Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 08, 2022 2:16 pm
Cleric,
What confidence can we have in our logical reasoning faculty? If I am currently in an "unliberated" state, unaware of the nature of the forces pulling my cognitive strings, is not my thinking to be viewed with great suspicion (by my thinking
)?
Interestingly, I've often tried to use the
same argument to point out the fallacy of philosophies that see thinking as inherently illusionary.
If this is really the case (that thinking is inherently illusionary and to be viewed with great suspicion) then how can we have confidence in our idea that pushing away cognitive spiritual activity and only observing quietly, actually presents us with the non-illusionary true reality? After all, if thinking is illusionary, we should take the idea of the no-thought 'enlightenment' as equally suspicious!
The reason people don't notice this elementary fallacy is because they are blind about the fact that they actually
think this conclusion. Instead, because they dimly repel cognition, they imagine that their decision and confidence in doing so, proceeds from some
completely different spiritual faculty (usually going by the name 'intuition').
The fallacy is elementary indeed. It's the belief that if we don't do anything, we can't go wrong. It's something like "Whoever is afraid of bears doesn't go into the woods." So whoever doesn't want to err in thinking, simply should avoid thinking! So simple, isn't it? Unfortunately, this philosophy is refuted by practically every practical experience. There's even a saying "Anything can draw enemy fire on you, including doing nothing." People imagine that just because they repel cognition, from that moment on every form of meaning that they experience is coming from some deep and unerring intuition.
As a matter of fact it is completely possible that the meaning can come from deep intuition! The error is to draw the hard line between this vague intuition and our ordinary thinking. This is just another incarnation of the dualism which inevitably surfaces somewhere, when we don't have clear consciousness of our spiritual activity. We could never settle this with Eugene, for example. At some point the mystic decides that the meaning he experiences as no-thought intuition ('experiencing' or whatever) is of
categorically and irreconcilably different kind than the meaning we experience in the intellect! It is really paradoxical how popular non-dualism creates hard dualisms at every step and doesn't even recognize it! Even the most basic glance over this should suggest that if we are to take non-dualism seriously, the most reasonable thing is to see intuition and the intellect as different
states of aggregation of meaning, so to speak. In other words, in our intellectual thoughts we experience
crystalized intuition.
We can see this fallacy everywhere really. People are really fond of drawing such hard and irreconcilable boundaries. Mike for example speaks of the background of everything and everyone but there there's no longer any trace of Mike. So we have two completely orthogonal states of being and not the faintest idea about any possible
gradient in between. And who wants to hear about gradient? Gradient quickly relates to hierarchy and that's too much to bear for most. Thus one remains with flat mysticism, with the paradoxical dual non-dualism, with illusionary ghost of the thinking ego on one side, and the 'true' transcendent reality on the other, yet with absolutely no point of contact between them.
If we see things without emotional bias, then we should naturally conclude that there's something of our deep spiritual intuition which crystalizes in our rigid intellectual vessels. Yet the meaningful essence is of the
same nature. Just as we can trace how a fluid crystalizes into a solid, so we can trace how fiery Intuition condenses into airy Inspiration, which condenses into fluid Imagination, which crystalizes into solid intellect. This is a gradient of cognition - spiritual life in meaning. There are no hard and irreconcilable boundaries. Just as we can see blocks of ice floating on water, so we can observe how our thoughts crystalize from the world of Imagination. Yes, the dynamics and rhythms at each level are different, but the primordial essence is the same.
So to your question. There's no single dividing line between liberated and non-liberated state. Yes, there are distinguishable thresholds between 'states of aggregation'. There are certain points in our life when we may have epiphanies, when we suddenly get an 'aha!' moment and lots of the pieces of the puzzle come together but still, these are only milestones along an infinite road. The important thing is to get a sense of sound thinking. We need to develop a good feeling for harmonious relation of thoughts and dissonant clashes. This sensitivity should be developed first about the most elementary facts. In our hectic age we hardly realizes how little sense of truth we have. And part of the reason is that we've become completely comfortable with
lying. Lies have become a completely natural part of our life. From Santa Claus, to all the lies and deceptions that businesses require if they are not to be crushed by the competition. The result is that modern man feels almost
nothing when he tells a lie. It's just words in specific arrangement - no big deal. It seems as natural part of the game. Alas, these 'normal' for our age cognitive habits have
completely devastating consequences for our thinking life.
An illogical thought should cause us real pain. It should sound like grinding metal, like unbearable squeaky sound. Conversely, a logical thought should sound as a pleasant chord, it should gladden our heart and spin luminous threads in all directions.
So in our intellect we're not at all exiled from the higher world of musical meaning. It is only that we have to work much harder, to experiment with the arrangements of thoughts and see how they fit. The analogy with water and ice-cubes is useful. There are currents, streams of harmony in the higher fluidic strata. These are not separate and remote worlds. We're submerged in them, we breath and think them. When our ice-cube thoughts are aligned with these streamlines, we cognitively feel their harmony. This is not a 'copy' of the higher harmony - it is the
the same harmony.
That's why, the quest for truth is always about the
harmony of the facts. We can never have certainty by taking few concepts, say "God", "Angel", "matter" and try to combine them in the most various ways as pieces of puzzle. We'll always wonder "How can I be certain whether this or that arrangement is the correct one?". Simple - we can't. We gain the certainty only when we begin to spin threads from these concepts and try to follow their dynamics in
all of reality, not only some chosen limited domain. The harmony of the facts will be musically confirmed or contradicted as we expand the horizon of our investigation. This is what we do everywhere. It's what science does, it's what forensics does. We can speak of truth only as an ever expanding horizon where everything fits together in a musical harmony. The more we can follow the logical movement of the ice-cubes (that is, the ordinary logical connections), the more we begin to sense the higher order flow within which they are streamlined.
As a practical advice, I can suggest the following. As long as we have fortified ourselves in a certain outlook, it is very difficult to make sense of these things. We're in the fortified tower and we're shelled by words. We don't allow the words come very close - that is, we don't allow ourselves to
think them. We only observe them as linguistic shapes and reflect them with our shield. Then we either say "These shapes make no sense" or we say "I know these things in and out. They look similar to what X and Y said. Nothing new." This is very characteristic. Each one of us can notice this if we try. Very often when we listen to something, we don't think about the ways it can be right but instead we think
only about all the ways it can be wrong (as seen from our perspective).
The solution is to allow a new
'alter' take form in us. We need to enter a dialog with
ourselves. We should allow a being take form in us which tries to understand things. Then we begin to converse with ourselves. We take both sides alternatively. This is much more difficult to do, even though logically it is completely straightforward. The resistance is completely emotional, it has nothing to do with logic. Yet if we manage to overcome that resistance, we'll quickly realize how until now we have been paralyzing our own progress. We realize that not only we don't loose anything when we think things from different sides but we only gain.
This is a very powerful inner experience. It is immeasurably more powerful than de-identifying with the ego and declaring it an illusion - this simply merges the ego with the background, as a chameleon. Instead, when we begin to
think from both sides, we quickly realize that our true being only becomes richer and richer. We overcome the
fear of understanding other points of view. This fear is very widespread even if not readily admitted. Most commonly people are afraid to understand things (like the ones we talk about here) because they are worried they'll be lulled into some sectarian framework of thought. We can overcome this fear only when we discover the strength and flexibility of our spirit. When we can confidently think through the perspectives of anyone. These thinking perspectives only add to the harmony of the facts. Thinking frameworks are dangerous only when we try to lock into one of them and call it 'the true one'. When we understand our spiritual activity as ever evolving be-ing, all thinking frameworks are only pieces of the Cosmic puzzle that we need to master.
So this is my humble advice - don't be afraid to give birth within yourself to a being which tries to see things from a new angle. A being which asks not "How can I ever know if that is true" but a being which asks "If this is true, and I follow the thread of the facts, where do they lead me? Do they contradict or harmonize and explain everything that I've encountered through experience?"
