New topic split from 'concise criticism of analytic idealism' thread.

[Martin_]

And if it’s so that you don’t have the burden to sell it, then I guess my only hope is to ask what the price is and hope I will be able to afford it?

The price is Faith. That's my subjecitve summary.

[AshvinP]

 'When we consider our own ideational activity, we feel this as 'top-down' activity, instead of bottom-up, right? Our consciousness sets in motion a series of perceptual states of being from the top-down, including the sounds, which then feed back into our ideas, our intentions and actions.'This brings us to the question of individual free will, right? A difficult question for me at the moment. I am not satisfied with much of what I have heard about it. But this idea of hierarchy here, doesn't seem to be of much help either...

I don't want to pile on too much, since I know these are new ideas and a lot to take in. And you may be wondering how you got into this discussion and what it has to do with metaphysical idealism : ) So I'll try to keep my response brief. In general, we are answering the question, "what and how can we precisely know about the ideal structure of reality?" Just from looking at the questions you are asking Cleric and myself, it appears your Intuition in serving you well.

Hierarchy isn't a conceptual theory, but a given fact of experience. We must always be careful to distinguish these. There is hierarchy of the outer world - physical forces common to all, life forces common to living beings, soul forces common to animals and humans, and reflective thinking force unique to humans. There are mineral (physical forces), plant (life), animal (soul), and human (spirit) kingdoms, with the human embedding the others as well. There is planet Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy. Sea, land, sky, space. Individual, family, race, nation, species. Moments, minutes, hours, days, years, epochs.

Within us, we have cells, tissues, organs, systems. Of course we can really continue indefinitely with these going towards infinity at the microscopic and macroscopic scales. We are not speaking yet of what these are in essence, only the given fact they exist. The point being, everywhere we look there is hierarchical structure which needs to be accounted for by any sound ontology and/or science. We can hardly blame a materialist for hesitating to pursue an idealist ontology which has nothing to say about any of that structure except, "it's a dream of Consciousness, blind will of MAL seen across a dissociative boundary". 

'Now if we are analogizing this to Consciousness at large, which exists in the same polar relation, ...  Our ideas are like the perceptual states, the musical notes, of beings and their higher ideations, precipitating from the top-down.'If our ideas are the top-down precipitations of a conscious movement set in motion by higher conscious beings, how does this tie in with the ‘inner effort’ that should allow us to expand our consciousness from the bottom up?

This is the Beauty of polar structure where we find absolutely everywhere, spatially-temporally, microcosmically-macrocosmically, inwardly-outwardly, etc. There must always be a cooperative, living effort between the poles for evolution to continue. All that we experience now can be understood as complex nonlinear interactions which delaminated from the Cosmic Seed, the Primal Polarity, only it takes significant effort to discern where and how it is being expressed within that fragmented experience. The top-down ideations provide archetypal structure for the bottom-up details which unfold in increasing levels of freedom (ideally), while these details provide living feedback for the ideal structure to evolve. It helps to think of the entire ideal Cosmos as a unified living organism, a Macrocosmic expression of the human microcosmic organism. 





Eventually through this process, the details become the Ideas and the Ideas become the details. These aren't separate units combining and decombining, but more like nested Russian dolls, or self-similar fractal structures metamorphosing through each other. It may help to think of a living Cell differentiating but never separating completely. Why does this differentiation occur? Ultimately it only makes sense as the expression of the highest sacrificial Love. But we can't confuse our dim concept of these things for what is experienced at the much higher levels of integrated Being. So we can't really speak of "rationale" because such a thing only exists for humans at an intellectual stage of evolution. Whatever the ideal, moral motive, we can rest assured it is highly Logical, because Logic (Logos) is itself the force by which the differentiation-integration polarity becomes manifest. It is what mediates between all poles of all polarities.

'Most importantly, there is no principle reason why our consciousness cannot expand to encompass those higher ideations with inner effort. 'If there is no in principle reason for not being able to expand our consciousness upwards, what are the de facto reasons why this is not happening?And are these higher beings, or conscious ideations, a plurality? In which case what is the rationale behind their differentiation?

That is the question at the basis of our critique of analytic idealism. It doesn't happen for one simple reason - most don't know it can happen. You asked Cleric what's the big deal with people abstractly speculating endlessly on forums like this one, and that's the biggest deal. If we are honest, we would never choose to remain with abstract theories of ineffable spiritual experiences if we knew, with genuine conviction, that there is another option - to actually experience the ineffable spiritual these theories are merely conceptual symbols for (which are very important so long as we remember they are, in fact, symbols). And this option doesn't require money, super high IQ, or even too much time. But it does require openness, good will, high ideals, and inner effort. Knowing that this path is an option is already a huge opportunity, one that most people won't come across their entire lives. As for the specific practices, those can be provided (and Cleric has provided many on this forum), but laying the conceptual foundation for why this should even be pursued is equally if not more important.

'This is also related to your initial criticism of the flawed bodily boundary...'Yes, setting this boundary as one with the physical body seems arbitrary to me. But the segmentation of universal consciousness has to be explained somehow. What makes for the separation of ideations, both across and within levels of your hierarchy?

The polar structure of reality cannot be fully grasped by the rational intellect. We simply have to get used to that fact, after a while. We see this differentiating-integrating happening everywhere, but we can't capture it only with our intellectual concepts. This seems to be a major obstacle for people, after we have discussed it for several years on this forum. We should be honest with ourselves here - the intellectual ego does not like anything it cannot immediately encompass within its thought-bubbles. But we shouldn't let that natural antipathy discourage our efforts. By coming to know our antipathies, in a living instead of purely theoretical way, we have already made a huge step forward in overcoming them.

Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.
- Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

And this is most important - the Mind's self-experiencing. When we ask questions about differentiation, separations, etc., often we are smuggling in a 3rd-person view. We are trying to view the whole thing as if we are neutrally observing it happen 'from the side'. My image of the cells above runs that same risk. This view from the side simply doesn't exist. What does exist, and what we are most intimately aware of, is the dynamic of our own first-person thinking perspective. It is here we can observe ourselves participating in the differentiating-integrating process. It is a process which simply wouldn't happen if that thinking-perspective didn't exist. We are that process and normally we are flowing along with it instinctively because our thinking-experience is completely merged with it. It will take a great effort at deconditioning from the modern 'view from nowhere', by differentiating our thinking-experience from the normal flow, if we are to begin understanding these things, but it certainly can be done. If all is Mind, and modern prejudices are only habits of mind, then there is no principle reason why they cannot be altered and, thereby, our experience of the entire World Content, and our own role in its Being and Becoming, can be altered as well. The great illusion of "dissociation" and "alter", as expressed in analytic idealism, is that those words only have meaning as relational qualities, based on the first-person cognitive activity of any given individual (or center of consciounsess) at any given time in any given relation with others. Do we suppose this, like everything else, isn't also highly differentiated between human individuals living today? It is, but we hardly like to admit that possibility in our age. What Schopenhauer rightly observed, yet himself succumbed to, is that "every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."

[Cleric K]

Can one go anywhere free from speculations or postulates of any sorts in philosophy?

I don't know about philosophy but we can certainly do that in phenomenology. When thinking is kept completely distinct from the spectrum of phenomena, we have the inner duality between the philosopher, knower, who builds mental models of reality and the world that confronts us as a mystical dream image. When the thinking process itself is included in the spectrum of investigation we have the beginnings of spiritual science. Thinking is the place where the living Being of the Cosmos encounters itself. In philosophy the Being of the Cosmos splits from itself and thinks about its shadow which it calls the World. In livingly experienced thinking these two parts spiral into each other. We should appreciate how inadequate our modern intellectual habits are for this kind of activity. We're used of having the comfortable distance between the philosophizing activity and the object of investigation which should be fixated. When these spiral into each other it becomes rather uncomfortable because we feel as a dog chasing its own tail. We try to fix and objectify that which we're constantly changing. But who is to say that the goal has ever been to have a fixed model placed before the eyes of the intellect who secretly cognizes from its undisturbed vantage point? The Universe has never promised such a convenience. We need completely new skills if we are to consciously explore the flow where meaning precipitates into perception. This can be likened to spiritual steering. Instead of anchoring ourselves at rigid conceptual handles (packets of meaning), our flow of being becomes flow of creative will and imagination. The science no longer consists in making static sculpture of the supposed reality, explaining the existence of our will and imagination but instead we're dealing with completely phenomenological and practical science which investigates from the inside how our creative flow is resisted by the environment and how we can find new degrees of freedom of this flow. The picture of the environment is not built from the outside but from within, we touch the interior with our will and imagination and that's how we come to know of its rhythmic lawfulness.

This doesn't mean that we can transform our consciousness immediately. We'll need a long transitional period (speaking of evolution of humanity) where we're still using more or less rigid concepts which however should be grasped only as handles that can help us get a grip on the flow. We can liken this to riding a bicycle. When we try to teach someone to ride we explain "Hold the handlebars, step on the pedals, turn into the direction you seem to fall into" and so on. These are only quite static snapshots that try to capture the dynamics of a quite complicated process. One doesn't learn to ride when they simply learn these concepts by heart. Instead, they must act as guides for the will to enter into a special dance where the whole body must act. I suppose most remember the magical feeling when we first got the chance to feel "I get it, I get it!" Then we quickly forget the verbal instructions and understand that they are only rigidified descriptions of dynamic spiritual activity.

It's something similar with the evolution of consciousness. Above Ashvin said that the intellect can't grasp deeper reality. We should make sure we understand that rightly. The intellect can perfectly well speak in concepts about deeper reality. The "I" lives in that reality and crystalizes concepts which give some kind of reference points within the otherwise infinitely detailed spectrum of reality. What the intellect can't do is build reality by mechanically patching together such concepts, anymore that we can build bicycle riding from patching together the concepts of the instructions.

So if you ask me whether philosophy is allowed to build upon postulates and speculations, I'll have to say that I'm simply not interested in that. I'm not interested in conceptual science of some Bicycle At Large, which is forever doomed to remain only that. The sorry state of our world should be the clearest indication that we don't yet know how to ride the flow of existence. We don't know which way to turn the handlebars when we feel leaning on one side. Real progress will be made when we begin to awaken to the fact that through our spirit we partake in a higher order ride. The great religions of the past will be found to have given precisely such riding instructions appropriate for the specific epoch and level of development of humanity. They didn't originate as intellectual musings of those who wanted to control the tribes for their own benefit by constraining them in arbitrary rules of conduct disguised as coming from divine revelation. The goal of the Initiates has always been to give to growing humanity in small gulps the proper habits of will, feeling and thought, which will one day culminate into the individual beginning to "get it". I'm not speaking of course of some alleged enlightenment which once we "get" all our work is done. No, what we should now "get" is only a small organ within our Cosmic body. We have all the eons of evolution in front of us to continue this work ever further. Still, the threshold at which the modern soul stands is especially significant. It wouldn't have been that significant if we were developing gradually but in the last millennium we've been resisting this development in a special way, which simply increases the tension of the spring. Now we're facing a moment where we need true understanding because when this tension releases explosively, it can either smash us in the ground or send us for a flight.

Seen in this way, we can't do otherwise but confront certain concepts which initially look quite alien. Yet they are meaningfully consistent. Similarly, one may doubt if the instructions for bicycle riding are 'the truth', yet even if we don't immediately try them, we can still think them, we can follow how they fit or contradict all other experiences of life. In this sense, it's inevitable that we'll have to work with some concepts that seem as speculations and postulates but this should be done with the understanding that at some point all of them should be seen as direct inner descriptions of spiritual dynamics. So science and philosophy have been our ground school, the build up of our vocabulary but now we should seek the flow where they can be seen as crystalized forms of the life of the spirit.

And are you also saying that your approach is freed from this inappropriate commerce, and if so, is there anything that makes people not adopt this approach other than laziness or intellectual weakness?
What I wasn’t aware of is that there was a way to ‘seek the living experience from whence the words 'water', 'fish net', 'inside', 'outside' can be seen as direct testimonies’. And if it’s so that you don’t have the burden to sell it, then I guess my only hope is to ask what the price is and hope I will be able to afford it?

This is a vast topic. One can hardly 'sell' these ideas because from the perspective of modern man it is like buying something from which not only he'll not profit in the worldly sense but will actually tax him even more. Of course I'm not speaking of cash but the fact that when our eyes begin to open for the essential being of reality, we begin to judge differently how we employ our energies. This is the greatest obstacle for the modern ego. People do not seek a truth which will let them see their own goals and desires within a greater landscape of spiritual reality (and potentially discover that they don't fit very constructively there). Instead they seek things that will empower them to follow their unexamined goals and desires even further. This is also why today's purely technological science is so addictive. It offers all the means to pursue desires and enhance their satisfaction, yet it has practically nothing to say about what these desires are and if they sit harmonically in the greater picture. That's why in our age people feel especially satisfied when proudly declaring that moral life is a question of personal preference (entirely subjective). Probing the brain reveals something about the dynamics of consciousness but no one expects that one will find something about good and evil there. All this results once again from the simple fact that we're not willing to include our life of thinking, feeling and willing as legitimate processes of reality which follow their own lawful rhythms in complicated entanglement with the soul and spirit environment. The bicycle riding metaphor above already hints how moral life is within the hidden dynamics of the flow. Claiming that there's no shared moral order is like saying that the atoms for the bicycle are objective truth shared by everyone but that the dynamics of riding (forces, gravity, friction, balance, etc.) are a matter of personal preference. And the reason for this faulty reasoning is very transparent - only if we're willing to face it. It's that people today secretly consider their soul (psyche) as a holy black box, that no eye is allowed to peek into - including (and especially) our own. This makes us feel as atomic beings whose inner life is a great mystery but entirely personal matter. Physical life forces us to synchronize our sensory understanding but as far as inner life is concerned, each person's black box is their own undisputable god. Today we need the same impartiality in regards to our own soul life, as we exercise in the laboratory for things remote to our inner being. Then we'll find that our flow of will, feeling and thinking are in constant lawful interaction with the spiritual environment and that the dynamics of these interactions we call from our human perspective, moral order. In reality, there's unified order in the Cosmos acting at different fractal scales, it's only that in our life the order of the sensory spectrum is largely out of phase with the soul and spirit spectrum. This disconnect continually feeds back on us as disease, social clash or in the simplest sense - evil - yet we haven't yet made up our minds that all this happens because we don't want to investigate the rhythmic dynamics of our soul and spiritual life - that of thinking, feeling, willing - and their corresponding worlds, with the same determination we have about the sensory spectrum.

As long as one fears that insight into the nature of reality may change their interests and sense for what is worthy pursuing and what only increases entropy, the price will be seen as too high. Such person will subconsciously avoid anything that brings them closer to the core essentials, even though in the long term the spring will only become tenser and tenser, until it snap-releases, and then who is to tell if in their ignorance they'll know how to give the released momentum a constructive direction.

[Federica]

And if it’s so that you don’t have the burden to sell it, then I guess my only hope is to ask what the price is and hope I will be able to afford it?

The price is Faith. That's my subjecitve summary.

Martin, I have also been wondering whether the price would come in such a currency.
But the price has now been called in a different one, namely giving up undue convenience and accepting fear of significant life change.
Do you have a new subjective summary at this point?

[Federica]

I don't want to pile on too much, since I know these are new ideas and a lot to take in. And you may be wondering how you got into this discussion and what it has to do with metaphysical idealism : )

: ) Well yes, I arrived here assuming this was the place to discuss BKs model, later ‘a place to discuss forms of idealism’ and I’ve been going with the flow, not wondering that much really. But you are actually right: 'Where am I? What am I doing here? Let’s take a random look at some older posts.' : )
Turns out waters got a whole lot more troubled in those layers, so I’m back here surfing the top of the wave if you don’t mind : )

Why does this differentiation occur? Ultimately it only makes sense as the expression of the highest sacrificial Love. But we can't confuse our dim concept of these things for what is experienced at the much higher levels of integrated Being. So we can't really speak of "rationale" because such a thing only exists for humans at an intellectual stage of evolution. Whatever the ideal, moral motive, we can rest assured it is highly Logical, because Logic (Logos) is itself the force by which the differentiation-integration polarity becomes manifest. It is what mediates between all poles of all polarities.

Logos is logic but also a 'key’ as language is a key. Language is abstraction par excellence. How can logos - the key by which reality evaporates into abstraction - at the same time be the mean by which all polarities condense into the manifested?
I am fearing an answer along the lines: ‘because Logos is the compound of all polarities’...

That is the question at the basis of our critique of analytic idealism. It doesn't happen for one simple reason - most don't know it can happen. You asked Cleric what's the big deal with people abstractly speculating endlessly on forums like this one, and that's the biggest deal. If we are honest, we would never choose to remain with abstract theories of ineffable spiritual experiences if we knew, with genuine conviction, that there is another option - to actually experience the ineffable spiritual these theories are merely conceptual symbols for (which are very important so long as we remember they are, in fact, symbols). And this option doesn't require money, super high IQ, or even too much time. But it does require openness, good will, high ideals, and inner effort. Knowing that this path is an option is already a huge opportunity, one that most people won't come across their entire lives. As for the specific practices, those can be provided (and Cleric has provided many on this forum), but laying the conceptual foundation for why this should even be pursued is equally if not more important.

Here I gather that this other option that you and Cleric K are presenting requires negotiation (your selling and someone else’s buying) just as much as other idealisms do, the difference being that those philosophies call primarily for an intellectual inquiry, whilst your approach calls primarily for a practice.
Maybe that’s why, as I discovered, Cleric K prefers to call the approach, or path, phenomenology rather than philosophy. To my taste, the -ology sounds in excess to encompass openness, good will, high ideals and inner effort. Not that I am taking the liberty to tell you how you should name what you do. I am rather wondering whether you share anything with other spiritual paths, like for instance the ‘direct path’ taught, or facilitated by Rupert Spira, which elicits similar foundations of openness and good will and similar investments of inner effort.

The polar structure of reality cannot be fully grasped by the rational intellect. We simply have to get used to that fact, after a while. We see this differentiating-integrating happening everywhere, but we can't capture it only with our intellectual concepts. This seems to be a major obstacle for people, after we have discussed it for several years on this forum. We should be honest with ourselves here - the intellectual ego does not like anything it cannot immediately encompass within its thought-bubbles. But we shouldn't let that natural antipathy discourage our efforts. By coming to know our antipathies, in a living instead of purely theoretical way, we have already made a huge step forward in overcoming them.

Yes, ego is constantly lurking, and its hunger for a full intellectual grasp...

And this is most important - the Mind's self-experiencing. When we ask questions about differentiation, separations, etc., often we are smuggling in a 3rd-person view. We are trying to view the whole thing as if we are neutrally observing it happen 'from the side'. My image of the cells above runs that same risk. This view from the side simply doesn't exist. What does exist, and what we are most intimately aware of, is the dynamic of our own first-person thinking perspective.

I see this third-person posture that makes us not embody and forget our insights the minute we pause introspection and slip back into everyday activities...

[Not my account]

Guys, can we keep this thread limited to concise criticism? (looking at you, Ashvin )

EDIT: For anyone interested, the 3rd round of the AMA with Bernardo Kastrup is happening June 30th, 8pm CET (11am PT) at The Analytic Idealism Discord Server.

[Federica]

I don't know about philosophy but we can certainly do that in phenomenology. When thinking is kept completely distinct from the spectrum of phenomena, we have the inner duality between the philosopher, knower, who builds mental models of reality and the world that confronts us as a mystical dream image. When the thinking process itself is included in the spectrum of investigation we have the beginnings of spiritual science. Thinking is the place where the living Being of the Cosmos encounters itself.

I wonder how you regard spiritual traditions that find that place not inside but outside thinking.

In philosophy the Being of the Cosmos splits from itself and thinks about its shadow which it calls the World. In livingly experienced thinking these two parts spiral into each other. We should appreciate how inadequate our modern intellectual habits are for this kind of activity. We're used of having the comfortable distance between the philosophizing activity and the object of investigation which should be fixated. When these spiral into each other it becomes rather uncomfortable because we feel as a dog chasing its own tail. We try to fix and objectify that which we're constantly changing. But who is to say that the goal has ever been to have a fixed model placed before the eyes of the intellect who secretly cognizes from its undisturbed vantage point? The Universe has never promised such a convenience. We need completely new skills if we are to consciously explore the flow where meaning precipitates into perception. This can be likened to spiritual steering. Instead of anchoring ourselves at rigid conceptual handles (packets of meaning), our flow of being becomes flow of creative will and imagination. The science no longer consists in making static sculpture of the supposed reality, explaining the existence of our will and imagination but instead we're dealing with completely phenomenological and practical science which investigates from the inside how our creative flow is resisted by the environment and how we can find new degrees of freedom of this flow. The picture of the environment is not built from the outside but from within, we touch the interior with our will and imagination and that's how we come to know of its rhythmic lawfulness.

The overview is stunning and I appreciate the value of relinquishing that hidden, convenient, artificial vantage point.

But then one wonders - what is a completely phenomenological and practical science that investigates from the inside? For instance I doubt that such a science can use abstract quantitative methods, that would bring the inquirer on the outside of the flow, back to vantage point.

If science is about discovering, co-creating the lawfulness of the world by scrubbing its interior with will and imagination, is science then anything distinct from life itself? Philosophy too, for that matter, or phenomenology, are they anyhow distinct from life itself?

And there’s the question of languages, the usual suspects of abstraction. Was not language that made us drift away from first-person experiential being? Is not language responsible to this day for keeping us comfortably lost in abstraction with every word we utter? What is humanity deemed to do with language: embrace it or renounce all convenience down to the last monosyllable? Or will a providential polarity come to our rescue and precipitate the right idea into our effort….

Without vantage point, one will wish to land in first-person, fully immersed thinking, and that it will feel empowering like first bike rides, but what if we get caught in endless polar rollercoaster loops and never get to ride the magical bike?

People do not seek a truth which will let them see their own goals and desires within a greater landscape of spiritual reality (and potentially discover that they don't fit very constructively there). Instead they seek things that will empower them to follow their unexamined goals and desires even further. This is also why today's purely technological science is so addictive. It offers all the means to pursue desires and enhance their satisfaction, yet it has practically nothing to say about what these desires are and if they sit harmonically in the greater picture. That's why in our age people feel especially satisfied when proudly declaring that moral life is a question of personal preference (entirely subjective). Probing the brain reveals something about the dynamics of consciousness but no one expects that one will find something about good and evil there. All this results once again from the simple fact that we're not willing to include our life of thinking, feeling and willing as legitimate processes of reality which follow their own lawful rhythms in complicated entanglement with the soul and spirit environment. The bicycle riding metaphor above already hints how moral life is within the hidden dynamics of the flow. Claiming that there's no shared moral order is like saying that the atoms for the bicycle are objective truth shared by everyone but that the dynamics of riding (forces, gravity, friction, balance, etc.) are a matter of personal preference. And the reason for this faulty reasoning is very transparent - only if we're willing to face it. It's that people today secretly consider their soul (psyche) as a holy black box, that no eye is allowed to peek into - including (and especially) our own. This makes us feel as atomic beings whose inner life is a great mystery but entirely personal matter. Physical life forces us to synchronize our sensory understanding but as far as inner life is concerned, each person's black box is their own undisputable god. Today we need the same impartiality in regards to our own soul life, as we exercise in the laboratory for things remote to our inner being. Then we'll find that our flow of will, feeling and thinking are in constant lawful interaction with the spiritual environment and that the dynamics of these interactions we call from our human perspective, moral order. In reality, there's unified order in the Cosmos acting at different fractal scales, it's only that in our life the order of the sensory spectrum is largely out of phase with the soul and spirit spectrum. This disconnect continually feeds back on us as disease, social clash or in the simplest sense - evil - yet we haven't yet made up our minds that all this happens because we don't want to investigate the rhythmic dynamics of our soul and spiritual life - that of thinking, feeling, willing - and their corresponding worlds, with the same determination we have about the sensory spectrum.

As long as one fears that insight into the nature of reality may change their interests and sense for what is worthy pursuing and what only increases entropy, the price will be seen as too high. Such person will subconsciously avoid anything that brings them closer to the core essentials, even though in the long term the spring will only become tenser and tenser, until it snap-releases, and then who is to tell if in their ignorance they'll know how to give the released momentum a constructive direction.

The tale of the play of polarities that spiral into each other and blur illusory boundaries in the flow of a universal danse is compelling. You tell it gracefully.
I realize that 'tale' builds an additional layer of abstraction into the language. I am using it because at this point that's how it inevitably lands at the receiver's end. And it feels as compelling and captivating as it feels dazing. Thinking will start wavering in all directions. That’s where the fear is awaiting, I guess, more than in the induced life changes.
And because the only way to know must be to try, maybe Martin was on to something and there is a leap of faith to be made somewhere along the path?

[Federica]

Guys, can we keep this thread limited to concise criticism? (looking at you, Ashvin )

EDIT: For anyone interested, the 3rd round of the AMA with Bernardo Kastrup is happening June 30th, 8pm CET (11am PT) at The Analytic Idealism Discord Server.

My apologies, I am the one responsible for instigating this mega digression, not Ashvin...
Most of this thread has actually very little to do with criticism for an AMA.
Does anyone know if there's a way I can clean up and move or duplicate all that's off-topic into a new discussion?
Sorry...

[AshvinP]

Why does this differentiation occur? Ultimately it only makes sense as the expression of the highest sacrificial Love. But we can't confuse our dim concept of these things for what is experienced at the much higher levels of integrated Being. So we can't really speak of "rationale" because such a thing only exists for humans at an intellectual stage of evolution. Whatever the ideal, moral motive, we can rest assured it is highly Logical, because Logic (Logos) is itself the force by which the differentiation-integration polarity becomes manifest. It is what mediates between all poles of all polarities.

Logos is logic but also a 'key’ as language is a key. Language is abstraction par excellence. How can logos - the key by which reality evaporates into abstraction - at the same time be the mean by which all polarities condense into the manifested?
I am fearing an answer along the lines: ‘because Logos is the compound of all polarities’...

The key is to see how it is our modern prosaic language which is abstract par excellence. This comes back to the Schop quote about mistaking our own limits for those of the world. We know, for ex., that some people wield language much less prosaically than others. We call them poets and storytellers. So there is differentiation within our own current age. Why do we assume there is not just as significant differentiation, if not greater, between our age and previous ones? Such as the ones which gave rise to all the world mythologies which Cleric mentioned. The mythologies themselves image this transition to more rigid and prosaic forms, not only of language, but all forms we perceive and think.

Language was once something more living and flowing, like classical music became more recently. After all, we think and speak with the sounds of our language. It was more vowel, less consonant (or more harmonically balanced). And if we keep digging into these 'fossils of consciousness', we will find all that we consider "outer forms" today were more flowing, more spiritualized, in ages past. At a certain point, we come to a time when what we consider 'inner' experience, which flows along for us more dynamically relative to outer experience, was concretely perceived as outer forms. Our inner ideas, abstract as they might be now, were outer revelation of Gods for the ancients. These 'pure' thoughts only remain abstract so long as we don't find the inner experiences which they symbolize, as Cleric mentioned. "Let he who is without Maya cast the first stone."

Also, let's be clear that Logic is not the thought-forms themselves, but that formless force which weaves them out of meaning. How else can we come back to that meaning except through the Logic which weaved the forms to begin with? Again, like hierarchy, this should not be understood as only a theory, but a given fact. When you read these rigid characters I am typing, the syntax, it is your logic which brings you to the supersensible meaning, the semantics, which doesn't resemble the outer structure in any way. Syntax-Semantics, consonant-vowel, i.e. perception-meaning, is a manifestation of the Primal Polarity. So we see the same polar structure of the Cosmos also manifests in Nature and Culture, in our own language and thinking.

That is the question at the basis of our critique of analytic idealism. It doesn't happen for one simple reason - most don't know it can happen. You asked Cleric what's the big deal with people abstractly speculating endlessly on forums like this one, and that's the biggest deal. If we are honest, we would never choose to remain with abstract theories of ineffable spiritual experiences if we knew, with genuine conviction, that there is another option - to actually experience the ineffable spiritual these theories are merely conceptual symbols for (which are very important so long as we remember they are, in fact, symbols). And this option doesn't require money, super high IQ, or even too much time. But it does require openness, good will, high ideals, and inner effort. Knowing that this path is an option is already a huge opportunity, one that most people won't come across their entire lives. As for the specific practices, those can be provided (and Cleric has provided many on this forum), but laying the conceptual foundation for why this should even be pursued is equally if not more important.

Here I gather that this other option that you and Cleric K are presenting requires negotiation (your selling and someone else’s buying) just as much as other idealisms do, the difference being that those philosophies call primarily for an intellectual inquiry, whilst your approach calls primarily for a practice.
Maybe that’s why, as I discovered, Cleric K prefers to call the approach, or path, phenomenology rather than philosophy. To my taste, the -ology sounds in excess to encompass openness, good will, high ideals and inner effort. Not that I am taking the liberty to tell you how you should name what you do. I am rather wondering whether you share anything with other spiritual paths, like for instance the ‘direct path’ taught, or facilitated by Rupert Spira, which elicits similar foundations of openness and good will and similar investments of inner effort.

There is a big difference - we have nothing invested in other people 'buying'. For one thing, by the very nature of our philosophy and spirituality, these are not our ideas or that of any particular individual to sell, but common possession of all thinking beings. We can consider our thinking as a sense-organ which perceives ideas like our eyes perceive colors and forms. I consider myself no more skilled at perceiving ideas than another, than I would consider myself more skilled at seeing forms compared to someome who needed glasses. It is by grace of the Spirit we recieve these ideas, so it is by that same grace of that same spirit we freely give them out.

The fact is, our happiness, our reputation, our self-worth, our peace and satisfaction, our capacity to grow and evolve, etc. really has little to do with who understands and pursues these ideas further. We have been commenting on this same forum for about 2 years plus, writing much of the same things to various people, even as participation seems to dwindle. I never tire of expressing these ideas to new people who take a genuine interest. We don't have foundations, patreon pages, YouTube videos, books, or anything similar, and don't expect to put value into these things. From this perspective, the spirtual life really shouldn't get too intertwined with worldly pursuits - not because we judge those as being inherently "bad", but because the outer and inner are lawfully unified and really do feedback into each other. We take that feedback in a living, not only theoretical, way.

I can't comment much on Spira as I haven't followed him. My understanding from others is that he teaches a modern 'nondual' mystical path. On that front, I would say that we really need to take the polairities, the 'union of the opppsites', more seriously. East-West, North-South, are geographical polarities. These streams should spiral into more harmonious unity in our age. Modern nondual teaching often leaves the spiritual practice geared towards the sense-world, towards penetrating deeply into the forms of Maya, completely ignored. It only declares them Maya and moves on without a second glance. The Western esotericism we speak of is familiar with ancient mystical practice and incorporates it thoroughly, yet also discerns the need to not only declare what is Maya, but to also work at its redemption for the benefit of the whole Cosmic organism.

And this is most important - the Mind's self-experiencing. When we ask questions about differentiation, separations, etc., often we are smuggling in a 3rd-person view. We are trying to view the whole thing as if we are neutrally observing it happen 'from the side'. My image of the cells above runs that same risk. This view from the side simply doesn't exist. What does exist, and what we are most intimately aware of, is the dynamic of our own first-person thinking perspective.

I see this third-person posture that makes us not embody and forget our insights the minute we pause introspection and slip back into everyday activities...

Yes, that is a manifestation of the polar rhythm within which our thinking and willing (perceiving) oscillate. When we polarize to the latter, we are absorbed in perceptual experience, and to the latter, we step back and try to grasp that experience from the side. These can be spiraled into more harmonious unity, because they are, essentially, unified. Thinking is not other than Willing-Perceiving, but they are two manifestations of the same spirtual activity. At the end of the day, the path we speak of is simply one in which we seek to restore this Unity by becoming more conscious of its dynamics, inwardly and outwardly. It is the same polarized rhythm which occurs during our present sleep-wake (willing-thinking) cycle, for ex. Psychologists take for granted that dreams can be made more conscious, and thereby we restore more continuity of consciousness. What they mostly fail to ask is, why? Why are these things possible for us now? There is no reason to stop only one layer deep of "why" - we can keep asking and answering that question at every layer, but with different modes of cognition. It isn’t simply the intellect going into a recursive loop, but the dream character and his dreamy thinking awakening through many layers of nested dreams.

[AshvinP]

...

I responded in a new thread.