I want to add, in addition to what Cleric commented here, a very broad level view of this dynamic. So broad it will be quite unhelpful if not also related to the more immediate experience Cleric mentioned re: development from infancy to adulthood.Martin_ wrote: ↑Mon Apr 04, 2022 5:27 pm A very good example of multi-layered thinking can be found in computer systems, where each layer of machine code -> programming language -> operating system -> application -> ... -> ...
are layeres of higher and higher abstraction. These levels did not appear by themselves. A human being thought them up.
Not sure that's what Ashvin means with vertical thinking though. The computer- and math- types of abstraction seem pretty mineralized to me...
Then again, maybe this is exactly vertical thinking, it's just that we would do better if we applied it to ourselves instead of the outside world...
Why do we perceive anything in an ideal Cosmos? After all, it is all qualia-meaning which has no spatial structure. The horizontal thought says, "because we have dissociated from this undifferentiated meaning and become alters, viewing the ideas of MAL as something external to us, i.e. perceptions". There is nothing untrue about this thought, but notice why it is true. It has simply restated what was already immediately apparent from our experience. Once we accept all is Idea-Meaning, the rest is just another way of saying what we already know - we are viewing the meaning of One Mind mostly from the outside as perception.
Horizontal thinking may go a bit further and say, "we are on the outside because we dissociated, like a person with DID has personalities which dissociate from their unified Personality." Has this explained anything or is it yet another restatement of what is already known?
The great truth of idealism is that absolutely every appearance on the phenomenal plane can serve as a metaphor for the One Mind reality in some significant way. Actually this fact immediately defeats Kantian and Schop epistemology, but horizontal thinking takes no notice. If it did take notice, becoming self-aware of what it is actually doing through this reasoning, then it would begin to develop vertical thinking. As Cleric has illustrated, the infernal loop develops from polarization of the hysteresis - because what we are doing with our activity and what we are perceiving in thought remains completely out of phase.
Once this polarity spirals back into some unity, thinking can ascend vertically. Then it becomes more clear why we perceive things external to us. It's not just a restatement of this fact, but an actual explanation (still very surface level explanation, but actually moving to deeper levels of explanation). This explanation is none other than what Cleric already posted about the infant and its unknown inner desires as external laws of nature. It's also what he illustrated in depth in the TCoTCT essays and Time-Consciousness essay. What follows is taken directly from the latter with few changes/additions. In our everyday experience, we find causative character only in the ideas through which we guide the transformation of our own willing-feeling-thinking states, like the idea of 'going to work today'. For something like the idea of the 'day and night cycle', our idea is only reflective. We have no justification to speak of our idea of day and night being causally responsible for that cycle, but simply an idea which we become conscious of in reflection. This is like the baby who is able to passively reflect on instinctual forces of desire and declares it external laws of nature.
The ideas of 'going to work' and 'day and night cycle' are both are, in fact, uniting the perceptual frames which occur within their meaningful context, but the former we can speak of as 'our own' and the latter as external to us. In fact, this sense of not being creatively responsible for certain ideas, while also becoming conscious of their existence, is what leads to an external perceptual world in the first place, for individuals and humanity as a whole. We have 'cast out' certain inner soul activity so that we may become conscious of ourselves and the world. In that process of involution - inner activity into perception - the relations become so complex and nonlinear that we cannot remember what or how it is related to our own activity. As long as remain stuck in horizontal hysteresis loop, this forgetfulness remains and we begin externalizing the explanations for perceptions to all sorts of intellectual concepts - god, idea, matter/energy, will, nothingness, etc. The common factor is that all of these seem to make something else responsible for the dissociation. We forget that "something else" was originally our own inner activity cast out into perceptions, including conceptual thoughts. Why take responsibility for reassociating if something else is running the show? Either it will happen or it won't, but we have washed our hands of the entire affair.
If we look more closely, though, we will find the two types of ideas we looked at before are not rigidly separated. There are examples of ideal rhythms which initially look like natural laws that we can only abstractly reflect upon but gradually turn out to be completely in our ability to encompass from within with our own living ideas, either alllowing them or not allowing them to become the motive for our will. We're speaking about instincts, habits, learned behavior, etc. Through inner effort, we can rise to a point where we encompass these elements and intervene in their unfoldment. An interesting example is breathing. Here we have something which can be perceived passively as occurring as a result of natural law, but at the same time we can 'step in' and consciously guide the process. That transfiguration of seemingly external law into internal idea has been the basis of all traditional meditative practice. So our abstract idea about breathing as a process governed by natural laws is transfigured into a process which unfolds as a result of our own creative ideation. Inner meaning which became perception becomes inner meaning again at a higher (more conscious) level, and now we creatively participate in its unfoldment. We consciously work on the ideas which will precipitate into the future environment.
Again, it is what we have been doing in mostly instinctive way throughout the modern age via philosophy, science, art, etc. No one can deny past ideas worked upon during this time have become our current environment. But there is no Wisdom in this ideal unfoldment until it becomes conscious what we are doing and how what we are doing relates to what we are perceiving. This is what Steiner endeavored to do through PoF - make us more conscious of what we are always doing through spiritual activity. Only then are we thinking vertically and, therefore, paying closer attention to how our creative spiritual activity will shape the landscape for generations to come. In this process, we also come to realize how our creative activity is not entirely ours - many higher order perspectives have been guiding this process through us and we cannot become truly conscious of our own activity until we also know these perspectives. To know, in this sense, is nothing less than experiencing their activity from within. Neither Cleric, nor certainly not myself, can claim such knowledge, but it's clearly not all or nothing - there is a gradient. Otherwise how would Cleric be able to illustrate these deeper explanations in such detail? Anyone who can reason through analytic idealism can also develop vertical thinking of this sort, with 10-15 min of spare time each day.