Hedge90 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 27, 2022 9:12 am
I'm sorry Ashvin, but I never seem to be able to understand what IN PRACTICE these things, like "redeeming XY through higher thinking", and "qualitative thinking rooted in a living logic" mean. I read the words and they don't mean anything to me.
Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sun Feb 27, 2022 9:25 am
Everybody has this problem! It's such slippery, abstract language - nothing concrete there at all! Maybe Dana can reword for us?
lorenzop wrote: ↑Sun Feb 27, 2022 5:12 pm
Ashwin,
Yours and Clerics essays are filled with layers of beliefs and parables-can’t either of you simply state your positions?
For example, Eugene in one sentence gave me a foundation to begin to understand your views, which you couldn’t do in walls of text. Or you wrap your ideas in mystical enclosures like ‘hidden meaning’ or ‘World Content’
We hear here all the time "MAL dreams reality, MAL dissociates, MAL deceives itself, etc., etc." Yet all these things are pure materialism in disguise. It's in no
principal way different than saying "Molecules react, electricity flows, neurons fire, etc., etc." In both cases, the intellect that utters these words stands completely hidden in the background. It speaks about the 'concrete' reality but it never occurs to it to investigate
its own place in that reality.
It is really not that complicated. If the Cosmos/MAL is really an inner spiritual experience in its essential nature, then
self-propelled activity is a natural aspect of it. Then if we follow our own ideas, which say that alters are really apertures of Cosmic Consciousness, it's only logical that this activity of the Cosmos should be found in some form also in our individual human experience.
Is it really so difficult to comprehend that the activity which the higher strata of MAL use to Cosmically Think the Worlds and beings, is of the
same essence as the thinking activity which manifests in a far more restricted way within our skulls?
Let me make it even more child-level approachable. The
active aspect of the Living Cosmos (the Spirit), can be likened to the air that a deep diver receives through a long hose. This air is not mechanical mixture of gases - it's the very living meaningful Will of the Cosmos (it is Thought-like but it thinks not verbal words but the inner Cosmos). As it passes through several 'filters', 'valves', etc. it is stepped down to our human state where we experience it as the flow of our thinking spirit. This flow can never by grasped in the way we try to understand the flow of electricity in wires, for example. It can only be grasped if we make our own thinking the object of investigation. This is not abstract concept but the direct perception of the real and concrete flow - our own flow of thinking which we creatively shape.
This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand. But this understanding is simply repelled. The trouble is that this understanding is not something the we simply add to our knowledge, as we add a file on our hard drive. It's not like learning about some new 'data', like the height of some peak in some mountain. It's something living which urges us to deepen the very way we experience ourselves as a thinking, feeling and willing spiritual beings.
This is what is resisted. The ego doesn't want to change. It expects 'simple' explanations, like a nice table of the highest peaks, which it looks at intellectually and says "Now this I understand." Alas, the last thing the ego wants is to investigate within itself, in the most concrete and real way, how the air-spirit flows from the Macrocosm and we experience it locally as our limited thinking I-ness.
Popular mysticism today, of course, talks all the time about this world of air of which we are part of. Yet the irony is that all that talk about non-dualism simply perpetuates the greatest dualism of our time - it simply cuts the air hose. Then people living in their deep suits say: "These air-thoughts in the mind are no different than the fishes and sea weed I see around me - they are illusions, dreams of the One Consciousness with which I'm one." Alas, one is 'one' with that Consciousness only 'on paper'. This oneness consists in a nebulous feeling of belonging, of expansiveness, bliss, etc., but ultimately, one waits for death to experience something of the Macrocosmic aspect of MAL. In the meantime air-thoughts are simply pushed away and seen as any other dream image.
This is the great dualism which contemporary flat 'non-dualism' perpetuates. If one genuinely seeks the oneness with the Macrocosmic Being, then the air hose can't be ignored because it is the only way through which consciousness grows into the Macrocosm. We can't simply dissolve the thinking ego merrily and wait for death in nebulous feeling of oneness (with who knows what). If we are to overcome the great dualism of 'non-dualism', we can only start bridging the worlds by gaining more and more consciousness of the way the Air-Spirit manifests in us from the depths/heights of Cosmic Being. This we need not in order to declare ourselves pridefully as 'enlightened' but in order to undertake our real tasks in the Cosmic organism. Otherwise we're simply biding our time here, repeating like in a trance "yeah, yeah, it's all one", waiting for true reality only after death, while in the meantime we witness the tragic events that have overcome humanity in the last few days. Then the dual non-dualism says "It's alright, just be compassionate, this is what MAL wanted to experience". But is it alright? Or humans simply don't want to awaken to their spiritual nature and instead fantasize some abstract MAL/void/transcendent nothingness out there which has ordained things to happen in this way?
This is the great dualism of non-dualism - the thinking being that each of us experiences as the active spiritual principle that we are, is seen as illusion, and instead one succumbs into a pleasant mystical sleep, watching the world go by. Instead of doing the only logical thing - to seek living understanding of how the Macrocosmic/Transcendent Being, is stepped down and precipitates in our Earthly experience as thinking "I". If this is understood (and it's not difficult) then it will be clear that we evolve towards our Macrocosmic Being not by pushing away the thinking "I" and sleeping mystically, but by becoming more and more freer and fuller expression of that Being which is our true nature.
To address the topic of this thread - the angst manifests only when the Cosmic Being is conceived as a hyperinflated
human ego. This is done out of habit, because it's the only kind of beingness contemporary man knows. This habit sneaks in completely unnoticed. Martin recently said:
Martin_ wrote: ↑Tue Feb 22, 2022 11:49 am
speculation:
1. I Am.
2. I am Alone
3. mind splits.
4. here we are.
This implicitly suggests that Cosmic Being is simply a human-like ego free from a body, thus it has all the human attributes to it, including the possibility to feel alone, bored, etc. How about the possibility that the possibility for loneliness only appears once the spirit feels separated and constrained? How about the possibility that Cosmic Being can not possibly know what loneliness is at the heights of the Spiritual World? So we create all of our problems because we anthropomorphically project the attributes characteristic to a life in a bodily environment, onto Macrocosmic Being. So it's not that the Cosmos is full of angst, it's that we project our own human angst on the Cosmos and say "What's the point of evolving, if I'll grow more and more into this infinity of angst?" Well, this is the fault of our own thinking and unresolved feeling life. It all boils down to our ability to stand in humility and be open for a Being (that manifest as our own little "I"), which is immeasurably greater than our current perspective. It's not about becoming a mindless slave of some external god but exactly the opposite - to
become more and more
that Being, even though there's always infinitely more of it which is still outside any level of consciousness.
The angst can only be overcome if we understand that at our human level we're out of sync with out higher being. We're square, the higher being is circle. They don't fit. Then we project our squaredness on high and say "What's the point?". Instead we should understand that we should gradually 'round the corners' of our rectangle (that is, develop our thinking, feeling and willing life) such that it becomes more and more compatible with the higher circle. The only way we can approach this task is through Love. Unless we open our whole being with Love for the Love of a Divine Being infinitely greater than us, we remain encapsulated in our human can, declare oneness only on paper but expect it (with great hesitation) only after death. The human ego simply can't stand the prospect of
not being the top tier container of all existence. And this is what perpetuates the angst and cold Lovelessness. And could it be otherwise when we imagine reality as contained in a lone human ego inflated into Cosmic proportions?