Eugene I. wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 7:21 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon May 16, 2022 5:37 pm
Let's refocus on the main point of TCT, given your last post. You say,
"(1) creative activity and direct experience of the creativity is what I do every day in my profession and my hobbies..." and then "(2) in no way preludes us from evolving and developing higher order abilities of our cognition."
Do you understand #1 to be equivalent to #2? How would you describe these higher order abilities of cognition and your experience with them?
This is the real crux of the issue and I hope these questions can be answered in a straightforward way, without bringing up extraneous topics that I am not asking about, like any philosophical categories of thought. I am only asking about first-person experience of higher order cognition and how you understand it in the context of your comments above.
Right, I think we are getting to the core of the issue here. I perfectly understand that #1 and #2 are equivalent
providing that our role in the development process is
co-creation and
not only just following the attractors and cognizing the structures and curvatures created by higher-order hierarchies. However, if our only role is to follow the curvatures and attractors, and all our individual creative contributions that are not aligned with those attractors are considered as only some useless or even harmful activity of our individual egos, then I don't agree with such view on the path of "evolving and developing higher order abilities of our cognition". So, the answer really depends on how exactly #2 is interpreted and whether it leaves any room for our creative co-participation.
We are indeed getting to the core of the issue. I want to pose one simple question for us to investigate, leaving all other questions aside for now. This will be the most productive way forward to a shared understanding, I feel. I ask you to please consider what is written below carefully.
Q: What do Cleric and Ashvin
mean when they write 'higher Imaginative cognition'?
Let's be clear - the question is
not whether Imaginative cognition exists, or what really is the essence of such a cognition. Those are topics for another time. I am not even including what Steiner means by it, because I don't want findingblanks or someone else to suddenly incarnate on the forum and quote some passage way out of context to muddle up the issue. The only question right now is what
we mean by it when presented in our various posts on this forum.
Although I am confident Cleric shares my understanding here, I will only speak for myself right now. In my understanding, #1 cannot possibly be equivalent to #2. Imaginative cognition is not simply more creative, more intelligent, more flexible, etc. thinking. It is all those things, but also much more. The difference between IC and normal intellectual thinking can be analogized to that between self-aware reflective thinking of an adult human and instinctive thinking of an infant or clever animal. We are talking about a major qualitative transformation here, an evolutionary leap.
I suppose I contributed some to the misunderstanding when always mentioning our current thinking and higher Thinking is continuous and of the same essence. That is true in the same way the adult human being is continuous and of the same essence of his former infant self. But the qualitative difference in cognition is just as great as well. So there is no sense in which someone could be imaginatively cognizing while they work at any regular job or engage in any regular hobby, like playing a musical instrument. But what I mentioned before is also at play - the lower simply cannot grasp the higher and finds it difficult to even imagine how the higher could exist in theory.
In fact, developing Imaginative cognition requires us to begin living in two different worlds, so to speak. If we were to engage such cognition after meditating while trying to go about the normal course of daily affairs, it would be a debacle. It simply wouldn't work. We wouldn't be able to get any of our normal intellectual activities done. Here I am not intending to claim that I have personal experience with this, but only that it's my well-informed understanding of the situation at this time. The long term aim is much more continuity of higher consciousness for humanity, but that will take great time to develop in any significant way. I want to also be clear that I do
not intend to speak of mystical states of consciousness here, as they are known to any nondual traditions - that is not my meaning.
So how can we even speak of IC and think about approaching it before actually developing it, if it's so much higher and not identical to what is already known in nondual traditions? That is precisely what Cleric has provided us in the TCT essays - metaphors and analogies which put us on a path towards shifting our perspective just enough to ascend to a more living thinking perspective on what this evolutionary leap to IC entails and how to go about it with simple exercises. Although the perspectival shift is quite simple - it is an inversion of our current perspective in many ways - the implications of successfully making it are profound and wide-ranging. First and foremost, we need to abandon the idea that we currently have an apex, top-level, mind-container perspective on the World Content.
If we think that we are mostly free thinkers, we are mostly creative thinkers, and we mostly grasp the standard objects of inquiry in philosophy, theology, science, and art - questions of essence, god, evolution, beauty, etc. - then we are most definitely stuck within this mind-container perspective. We have no sense for the much higher, invisible meaningful context of soul forces which funnel our thinking into very narrow, templated channels of mineralized concepts. We have no sense of how our thinking is dragged around by sense-experience nonstop throughout most of our waking day. Now I am getting carried away, so let me stop and return to the main question. We can debate the existence of this higher meaningful context, hierarchical structures and what not later.
From the above, is it clear to you what we mean by higher cognition, why #1 is not even close to equivalent with #2 for us, and why this makes the nature of our arguments much different than you suppose? For us, the questions of attractors, top-down ideas, hierarchies, co-creation, novelty, etc. is entirely irrelevant at the abstract conceptual level. The meaning of those concepts
emerge from our subconscious Imaginative thinking and the real issue is whether we have any solid reasons to think the latter exists and can be consciously harnessed by the average thinking individual today. The answers to all those other questions - how various philosophical concepts can logically cohere - will only come from the higher perspective of living and imaginative thinking, if it exists and is attainable.
Does this make sense? Not whether you agree with the existence or description of IC above, but does it make sense
what I mean when I refer to it?