A Simple, Logical System for Proving the Existence of God — Idealist Metaphysics

[AshvinP]

So the dichotomy between "pure experience" and meta-analysis thinking cannot be valid, as there would be nothing to meta-analyze in the absence of thinking.

Good catch, I wasn’t careful enough with that description.

I’m not intending to advocate that all thinking isn’t a meta-analysis of pre-existing thinking activity, but that we can block sense perceptions from interrupting such thoughts, thereby rendering them “internal experiences” that precede additional context provided by future sense perceptions. I don’t intend to propose a dichotomy between meta-analysis and pure experiences, but that we can engage in pure experiences (as a meta-analysis of previous thinking activity) without simultaneously forming an additional meta-analysis of that pure experience (which is itself a meta-analysis of previous thinking activity). The point I was trying to make is that when we form a meta-analysis of previous thinking activity, we lose some pure comprehension thereof.

This framework is supported by the visual analogy I shared. All future thinking activity — as bound by an outer circle — is linked to, and based upon previous thinking activity — as bound by an inner circle.

One thing I have tried to make clear from many of my previous comments is that there are no tangible objects, or an object/subject divide. I think the mind can trick itself into believing that such a divide exists — even though it doesn’t. The mind can assign arbitrary boundaries that separate subjects — this is evident by the fact that we can differentiate things in our surroundings. But these boundaries dissolve when they are brought deeper into focus. My reference to the mind as compartmentalizing information is as such a hallucination of mind.

This is also how I use pixels in my visual analogy — which should not be mistaken as objective content. The analogy demonstrates how pixels cannot be bound by perception, nor can pixels exist outside of perception. Thus, it is not rational to claim the existence of pixels as occupying a definite position in time (either as mind dependent or mind independent phenomena). Rather, pixels are how the mind forms estimations of its qualitative experiences.

I propose that our thinking activity is like a sensory organ which perceives ideal content like our eyes perceive colors, and therefore we are always co-creating the experiential world through this activity.

I agree that we participate in the creation of the experiential world through ideal thinking activity.

Most of our perception-thinking is completely reflexive, dragged around by sense-perceptions and intellectual concepts, and therefore out of our control. We need to seek out the relatively tiny islands of active thinking and images which we have creative responsibility for.

I don’t believe our perception-thinking is ever completely reflexive. This presupposes dualism, as it implies that our conscious thinking can be separate from the conscious thinking of MAL. It implies that we can be merely be a body which acts out the thinking activity of higher orders of consciousness.

Our capacity for creative choice is what enables our subjective experience of world content. It is our unique way of qualitatively viewing the world which makes us a participant in its creation. The experiential world is therefore never entirely created by “something else”. Otherwise, we would be dissolved in an entropic soup of the universe. The energy cost of creative choice is just subject to variation, and creative choice more quickly or slowly breaks down to instinct at the whims of the cosmic plan.

We serve a higher order consciousness in accordance with our order within the complexity chain. Like how each organ in our body functions to contribute not just to that organ but other related organs. And most of all, they serve to contribute to the function of our nervous system. Whereas, our nervous system moderates resources between all organs, but at some point delegates tasks to each specific organ. Universal minds' goal to dictate requires that it also empowers in a self generative feedback loop. Also a bit like how each neuron is essentially fighting for agency over every single neuron in your brain, which requires that it also sends information to other neurons (empowering them) in order for that neuron to reciprocate.

The energy cost for shifting focus against the influences of the cosmic forces depends on the homogeneity between our higher conscious environment and our individualistic interpretive model thereof, as well as our internal vs sense perceptual proclivities of our individualist focus/engagement in the instance of action.

For example, if we enter a relatively unfamiliar environment, and we are engaging our sense perceptions, the energy cost to shift our focus to some standard amount would be higher. Additionally, the time frame in which Willed thought breaks down to instinct reduces per standard amount of energy used — In which case, we are more at the whims of the “cosmic plan”. Whereas, if our sense perceptions are not as engaged, but we are instead processing deep internal experiences, this unfamiliar environment does not reduce the energy cost for individualistic choice as much. Furthermore, under familiar environmental conditions, we do not need to engage our sense perceptions as heavily, and are thereby more free to engage in internal processes without disruption by our relative environment.

As such, the relative entropy of the observer's environment, and the observer's sensory vs internal engagement levels determines the energy cost for said observer to make creative choices, as well as the time based parameters in which said observer's thinking breaks down to instinct under the whims of cosmic influences. This seems to function to filter the actions of observers that may otherwise push against the ideal patterns of the whole system.

Here’s another way of looking at it which you may not like due to its outward facing nature.

Since action by a local observer changes the state of the environment it is contained within, it can be regarded as distinct to its environment by the entropy differential it imposes on its environment. More specifically, the degree to which a local observer is defined as an alter = the differential entropy between the whole system, and the system external to the observer in a moment of conjunction between the observer and the system, multiplied by the time duration in which information is communicated from the relative system to the observer such that the system entropy is increased an amount equal to the differential entropy imposed by the observer.

Inversely, the degree to which the observer is globally defined (an aspect of the system) = the differential entropy between the whole system, and the observer in a moment of conjunction between the observer and the system as a whole, divided by the time duration in which information is communicated from the relative system to the observer such that the system entropy is increased an amount equal to the differential entropy imposed by the observer.

If two people are playing a game of 4 dimensional tag and the chaser can never catch the avoider, then the avoider is untouched by the chaser. But rather, the chaser only has to catch up to a point in which the avoider has previously been in order to define how far ahead the avoider is in that measured instance. Such is inevitable so long as the chaser is always moving.

So long as the observer imposes an informational complexity to the system, and that informational complexity is reimposed to the observer by the system in equal (or greater) margin, the observer is contained within that system because an equally complex relationship has been established between observer and environment.

P.s. I like the Steiner quote you linked. I wasn't aware of who he was until our conversation.

Grant,

Thanks for the thoughtful post. Once again, I find myself agreeing with much of what you wrote. At the same time, the "outward facing nature" you mention is troublesome for me. What I keep thinking is, "how many more conceptual formulations could be utilized here to convey the same underlying content?", and the answer I come to is, "infinitely many". When we really sense that reality, it makes the whole thing less impressive, so to speak. It feels as if we are hitting a ceiling but becoming too enamored with our concepts to rise above the ceiling. Perhaps that's more of a reflection of my own state of thinking and path at this time, but I imagine nearly every careful thinker eventually comes upon similar concerns if they are striving for something more than just thinking as they have always known it.

In terms of reflexive thinking, I am speaking from a phenomenological perspective in terms of our conscious thinking. Thinking is the opposite pole of perceiving, which is basically Willing activity. Plato described perceiving as a process in which our eyes are as 'prehensile' instruments reaching out and grabbing hold of objects. That is a much more accurate way of describing its essential nature than modern scientific understanding. We get better sense of it when considering how we direct our attention to places without much if any reflection. Our active perception happens mostly subconsciously, including perception of concepts, while our conscious thinking reflexively reacts to those perceptions, outer and inner. So, in that sense, our normal thinking is the passive counter-force to our active willing-perceiving.

We can notice how modern metaphysics like analytic idealism smear out all of what we do with these inner activities into "consciousness". It gains an abstract metaphysics, even if technically accurate, at the expense of a living understanding of what we are doing inwardly. This is why materialistic thinking which highly differentiates experience and activity can even gain an advantage if it avoids the naive realism of outer perceptions and the reductionism of inner experience, which of course are huge problems. We really need to distinguish these activities precisely in our phenomenal experience to reach greater levels of understanding. This is a big obstacle for analytic philosophy - a smeared out ontology to save 'mind' from 'matter' results in mind which is functionally equivalent to matter as an abstract concept. But even when our careful thinking manages to make conceptual differentiations, these aren't necessarily going to promote understanding beyond a certain point.

As long as our higher intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations remain subconscious, our conscious thinking is mostly passive in this manner, working with whatever it was subconsciously steered towards, which includes the palette of concepts it is familiar with. We are still experiencing the higher cognitions, but not in connection with our own active will, but a seemingly external will emanating from God, nature, nurture, cultural institutions, etc. The goal of developing higher cognition is to spiral our thinking and willing into a tighter active union, through feeling, so that we increasingly find the reasons or motives for our thinking experience in our own will. It is because they are so out-of-phase with each other normally that we feel as atomized beings surrounded by perceptual structures which we have little to no creative involvement in. It is only a habit of passive thinking which we can learn to overcome like we can with all other habits of mind. This comes back to what you said earlier re: Goethe's color theory and how it's interesting, but we probably cannot ever know if it's accurate.

Why would this be the case in a monistic, idealistic Cosmos in which our own Thinking participates in its evolution? Why would something as the manifestation of colors of the rainbow forever remain a great mystery for human scientific knowledge? It is only because we have intellectually convinced ourselves that our intellectual thinking is equivalent to Thinking as such, and because we have not differentiated our own thinking enough to understand the richly differentiated structures of Consciousness, i.e. Willing-Feeling-Thinking in their Passive-Active dimensions. Conceptual formulations don't help us inwardly differentiate beyond a certain point - they simply start pooling up on each other and bury our living understanding under the gravity of mineralized abstraction. On the other hand, one-sided mystical introspection may dissolve and evaporate our concepts into nothingness. The key is to locate the strait and narrow path which spirals rhythmically and harmoniously between the Center.

[GrantHenderson]

So the dichotomy between "pure experience" and meta-analysis thinking cannot be valid, as there would be nothing to meta-analyze in the absence of thinking.

Good catch, I wasn’t careful enough with that description.

I’m not intending to advocate that all thinking isn’t a meta-analysis of pre-existing thinking activity, but that we can block sense perceptions from interrupting such thoughts, thereby rendering them “internal experiences” that precede additional context provided by future sense perceptions. I don’t intend to propose a dichotomy between meta-analysis and pure experiences, but that we can engage in pure experiences (as a meta-analysis of previous thinking activity) without simultaneously forming an additional meta-analysis of that pure experience (which is itself a meta-analysis of previous thinking activity). The point I was trying to make is that when we form a meta-analysis of previous thinking activity, we lose some pure comprehension thereof.

This framework is supported by the visual analogy I shared. All future thinking activity — as bound by an outer circle — is linked to, and based upon previous thinking activity — as bound by an inner circle.

One thing I have tried to make clear from many of my previous comments is that there are no tangible objects, or an object/subject divide. I think the mind can trick itself into believing that such a divide exists — even though it doesn’t. The mind can assign arbitrary boundaries that separate subjects — this is evident by the fact that we can differentiate things in our surroundings. But these boundaries dissolve when they are brought deeper into focus. My reference to the mind as compartmentalizing information is as such a hallucination of mind.

This is also how I use pixels in my visual analogy — which should not be mistaken as objective content. The analogy demonstrates how pixels cannot be bound by perception, nor can pixels exist outside of perception. Thus, it is not rational to claim the existence of pixels as occupying a definite position in time (either as mind dependent or mind independent phenomena). Rather, pixels are how the mind forms estimations of its qualitative experiences.

I propose that our thinking activity is like a sensory organ which perceives ideal content like our eyes perceive colors, and therefore we are always co-creating the experiential world through this activity.

I agree that we participate in the creation of the experiential world through ideal thinking activity.

Most of our perception-thinking is completely reflexive, dragged around by sense-perceptions and intellectual concepts, and therefore out of our control. We need to seek out the relatively tiny islands of active thinking and images which we have creative responsibility for.

I don’t believe our perception-thinking is ever completely reflexive. This presupposes dualism, as it implies that our conscious thinking can be separate from the conscious thinking of MAL. It implies that we can be merely be a body which acts out the thinking activity of higher orders of consciousness.

Our capacity for creative choice is what enables our subjective experience of world content. It is our unique way of qualitatively viewing the world which makes us a participant in its creation. The experiential world is therefore never entirely created by “something else”. Otherwise, we would be dissolved in an entropic soup of the universe. The energy cost of creative choice is just subject to variation, and creative choice more quickly or slowly breaks down to instinct at the whims of the cosmic plan.

We serve a higher order consciousness in accordance with our order within the complexity chain. Like how each organ in our body functions to contribute not just to that organ but other related organs. And most of all, they serve to contribute to the function of our nervous system. Whereas, our nervous system moderates resources between all organs, but at some point delegates tasks to each specific organ. Universal minds' goal to dictate requires that it also empowers in a self generative feedback loop. Also a bit like how each neuron is essentially fighting for agency over every single neuron in your brain, which requires that it also sends information to other neurons (empowering them) in order for that neuron to reciprocate.

The energy cost for shifting focus against the influences of the cosmic forces depends on the homogeneity between our higher conscious environment and our individualistic interpretive model thereof, as well as our internal vs sense perceptual proclivities of our individualist focus/engagement in the instance of action.

For example, if we enter a relatively unfamiliar environment, and we are engaging our sense perceptions, the energy cost to shift our focus to some standard amount would be higher. Additionally, the time frame in which Willed thought breaks down to instinct reduces per standard amount of energy used — In which case, we are more at the whims of the “cosmic plan”. Whereas, if our sense perceptions are not as engaged, but we are instead processing deep internal experiences, this unfamiliar environment does not reduce the energy cost for individualistic choice as much. Furthermore, under familiar environmental conditions, we do not need to engage our sense perceptions as heavily, and are thereby more free to engage in internal processes without disruption by our relative environment.

As such, the relative entropy of the observer's environment, and the observer's sensory vs internal engagement levels determines the energy cost for said observer to make creative choices, as well as the time based parameters in which said observer's thinking breaks down to instinct under the whims of cosmic influences. This seems to function to filter the actions of observers that may otherwise push against the ideal patterns of the whole system.

Here’s another way of looking at it which you may not like due to its outward facing nature.

Since action by a local observer changes the state of the environment it is contained within, it can be regarded as distinct to its environment by the entropy differential it imposes on its environment. More specifically, the degree to which a local observer is defined as an alter = the differential entropy between the whole system, and the system external to the observer in a moment of conjunction between the observer and the system, multiplied by the time duration in which information is communicated from the relative system to the observer such that the system entropy is increased an amount equal to the differential entropy imposed by the observer.

Inversely, the degree to which the observer is globally defined (an aspect of the system) = the differential entropy between the whole system, and the observer in a moment of conjunction between the observer and the system as a whole, divided by the time duration in which information is communicated from the relative system to the observer such that the system entropy is increased an amount equal to the differential entropy imposed by the observer.

If two people are playing a game of 4 dimensional tag and the chaser can never catch the avoider, then the avoider is untouched by the chaser. But rather, the chaser only has to catch up to a point in which the avoider has previously been in order to define how far ahead the avoider is in that measured instance. Such is inevitable so long as the chaser is always moving.

So long as the observer imposes an informational complexity to the system, and that informational complexity is reimposed to the observer by the system in equal (or greater) margin, the observer is contained within that system because an equally complex relationship has been established between observer and environment.

P.s. I like the Steiner quote you linked. I wasn't aware of who he was until our conversation.

Grant,

Thanks for the thoughtful post. Once again, I find myself agreeing with much of what you wrote. At the same time, the "outward facing nature" you mention is troublesome for me. What I keep thinking is, "how many more conceptual formulations could be utilized here to convey the same underlying content?", and the answer I come to is, "infinitely many". When we really sense that reality, it makes the whole thing less impressive, so to speak. It feels as if we are hitting a ceiling but becoming too enamored with our concepts to rise above the ceiling. Perhaps that's more of a reflection of my own state of thinking and path at this time, but I imagine nearly every careful thinker eventually comes upon similar concerns if they are striving for something more than just thinking as they have always known it.

In terms of reflexive thinking, I am speaking from a phenomenological perspective in terms of our conscious thinking. Thinking is the opposite pole of perceiving, which is basically Willing activity. Plato described perceiving as a process in which our eyes are as 'prehensile' instruments reaching out and grabbing hold of objects. That is a much more accurate way of describing its essential nature than modern scientific understanding. We get better sense of it when considering how we direct our attention to places without much if any reflection. Our active perception happens mostly subconsciously, including perception of concepts, while our conscious thinking reflexively reacts to those perceptions, outer and inner. So, in that sense, our normal thinking is the passive counter-force to our active willing-perceiving.

We can notice how modern metaphysics like analytic idealism smear out all of what we do with these inner activities into "consciousness". It gains an abstract metaphysics, even if technically accurate, at the expense of a living understanding of what we are doing inwardly. This is why materialistic thinking which highly differentiates experience and activity can even gain an advantage if it avoids the naive realism of outer perceptions and the reductionism of inner experience, which of course are huge problems. We really need to distinguish these activities precisely in our phenomenal experience to reach greater levels of understanding. This is a big obstacle for analytic philosophy - a smeared out ontology to save 'mind' from 'matter' results in mind which is functionally equivalent to matter as an abstract concept. But even when our careful thinking manages to make conceptual differentiations, these aren't necessarily going to promote understanding beyond a certain point.

As long as our higher intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations remain subconscious, our conscious thinking is mostly passive in this manner, working with whatever it was subconsciously steered towards, which includes the palette of concepts it is familiar with. We are still experiencing the higher cognitions, but not in connection with our own active will, but a seemingly external will emanating from God, nature, nurture, cultural institutions, etc. The goal of developing higher cognition is to spiral our thinking and willing into a tighter active union, through feeling, so that we increasingly find the reasons or motives for our thinking experience in our own will. It is because they are so out-of-phase with each other normally that we feel as atomized beings surrounded by perceptual structures which we have little to no creative involvement in. It is only a habit of passive thinking which we can learn to overcome like we can with all other habits of mind. This comes back to what you said earlier re: Goethe's color theory and how it's interesting, but we probably cannot ever know if it's accurate.

Why would this be the case in a monistic, idealistic Cosmos in which our own Thinking participates in its evolution? Why would something as the manifestation of colors of the rainbow forever remain a great mystery for human scientific knowledge? It is only because we have intellectually convinced ourselves that our intellectual thinking is equivalent to Thinking as such, and because we have not differentiated our own thinking enough to understand the richly differentiated structures of Consciousness, i.e. Willing-Feeling-Thinking in their Passive-Active dimensions. Conceptual formulations don't help us inwardly differentiate beyond a certain point - they simply start pooling up on each other and bury our living understanding under the gravity of mineralized abstraction. On the other hand, one-sided mystical introspection may dissolve and evaporate our concepts into nothingness. The key is to locate the strait and narrow path which spirals rhythmically and harmoniously between the Center.

Maybe there are infinitely many analogies of the proposed formulation, but hopefully they would all reduce to the proposed formulation.

But I think I get your main concern. The proposed formulation makes claims about our phenomenal experience in a context greater than what is apprehensible to our phenomenal experience, about our phenomenal experience.
As soon as our conceptualizations offer explanations about phenomena outside of how conceptualizations phenomenally occur, they stop being “about concept”, and are thereby inessential conceptualizations. They are disconnected from the most fundamental concept about our world — our conceptualization of it via phenomenal experience.

But here’s my qualm. When we form inner-concepts, we can apply rules based on outer-concepts to support the reasoning of inner-concepts, but only if the reasoning of the inner concepts doesn’t cross the explanatory boundary to outer-concept. However, we cannot then confirm how any laws based on outer concept apply to inner concepts because we cannot test or prove using science or logic that these are the actual rules/processes occurring. As such, we are either using rules/processes based on outer concepts to comprehensibly explain inner concepts without being certain that such outer concepts truly apply, or, we cannot comprehensively explain the rules behind inner concepts. For example, I can’t comprehensively explain inner-concepts without referencing the laws of thermodynamics (an outer concept), but if I do use it, I have no way of testing or proving (logically or scientifically) that I’m actually right in using it. Maybe there is a way to do this, but I’m not sure how yet.

I find it interesting that you say that thinking and perceiving are polar opposing. I want to explore this further, because I think it’s important. Too often I hear philosophers claim that thinking activity is the “extrinsic appearance” of qualitative experiences, without proposing a valid means by which to unify them, thereby implying dualism. The question then becomes, how can our thinking and perceiving be intrinsically linked yet be different responses of mind. A flip in polarity is the right idea. But I’m wondering if you can elaborate. I’ve tried to do that a bit with my visual analogy.

We can also evaluate this purely from an idealistic perspective to show how our perceiving and thinking functions are expressed as phenomenal qualities. Think about the relationship between the “love we give” and the “love we take”. From our subjective experience, the former is love while the latter is gratitude — and these two phenomenal qualities are intimately linked. When we express our love of something, we reflexively become grateful for what that thing gives us in return, and vice-versa.
“The love you give us equal to the love you take” — Paul McCartney. When we open ourselves up to the universe, it closes in on us.
How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

[AshvinP]

But here’s my qualm. When we form inner-concepts, we can apply rules based on outer-concepts to support the reasoning of inner-concepts, but only if the reasoning of the inner concepts doesn’t cross the explanatory boundary to outer-concept. However, we cannot then confirm how any laws based on outer concept apply to inner concepts because we cannot test or prove using science or logic that these are the actual rules/processes occurring. As such, we are either using rules/processes based on outer concepts to comprehensibly explain inner concepts without being certain that such outer concepts truly apply, or, we cannot comprehensively explain the rules behind inner concepts. For example, I can’t comprehensively explain inner-concepts without referencing the laws of thermodynamics (an outer concept), but if I do use it, I have no way of testing or proving (logically or scientifically) that I’m actually right in using it. Maybe there is a way to do this, but I’m not sure how yet.

Here is the issue - this assumption that we take concepts and model the world of perceptions (which I think you are calling "outer concepts") is simply false. When we derive 'laws of nature', we perceive ideas which more coherently unite the perceptual facts available to us at any given time, relative to our previous ideas. This is how all science has been done, but most people are not yet conscious of it. We do this instinctively and then the intellect imposes this "correspondence theory of truth" onto our knowing activity, which is not faithful to what we are actually doing. Only then do we speak of "proving" something using our logic. But we are never proving anything outside the domain of pure mathematics. Our logic is weaving together ever-greater constellations of holistic meaning from available perceptions, but new perceptions can and do lead to qualitative leaps in those ideal constellations. We cannot predict these leaps in advance with the current slate of ideas we are using, but only through more expansive spheres of experience. These are what we call scientific paradigm shifts. Advances in human consciousness, and therefore experience of the world, have always given rise to these paradigmatic shifts. Our Earthly existence in the Cosmos first had to be concretely cognized-perceived as heliocentric, for ex., before that theory became possible to conceive and propose. There was a time when this was impossible to conceive-perceive, not due to lack of technology, but due to the state of human consciousness. The development of greater technology is itself a reflection of evolved consciousness.

No one has ever used current concepts to prove a new theory - the higher, more integrated Idea must itself be present as a precondition to all theorizing, which then leads the Idea back to itself at a higher level. In that sense, it is the evolved Idea which makes possible more expansive perception which, in turn, makes possible the same Idea at a higher level of holistic integration. The implication here is that there are no fixed 'laws of nature' - these evolve in response to the underlying Ideas which make themselves manifest through our human consciousness. We cannot take current laws and extrapolate them backwards or forwards into the indefinite past and future, because this leaves our own participatory activity completely out of consideration. This manner of thinking is so radically different from our ingrained habits of thought in the modern era that it will sound like a mostly meaningless string of words until we actually endeavor to evolve our own consciousness. The nature of the paradigmatic shift taking place now makes exactly this endeavor possible - it is a shift in which humans become much more actively responsible for taking over the torch of ideal evolution, by becoming more conscious of how they have always participated in the World Processes since the dawn of thinking.

If we demand "proof" before taking on this responsibility, a burden of proof which was never actually necessary, possible, or utilized for any prior philosophical or scientific progress, then we are simply placing arbitrary, yet insurmountable, obstacles in our own way. These things cannot be proved to us because the structure of Reality does not allow for a 3rd-person perspective from which inner concepts can be closely matched to outer concepts. That match-making understanding of concepts and percepts is simply an illusion of intellectual thinking which has abstracted too far out from what it is actually doing when perceiving-thinking through the World Content (including its own activity). By doing so, i.e. by leaving its own activity out of consideration, things become easier for it to encompass as thought-bubbles. Cosmic and natural processes are simply easier to conceptualize when treated as fixed, uniform, universal laws which govern all that we experience through time immemorial. Yet this has simply become an untenable way to approach any essential World Processes now, given our stage of cognitive evolution and our latest scientific understanding of our participatory conscious activity.

I find it interesting that you say that thinking and perceiving are polar opposing. I want to explore this further, because I think it’s important. Too often I hear philosophers claim that thinking activity is the “extrinsic appearance” of qualitative experiences, without proposing a valid means by which to unify them, thereby implying dualism. The question then becomes, how can our thinking and perceiving be intrinsically linked yet be different responses of mind. A flip in polarity is the right idea. But I’m wondering if you can elaborate. I’ve tried to do that a bit with my visual analogy.
We can also evaluate this purely from an idealistic perspective to show how our perceiving and thinking functions are expressed as phenomenal qualities. Think about the relationship between the “love we give” and the “love we take”. From our subjective experience, the former is love while the latter is gratitude — and these two phenomenal qualities are intimately linked. When we express our love of something, we reflexively become grateful for what that thing gives us in return, and vice-versa.

“The love you give us equal to the love you take” — Paul McCartney. When we open ourselves up to the universe, it closes in on us.How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

What you write here is of extreme importance. I will return to address it more tomorrow.

[AshvinP]

I find it interesting that you say that thinking and perceiving are polar opposing. I want to explore this further, because I think it’s important. Too often I hear philosophers claim that thinking activity is the “extrinsic appearance” of qualitative experiences, without proposing a valid means by which to unify them, thereby implying dualism. The question then becomes, how can our thinking and perceiving be intrinsically linked yet be different responses of mind. A flip in polarity is the right idea. But I’m wondering if you can elaborate. I’ve tried to do that a bit with my visual analogy.

We can also evaluate this purely from an idealistic perspective to show how our perceiving and thinking functions are expressed as phenomenal qualities. Think about the relationship between the “love we give” and the “love we take”. From our subjective experience, the former is love while the latter is gratitude — and these two phenomenal qualities are intimately linked. When we express our love of something, we reflexively become grateful for what that thing gives us in return, and vice-versa.
“The love you give us equal to the love you take” — Paul McCartney. When we open ourselves up to the universe, it closes in on us.
How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Grant,

This topic is so rich that I will need to revisit it again after this introductory response. I am going to begin with your second paragraph. Maybe some others, such as Cleric, will jump in with thoughts as well, which would be welcome.

  How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Indeed this is the very heart of the matter, pun intended. How do we reconcile the human soul with the world around it, the moral law which lives within that soul, often expressing itself as the inner voice of conscience, with the natural law which seems to govern what surrounds it? All knowing endeavors of humanity since the dawn of such endeavors can be understood as a means of reconciling these two - the "I" with the World, the Moral with the Natural, the Spirit with the Soul, Thinking with Perceiving. Then the question becomes, can this deep desire within us be satisfied or can we, at best, theorize abstractly about the association and wait for death and the 'hereafter' to experience the actual reconciliation? Modern philosophy, theology, mysticism, and secular science conclude the latter, because they set up the "world as it really is" in the opposition to the "world as we experience and know it", whether the latter is thought to be composed of god's ideas, MAL's ideas, matter, blind will, pure consciousness, nothingness, etc.

We have basically explored the reasons why this dualism is not warranted. So let's focus more on the spiritual side of things. To associate this polarity of Moral-Natural, or Gratitude and Love with our Thinking-Perceiving is very astute. There is certainly a moral aspect to that which is nearly always directing its energy to other objects, i.e. our Thinking. So much so that, in the modern era, this activity goes almost entirely unnoticed. This is a major reason why we get so many philosophies which presume they divine ontological conclusions directly from perceptions without accounting for the thinking which was obviously present the entire time. Materialism does this when it locates the cause of inner experience within outer perceptions. Critical idealism or fundamentalism does this when it locates the cause in a 'transcendent God' or 'blind Will'. Modern mystics do this when they speak of 'pure awareness' or 'experiencing'. So we see, this selfless nature of our innermost Thinking is also what makes it so ubiquitously ignored.

Just like our intuitive moral ideals, our innermost formless Thinking cannot be perceived, as we saw with Steiner's quote on how we can never observe our "present thinking". This present thinking is our active agency, at work subconsciously, yet there is also the dark aspect - our conscious thinking which is passive and consumes information. It simply absorbs or reflects the light like the Moon, rather than producing it and freely sharing it like the Sun. At prior stages of human evolution, this aspect was entirely necessary to differentiate the human soul from its surroundings and make possible the free inner thought-life. The Light of higher forces - the Ideas of higher agencies - were necessary for us to perceive the world as individuals. Yet it also became an entirely erroneous and immoral perceiving without any impulse to orient it towards true North. It became entirely interested in consumption and not interested in the production of Light from within, so that other beings can perceive from their own individuated perspective in the future. That is where the forces of Gratitude and Love come in.

It is these which have the capacity to reunite active Perception (Will) with active Thinking in a harmonious, selfless way. But how? We must notice the cognitive precondition for any such Gratitude and Love - we must precisely know something before we can feel grateful and love for it. A nebulous feeling isn't sufficient for knowledge - we must truly understand what we are directing these feelings towards. Yet this doesn't seem possible with our cold intellectual thinking - it's like the sphere of this intellectual thinking still doesn't reach deep enough into our collective past (subconscious) to overlap with our gratitude and love of Natural and Cosmic forces. We can actually discern the remnants of the latter in the ancient Egyptian epoch and the beginnings of ancient Greek civilization. Yet our intellectual thinking, in any way resembling its current state, is much more recent, only blossoming in the late Middle Ages. There is a significant temporal gap here which needs to be bridged.

We can do this by digging deeper into the collective subconscious to locate more heartfelt thinking, becoming more Self-conscious of our own inner nature. It's interesting to note here Rene Girard's understanding of Christian spirituality. He saw it as unique because it was Self-conscious that its God was a scapegoat, sacrificed for communal harmony which was constantly under siege by the forces of differentiation and fragmentation. All other prior spiritual traditions had been utilizing this sacrifice and deification process to bring stability back to their communities instinctively (which is certainly not to imply the Gods aren't real), but in Christ Jesus, the self-sacrificial act became the very heart of the faith in his Divinity. It became an impulse for humanity to become more conscious of what it was doing instinctively and this process of becoming more conscious of the subconscious is what makes possible the flow of Gratitude and Love into increasingly intellectual and abstracted thinking. This was also recognized by Jung throughout his works.

We were given the Law as an instinctive impulse towards moral ideals as we became perceiving individuals, but what only comes from without eventually is seen as a compulsion, i.e. as the oppressive blind Will of Schopenhauer. We are given the Spirit of Thinking, empowered by Love, so that we may rediscover the Law 'written on our hearts' of our own free choice. The force of Love does not come to abolish the Law (Will), but to fulfill the Law. But what does it mean to become more conscious of these things? Is it simply the stating of these associations as abstract conceptual theories which can give us understanding? The fact that moral ideals and natural laws are so tightly woven into the nature of our Thinking-Perceiving should indicate to us that it's much more than that; that we can investigate the moral laws just as rigorously as we can the natural laws and, indeed, we cannot really speak of one without the other within the science of living beings and consciousness. This brings us to your first paragraph in the last response. I will try to address that further by this evening.

[AshvinP]

I think we all agree that natural laws must be the reflection of cosmic ideations. All the natural forms we perceive are the result of ideational processes which are, in essence, not unlike our own. If we disagree here, then the discussion simply become whether dualism is viable metaphysically. The natural forms are like a language which we have forgotten how to read unfolding according to a Logic higher than that which precipitates into our language, for ex. This is the biggest victim of Schopenhauer's 'blind Will' idealism, since the latter strips ideas of their moral valence. In our own experience of ideation, there are no such ideas without moral valence, but Schop and BK abstractly posit such ideas to avoid the moral implications of these Cosmic ideational processes. If we avoid making that assumption from the outset, then we can ask whether our own ideations and the logic according to which they unfold are on an 'opaque' side to the higher ideations and their Logic, or they are concentric within those higher Cosmic ideations?

As Schelling observed, "Natute is visible Spirit, and Spirit in invisible Nature." If so, then how do we go about expanding our own consciousness to encompass those higher ideations so that we truly understand them in their rich and meaningful relation to our own soul? What is unknown and higher than us is never amenable to our current concepts - if they were, then they wouldn't be unknown and higher. So we work around it for awhile, but always remembering we are only probing the outermost periphery of its structure. To begin with, it will be helpful to simply think about how what we call 'natural laws' also have moral significance. Let's take a few crude examples:

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

"Fire consumes air so it can grow."

"An experience reaches consciousness when it goes beyond a certain threshold of valence (feeling)."

"Humans breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, plants do the opposite, and thereby mutually support one another."

"What qualities a person doesn't confront within their subconscious will be projected outward onto others."

"A wolf beaten in a fight within the pack will expose its neck to the victor, so the latter does not need to kill it."

When we go from physics to biology, we can sense how it becomes more complex from our perceptual perspective and therefore difficult to discern the moral significance. On the other hand, when we consider the inner experiential aspect, it goes the opposite way - we are most familiar with human psychology and can hardly imagine the inner perspective of plants or rocks to give useful examples. I am not speaking only about our conceptual associations here, but what we can livingly know from our first-person experiential perspective. There is a clear gradient of what we can intimately know in this manner, and from the inner experiential perspective, that begins with the human psyche (soul), i.e. our own thinking, feeling, and willing processes. If we want to investigate the inner aspect, then we need to start with what is most intimate to our waking experience. Speculating about the 'essence' of phenomena now would certainly lead us astray.

Related to that, we can also consider the process of making metaphors, i.e. why are we, as thinking beings, so consistently able to use natural forms to construct metaphors pointing to moral meaning? For example, everything related to the sun, the moon, light, darkness, heart, head, earth, water, air, fire, reflection, refraction, invisibility, transparency, the deep abyss of sea, the pitch black of space, signals, networks, ecosystems, etc. We could go on endlessly here. Through human metaphorical thinking, all these things have become, in addition to whatever other functions they serve, symbols for inner experiences of deep moral significance. Note that we don't want to simply continue making the metaphors in an instinctive manner as humanity has been doing for millennia now, but to observe what we are actually doing with our inner activity when making such metaphors. What is the Logic through which the human mind bridges the moral with the natural in this manner?

There is an interesting Black Mirror episode I want to mention here, "Hated in the Nation" (actually that show gives a lot of insight into what we fear subconsciously due to lack of intimate knowledge)

In this episode, they are dealing with the disappearance of bees, as we are also in real life. So a company starts making drone bees to pollinate the plants. But these can be hacked like any other technology, so they are hacked and used by people on social media to target people they are outraged with, for some silly PC reason or another, and kill these people. No one can stop them. So we have a genuine attempt to solve a genuine problem in nature, but, because there is no consciousness of the spiritual-ideal from which these natural dynamics precipitate, they are forced towards mechanization of nature instead. To replace the bees with robots. And what remains merely physical via mechanization can and will be compromised by those who want to attain destructive ends.

We can see things like this happening across the world today, and people artistically representing them in TV shows and movies, because higher Imaginations are precipitating into our modern subconscious. Then they are physicalized, dramatized, and portrayed in movies. But the patterns are clear - we feel very threatened by all those archetypal Ideas which remain subconscious and therefore feel as external forces of prejudice, coercion, instability, and destruction. As long as we don't become conscious of the higher Imaginations, we will continue putting energy into all sorts of physical endeavors which only pull our attention even further away from the spiritual, and therefore further away from the moral ideals. People are simply biding time and waiting for 'salvation' from the state, religions, technology, etc. Instead of taking an active interest in reuniting the moral-ideal with the natural. We only focus on material aims and mechanize the natural ever-more to further those aims. Then we are taking less responsibility for awakening from Maya rather than more responsibility.

Everyone wants to point blame at someone or something else, and we should avoid that here as well. What I wrote above is not only a problem for the "ignorant masses", but also, and especially, a problem for the educated philosophers and scientists who have erected hard boundaries and discontinuities between and within our endeavors to attain knowledge. Many within the analytic idealist community, including myself not too long ago, feel they are enlightened by erecting these barriers and bashing the materialists who still engage in something resembling the scientific method. When will we figure out that one-sided, polarized thinking never progresses but only regresses? We can't embrace idealism at the expense of science and precise knowledge and, when you think about it, that is the most improbable thing to happen based on the plain meaning of "idealism", yet it's exactly what happens.

Nature herself makes things quite easy on us - we are given two halves of a unified polar relation, like science and spirituality, and endless opportunities to integrate them given our modern ease of research and communication. For the idealist, this should be especially easy and joyful to contemplate. Yet we don't even make the attempt because it is assumed to be a futile endeavor, often to an ever greater extent than the materialist or fundamentalist would assume. Maybe we say, "the mythology and metaphors are great, but that's as far as we can go", even when these metaphors wouldn't be possible if the higher worlds were inaccesible to cognition. Really, as Cleric said on the critique thread, we don't want to admit the possibility that our moral ideals, along with inner experience in general, is a matter of shared and objective inquiry. The seduction of ruling over our own private fiefdom of values and ideals is too great, and the responsibility which comes with sacrificing it is felt to be too hard, too high a price to pay because we don't know exactly what we get in return.

The secular humanist speaks of "saving the environment", the fundamentalist of "loving God" and "heaven", the mysticist of "ego death", and so on, but the tragic irony is that only speaking of these things in an abstract way ensures they will not manifest for us. This may sound like preaching, but all of this flows logically from when what is essentially a polarity is divided into duality. In the modern culture, from the intellectual perspective, all has been reversed. We feel that we are spiritually complete and materially lacking, so we need to strive after the latter. This is more than evident within our culture. People don't consider the possibility that, because we are becoming more spiritually free, we have the power to create self-fulfilling prophecies. An inversion takes place and that which we seek outwardly brings about the opposite, because we have confused the roles. We have given priority to the outer lawfulness of perceptions instead of the inner lawfulness of ideas, when it is really the inner running the show. So this shouldn't simply an intellectual debate about what can we know, but how can we avoid the entire World Content being turned upside down.

What if the moral imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive fabric of reality bestows power, beauty, etc. upon only those who don't seek it? What if those who strive to be inwardly powerful, rich, and beautiful and sacrifice those things outwardly evolve? Becoming more spiritually complete is taking what feels to work as an external force, the Law of Gods, Nature, Culture, which acts from without, and making it our own as living ideas, so it becomes the Law 'written on our hearts'. It is synonymous with becoming more spirtually free and more like the Gods. This can only happen if we admit to ourselves there is more than simply a passing connection between inner and outer - that speculating about "synchronicities" and similar things is a way to avoid investigating the real lawful connections at work. It's a way of keeping the latter at a safe distance. In psychology, it is well accepted that we only overcome fears by confronting them head on, and this is what humanity must do for the higher worlds of inner moral lawfulness.

[GrantHenderson]

I find it interesting that you say that thinking and perceiving are polar opposing. I want to explore this further, because I think it’s important. Too often I hear philosophers claim that thinking activity is the “extrinsic appearance” of qualitative experiences, without proposing a valid means by which to unify them, thereby implying dualism. The question then becomes, how can our thinking and perceiving be intrinsically linked yet be different responses of mind. A flip in polarity is the right idea. But I’m wondering if you can elaborate. I’ve tried to do that a bit with my visual analogy.

We can also evaluate this purely from an idealistic perspective to show how our perceiving and thinking functions are expressed as phenomenal qualities. Think about the relationship between the “love we give” and the “love we take”. From our subjective experience, the former is love while the latter is gratitude — and these two phenomenal qualities are intimately linked. When we express our love of something, we reflexively become grateful for what that thing gives us in return, and vice-versa.
“The love you give us equal to the love you take” — Paul McCartney. When we open ourselves up to the universe, it closes in on us.
How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Grant,

This topic is so rich that I will need to revisit it again after this introductory response. I am going to begin with your second paragraph. Maybe some others, such as Cleric, will jump in with thoughts as well, which would be welcome.

  How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Indeed this is the very heart of the matter, pun intended. How do we reconcile the human soul with the world around it, the moral law which lives within that soul, often expressing itself as the inner voice of conscience, with the natural law which seems to govern what surrounds it? All knowing endeavors of humanity since the dawn of such endeavors can be understood as a means of reconciling these two - the "I" with the World, the Moral with the Natural, the Spirit with the Soul, Thinking with Perceiving. Then the question becomes, can this deep desire within us be satisfied or can we, at best, theorize abstractly about the association and wait for death and the 'hereafter' to experience the actual reconciliation? Modern philosophy, theology, mysticism, and secular science conclude the latter, because they set up the "world as it really is" in the opposition to the "world as we experience and know it", whether the latter is thought to be composed of god's ideas, MAL's ideas, matter, blind will, pure consciousness, nothingness, etc.

We have basically explored the reasons why this dualism is not warranted. So let's focus more on the spiritual side of things. To associate this polarity of Moral-Natural, or Gratitude and Love with our Thinking-Perceiving is very astute. There is certainly a moral aspect to that which is nearly always directing its energy to other objects, i.e. our Thinking. So much so that, in the modern era, this activity goes almost entirely unnoticed. This is a major reason why we get so many philosophies which presume they divine ontological conclusions directly from perceptions without accounting for the thinking which was obviously present the entire time. Materialism does this when it locates the cause of inner experience within outer perceptions. Critical idealism or fundamentalism does this when it locates the cause in a 'transcendent God' or 'blind Will'. Modern mystics do this when they speak of 'pure awareness' or 'experiencing'. So we see, this selfless nature of our innermost Thinking is also what makes it so ubiquitously ignored.

Just like our intuitive moral ideals, our innermost formless Thinking cannot be perceived, as we saw with Steiner's quote on how we can never observe our "present thinking". This present thinking is our active agency, at work subconsciously, yet there is also the dark aspect - our conscious thinking which is passive and consumes information. It simply absorbs or reflects the light like the Moon, rather than producing it and freely sharing it like the Sun. At prior stages of human evolution, this aspect was entirely necessary to differentiate the human soul from its surroundings and make possible the free inner thought-life. The Light of higher forces - the Ideas of higher agencies - were necessary for us to perceive the world as individuals. Yet it also became an entirely erroneous and immoral perceiving without any impulse to orient it towards true North. It became entirely interested in consumption and not interested in the production of Light from within, so that other beings can perceive from their own individuated perspective in the future. That is where the forces of Gratitude and Love come in.

It is these which have the capacity to reunite active Perception (Will) with active Thinking in a harmonious, selfless way. But how? We must notice the cognitive precondition for any such Gratitude and Love - we must precisely know something before we can feel grateful and love for it. A nebulous feeling isn't sufficient for knowledge - we must truly understand what we are directing these feelings towards. Yet this doesn't seem possible with our cold intellectual thinking - it's like the sphere of this intellectual thinking still doesn't reach deep enough into our collective past (subconscious) to overlap with our gratitude and love of Natural and Cosmic forces. We can actually discern the remnants of the latter in the ancient Egyptian epoch and the beginnings of ancient Greek civilization. Yet our intellectual thinking, in any way resembling its current state, is much more recent, only blossoming in the late Middle Ages. There is a significant temporal gap here which needs to be bridged.

We can do this by digging deeper into the collective subconscious to locate more heartfelt thinking, becoming more Self-conscious of our own inner nature. It's interesting to note here Rene Girard's understanding of Christian spirituality. He saw it as unique because it was Self-conscious that its God was a scapegoat, sacrificed for communal harmony which was constantly under siege by the forces of differentiation and fragmentation. All other prior spiritual traditions had been utilizing this sacrifice and deification process to bring stability back to their communities instinctively (which is certainly not to imply the Gods aren't real), but in Christ Jesus, the self-sacrificial act became the very heart of the faith in his Divinity. It became an impulse for humanity to become more conscious of what it was doing instinctively and this process of becoming more conscious of the subconscious is what makes possible the flow of Gratitude and Love into increasingly intellectual and abstracted thinking. This was also recognized by Jung throughout his works.

We were given the Law as an instinctive impulse towards moral ideals as we became perceiving individuals, but what only comes from without eventually is seen as a compulsion, i.e. as the oppressive blind Will of Schopenhauer. We are given the Spirit of Thinking, empowered by Love, so that we may rediscover the Law 'written on our hearts' of our own free choice. The force of Love does not come to abolish the Law (Will), but to fulfill the Law. But what does it mean to become more conscious of these things? Is it simply the stating of these associations as abstract conceptual theories which can give us understanding? The fact that moral ideals and natural laws are so tightly woven into the nature of our Thinking-Perceiving should indicate to us that it's much more than that; that we can investigate the moral laws just as rigorously as we can the natural laws and, indeed, we cannot really speak of one without the other within the science of living beings and consciousness. This brings us to your first paragraph in the last response. I will try to address that further by this evening.

These are great thoughts.
To address your comments more thoroughly, I'll only address your second comment for now. I'll try to address your first comment in the coming days.

True, we can only be grateful for that which we know wholey. So deep within our subconscious we have the ultimate knowledge of that which we draw love from. But still, why are we grateful for it? Why do we love it? Of course, this roots back to something we know intuitively. The answer can be found by shining a light on what God ultimately is and does according to our understanding of our own highest ideals (you did touch on this a bit throughout interspersed paragraphs).

God, including our inner-god, is almost synonymous with “responsibility”. This is implied by the definition of “responsibility” — God is that which is “responsible” for all. He who is ultimately responsible is both a master and a servant of that which he is responsible for. Upon being granted will power (responsibility), acting responsibly requires that one limit the freedom of their behavior to that which maintains structural integrity of the bear with which one holds. God is a servant because he bears the ultimate responsibility to self-sacrifice for the sake of bringing harmony to all. Inversely, god is also our master because he knows all, is capable of all, and personifies the highest living ideal.

With that said, I think our love and gratitude for God are derived from our intrinsic knowledge of God as both our master and our servant—he who is ultimately responsible. We are grateful for God's self sacrifice and repay him with our expression of love. Inversely, our love for God's ultimate moral ideal is fueled by our gratitude thereof. But when we look even deeper within our subconscious, we realize that there is no real difference between the two; The love we give to God is also the love we give to ourselves in gratitude. This way of associating our perceiving-thinking functions is also our means of reconciling them. When we understand deep within our subconscious that our gratitude and love for god is also what we give to ourselves, then we can realize our reflective-thinking will as aligned with our active-perceptual will.

[GrantHenderson]

I find it interesting that you say that thinking and perceiving are polar opposing. I want to explore this further, because I think it’s important. Too often I hear philosophers claim that thinking activity is the “extrinsic appearance” of qualitative experiences, without proposing a valid means by which to unify them, thereby implying dualism. The question then becomes, how can our thinking and perceiving be intrinsically linked yet be different responses of mind. A flip in polarity is the right idea. But I’m wondering if you can elaborate. I’ve tried to do that a bit with my visual analogy.

We can also evaluate this purely from an idealistic perspective to show how our perceiving and thinking functions are expressed as phenomenal qualities. Think about the relationship between the “love we give” and the “love we take”. From our subjective experience, the former is love while the latter is gratitude — and these two phenomenal qualities are intimately linked. When we express our love of something, we reflexively become grateful for what that thing gives us in return, and vice-versa.
“The love you give us equal to the love you take” — Paul McCartney. When we open ourselves up to the universe, it closes in on us.
How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Grant,

This topic is so rich that I will need to revisit it again after this introductory response. I am going to begin with your second paragraph. Maybe some others, such as Cleric, will jump in with thoughts as well, which would be welcome.

  How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Indeed this is the very heart of the matter, pun intended. How do we reconcile the human soul with the world around it, the moral law which lives within that soul, often expressing itself as the inner voice of conscience, with the natural law which seems to govern what surrounds it? All knowing endeavors of humanity since the dawn of such endeavors can be understood as a means of reconciling these two - the "I" with the World, the Moral with the Natural, the Spirit with the Soul, Thinking with Perceiving. Then the question becomes, can this deep desire within us be satisfied or can we, at best, theorize abstractly about the association and wait for death and the 'hereafter' to experience the actual reconciliation? Modern philosophy, theology, mysticism, and secular science conclude the latter, because they set up the "world as it really is" in the opposition to the "world as we experience and know it", whether the latter is thought to be composed of god's ideas, MAL's ideas, matter, blind will, pure consciousness, nothingness, etc.

We have basically explored the reasons why this dualism is not warranted. So let's focus more on the spiritual side of things. To associate this polarity of Moral-Natural, or Gratitude and Love with our Thinking-Perceiving is very astute. There is certainly a moral aspect to that which is nearly always directing its energy to other objects, i.e. our Thinking. So much so that, in the modern era, this activity goes almost entirely unnoticed. This is a major reason why we get so many philosophies which presume they divine ontological conclusions directly from perceptions without accounting for the thinking which was obviously present the entire time. Materialism does this when it locates the cause of inner experience within outer perceptions. Critical idealism or fundamentalism does this when it locates the cause in a 'transcendent God' or 'blind Will'. Modern mystics do this when they speak of 'pure awareness' or 'experiencing'. So we see, this selfless nature of our innermost Thinking is also what makes it so ubiquitously ignored.

Just like our intuitive moral ideals, our innermost formless Thinking cannot be perceived, as we saw with Steiner's quote on how we can never observe our "present thinking". This present thinking is our active agency, at work subconsciously, yet there is also the dark aspect - our conscious thinking which is passive and consumes information. It simply absorbs or reflects the light like the Moon, rather than producing it and freely sharing it like the Sun. At prior stages of human evolution, this aspect was entirely necessary to differentiate the human soul from its surroundings and make possible the free inner thought-life. The Light of higher forces - the Ideas of higher agencies - were necessary for us to perceive the world as individuals. Yet it also became an entirely erroneous and immoral perceiving without any impulse to orient it towards true North. It became entirely interested in consumption and not interested in the production of Light from within, so that other beings can perceive from their own individuated perspective in the future. That is where the forces of Gratitude and Love come in.

It is these which have the capacity to reunite active Perception (Will) with active Thinking in a harmonious, selfless way. But how? We must notice the cognitive precondition for any such Gratitude and Love - we must precisely know something before we can feel grateful and love for it. A nebulous feeling isn't sufficient for knowledge - we must truly understand what we are directing these feelings towards. Yet this doesn't seem possible with our cold intellectual thinking - it's like the sphere of this intellectual thinking still doesn't reach deep enough into our collective past (subconscious) to overlap with our gratitude and love of Natural and Cosmic forces. We can actually discern the remnants of the latter in the ancient Egyptian epoch and the beginnings of ancient Greek civilization. Yet our intellectual thinking, in any way resembling its current state, is much more recent, only blossoming in the late Middle Ages. There is a significant temporal gap here which needs to be bridged.

We can do this by digging deeper into the collective subconscious to locate more heartfelt thinking, becoming more Self-conscious of our own inner nature. It's interesting to note here Rene Girard's understanding of Christian spirituality. He saw it as unique because it was Self-conscious that its God was a scapegoat, sacrificed for communal harmony which was constantly under siege by the forces of differentiation and fragmentation. All other prior spiritual traditions had been utilizing this sacrifice and deification process to bring stability back to their communities instinctively (which is certainly not to imply the Gods aren't real), but in Christ Jesus, the self-sacrificial act became the very heart of the faith in his Divinity. It became an impulse for humanity to become more conscious of what it was doing instinctively and this process of becoming more conscious of the subconscious is what makes possible the flow of Gratitude and Love into increasingly intellectual and abstracted thinking. This was also recognized by Jung throughout his works.

We were given the Law as an instinctive impulse towards moral ideals as we became perceiving individuals, but what only comes from without eventually is seen as a compulsion, i.e. as the oppressive blind Will of Schopenhauer. We are given the Spirit of Thinking, empowered by Love, so that we may rediscover the Law 'written on our hearts' of our own free choice. The force of Love does not come to abolish the Law (Will), but to fulfill the Law. But what does it mean to become more conscious of these things? Is it simply the stating of these associations as abstract conceptual theories which can give us understanding? The fact that moral ideals and natural laws are so tightly woven into the nature of our Thinking-Perceiving should indicate to us that it's much more than that; that we can investigate the moral laws just as rigorously as we can the natural laws and, indeed, we cannot really speak of one without the other within the science of living beings and consciousness. This brings us to your first paragraph in the last response. I will try to address that further by this evening.

This reminds me of something. There is actually another reason why my original post here can be profoundly useful, which I forgot to mention previously.

Last year I worked on the railway as a utility worker at train stations on night shifts. Long story short, I was trying to calm down a man who was very intoxicated on paraphernalia and was causing a disruption. He didn't seem to like that very much because he pulled out a 10” blade. He spent the next 5 minutes contemplating whether to kill me or not. Luckily, the woman I was working with was at a safe enough distance to call the police who eventually arrived to arrest him. For the next few weeks I experienced shock trauma and heavy derealization and dissociation. The derealization was so bad that if I tried to set a goal -- something so simple as getting in or out of my work truck -- I would forget it immediately thereafter and end up staring off into space. It didn’t help that I was falling for the woman I was working with because the incident damaged my emotional regulation capacity enough to throw me into a codependent trap. At one point I even dissociated into convincing myself that I was her.

I felt like I had tried just about every mental exercise to improve the derealization/dissociation. Eventually I found that the only solution was to welcome it. Welcoming it, and even inviting it to get “worse” was a true relief of the fear that had a hold on me.

The mental act of inviting a concept to your attention involves assigning a meaning to that concept. Furthermore, by accepting that some idea characterizes yourself, you’ve thereby characterized yourself in some qualitative manner. Even though derealization is defined by “the diminishing effect on your qualitative experience/awareness, and characterization of yourself with respect to your environment” your mind cannot identify it as such because it can only identify concepts by giving them qualitative meaning. As such, by welcoming derealization, you’ve qualitatively defined it as something that it isn’t by definition. Just the act of defining it as some characterization of yourself in a qualitatively meaningful manner allows you to fully grasp its effect on you, and see past its effect on you. Whereas, by fearing it, you submit to it. You have no way of defining its effect on you and thereby no way to see past its effect on you.

This is why I find Bernardo’s analogy “dissociative alter” to be very misleading (I'm guilty of having used it on occasion for the sake of convenience). Any attempt to comprehensively associate ourselves as dissociated from God only further associates us with him. As far as I can tell, this is proof that our eminent personal experience is not dissociated from God, but is intimately connected with God. This is also the same basic idea presented by my original post, but applied directly to our subjective experience.

Anyways, I will try to address your first response in the coming days. I now see that there is also a 3rd comment that I will read tonight. It takes me a long time for me to read, convert words into a more comprehensible mental format, process a response, and convert that response back to words, etc (something to do with being clinically retarded). That along with other jobs and activities that consume my time is why my responses take so long.

[AshvinP]

I find it interesting that you say that thinking and perceiving are polar opposing. I want to explore this further, because I think it’s important. Too often I hear philosophers claim that thinking activity is the “extrinsic appearance” of qualitative experiences, without proposing a valid means by which to unify them, thereby implying dualism. The question then becomes, how can our thinking and perceiving be intrinsically linked yet be different responses of mind. A flip in polarity is the right idea. But I’m wondering if you can elaborate. I’ve tried to do that a bit with my visual analogy.

We can also evaluate this purely from an idealistic perspective to show how our perceiving and thinking functions are expressed as phenomenal qualities. Think about the relationship between the “love we give” and the “love we take”. From our subjective experience, the former is love while the latter is gratitude — and these two phenomenal qualities are intimately linked. When we express our love of something, we reflexively become grateful for what that thing gives us in return, and vice-versa.
“The love you give us equal to the love you take” — Paul McCartney. When we open ourselves up to the universe, it closes in on us.
How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Grant,

This topic is so rich that I will need to revisit it again after this introductory response. I am going to begin with your second paragraph. Maybe some others, such as Cleric, will jump in with thoughts as well, which would be welcome.

  How love and gratitude are intimately linked is similar to, or maybe even the basis upon which perception and thinking are intimately linked. We can effectively give qualitative meaning to attributes when approaching our perception-thinking in this qualitatively meaningful manner.

Indeed this is the very heart of the matter, pun intended. How do we reconcile the human soul with the world around it, the moral law which lives within that soul, often expressing itself as the inner voice of conscience, with the natural law which seems to govern what surrounds it? All knowing endeavors of humanity since the dawn of such endeavors can be understood as a means of reconciling these two - the "I" with the World, the Moral with the Natural, the Spirit with the Soul, Thinking with Perceiving. Then the question becomes, can this deep desire within us be satisfied or can we, at best, theorize abstractly about the association and wait for death and the 'hereafter' to experience the actual reconciliation? Modern philosophy, theology, mysticism, and secular science conclude the latter, because they set up the "world as it really is" in the opposition to the "world as we experience and know it", whether the latter is thought to be composed of god's ideas, MAL's ideas, matter, blind will, pure consciousness, nothingness, etc.

We have basically explored the reasons why this dualism is not warranted. So let's focus more on the spiritual side of things. To associate this polarity of Moral-Natural, or Gratitude and Love with our Thinking-Perceiving is very astute. There is certainly a moral aspect to that which is nearly always directing its energy to other objects, i.e. our Thinking. So much so that, in the modern era, this activity goes almost entirely unnoticed. This is a major reason why we get so many philosophies which presume they divine ontological conclusions directly from perceptions without accounting for the thinking which was obviously present the entire time. Materialism does this when it locates the cause of inner experience within outer perceptions. Critical idealism or fundamentalism does this when it locates the cause in a 'transcendent God' or 'blind Will'. Modern mystics do this when they speak of 'pure awareness' or 'experiencing'. So we see, this selfless nature of our innermost Thinking is also what makes it so ubiquitously ignored.

Just like our intuitive moral ideals, our innermost formless Thinking cannot be perceived, as we saw with Steiner's quote on how we can never observe our "present thinking". This present thinking is our active agency, at work subconsciously, yet there is also the dark aspect - our conscious thinking which is passive and consumes information. It simply absorbs or reflects the light like the Moon, rather than producing it and freely sharing it like the Sun. At prior stages of human evolution, this aspect was entirely necessary to differentiate the human soul from its surroundings and make possible the free inner thought-life. The Light of higher forces - the Ideas of higher agencies - were necessary for us to perceive the world as individuals. Yet it also became an entirely erroneous and immoral perceiving without any impulse to orient it towards true North. It became entirely interested in consumption and not interested in the production of Light from within, so that other beings can perceive from their own individuated perspective in the future. That is where the forces of Gratitude and Love come in.

It is these which have the capacity to reunite active Perception (Will) with active Thinking in a harmonious, selfless way. But how? We must notice the cognitive precondition for any such Gratitude and Love - we must precisely know something before we can feel grateful and love for it. A nebulous feeling isn't sufficient for knowledge - we must truly understand what we are directing these feelings towards. Yet this doesn't seem possible with our cold intellectual thinking - it's like the sphere of this intellectual thinking still doesn't reach deep enough into our collective past (subconscious) to overlap with our gratitude and love of Natural and Cosmic forces. We can actually discern the remnants of the latter in the ancient Egyptian epoch and the beginnings of ancient Greek civilization. Yet our intellectual thinking, in any way resembling its current state, is much more recent, only blossoming in the late Middle Ages. There is a significant temporal gap here which needs to be bridged.

We can do this by digging deeper into the collective subconscious to locate more heartfelt thinking, becoming more Self-conscious of our own inner nature. It's interesting to note here Rene Girard's understanding of Christian spirituality. He saw it as unique because it was Self-conscious that its God was a scapegoat, sacrificed for communal harmony which was constantly under siege by the forces of differentiation and fragmentation. All other prior spiritual traditions had been utilizing this sacrifice and deification process to bring stability back to their communities instinctively (which is certainly not to imply the Gods aren't real), but in Christ Jesus, the self-sacrificial act became the very heart of the faith in his Divinity. It became an impulse for humanity to become more conscious of what it was doing instinctively and this process of becoming more conscious of the subconscious is what makes possible the flow of Gratitude and Love into increasingly intellectual and abstracted thinking. This was also recognized by Jung throughout his works.

We were given the Law as an instinctive impulse towards moral ideals as we became perceiving individuals, but what only comes from without eventually is seen as a compulsion, i.e. as the oppressive blind Will of Schopenhauer. We are given the Spirit of Thinking, empowered by Love, so that we may rediscover the Law 'written on our hearts' of our own free choice. The force of Love does not come to abolish the Law (Will), but to fulfill the Law. But what does it mean to become more conscious of these things? Is it simply the stating of these associations as abstract conceptual theories which can give us understanding? The fact that moral ideals and natural laws are so tightly woven into the nature of our Thinking-Perceiving should indicate to us that it's much more than that; that we can investigate the moral laws just as rigorously as we can the natural laws and, indeed, we cannot really speak of one without the other within the science of living beings and consciousness. This brings us to your first paragraph in the last response. I will try to address that further by this evening.

This reminds me of something. There is actually another reason why my original post here can be profoundly useful, which I forgot to mention previously.

Last year I worked on the railway as a utility worker at train stations on night shifts. Long story short, I was trying to calm down a man who was very intoxicated on paraphernalia and was causing a disruption. He didn't seem to like that very much because he pulled out a 10” blade. He spent the next 5 minutes contemplating whether to kill me or not. Luckily, the woman I was working with was at a safe enough distance to call the police who eventually arrived to arrest him. For the next few weeks I experienced shock trauma and heavy derealization and dissociation. The derealization was so bad that if I tried to set a goal -- something so simple as getting in or out of my work truck -- I would forget it immediately thereafter and end up staring off into space. It didn’t help that I was falling for the woman I was working with because the incident damaged my emotional regulation capacity enough to throw me into a codependent trap. At one point I even dissociated into convincing myself that I was her.

I felt like I had tried just about every mental exercise to improve the derealization/dissociation. Eventually I found that the only solution was to welcome it. Welcoming it, and even inviting it to get “worse” was a true relief of the fear that had a hold on me.

The mental act of inviting a concept to your attention involves assigning a meaning to that concept. Furthermore, by accepting that some idea characterizes yourself, you’ve thereby characterized yourself in some qualitative manner. Even though derealization is defined by “the diminishing effect on your qualitative experience/awareness, and characterization of yourself with respect to your environment” your mind cannot identify it as such because it can only identify concepts by giving them qualitative meaning. As such, by welcoming derealization, you’ve qualitatively defined it as something that it isn’t by definition. Just the act of defining it as some characterization of yourself in a qualitatively meaningful manner allows you to fully grasp its effect on you, and see past its effect on you. Whereas, by fearing it, you submit to it. You have no way of defining its effect on you and thereby no way to see past its effect on you.

This is why I find Bernardo’s analogy “dissociative alter” to be very misleading (I'm guilty of having used it on occasion for the sake of convenience). Any attempt to comprehensively associate ourselves as dissociated from God only further associates us with him. As far as I can tell, this is proof that our eminent personal experience is not dissociated from God, but is intimately connected with God. This is also the same basic idea presented by my original post, but applied directly to our subjective experience.

Anyways, I will try to address your first response in the coming days. I now see that there is also a 3rd comment that I will read tonight. It takes me a long time for me to read, convert words into a more comprehensible mental format, process a response, and convert that response back to words, etc (something to do with being clinically retarded). That along with other jobs and activities that consume my time is why my responses take so long.

Grant,

That's a terribly scary situation. I'm glad you made it through safely. I was once held up at gun point at a poker game, which was frightening. Although there were a bunch of other guys in the room, so we all pretended not to be scared when they left : )

I think this is a good illustration to explore. In a real sense, modern secularized culture can be analogized to your experience. Here I don't mean whether people call themselves atheist or religious, but to what extent they feel the spiritual can be known as directly and precisely as we know the physical sense-world. It's clear hardly anyone feels that way. So bad things inevitably happen, and then the task becomes to manage the traumatic consequences as best possible with physical thinking and concepts. But bad things don't even need to happen, because our default state is to feel alienated, isolated, and threatened from all corners. And, moreover, we feel these things mostly subconsciously, so we may consciously tell ourselves everything is not so bad for us, but that's only because we're flowing along with the alienation and isolation and vulnerability as our default state. It's only when something unusual happens, like we are confronted by an aggressive person, an abnormality of some sort, that we notice how "dissociated' or fragmented we normally are. I'm not saying this is necessarily what happened with you, but I think this holds true on average for a person in modern civilization.

Now imagine you had conviction that your soul is eternal and will simply pass into another mode of experience after physical death, as much as you have conviction that this is what happens when you pass into sleep state before you awaken again. This is a thought experiment which is presupposing the higher, eternal spiritual exists and you are concretely aware of its presence at all times. This changes the problems left to deal with quite drastically, does it not? Now we are no longer wondering whether all our experience and memories are about to end, or someone else's, or whether it's a total crapshoot, but only how to know the 'beyond' more intimately and orient ourselves towards it so certain relations manifest. We are planning for it more like a journey to a foreign country with our conceptual maps and discussions with spiritual guides who live in that country. We realize it's only language barriers which prevent us from communing with citizens of this country already in our midst. The problem here is, if what I just wrote remains intellectual theory and experiment, then it will still seem like I am referring to religious belief. The intellect cannot imagine clearly what it means to know the spiritual because it hasn't experienced enough 'abnormalities' of spiritual nature, so it makes a metaphor to its own experience and says "yeah but, it's still just a belief and it might be false and therefore I might be wasting my time wondering about it, or it's just another topic for speculation... who really knows."

It's not that there aren't erroneous spiritual outlooks, but that the method of evaluating what is erroneous is not the same as we use for intellectual questions. This is the great hurdle for modern traumatized culture to overcome - the asymmetry of knowing and investigating the outermost consequences of spiritual trauma after it already happens, i.e. the physical sense and conceptual world, and knowing the causes of that trauma and thereby avoiding the trauma with proactive and preemptive effort. To the extent the higher worlds remain as black boxes which we either ignore or project our own soul qualities into, they will appear as threatening and traumatic, because what lives within us is as subconscious impulses is also of that nature. It's simply an inevitable consequence of that fragmented psychic and spritual state.

Ad Nietzsche's remarked, "all morality is cowardice". When we are forced to remain civil and orderly by custom, habit, law, etc. we flow along and call ourselves moral, but when that order breaks down, we are forced to confront the schisms within our own soul which reflect back to us from the outer circumstances. There is no waving a magic conceptual or mystical wand to rapdily purify ourselves. To the extent anything in the world is felt as foreign, we still have more work to do. But there is great liberation in knowing, in a living and concrete way, that these spiritual causes of trauma exist and soul purification is not only possible but always at our fingertips.

I have more to add in response to your earlier response, which is related to this. Taking responsibility is indeed the critical orientation for modern souls, through the forces of gratitude and love, but as long as we feel that our current concepts of these things are equivalent to their essence, and/or the rest of their depth structure is simply unimportant or unknowable, then we have to ask ourselves whether we are really taking responsibility, or whether we are finding ways to excuse that responsibility without feeling too guilty about doing so. How can we take responsibility in a way which leads us to knowledge of God that solves the riddle of death and, therefore, our most traumatic fears and reactions to nature and to other souls? This can be done if we admit, in all humility, that it's possible, it's worthy of our effort, and it is many ways our sacred duty for the modern age.

[GrantHenderson]

Grant,

This topic is so rich that I will need to revisit it again after this introductory response. I am going to begin with your second paragraph. Maybe some others, such as Cleric, will jump in with thoughts as well, which would be welcome.



Indeed this is the very heart of the matter, pun intended. How do we reconcile the human soul with the world around it, the moral law which lives within that soul, often expressing itself as the inner voice of conscience, with the natural law which seems to govern what surrounds it? All knowing endeavors of humanity since the dawn of such endeavors can be understood as a means of reconciling these two - the "I" with the World, the Moral with the Natural, the Spirit with the Soul, Thinking with Perceiving. Then the question becomes, can this deep desire within us be satisfied or can we, at best, theorize abstractly about the association and wait for death and the 'hereafter' to experience the actual reconciliation? Modern philosophy, theology, mysticism, and secular science conclude the latter, because they set up the "world as it really is" in the opposition to the "world as we experience and know it", whether the latter is thought to be composed of god's ideas, MAL's ideas, matter, blind will, pure consciousness, nothingness, etc.

We have basically explored the reasons why this dualism is not warranted. So let's focus more on the spiritual side of things. To associate this polarity of Moral-Natural, or Gratitude and Love with our Thinking-Perceiving is very astute. There is certainly a moral aspect to that which is nearly always directing its energy to other objects, i.e. our Thinking. So much so that, in the modern era, this activity goes almost entirely unnoticed. This is a major reason why we get so many philosophies which presume they divine ontological conclusions directly from perceptions without accounting for the thinking which was obviously present the entire time. Materialism does this when it locates the cause of inner experience within outer perceptions. Critical idealism or fundamentalism does this when it locates the cause in a 'transcendent God' or 'blind Will'. Modern mystics do this when they speak of 'pure awareness' or 'experiencing'. So we see, this selfless nature of our innermost Thinking is also what makes it so ubiquitously ignored.

Just like our intuitive moral ideals, our innermost formless Thinking cannot be perceived, as we saw with Steiner's quote on how we can never observe our "present thinking". This present thinking is our active agency, at work subconsciously, yet there is also the dark aspect - our conscious thinking which is passive and consumes information. It simply absorbs or reflects the light like the Moon, rather than producing it and freely sharing it like the Sun. At prior stages of human evolution, this aspect was entirely necessary to differentiate the human soul from its surroundings and make possible the free inner thought-life. The Light of higher forces - the Ideas of higher agencies - were necessary for us to perceive the world as individuals. Yet it also became an entirely erroneous and immoral perceiving without any impulse to orient it towards true North. It became entirely interested in consumption and not interested in the production of Light from within, so that other beings can perceive from their own individuated perspective in the future. That is where the forces of Gratitude and Love come in.

It is these which have the capacity to reunite active Perception (Will) with active Thinking in a harmonious, selfless way. But how? We must notice the cognitive precondition for any such Gratitude and Love - we must precisely know something before we can feel grateful and love for it. A nebulous feeling isn't sufficient for knowledge - we must truly understand what we are directing these feelings towards. Yet this doesn't seem possible with our cold intellectual thinking - it's like the sphere of this intellectual thinking still doesn't reach deep enough into our collective past (subconscious) to overlap with our gratitude and love of Natural and Cosmic forces. We can actually discern the remnants of the latter in the ancient Egyptian epoch and the beginnings of ancient Greek civilization. Yet our intellectual thinking, in any way resembling its current state, is much more recent, only blossoming in the late Middle Ages. There is a significant temporal gap here which needs to be bridged.

We can do this by digging deeper into the collective subconscious to locate more heartfelt thinking, becoming more Self-conscious of our own inner nature. It's interesting to note here Rene Girard's understanding of Christian spirituality. He saw it as unique because it was Self-conscious that its God was a scapegoat, sacrificed for communal harmony which was constantly under siege by the forces of differentiation and fragmentation. All other prior spiritual traditions had been utilizing this sacrifice and deification process to bring stability back to their communities instinctively (which is certainly not to imply the Gods aren't real), but in Christ Jesus, the self-sacrificial act became the very heart of the faith in his Divinity. It became an impulse for humanity to become more conscious of what it was doing instinctively and this process of becoming more conscious of the subconscious is what makes possible the flow of Gratitude and Love into increasingly intellectual and abstracted thinking. This was also recognized by Jung throughout his works.

We were given the Law as an instinctive impulse towards moral ideals as we became perceiving individuals, but what only comes from without eventually is seen as a compulsion, i.e. as the oppressive blind Will of Schopenhauer. We are given the Spirit of Thinking, empowered by Love, so that we may rediscover the Law 'written on our hearts' of our own free choice. The force of Love does not come to abolish the Law (Will), but to fulfill the Law. But what does it mean to become more conscious of these things? Is it simply the stating of these associations as abstract conceptual theories which can give us understanding? The fact that moral ideals and natural laws are so tightly woven into the nature of our Thinking-Perceiving should indicate to us that it's much more than that; that we can investigate the moral laws just as rigorously as we can the natural laws and, indeed, we cannot really speak of one without the other within the science of living beings and consciousness. This brings us to your first paragraph in the last response. I will try to address that further by this evening.

This reminds me of something. There is actually another reason why my original post here can be profoundly useful, which I forgot to mention previously.

Last year I worked on the railway as a utility worker at train stations on night shifts. Long story short, I was trying to calm down a man who was very intoxicated on paraphernalia and was causing a disruption. He didn't seem to like that very much because he pulled out a 10” blade. He spent the next 5 minutes contemplating whether to kill me or not. Luckily, the woman I was working with was at a safe enough distance to call the police who eventually arrived to arrest him. For the next few weeks I experienced shock trauma and heavy derealization and dissociation. The derealization was so bad that if I tried to set a goal -- something so simple as getting in or out of my work truck -- I would forget it immediately thereafter and end up staring off into space. It didn’t help that I was falling for the woman I was working with because the incident damaged my emotional regulation capacity enough to throw me into a codependent trap. At one point I even dissociated into convincing myself that I was her.

I felt like I had tried just about every mental exercise to improve the derealization/dissociation. Eventually I found that the only solution was to welcome it. Welcoming it, and even inviting it to get “worse” was a true relief of the fear that had a hold on me.

The mental act of inviting a concept to your attention involves assigning a meaning to that concept. Furthermore, by accepting that some idea characterizes yourself, you’ve thereby characterized yourself in some qualitative manner. Even though derealization is defined by “the diminishing effect on your qualitative experience/awareness, and characterization of yourself with respect to your environment” your mind cannot identify it as such because it can only identify concepts by giving them qualitative meaning. As such, by welcoming derealization, you’ve qualitatively defined it as something that it isn’t by definition. Just the act of defining it as some characterization of yourself in a qualitatively meaningful manner allows you to fully grasp its effect on you, and see past its effect on you. Whereas, by fearing it, you submit to it. You have no way of defining its effect on you and thereby no way to see past its effect on you.

This is why I find Bernardo’s analogy “dissociative alter” to be very misleading (I'm guilty of having used it on occasion for the sake of convenience). Any attempt to comprehensively associate ourselves as dissociated from God only further associates us with him. As far as I can tell, this is proof that our eminent personal experience is not dissociated from God, but is intimately connected with God. This is also the same basic idea presented by my original post, but applied directly to our subjective experience.

Anyways, I will try to address your first response in the coming days. I now see that there is also a 3rd comment that I will read tonight. It takes me a long time for me to read, convert words into a more comprehensible mental format, process a response, and convert that response back to words, etc (something to do with being clinically retarded). That along with other jobs and activities that consume my time is why my responses take so long.

Grant,

That's a terribly scary situation. I'm glad you made it through safely. I was once held up at gun point at a poker game, which was frightening. Although there were a bunch of other guys in the room, so we all pretended not to be scared when they left : )

I think this is a good illustration to explore. In a real sense, modern secularized culture can be analogized to your experience. Here I don't mean whether people call themselves atheist or religious, but to what extent they feel the spiritual can be known as directly and precisely as we know the physical sense-world. It's clear hardly anyone feels that way. So bad things inevitably happen, and then the task becomes to manage the traumatic consequences as best possible with physical thinking and concepts. But bad things don't even need to happen, because our default state is to feel alienated, isolated, and threatened from all corners. And, moreover, we feel these things mostly subconsciously, so we may consciously tell ourselves everything is not so bad for us, but that's only because we're flowing along with the alienation and isolation and vulnerability as our default state. It's only when something unusual happens, like we are confronted by an aggressive person, an abnormality of some sort, that we notice how "dissociated' or fragmented we normally are. I'm not saying this is necessarily what happened with you, but I think this holds true on average for a person in modern civilization.

Now imagine you had conviction that your soul is eternal and will simply pass into another mode of experience after physical death, as much as you have conviction that this is what happens when you pass into sleep state before you awaken again. This is a thought experiment which is presupposing the higher, eternal spiritual exists and you are concretely aware of its presence at all times. This changes the problems left to deal with quite drastically, does it not? Now we are no longer wondering whether all our experience and memories are about to end, or someone else's, or whether it's a total crapshoot, but only how to know the 'beyond' more intimately and orient ourselves towards it so certain relations manifest. We are planning for it more like a journey to a foreign country with our conceptual maps and discussions with spiritual guides who live in that country. We realize it's only language barriers which prevent us from communing with citizens of this country already in our midst. The problem here is, if what I just wrote remains intellectual theory and experiment, then it will still seem like I am referring to religious belief. The intellect cannot imagine clearly what it means to know the spiritual because it hasn't experienced enough 'abnormalities' of spiritual nature, so it makes a metaphor to its own experience and says "yeah but, it's still just a belief and it might be false and therefore I might be wasting my time wondering about it, or it's just another topic for speculation... who really knows."

It's not that there aren't erroneous spiritual outlooks, but that the method of evaluating what is erroneous is not the same as we use for intellectual questions. This is the great hurdle for modern traumatized culture to overcome - the asymmetry of knowing and investigating the outermost consequences of spiritual trauma after it already happens, i.e. the physical sense and conceptual world, and knowing the causes of that trauma and thereby avoiding the trauma with proactive and preemptive effort. To the extent the higher worlds remain as black boxes which we either ignore or project our own soul qualities into, they will appear as threatening and traumatic, because what lives within us is as subconscious impulses is also of that nature. It's simply an inevitable consequence of that fragmented psychic and spritual state.

Ad Nietzsche's remarked, "all morality is cowardice". When we are forced to remain civil and orderly by custom, habit, law, etc. we flow along and call ourselves moral, but when that order breaks down, we are forced to confront the schisms within our own soul which reflect back to us from the outer circumstances. There is no waving a magic conceptual or mystical wand to rapdily purify ourselves. To the extent anything in the world is felt as foreign, we still have more work to do. But there is great liberation in knowing, in a living and concrete way, that these spiritual causes of trauma exist and soul purification is not only possible but always at our fingertips.

I have more to add in response to your earlier response, which is related to this. Taking responsibility is indeed the critical orientation for modern souls, through the forces of gratitude and love, but as long as we feel that our current concepts of these things are equivalent to their essence, and/or the rest of their depth structure is simply unimportant or unknowable, then we have to ask ourselves whether we are really taking responsibility, or whether we are finding ways to excuse that responsibility without feeling too guilty about doing so. How can we take responsibility in a way which leads us to knowledge of God that solves the riddle of death and, therefore, our most traumatic fears and reactions to nature and to other souls? This can be done if we admit, in all humility, that it's possible, it's worthy of our effort, and it is many ways our sacred duty for the modern age.

I have more to add in response to your earlier response, which is related to this. Taking responsibility is indeed the critical orientation for modern souls, through the forces of gratitude and love, but as long as we feel that our current concepts of these things are equivalent to their essence, and/or the rest of their depth structure is simply unimportant or unknowable, then we have to ask ourselves whether we are really taking responsibility, or whether we are finding ways to excuse that responsibility without feeling too guilty about doing so. How can we take responsibility in a way which leads us to knowledge of God that solves the riddle of death and, therefore, our most traumatic fears and reactions to nature and to other souls? This can be done if we admit, in all humility, that it's possible, it's worthy of our effort, and it is many ways our sacred duty for the modern age.

Indeed, the question is whether we can draw parallels between “life and death” and our living experiences. This may seem like an oxymoron, but only because our concept of death is based on that which isn’t in living context. From our living, outer-observations of death, all we can directly deduce is that the natural body is no longer a function of the spirit. Our only experiences of a perceived disconnection with our own body (sense perceptions) is through altered forms of consciousness. We should draw upon these when considering the implications of death. Some of these induce a reduction of consciousness, some induce an elevation of consciousness, and others appear to do both (sleeping/dreaming).

The association you make between “death and responsibility” is interesting. It might first be important to note that taking on more responsibility than we can handle is just as irresponsible as taking on “too little responsibility”. Our moral obligation is to optimize circumstance in the greatest responsibility we can bear to maximize the probability of surplus for the degree of freedom we invest. If our degrees of freedom for choice are limited then we should accordingly limit that which we make ourselves responsible for. Furthermore, we can also take into consideration, not only our degrees of freedom for choice in each moment of action, but also across our entire life expectancy; how much energy is spent on us from the universe, and how much energy we expend to the universe throughout our lifespan. This puts into context our order within the complexity chain of consciousness. We can reasonably infer that our influence on the world is meant to be limited only to that which is expected of us throughout our lifespan, so our influence on the world is to some degree proportional to our capabilities with respect to the moral demands of the world. Thus, it is our moral responsibility to live and also to die. For a long time, I have considered that the greatest act we could perform to serve the universe would be to commit suicide on its behalf (only if beneficial — I dont believe that our limited capacities for living often, or ever require this level of responsibility).

This is similar to our lungs, and how they only produce a limited amount of oxygen on regular intervals. If our lungs instead constantly produced some overwhelmingly massive amount of oxygen, we would die of oxygen toxicity. But as things are, our lungs intake oxygen and it spreads throughout our bloodstream in useful quantities. There is; the moment of oxygen intake, oxygen transfer, and oxygen delivery — repeat. Our oxygen intake can’t exceed the limit of that which can be transferred to our bloodstream at once before we experience oxygen toxicity, etc. Meanwhile, our nervous system records whether our lungs provide enough oxygen to our bloodstream, and moderates the rate of oxygen intake accordingly.

The lung metaphor can be taken much deeper, but that might be a good spot to stop for an introduction. Though my larger proposal is that death has 2 stages (all part of 1 true stage). Ego dissolution and then unity with God. The first stage probably involves a life review and then an opportunity to wash away our sins with the helping hand of God. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if these processes were different for everyone, depending on their moral standing and primary modes of action (personality) within this life.

the higher, more integrated Idea must itself be present as a precondition to all theorizing, which then leads the Idea back to itself at a higher level. In that sense, it is the evolved Idea which makes possible more expansive perception which, in turn, makes possible the same Idea at a higher level of holistic integration.

Can you elaborate on this, and maybe provide an example?

So you propose that natural laws evolve in response to the evolving realizations of each individual? I’m not sure that the participatory universe works quite like that. Evidently, our evolving realizations can imply dualism, but this doesn’t give the universe laws which make it dualistic. There are laws intrinsic to our experience that connect all experiences, which cannot be altered by our perceiving/thinking activity that may make ideations indicating otherwise. If natural laws did evolve in response to our thinking/perceiving activity, and these were allowed by the moral/metaphysical laws, then they would also be implications of moral/metaphysical laws, and would thereby just be what is established by the moral/metaphysical laws. The question of whether they evolve over time, or whether they are “always there” is a philosophical speculation that is hardly even worth pondering about as far as I can tell. All natural laws are reflections of what is required for phenomenal experience, and are only induced by the experiential agent insofar as they are required for their phenomenal experiencing. I don’t believe that there is anything superfluous beyond that.

To be clear, my proposition isn’t that natural laws directly correspond to moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws, but that these moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws cast a shadow on the natural world. And if I am misinterpreting your position, please let me know.

[AshvinP]

Indeed, the question is whether we can draw parallels between “life and death” and our living experiences. This may seem like an oxymoron, but only because our concept of death is based on that which isn’t in living context. From our living, outer-observations of death, all we can directly deduce is that the natural body is no longer a function of the spirit. Our only experiences of a perceived disconnection with our own body (sense perceptions) is through altered forms of consciousness. We should draw upon these when considering the implications of death. Some of these induce a reduction of consciousness, some induce an elevation of consciousness, and others appear to do both (sleeping/dreaming).

But there is a big difference between altering our state of consciousness, inducing it in some way, and developing it through inner effort. To discern this difference, we must remember it's not only our outer observations which give our understanding of "death", or anything else, but our inner conceptual reasoning. If the latter remains the same, and the mode of observing changes, then why should we get any more living understanding of what death actually is, in its essence? This is why thinking is left in the blind spot - if simply altering the mode of perceiving gives us a higher understanding of what is under consideration, then things are much easier. We can ingest substances, or do a few meditations, and reach this understanding, and then stop, rinse, and repeat as often or not as often as we like. If our very mode of thinking must shift as we move from outer to inner, however, then it means developing, maintaining, and growing new thinking skills, which is ongoing effortful practice. Then our intellectual judgments of altered experience no longer suffice. We then need to approach it like developing and growing any new skill, such as playing an instrument. 

Who wants to do that for thinking itself? To withhold making judgments on all manner of fundamental topics of consideration, to refrain from playing the instrument which is the human soul, until the skills are developed? It feels much better, and safer, to continue making judgments but never reach firm conclusions - maybe after death we dissolve back into MAL bliss, maybe we continue on as alters and reincarnate after some indeterminate period, maybe we enter eternal paradise with God and angels, who really knows? This is the stance we question here as born of intellectual pride, fear of the unknown depths of soul, and therefore intentional incompleteness of reasoning (mostly subconscious). We must confront the natural fear of the spiritual within us - it feels very uncomfortable and dangerous to abandon the stable world of outer perceptions and intellectual judgments (natural), and turn to the world of spiritual experience (moral), which our own soul activity is always bound up with. Our darkest qualities may then be reflected back to us and/or we may lose our stable perceptual identity completely in the void.

So we need a good deal of inner courage to confront spiritual knowledge from within. The outer world of stable perceptions must darken to our will and our thinking, and we must enter entirely unknown, dynamic, and seemingly unstable territory within our soul to unveil the higher Light behind the abyss of darkness inside. In ancient times, these things took place in the Mystery centers - it was quite the physical and mental ordeal for the initiate to go through before ascending to perception-cognition of higher worlds. Something akin to physical death was actually necessary. Now, the 'mystery center' is the heart and soul of the individual. We are all potential initiates today and the physical ordeal is mostly absent, but the spiritual ordeal is still a frightening prospect, especially in modern culture where ordeals of all sorts are discouraged. Confronting our inner shadows feels just as frightening as physical death for many of us. People want to be protected and insulated from every little danger, outer and inner. Yet these people are not aware there is another option in which we grow spiritually strong, beautiful, and wise through confronting the darkness within our soul to transfigure and redeem it. 

https://rsarchive.org/Articles/GA036/En ... l_e04.html
"The habits of thinking that have come to be accepted in the modern study of nature [Naturerkenntnis] can yield no satisfying results for the study of the soul. What one would grasp with these habits of thinking must either be spread out in repose before the soul or, if the object of knowledge is in movement, the soul must feel itself extricated from this movement. For to participate in the movement of the object of knowledge means to lose oneself in it, to transform oneself, so to speak, into it.

How should the soul grasp itself, however, in an act of knowing in which it must lose itself? It can expect self-knowledge only in an activity in which, step by step, it comes into possession of itself.

This can only be an activity that is creative. Here, however, a cause for uncertainty arises at once for the knower. He believes he will lapse into personal arbitrariness.

It is precisely this arbitrariness that he gives up in the knowledge of nature. He excludes himself and lets nature hold sway. He seeks certainty in a realm which his individual soul being does not reach. In seeking self-knowledge he cannot conduct himself in this way. He must take himself along wherever he seeks to know. He therefore can find no nature on his path to self-knowledge. For where she would encounter him, there he is no longer to be found.

This, however, provides just the experience that is needed with regard to the spirit. One cannot expect other than to find the spirit when, through one's own activity, nature, as it were, melts away; that is, when one experiences oneself ever more strongly in proportion to one's feeling this melting away.

If one fills the soul with something that afterward proves to be like a dream in its illusory character, and one experiences the illusory in its true nature, then one becomes stronger in one's own experience of self. In confronting a dream, one's thinking corrects the belief one has in the dream's reality while dreaming. Concerning the activity of fantasy, this correction is not needed because one did not have this belief. Concerning the meditative soul activity, to which one devotes oneself for spirit-knowledge, one cannot be satisfied with mere thought correction. One must correct by experiencing. One must first create the illusory thinking with one's activity and then extinguish it by a different, equally strong, activity.

In this act of extinguishing, another activity awakens, the spirit-knowing activity. For if the extinguishing is real, then the force for it must come from an entirely different direction than from nature. With the experienced illusion one has dispersed what nature can give; what inwardly arises during the dispersion is no longer nature.

With this activity something is needed that does not come into consideration in the study of nature: inner courage." (Steiner, On the Life of the Soul)

The association you make between “death and responsibility” is interesting. It might first be important to note that taking on more responsibility than we can handle is just as irresponsible as taking on “too little responsibility”. Our moral obligation is to optimize circumstance in the greatest responsibility we can bear to maximize the probability of surplus for the degree of freedom we invest. If our degrees of freedom for choice are limited then we should accordingly limit that which we make ourselves responsible for. Furthermore, we can also take into consideration, not only our degrees of freedom for choice in each moment of action, but also across our entire life expectancy; how much energy is spent on us from the universe, and how much energy we expend to the universe throughout our lifespan. This puts into context our order within the complexity chain of consciousness. We can reasonably infer that our influence on the world is meant to be limited only to that which is expected of us throughout our lifespan, so our influence on the world is to some degree proportional to our capabilities with respect to the moral demands of the world. Thus, it is our moral responsibility to live and also to die. For a long time, I have considered that the greatest act we could perform to serve the universe would be to commit suicide on its behalf (only if beneficial — I dont believe that our limited capacities for living often, or ever require this level of responsibility).

This is similar to our lungs, and how they only produce a limited amount of oxygen on regular intervals. If our lungs instead constantly produced some overwhelmingly massive amount of oxygen, we would die of oxygen toxicity. But as things are, our lungs intake oxygen and it spreads throughout our bloodstream in useful quantities. There is; the moment of oxygen intake, oxygen transfer, and oxygen delivery — repeat. Our oxygen intake can’t exceed the limit of that which can be transferred to our bloodstream at once before we experience oxygen toxicity, etc. Meanwhile, our nervous system records whether our lungs provide enough oxygen to our bloodstream, and moderates the rate of oxygen intake accordingly.

The lung metaphor can be taken much deeper, but that might be a good spot to stop for an introduction. Though my larger proposal is that death has 2 stages (all part of 1 true stage). Ego dissolution and then unity with God. The first stage probably involves a life review and then an opportunity to wash away our sins with the helping hand of God. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if these processes were different for everyone, depending on their moral standing and primary modes of action (personality) within this life.

Related to what I responded above, I think most people today are hardly at risk of taking on "too much" responsibility, given how little is currently taken. As a precondition, we must know what we are actually capable of doing with our Spirit before assessing whether it is too much to take on. We simply won't have that knowledge until we delve into the depths of the soul and unveil it. This can be done, as Steiner indicates above. You are certainly correct that there is great balancing Wisdom at work in both the microcosmic human organism and the Macrocosm. But that Wisdom is still an ideal for us at this stage. We wouldn't even know where to begin balancing the physical, life, and soul processes if we were given creative responsibility for them. Is that a reason to say, "well I guess my current level of responsibility is fine because I don't know enough to do more, and would therefore screw it up"? In my view, it's a reason to seek more creative knowledge from within through the Spirit. It is how Wisdom beckons for us to come and join her in fashioning the Cosmos through our free agency.

"the higher, more integrated Idea must itself be present as a precondition to all theorizing, which then leads the Idea back to itself at a higher level. In that sense, it is the evolved Idea which makes possible more expansive perception which, in turn, makes possible the same Idea at a higher level of holistic integration."

Can you elaborate on this, and maybe provide an example?

So you propose that natural laws evolve in response to the evolving realizations of each individual? I’m not sure that the participatory universe works quite like that. Evidently, our evolving realizations can imply dualism, but this doesn’t give the universe laws which make it dualistic. There are laws intrinsic to our experience that connect all experiences, which cannot be altered by our perceiving/thinking activity that may make ideations indicating otherwise. If natural laws did evolve in response to our thinking/perceiving activity, and these were allowed by the moral/metaphysical laws, then they would also be implications of moral/metaphysical laws, and would thereby just be what is established by the moral/metaphysical laws. The question of whether they evolve over time, or whether they are “always there” is a philosophical speculation that is hardly even worth pondering about as far as I can tell. All natural laws are reflections of what is required for phenomenal experience, and are only induced by the experiential agent insofar as they are required for their phenomenal experiencing. I don’t believe that there is anything superfluous beyond that.

To be clear, my proposition isn’t that natural laws directly correspond to moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws, but that these moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws cast a shadow on the natural world. And if I am misinterpreting your position, please let me know

I would really point to every paradigmatic shift since the birth of philosophy-science 2,500-3,000 years ago as examples. First, the shift in consciousness had to occur, in perception-cognition, before mathematical and scientific theorizing became possible. Consider this passage from Jean Gebser: 

During the heyday of the Baroque era in the seventeenth century, an age which also attempted to get beyond the perspectival strictures of Renaissance space in the arts, there was a “downright frenzied forward thrust . . . in mathematics” of which Colerus speaks. The traditional and predominantly static geometry of measurement set down by Euclid is displaced, after a nearly two-thousand-year exclusive reign, by Descartes’ “analytic geometry” (1637), by Desargues’ “projective geometry” based on perception and illustration rather than on measurement (!) (1639), and by the “dynamic mathematics” (1638, 1687) of Galileo and Newton (see above p. 100). Projective geometry in particular engendered to a greater degree than the others the modern “non-Euclidian” geometries which brought into being the fourth dimension that Einstein introduced into physics in the form of “time.” These new mathematical concepts, moreover, were the foundation on which for the first time modern technology could be developed. Even bythemselves—and there are other parallel phenomena which are familiar to every mathematician—these facts are a clear indication of the “irruption of time” into mathematical thinking. They elicit a wealth of phenomena of which the foremost, the technologizing and four-dimensionalizing of our world, speak an unambiguous language.

Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin . Ohio University Press. Kindle Edition. 

So we are speaking of collective transformations here, but of course this manifests through individual human consciousness as well. We could say there is a 'top-down' precipitation of higher cognitions (moral laws) which are met by human individuals from the 'bottom-up' and manifested concretely in the world, and then we observe the manifestations abstractly, i.e. we ignore our own collective and individual participation in their manifestation, and call them "natural laws". In the modern age, the latter were then extrapolated indefinitely into the past and into the future as entities existing entirely independent of the human soul and its moral valence. I agree, there is little point speculating abstractly about this too much - the key is to actually undertake a reunion between the realm of moral laws, which reside within the soul, and the realm of natural laws which we perceive outside of us. The extent to which these two realms are kept separate from one another, inner (moral) from outer (natural), is entirely a function of each individual's cognitive development - it is not the same for everyone at any given time. We must abandon this modern abstract uniformitarianism in philosophy, science, art, and spirituality. That is what we are pointing to here. A path for each individual to actually undertake this reuniting of the 'opposites' which requires a sacrifice of abstraction - a death of the intellectual ego - to be born again from within as living thinking.