Anthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 29, 2022 3:44 pm
Given things have been a bit quiet here of late, I thought I might ask another 101 question. How do we understand the anesthetized state in terms of the Deep M@L? The lights are out for the individual. There is negligible brain activity detectable. What is happening with the Thinking activity? What is going on behind the veil?
To use Lorenzo's terminology, we're
aware of only that which can be integrated into the holistic state of our evolving "I"-experience. Today when people repeat consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, it is usually taken completely for granted that this consciousness experiences
continuity through time. But it is easy to see that this continuity results only because of the continual integration of the states of being into the coherent "I"-experience. I know that many will object that the "I" is an illusion but then they should answer the following: imagine that instead of our usual stream of consciousness we were to experience successions of completely random states of being. Now we experience a 'frame' of inner experience of John Smith, then of some alien in a galaxy far away, then of a dog, then of a divinity and so on. Would there be a sense of continuity? Would there be awareness that our subjective state jumps through these random states? See, no matter how we try to avoid it, the very facts of existence lead us back to this continuity of a
certain spiritual perspective. When we jump from the state of John Smith to that of the alien, we're not just any alien. We're an alien that can say to itself "an instant ago I was John Smith but now I'm an alien". So our current alien state must contain as memory within itself that it arrived from that of John Smith. Only because this spiritual perspective grows and embeds within itself reverberations of its previous states, we can speak of continuity of consciousness. If every our state of being was a disconnected complex of spiritual phenomena, there wouldn't be any consciousness of existence
through time.
These are simple things, practically self-evident, yet because of the fascination with illusionism, the are ignored and one leaves the question of continuity of consciousness completely unexamined in the blind spot. One simply takes for granted that pure awareness somehow maintains identity through time.
If we reflect with the needed seriousness on this continuity of consciousness, we would find completely natural explanations of the different states - waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, anesthesia, etc.
One of the most prolific topics for reflection is to consider the following. Without any doubt, we can be conscious only of what we can think of. There simply isn't such a spiritual experience for which we can say "I experienced that but I can't think of it". It is true that we may not have clear cut concepts about the experience but we can certainly think about it by saying for example "I went through this inexplicable state. I don't know what it is but it was incredible." So if we introspect closely what we're doing when we think like that, we'll observe that when we say "I went through this inexplicable state" we really summon the
memory of that state. We try to fill our soul with the the perceptual and feeling content, as if to reconstruct the mystical state.
Now what about things that we
may have experienced but we simply don't have the conceptual and perceptual 'slots' to remember and think about in our waking state? Very simple - then we have what we have when we try to think about our deep dreamless sleep or anesthetic state. It seems that nothing happened there, that we went through darkness. Probably the only thing we can recollect is that we spent time in that darkness.
If we allow ourselves to reflect deeply on these topics most of the nature of higher cognition will also come out as a completely natural conclusion. Really, if we consider with humility that not only during sleep but even now we're submerged in a world of spiritual activity, which however doesn't register in our everyday thinking forms (not even into the popular spiritual concepts), then we'll realize that just because we don't remember anything of the dark states (except the duration of darkness) or just because we're not conscious in this very moment of the higher order Thinking flows that shape the dreamscape, it doesn't mean that they don't exist and they don't guide every 'frame' of our existence.
As a simplified example we can think of Amazonian natives who are conscious of their land being destroyed but have no concepts of economics, corporations, industry, etc. In short, they are not conscious of the forms of spiritual activity of 'civilized' man, which are responsible for the changes in their environment. So the natives may imagine that their land is destroyed for no reason at all, it's just a part of inexplicable flow of phenomena. But we know that there's living thinking spirit behind the events, which is knowable if we can resonate with its thought forms. This example is limited, because the forms of thinking of civilized man are not that different from those of the native, they are only more convoluted, more complicated, but still they revolve around the basic human needs and desires. To grasp the deeper layers of spiritual activity of the Cosmos, however, we need to explore forms of our own spiritual activity which our sensory perceptions and associated Earthly feelings and desires can't stimulate out of themselves. For this reason, these forms of spiritual activity simply pass through us unregistered and when the physical organs shut down we're left in duration of darkness. In reality this darkness if full of the activity of beings that work on human destinies, the evolution of humanity, the kingdoms and the whole Cosmic context. All this is a spiritual
language. The dreamscape is shaped by lawful spiritual activity. Human concepts resonate, for example, with words (sounds). That's why we can think in words. But in the language of an angel, the 'words' are living streams in the soul strata of man and animals. If we are to understand the language of an angel we need to raise to a much more comprehensive view of soul life. We can never do this by declaring thing to be illusions and simply rest peacefully in nebulous feeling of unboundedness. We need real interest in our surrounding world, real empathic interest in the soul lives of our fellow beings. Only then we begin to grasp the archetypal streams within these lives. Only then we can begin to sense how the most varied beings modulate these streams. Yet all of this belongs to a higher order of the dreamscape. To find that order we need to see how our own life is embedded within this stream (we can't find it in others if we can't first find it in ourselves).
As long as our concepts are of the form "provide food", "have fun", "visit places", "reproduce", "imagine that everything is illusion" and so on, our spiritual activity is simply
too dissimilar from the higher order spiritual activities. To understand a mathematician our spiritual gestures (math thinking) must become
similar to those of the mathematician. In the same sense, to have consciousness of the higher orders spiritual activity that meaningfully shape the flow of reality, we need to liberate the forces currently chained in our intellectual forms and make this liberated spiritual activity
similar to the higher order flows. Only in this way our consciousness
grows into the depths of reality. Then we begin to cognize the hidden order of the dreamscape and can say "All this is always part of reality - it is what creates reality. But it is a language that simply passes through my cognition as far as it is chained to the intellectual forms. I had to liberate unsuspected forces that have been previously formatted in the rigid thought forms. Now my spiritual activity flows in a way similar to the way higher beings art the rhythms and forms of the dreamscape. As long as I didn't know myself as a spirit that can move in these ways, all of this was simply darkness." So in this sense, the development of higher cognition in our age consists first, in the fully conscious lifting of our spiritual activity from the rigid intellectual forms and finding ourselves as a higher being that can shape the flow of reality in novel ways (initially we shape this flow by mastering the flow of our own life of thinking, feeling, willing), second, in the ability to
condense the higher flows into intellectual concepts and images. The latter we do not in order to become locked in these concepts but to build the gradient bridge along the depth axis, between the spiritual activity locked in the intellectual plane and the higher order spiritual activities that shape reality.
To summarize:
1. We can't take the darkness of sleep/anesthesia as some absolute quality of consciousness. Our consciousness can only be understood properly if we take into account the continual memory integration which alone gives the sense of continuity through time.
2. Then we understand we can only be conscious/remember things that can be properly integrated in our evolving state.
3. Even if we're surrounded by cognitive activity which however is too dissimilar from our own intellectual (or the lack of it in popular mysticism), then this world of activity is simply darkness to us.
4. By lifting Thinking from the rigid intellectual forms and finding the higher order flow of the spirit, we begin to live in higher languages of MAL's cognition. These languages do not consist simply of strings of reflective concepts that build mental pictures of the world-in-itself but are themselves the driving forces of the flows of the dreamscape, just like our own ordinary thinking, on a smaller scale, is the driving force of our thought perceptions and imagination.