances, even if very faithfully. Then we ask "But how do we know if our thoughts correspond to the truth?" All attempts here have always been to challenge this correspondence theory. This means that we should consider thinking not as a tool for
mirroring reality but as part of reality itself. This of course is a little inconvenient because when thinking tries to grasp itself, it stumbles upon the hysteresis process where the dog is chasing its tail. Obviously we need different cognitive methods if we are to include thinking in the picture of reality. Otherwise, if we insist on using our mental habits which have been so successful in science, we must continually split from thinking and think only about our past thinking while being merged with current thinking which thinks about the memory images of thoughts.
If we don't seek this new kind of inner experience our task will become more and more overwhelming. Like Ashvin above gave the example - it would be like trying to grasp the fragments of a symphony (for example, only the symbols in the score) without a way to experience the actual sound. Justin has given a very appropriate quote in his thread:
Only one who knows that in every moment of reading he must, out of the depths of his own soul, and through his most intimate willing, create something for which the books should be only a stimulus – only such a one can regard these books as musical scores out of which he can gain the experience in his own soul of the true piece of music. (Steiner 1949: 14)
If we don't seek the musical reality of the soul, then accumulating more and more symbols will simply lead us to be crushed under their weight. In other words, the harmony of the facts is not simply about intellectual relations.
Let's use another metaphor. Let's take a skill such as riding a bicycle. We all know that we can analyze in great details the complicated movements we need to do in order to keep our balance. Imagine that we try to explain all this to someone who can't ride. Even if he manages to somehow comprehend all the descriptions, even if he more or less sees them fitting together, he can still ask "but how can I know if all this corresponds to truth?" The answer is obvious - try to ride the bicycle. Please note that one who speaks about the complicated movements, simply describes what he is livingly doing while riding. He's not presenting some floating theory of imagined bicycle riding. Note also something else. The riding of the bicycle is
not the sum total of the intellectual descriptions of the motions. It is still a form of spiritual activity (mainly involving our bodily will) but it is of different character than the willing of our thoughts. Not only that but we would never be able to keep our balance if we had to will every movement of the body only as result of intellectual thinking. If we try to ride a bike by analyzing everything and intellectually calculating our actions, we won't do very well. In other words, something like riding a bike is much more dynamic and rich than the intellect can grasp
in real time. We simply need to 'get the hang of it'. The intellect must concede that while we're riding, we're dancing with processes which we
don't control with our intellect in the finest details. Nevertheless, we understand the harmony of the facts in a holistic way. This harmony is not made of purely abstract thoughts. These thoughts are only descriptions of our willing being and the complicated dance it is involved with. So if someone asks "But how can I ever distinguish the intellectual theory of riding from imagined riding?" the answer is obvious. The theory is not supposed to remain purely in the intellect but it must be experienced as a description of our willing activity, which feels
very differently from pure thinking about riding.
Things are somewhat similar in our thinking, although in a different way. When we think all the time, we're actually riding a bike. We're doing something with our spiritual activity which, however, we're not in full control of, neither we're even fully aware of. As long as we're dealing with our bodily will, there's natural distance between our intellect and our willing impulses. We're 'here' with our intellect, our bodily will is 'there' in front of us. With our thinking it becomes much more challenging because we can no longer keep that comfortable distance. If we try to force that distance, we simply polarize in the hysteresis process and think about the memory images of thinking instead of perceiving the real time thinking (the (T) experience).
The difficulty with thinking is that people don't know they are riding a bike. This is what I tried to illustrate with the Fourier animation with the arrows cascade. We simply consider ourselves the top authority and imagine all our thoughts to be completely free and original creations. In reality, our thoughts are only at the tip of a complicated cascade of spiritual activity. If we try to overanalyze this process, we simply paralyze ourselves, in the same way we'll paralyze our bike riding if we demand that every movement should result only from the calculated authority of the intellect. But this doesn't mean that the intellect can't understand the thinking process in its depth. It only needs to find the appropriate mode of experience. To understand the bike riding we must invert the authority - we first try to experience what we're doing with our bodily will and then find the appropriate thoughts which can express the movements in some structured form. We do something similar in higher cognition but in the
opposite direction - we're not contemplating the spiritual activity of the bodily will but we seek to contemplate the deeper spiritual activity and
from there precipitate intellectual thoughts which draw an imaginative picture of them. The Fourier metaphor is precisely such kind of imagination. We're not supposed to build an abstract theory of cognition and then ask "but how do I distinguish ideas between the spatial and time domain?" This only shows that the imagination is not comprehended. This leaves everything in the abstract. We're not interested in riding the bicycle, we want to build a theory of it. We're not interested in hearing the music, we only want to juggle with the symbols in the score. The Fourier metaphor comes to life only if we try to grasp, not simply as abstract idea but in living reality, how the tip of our intellectual voice is being carried by the deeper forces of soul and spirit. The distinguishment will come by itself as soon as we stop seeing everything as mere abstract ideas and seek the living dynamics of our spiritual being.
The great difficulty with the above is that in our intellect we shouldn't feel as an absolute authority. It is easy (we're forced) to concede that we're not the authority of the outer world. We concede that the intellect is not the authority even over our bodily will as in bike riding. In the latter case we're forced to admit that we're dealing with processes which we don't control in full comprehension. Yet the intellect resists a similar conclusion about itself with all its might.
So the first step is to loosen our rigidity. As long as we act in our thinking as absolute authority, where we consider every thought to be our completely free and original creation, we're blinding ourselves for the depth processes. The key is that we can't create these processes out of the intellectual thoughts, just like we can't create our bicycle riding out of them. We must confront something within the essence of the intellect which the intellect itself is
not in control of. This is the major challenge which clashes deeply with modern consciousness. The intellect is used to feel itself as the holy of holies within itself. But now the intellect must open up for the possibility that within itself it may find something which is
more than itself. And furthermore, this 'more' is not something that can be rigidly intellectualized and controlled, similarly to the way we can't do that with our riding will.
I hope this makes it more clear. When asking "If everything is only beliefs, how do we know which one is true" this implies that cognition must forever remain within the plane of the intellect and seek correspondences from there. But we can easily see that the intellect can speak about processes which go beyond mere abstract thoughts. When we think about bicycle riding we know very well that what we think of is not floating imagination. There's experiential difference between our bodily will and simply thinking abstractly. In a similar way, although in a polar direction, our intellect can perfectly well distinguish between things that are only imagined and things that we innerly confront. We can very well distinguish the abstract thought of having a drink and the thought of the burning desire which we can't easily overcome when we have a drinking problem. All those questions about how to know if thoughts correspond to realities, imply that these realities have no point of contact with the intellect. But they do. And this is what we must begin to investigate - not simply what we think about spiritual things but begin to find how our thinking confronts and is being shaped by them. We can only approach these experiences when we stop acting as absolute authority which is completely outside reality and tries to understand the world from a completely detached perspective. The goal is not to have an intellectual theory/belief about reality but to investigate livingly how in thinking we can actually grow into reality and confront the spiritual process just like we confront our bicycle riding will.
