Federica wrote: ↑Mon Aug 08, 2022 11:39 pm Hi Ashvin,
Getting back to the threads now, after a few days when I couldn’t spend any time either on the forum or on anything related, I feel scarily estranged from the discussion. I remember I was completely involved in it, but sadly, I can’t find that connection right now. I can only find the motivation to search for it again. All in all, it's maybe not that bad, because what I’ve lost in terms of involvement I seem to have gained in equanimity. I can see this by reading my last posts, I find them somewhat exaggerated now. Wisdom must be with those who can be fully involved and fully balanced at the same time!
Anyway, the help of the various perspectives you have offered here on identification and Karma remains to be aknowledged. The perspectives were useful to gain an overall understanding, or sense, that identifications are unconscious, and stating “we are not those people'' is limited. Maybe this statement is nothing but a subtler way to recreate that same ‘us versus them’ separation that I was criticizing in the radical identifications.
It’s possible that there’s a way to go beyond such a relative viewpoint through a deep understanding of doctrines that at the moment I don’t realize. I certainly don't want to exclude that. More than the suggested thought experiments - the first one I found impossible to experiment with, and about the second, I can confidently and carefully say that I couldn’t care less about nationality - it’s the compendium of perspectives that I found helpful to draw the contours of this unknown space. I don’t know the space in itself, but its shape seems consistent, or at least could be consistent, with itself and with everything else. That's what I can say at this point.
Federica,
This is natural. I often have days where I am much less interested in pursuing the spiritual path than others. Sometimes I 'forget' things that I had just worked out the day before, or it's much more hazy and less inspiring than it seemed to be. This is the oscillation we will always be confronting on the path, since, after all, our desires, feelings, and thoughts are very much conditioned to the sensory world and its daily happenings. As we decondition, it raises up and confronts us even more fiercely. What you stated is very wise - we shouldn't view this oscillation as an 'enemy' to eliminate. It serves a great purpose in our evolution and we will often find, from a later, more holistic vantage point, that what seemed like a setback actually made room the opportunity for great spiritual advances.
And this is all tied into what I was saying about our subconscious identifications that we often presume to have 'overcome'. We are most vulnerable to that conditioning whenever we feel like we have overcome it. I wrote an essay on dualism here once, and Cleric offered this comment which I found very insightful and helpful. It can equally apply to any worldview or modern state of being.
viewtopic.php?p=14365#p14365
Cleric wrote:The first is that this addiction is not entirely of the same kind as other addictions. The big difference is that in most other addictions we know what it is to be addicted but in most cases we also know what it is to be sober. The big difficulty today is that it's not just about abolishing dualism. The trouble is that people don't know what the sober state is, because it is something that is only now beginning to enter the general evolution. This is also why non-dualism is such a misnomer today. It's not enough to just stop thinking about duality. If I'm not particularly bright then if I keep my mouth shut I'll probably get into less trouble. But this in itself won't make me smart. This is the challenge, that it's not just about abolishing dual thinking but about working towards a higher form of consciousness.
When we look at the whole image we can think to ourselves "I'm completely balanced now, I'm outside the duality." But in fact, it can be said that we're in the blind spot in the dark half, looking at the white half and seeing there the fractal of the whole, which, however, we believe is the full picture. As a matter of fact there's no point of view 'outside' the polarity. We spoke with Martin about this recently. The polarity of the mind is really the balancing of the two-petal lotus flower or the two brain hemispheres. This is achieved through concentration - all jumping around of thoughts must cease and all thinking must be focused as laser in the weightless point in the head. But this polarity is not the one from which the World proceeds. Interestingly, it was so for Hegel. For him the fractal of concepts was the World. Yet this polarity lives as an octave within higher order polarity (in the astral). There are even higher order polarities. Actually the feeling of dissociation comes not from the mind-polarity but from the astral. And this is quite obvious. It's much easier to conceptualize "It's all one" and collapse the mind. It's much more difficult to overcome the feelings of antipathy and embrace the world with Love - not only in some wishy-washy sentimental way but as real, sacrificial Love, such that we take responsibility for the sins of the world as if they are done by our very own brothers, sisters, children and most importantly - ourselves.
My point is that we should guard against projecting our blame onto duality. Think about it: the very fact that we divide things into dual and non-dual is already a duality. These are very slippery things and if we try to solve them mentally they can lead to actual breakdown. Something of this sort happened to Nietzsche. It looks a little like Gödel's theorem: if a given axiomatic system can prove its consistency then it is not consistent (since the G statement can be formulated). Similarly, if thinking concludes that it is now in non-dual mode, it most certainly isn't.
Fighting against certain mode of thinking can turn out to simply perpetuate the war. We shouldn't simply label different kinds of cognition and prefer one over the other. Any kind of thinking has it's rightful place. It's not a bad thing that we formulated a thought in polar subject-object relation. The real question is how these thoughts fit in the big picture.
The solution can only be found if we have the High Ideal. In PoF this is approached with Moral Imagination, Moral Intuition. We don't know the exact solution, it's not humanly possible to solve that many equations for flying stones. But we can focus our intentions toward the potential where the problem is already solved. We need to have faith that the solution exists - it's only a matter of finding our way to it.
Let's say I'm taking a slice of bread from the toaster. Is it a problem that I'm seeing the toaster and the slice in the sensory realm and think about them as an object that I reach for? Not really. It is a nice thing to recognize the different modes of thinking but we need a different skill if we're to judge if it is really the thinking mode that causes problems. Ultimately, what's really important is the moral value of what we're doing, feeling, thinking. And this value is not measured against some predefined yardsticks. It's really about trying to relate everything to the One Unity. Of course now some will object and say that there isn't one morality but that it's all about individuals or groups which are loosely related. There's no question of moral life only for beings who have no chance to affect each other - that is, if they exist in independent realities. As long as there's even a single point of contact, there's always a more encompassing whole from which the groups can be seen. The groups can be in conflict or harmony, so we can't address these issues if we don't seek the moral whole which encompasses them.
In this sense, when I take the slice of bread, why am I doing it? To feed myself. Why do I need to feed myself? To provide nutrition for my body. Why? To be healthy? Why? To perform my daily tasks? Why? Because I have certain goals in mind? What goals? To provide for my family, to do something beneficial for society, to develop some new skills which will allow me to be even more helpful, to work in alignment with the evolutionary impulses of the time, which are part of the grand Cosmic eons, within which the One common existence of all beings flows.
So we see that everything we do, feel, think can ultimately be traced to its moral dimension. This is really what distinguishes man from the animal. The animal operates by the necessity of the instinct, man must seek the moral impulses for his actions in freedom. We can seek these impulses only if we hold the High Ideal, the vision that everything is ultimately part of the One Cosmic organism. If we don't do that we'll be moral for our self, for our family or nation, but at some point we'll encounter a group which will clash with our interests. To move beyond that point we need true understanding of the spiritual whole from which my group and the other are part. Only through that understanding I'll be able to draw the moral impulses that can harmonize the groups.
I just wanted to expand on what is, of course, already implicit in the essay - that overcoming duality is not an end in itself. We can only make sense of it when it's seen in the larger picture where everything that we do, feel and think has moral significance for the Cosmic Whole. It is now an interesting exercise to trace how each of these 12 points actually affects the moral dimension of existence. It will be seen that it's not simply that the points in themselves decide arbitrarily that this is bad, that is good, but it'll be seen that they stand on the way of freedom and morality that can reach for the One Unity.