This forum

[Cleric K]

I don’t expect things to change significantly for anyone from this transition. I’m not sure what the plan will be for moderation with Dana stepping back, but I’m sure contributions of ideas and polite debate will continue to be welcome.

I just want to affirm that indeed nothing changes for this forum. The only difference is that we relieve Simon from paying for the hosting. He and Dana remain in full power and can be active as much as they would like.

I know there are people who consider that in the last two-three years the forum has been 'taken over'. Now reading news like the above, they probably think "Oh no, the era of free speech has finally ended." But this simply doesn't make any sense. I don't know in details what Dana has been doing as a moderator but to my knowledge no ideas that deal with philosophy, science, spirituality have been suppressed or censored. This will be even less likely in the future, because the forum will remain largely unmoderated.

If no one is censoring posts then why did activity dwindle? My view is that in the light of the other active discussions, it simply becomes very obvious that the majority of topics really don't lead much further than their title. And this holds true even for BK's work. It started with great enthusiasm but after the intellectual volume has been thoroughly probed, one reaches a point where there's no longer anywhere more to move. We reach the Great Dissociative Wall. This forces one to capitulate and turn the philosophy into (as BK expresses in recent interviews) "We don't know [the inner nature of MAL] and we don't need to know."

The shift in topics in recent times simply reflects the opposite "We can know and we need to know." And this is not said from the perspective of an ego that wants to know in its head, in order to rule the world. It is MAL that wants to know itself and it needs to know itself in order to be creative. And that which is creative in man, is our imagination which, when confronted with the constraints of perceptions, becomes thinking. Our thinking is the first-person creative force of MAL which is presently heavily constrained. Seen in this way, to know is not simply to have an abstract mental replica of the supposed real world but to transform the constraints which tie down the creative forces of MAL that work through man.

Bernardo says that man has the freedom of the slave. MAL pulls the strings while we have to simply accept that fact and let ourselves be blindly carried. This implies that MAL uses human beings as sense and willing organs while its mental processing happens on the collective level and is strictly orthogonal (incompatible) to human cognition. Thus, the sense of self that the intellect has, is only a side effect, a strange loop in no way related with the true nature of MAL. Yet it has also been said:

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

If we understand this, we can grasp that human beings are not simply sense organs but thinking organs of MAL. MAL not only perceives through us but thinks through us. Our thinking voice really belongs to MAL. This places us in a very interesting position. Bernardo says "This life has never been, is not and will never be about me. It serves a greater purpose that I don't understand and don't need to understand". So we have accepted our fate of a slave and we sacrifice our perceptions, our will, our feelings. We say "They are not mine and have never been. They belong to MAL." But then why don't we go full throttle? Why don't we sacrifice our thinking too? This looks like it should be the most easy sacrifice of all, since we already take our intellectual strange loop to be an illusion. Yet it turns out that this is the hardest of all sacrifices. And to sacrifice our thinking doesn't mean to let go of our thoughts and see them as floating pictures. This only prevents MAL to act creatively in them. To become not only sense and will organ of MAL but also thinking organ, we have to unite our thinking voice with the voice of the Word of MAL. It's not about surrendering our thinking in order to observe from the side how another being thinks instead of us but to become a conscious continuation of the Cosmic thinking force, in freedom and out of Love. On paper, we're willing to sacrifice our life for MAL but our strange loop we keep to ourselves. We say: "Here, take everything, but please leave me my strange loop. I promise I'll give it back at the gate of death." Yet MAL can't act creatively through organs that allow it to perceive, act, feel but not think. So we're really preventing MAL's Word to become fully self-conscious on the physical plane through us.

I apologize for going into these unrequested reflections but I felt that it should be clear where exactly the division of opinions lie. The shift in the topics on the forum reflects precisely this realization, that if we're to ever find these things as reality and not simply as intellectual subharmonics of our strange loop, then we have to find a way for our strange loop to become a fully conscious, musically cognitive chord in the Divine symphony.

It's understandable that all this will be seen as outrageous by many. And I'll finish by repeating than nothing in the forum changes. Everyone is free to speculate as much as they like. It's only that these people shouldn't be offended when they read that it is possible to sacrifice even this speculating voice in order to align it with the Cosmic one. We don't have to wait for death for this to happen. It happens here and now and it transforms our reality in ways inconceivable by any arrangement of subharmonics in the intellectual strange loop. This is where all our theories lead us, except that we need the courage to step from the ground school and begin verifying these theories in full reality.

[Güney27]

I don’t expect things to change significantly for anyone from this transition. I’m not sure what the plan will be for moderation with Dana stepping back, but I’m sure contributions of ideas and polite debate will continue to be welcome.

I just want to affirm that indeed nothing changes for this forum. The only difference is that we relieve Simon from paying for the hosting. He and Dana remain in full power and can be active as much as they would like.

I know there are people who consider that in the last two-three years the forum has been 'taken over'. Now reading news like the above, they probably think "Oh no, the era of free speech has finally ended." But this simply doesn't make any sense. I don't know in details what Dana has been doing as a moderator but to my knowledge no ideas that deal with philosophy, science, spirituality have been suppressed or censored. This will be even less likely in the future, because the forum will remain largely unmoderated.

If no one is censoring posts then why did activity dwindle? My view is that in the light of the other active discussions, it simply becomes very obvious that the majority of topics really don't lead much further than their title. And this holds true even for BK's work. It started with great enthusiasm but after the intellectual volume has been thoroughly probed, one reaches a point where there's no longer anywhere more to move. We reach the Great Dissociative Wall. This forces one to capitulate and turn the philosophy into (as BK expresses in recent interviews) "We don't know [the inner nature of MAL] and we don't need to know."

The shift in topics in recent times simply reflects the opposite "We can know and we need to know." And this is not said from the perspective of an ego that wants to know in its head, in order to rule the world. It is MAL that wants to know itself and it needs to know itself in order to be creative. And that which is creative in man, is our imagination which, when confronted with the constraints of perceptions, becomes thinking. Our thinking is the first-person creative force of MAL which is presently heavily constrained. Seen in this way, to know is not simply to have an abstract mental replica of the supposed real world but to transform the constraints which tie down the creative forces of MAL that work through man.

Bernardo says that man has the freedom of the slave. MAL pulls the strings while we have to simply accept that fact and let ourselves be blindly carried. This implies that MAL uses human beings as sense and willing organs while its mental processing happens on the collective level and is strictly orthogonal (incompatible) to human cognition. Thus, the sense of self that the intellect has, is only a side effect, a strange loop in no way related with the true nature of MAL. Yet it has also been said:

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

If we understand this, we can grasp that human beings are not simply sense organs but thinking organs of MAL. MAL not only perceives through us but thinks through us. Our thinking voice really belongs to MAL. This places us in a very interesting position. Bernardo says "This life has never been, is not and will never be about me. It serves a greater purpose that I don't understand and don't need to understand". So we have accepted our fate of a slave and we sacrifice our perceptions, our will, our feelings. We say "They are not mine and have never been. They belong to MAL." But then why don't we go full throttle? Why don't we sacrifice our thinking too? This looks like it should be the most easy sacrifice of all, since we already take our intellectual strange loop to be an illusion. Yet it turns out that this is the hardest of all sacrifices. And to sacrifice our thinking doesn't mean to let go of our thoughts and see them as floating pictures. This only prevents MAL to act creatively in them. To become not only sense and will organ of MAL but also thinking organ, we have to unite our thinking voice with the voice of the Word of MAL. It's not about surrendering our thinking in order to observe from the side how another being thinks instead of us but to become a conscious continuation of the Cosmic thinking force, in freedom and out of Love. On paper, we're willing to sacrifice our life for MAL but our strange loop we keep to ourselves. We say: "Here, take everything, but please leave me my strange loop. I promise I'll give it back at the gate of death." Yet MAL can't act creatively through organs that allow it to perceive, act, feel but not think. So we're really preventing MAL's Word to become fully self-conscious on the physical plane through us.

I apologize for going into these unrequested reflections but I felt that it should be clear where exactly the division of opinions lie. The shift in the topics on the forum reflects precisely this realization, that if we're to ever find these things as reality and not simply as intellectual subharmonics of our strange loop, then we have to find a way for our strange loop to become a fully conscious, musically cognitive chord in the Divine symphony.

It's understandable that all this will be seen as outrageous by many. And I'll finish by repeating than nothing in the forum changes. Everyone is free to speculate as much as they like. It's only that these people shouldn't be offended when they read that it is possible to sacrifice even this speculating voice in order to align it with the Cosmic one. We don't have to wait for death for this to happen. It happens here and now and it transforms our reality in ways inconceivable by any arrangement of subharmonics in the intellectual strange loop. This is where all our theories lead us, except that we need the courage to step from the ground school and begin verifying these theories in full reality.

Hello Cleric,
I have a feeling your suggested meditation practices make sense because we are beginning to experience how we create our thoughts.
Due to our concentration we are not caught in daydreaming and do not objectify everything like in the non-dual state.
That's all understandable.
I find it easier to simply designate what you call the deeper processes we are meant to penetrate as the subconscious.
This makes it easier for me to build a conceptual landscape.
My intellect is looking for a footing, so I'm trying with all my might to understand what you're saying before I actually meditate.
At least that's how I observed it in myself.
I read your essay on deep m@l, which also helped me to understand what you were saying.
In the beginning I read your essays and didn't understand what this is about.
More and more, however, I get the feeling that I am developing an understanding of what is being said.
I also find your essay, where you talk about the time consciousness spectrum, very enlightening, but I keep encountering difficulties in understanding it.
Especially with T (true time) it gets very foggy for me, I understand what is written up to a certain point, but I have no living inner experience that I can add to the term in order to gain a living knowledge of the whole.

I imagine our sensations and thoughts as waves on the surface of the ocean. Below that are all the hidden things that happen that work up to the surface, and the wave forms, all the way down to the deepest point plus everything runs down (I know it's not a scientifically accurate representation of the ocean, but this analogy came to mind when I saw a Picture of the ocean i
in the internet.)

Why does focusing our thoughts help us gain deeper knowledge of our subconscious?
If we focus everything to a certain point, aren't we in danger of seeing only certain aspects, while what is out of our focus remains invisible?
And could you go into your concept of time again, because I notice that it has great significance in this topic.
I know you have done it many times and I have asked you before, I would be very grateful.
I have decided to read henri bergson, whom Ashvin often quoted, because he also talks a lot about the inner experience of time (at least that's what I think from what I've read from him so far, I can also be wrong and I'm happy if someone corrects me)
Kind regards
Güney

[Cleric K]

I also find your essay, where you talk about the time consciousness spectrum, very enlightening, but I keep encountering difficulties in understanding it.

Hi Guney,

Things will become clearer in time. After all, if you have felt that in the last few months things have become more comprehensible, there shouldn’t be any reason why they won’t become even more clear in time. As we recently discussed about the continual incarnation here, our growing in understanding is connected with the development of the whole human being. Think of yourself at the age 4 of 5. Compare that past state with your current. It is clear that your present state can’t be constructed by combining the images in which your soul lived as a child. No matter how you arrange your toys, that won’t make the child say “Aha, now I see what the adult state is like”. In the same sense, even at this moment there’s something that you can’t grasp about how your inner life will change some months or years from now. This is, of course, if you persist on the path of development. If we’re content with what we are, then we can picture our state at an old age and imagine that we’ll be practically the same ego, except having blurrier sight, more bodily pains and so on. That’s why it is so important to always have that ideal that there’s an infinite evolutionary path in front of us. This shouldn’t feel discouraging. Instead, it should fill us with joy because there’s so many incredible things to discover. The stages of our development are like climbing out of a fractal labyrinth, where we continually become conscious of what we have been formerly moving though. For example, as a child you have been living in sympathies and antipathies about perceptions. Toys and play brought you pleasure, other things made you cry. Today you still carry within you this kind of instinctive life but it is all imbued with much vaster intuition, which was only gradually developed through thinking about yourself and the world. And even this state is child-like in comparison with your future forms of being. This holds true for each one of us. No matter how far we have gone, there's always something higher than us, which doesn't yet fit our present form of being.

Why does focusing our thoughts help us gain deeper knowledge of our subconscious?
If we focus everything to a certain point, aren't we in danger of seeing only certain aspects, while what is out of our focus remains invisible?

We can understand this by considering another way we can think of the word ‘concentrate’. The usual sense is to say “I’m here and I focus (concentrate) my attention at the point over there.” In this case it is perfectly natural to ask if we’re not limiting ourselves in this way. The other way of thinking about the word is by noting its etymology.

mid 17th century (in the sense ‘bring towards a centre’): Latinized form of concentre, or from French concentrer ‘to concentrate’. concentrate (sense 1 of the verb) dates from the early 20th century.

Here we have the same sense as in concentric, as two circles can be concentric – having different radiuses but sharing the same center.

This is true goal of concentration. Think of the atom. It has a nucleus and electron cloud. Measuring for the electron finds it at certain positions according to the probabilities of the electron shell’s wave function. Now think of the average inner life of modern man. We’re constantly ‘measuring’ phenomena in our soul space – perceptions, thoughts, memories, feelings and so on. Our sense of being is spread out over this multiplicity. Now we’re happy, then we’re sad, we think this, then we change opinions and so on. There’s only a quite loose unity of phenomena and the first more substantial shock in our life makes us question who we are and where things are going.

However, in a certain sense all this is only taking place around the nucleus. The problem is that in the modern materialistic world conception, this nucleus can only be taken to be fundamentally the structure of the physical body. And when the latter changes, becomes diseased and so on, our sense of being also changes accordingly. To concentrate means to find a more fundamental center of our being, a spiritual core that thinks about the phenomena of our soul sphere and seeks to organize them in a more rhythmic, musical way. Instead of being thrown around in the electron shell, we now feel centered at the nucleus and orchestrate our stream of becoming according to deeper understanding.

Yet even this center is not yet the final destination. The nucleus is itself a cloud of quarks. There’s an even deeper center which can find even greater stability in the midst of the outer shells. This would correspond to even more fundamental levels of our spiritual being, which are not identified with nation, race, gender. We find the perspective of the human universal which lives in every man and woman.

In this sense, we’re always at the center of be-ing, but the progression of our flow of becoming seems as disconnected phenomena, just like words in an unknown language are only disconnected auditory fragments to us. We feel that there should be a center, yet our life is lost in the flow of fragments in the electron shells. We dimly sense that there’s a center of gravity around which the fragments revolve but we can’t see them in that way.

For this reason we need to become concentric with that Divine center at the core of our being. The problem is that we don’t see that center. We can’t fix our gaze on it and concentrate. We become conscious of that center in proportion to how much musical sense we make out of our flow of being. We can make that sense only if we see things from the perspective of the conductor. Then we understand that evolution proceeds in archetypal patterns. We understand our own life only when we see how it fits in these archetypal patterns and this is only possible if we make it our ideal to draw nearer and nearer to the musical center from which these patterns emanate.

This is the real meaning of concentration. To understand your incarnational rhythms, your present “I”-experience must become concentric to the perspective of a being that can see itself in quite diverse personal lives on Earth. This is part of the reason why as a whole we can’t remember our past lives at this stage. It is simply that we wouldn’t recognize our present sense of self into these other lives. We have been the opposite gender, we have had completely different ideas, desires and so on. It is for this reason that before we can have consciousness of our former lives we have to develop interest in our fellow human beings. If we’re not willing to empathize with feelings of others and see their ideas from the first-person perspective, then most certainly we wouldn’t recognize even ourselves if we were to meet some of our past personalities. We would say “I don’t care about you, you are so different, you and I have nothing in common. I’m not interested in you, I want to know my own past”. This of course doesn’t mean that we should become lost in the superficial life of humanity, subscribe to Cosmopolitan, Glamour and so on. Our interest in others should always be focused on seeking the Divine in every being. It is this Center that unites, which is of value.

As said, we can’t simply find that center and focus on it. That’s why our exercises indeed begin with concentration in the general sense, where we try to keep our focus fixed on a thought-image. But all this is only means to strengthen our spiritual core, such that we can resist the forces that throw us around. As long as we’re completely dragged along the flow of events, our being is at the mercy of unknown factors. By taking some time to resist this usual flow, we find new aspects of our being which gradually gains the strength to reshape the flow according to higher ideals. In this way, ordinary concentration (focus of attention) helps us to reach the true concentration – becoming more and more concentric with the Divine singularity of the Cosmos, from which Time spreads out and is experienced in evolutionary arcs.

I imagine our sensations and thoughts as waves on the surface of the ocean. Below that are all the hidden things that happen that work up to the surface, and the wave forms, all the way down to the deepest point plus everything runs down (I know it's not a scientifically accurate representation of the ocean, but this analogy came to mind when I saw a Picture of the ocean i
in the internet.)

The recent post here may be helpful about this.

I also find your essay, where you talk about the time consciousness spectrum, very enlightening, but I keep encountering difficulties in understanding it.
Especially with T (true time) it gets very foggy for me, I understand what is written up to a certain point, but I have no living inner experience that I can add to the term in order to gain a living knowledge of the whole.

I think that you’re simply trying to grasp this in a too philosophical way. In reality, it is something very simple. When it’s getting dark you stand up, go and flip the light switch. From the time you get up, all your movements are within the context of this idea “to turn on the lights”. Imagine time slowing down such that some tiny beings observe you, as we observe the Andromeda galaxy. They look at you with their telescopes, try to calculate the velocity vectors of your cells, make mathematical models, calculate the mass-energy distribution, calculate the curvature of spacetime and say: “According to our calculation, in so and so seconds (from their perspective a second is like millions of years) that galaxy of cells will collide with the Sloan Great Wall on the other end of the room universe.” From the perspective of these beings, time is just the propagation of the state of the universe from frame to frame, according to immutable laws. But from your perspective, your idea of “turning on the lights” is something that shapes the structure of time. In fact, this idea is the curvature through which your galaxy of cells will flow in order to reach the other side of the room.

This is something very simple. The whole reason to call it true time is because it is the only instance where we can really understand why the flow of becoming is going in one way or another. As long as we look upon reality as the small beings that calculate your trajectory, any spiritual causes for the transformations of the Cosmos will be unknown. Then time remains a completely mysterious phenomenon that somehow ticks forward our movie of existence, yet we can’t do more than try to build mathematical models that try to predict the next frame based on present and past frames. When we realize that we ourselves continually engineer time through our intentions, it would be natural to find ourselves embedded within even more encompassing Divine intentions, which can be known by becoming concentric to them.

[Federica]

To Cleric and Ashvin:

As I read Cleric's last reply to Lorenzo, as well as Ashvin's last reply to Anthony, it strucks me that the entire series of countless attempts, a series that tends to infinity to the naked eye, has an unbroken history of falling on deaf ears, and to this day it continues to fall on inveterate deaf ears. Let's face it, neither could care less about the direction of your clarifying intentions. With their persisting presence on this forum, they obviously serve some particular personal goals, be these goals conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious. But is there any intersection between those goals and the one human enterprise you endlessly try to bring to their attention? It seems evident to me that they have not taken the least real converging step, not shown the least concrete interest in what you have so far spent hundreds if not thousands of pages trying to convey, let alone deigned to provide feedback to any of your various essays... through the years.

Not that I suggest that people cannot talk about whatever they want here, as long as it sounds vaguely philosophical. Of course they can, and should continue to have the option to. Nonetheless, when it comes to your approach to these dialogues - and you can call me ungenerous and short-sighted if you wish - I believe that when patience is boundlessly extended, distended and exhausted beyond any reasonable measure, it ceases to be a virtue. And I wonder: will you ever come to a point where you will let go of these constantly fruitless attempts and the inverted effects they may be yielding?

[AshvinP]

To Cleric and Ashvin:

As I read Cleric's last reply to Lorenzo, as well as Ashvin's last reply to Anthony, it strucks me that the entire series of countless attempts, a series that tends to infinity to the naked eye, has an unbroken history of falling on deaf ears, and to this day it continues to fall on inveterate deaf ears. Let's face it, neither could care less about the direction of your clarifying intentions. With their persisting presence on this forum, they obviously serve some particular personal goals, be these goals conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious. But is there any intersection between those goals and the one human enterprise you endlessly try to bring to their attention? It seems evident to me that they have not taken the least real converging step, not shown the least concrete interest in what you have so far spent hundreds if not thousands of pages trying to convey, let alone deigned to provide feedback to any of your various essays... through the years.

Not that I suggest that people cannot talk about whatever they want here, as long as it sounds vaguely philosophical. Of course they can, and should continue to have the option to. Nonetheless, when it comes to your approach to these dialogues - and you can call me ungenerous and short-sighted if you wish - I believe that when patience is boundlessly extended, distended and exhausted beyond any reasonable measure, it ceases to be a virtue. And I wonder: will you ever come to a point where you will let go of these constantly fruitless attempts and the inverted effects they may be yielding?

My perspective is that this criticism would be more appropriate if we were teaching something like secular history lessons, where there are clear facts to understand and integrate. Then if someone keeps suggesting they cannot understand the facts communicated, despite numerous presentations, or simply ignores the presentations and keeps asking the same questions, it would perhaps make sense to stop indulging them with repeated lessons.

As you know, what we are communicating here is much different. The comments are attempts to orient toward an entirely unfamiliar intuition of how to think through experience (and feel and will to some extent). Nothing is wasted in such attempts. In all such comments, we are having dialogues with not only one particular person, but also ourselves and others who happen to be reading, now or later. We are reinforcing the unfamiliar intuition for ourselves and perhaps finding new ways to express it, from varied angles. All of that is critical for enlivening our thinking and fostering a sense of shared spiritual enterprise.

I would also add, not to stoke any further discord, but I sense the approaches of Lorenzo and Anthony are quite different. It is one thing to continually comment just to argue and make one's opinion be heard, with zero interest in understanding what the other person is communicating and learning something new. Lorenzo has expressed his opinion on a few occasions that the very process of 'learning something new' in spiritual pursuits is a quest for the golden calf and therefore to be taken lightly if taken at all. I don't see that at all with Anthony - he is genuinely trying to orient toward this unfamiliar intuition and see how it relates to more familiar concepts and knowledge. That the process unfolds more gradually with fits and starts for some people is to be expected. There is no time limit to integrating spiritual knowledge, it is what we will be doing for the rest of our evolution. We just need to persevere in good faith.

[Federica]

To Cleric and Ashvin:

As I read Cleric's last reply to Lorenzo, as well as Ashvin's last reply to Anthony, it strucks me that the entire series of countless attempts, a series that tends to infinity to the naked eye, has an unbroken history of falling on deaf ears, and to this day it continues to fall on inveterate deaf ears. Let's face it, neither could care less about the direction of your clarifying intentions. With their persisting presence on this forum, they obviously serve some particular personal goals, be these goals conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious. But is there any intersection between those goals and the one human enterprise you endlessly try to bring to their attention? It seems evident to me that they have not taken the least real converging step, not shown the least concrete interest in what you have so far spent hundreds if not thousands of pages trying to convey, let alone deigned to provide feedback to any of your various essays... through the years.

Not that I suggest that people cannot talk about whatever they want here, as long as it sounds vaguely philosophical. Of course they can, and should continue to have the option to. Nonetheless, when it comes to your approach to these dialogues - and you can call me ungenerous and short-sighted if you wish - I believe that when patience is boundlessly extended, distended and exhausted beyond any reasonable measure, it ceases to be a virtue. And I wonder: will you ever come to a point where you will let go of these constantly fruitless attempts and the inverted effects they may be yielding?

My perspective is that this criticism would be more appropriate if we were teaching something like secular history lessons, where there are clear facts to understand and integrate. Then if someone keeps suggesting they cannot understand the facts communicated, despite numerous presentations, or simply ignores the presentations and keeps asking the same questions, it would perhaps make sense to stop indulging them with repeated lessons.

As you know, what we are communicating here is much different. The comments are attempts to orient toward an entirely unfamiliar intuition of how to think through experience (and feel and will to some extent). Nothing is wasted in such attempts. In all such comments, we are having dialogues with not only one particular person, but also ourselves and others who happen to be reading, now or later. We are reinforcing the unfamiliar intuition for ourselves and perhaps finding new ways to express it, from varied angles. All of that is critical for enlivening our thinking and fostering a sense of shared spiritual enterprise.

I would also add, not to stoke any further discord, but I sense the approaches of Lorenzo and Anthony are quite different. It is one thing to continually comment just to argue and make one's opinion be heard, with zero interest in understanding what the other person is communicating and learning something new. Lorenzo has expressed his opinion on a few occasions that the very process of 'learning something new' in spiritual pursuits is a quest for the golden calf and therefore to be taken lightly if taken at all. I don't see that at all with Anthony - he is genuinely trying to orient toward this unfamiliar intuition and see how it relates to more familiar concepts and knowledge. That the process unfolds more gradually with fits and starts for some people is to be expected. There is no time limit to integrating spiritual knowledge, it is what we will be doing for the rest of our evolution. We just need to persevere in good faith.

Of course, there are quite different individualities here, but how this is relevant to the question I asked, I fail to see.

And I thought it was agreed that, in what you and Cleric attempt to convey, there are indeed clear facts to understand and integrate. Besides, Ashvin, you have often warned people of the effects of sympathies and antipathies here, and your answer seems to contain a reminder of that.

More generally, it seems to me that, sooner or later, the search for truth requires sacrifices in terms of search for other things, and that the preferred objects of sacrifice can be influenced by sympathies and antipathies, likes and dislikes, just like anything else. Finally, yes, we all know that this is a public forum and posts are read by some more than one person. And here I will simply repeat one last time my opinion that there might be inverted results when the attraction of certain curvatures is allowed to, well, attract.

[Cleric K]

To Cleric and Ashvin:

As I read Cleric's last reply to Lorenzo, as well as Ashvin's last reply to Anthony, it strucks me that the entire series of countless attempts, a series that tends to infinity to the naked eye, has an unbroken history of falling on deaf ears, and to this day it continues to fall on inveterate deaf ears. Let's face it, neither could care less about the direction of your clarifying intentions. With their persisting presence on this forum, they obviously serve some particular personal goals, be these goals conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious. But is there any intersection between those goals and the one human enterprise you endlessly try to bring to their attention? It seems evident to me that they have not taken the least real converging step, not shown the least concrete interest in what you have so far spent hundreds if not thousands of pages trying to convey, let alone deigned to provide feedback to any of your various essays... through the years.

Not that I suggest that people cannot talk about whatever they want here, as long as it sounds vaguely philosophical. Of course they can, and should continue to have the option to. Nonetheless, when it comes to your approach to these dialogues - and you can call me ungenerous and short-sighted if you wish - I believe that when patience is boundlessly extended, distended and exhausted beyond any reasonable measure, it ceases to be a virtue. And I wonder: will you ever come to a point where you will let go of these constantly fruitless attempts and the inverted effects they may be yielding?

For my part, besides what Ashvin said, I still use these dialogs as opportunities to understand the perspective of the other person. The reasons why things are rejected or misunderstood could have various sources. For example, I vividly remember my young materialistic years. I used to argue with a friend who had embraced Gita. The truth is, that even if I were to lead these conversations today, they would still be completely unconvincing. Thus I often wonder what my reaction would have been if I was presented with some of the things that I have realized today. Would I have rejected them impulsively without really trying to understand? I don't know. But anyway, in these conversations the thing that motivates me is that I still search for ways to present the ideas, in the hope that the person maybe simply needs a thought-form that clicks to their personal constitution.

For example, in Lorenzo and Eugene's case, my feeling is that the culprit is the Toruk Makto fallacy:

As explained countless times, this an elementary error. Remember the following scene of the first Avatar. Toruk is a top predator. He has no natural enemies so he never looks up. That's exploited by Jake to jump on his back and make the Tsaheylu bond:



Movie clip: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkxh9dgBu ... ti2HCxfTbZ

We act like Toruk every time we imagine that we have reached the ultimate foundations of reality. And NO, this is not denial of oneness. This in no way contradicts the fact that we're of one essence with the Divine and all beings. It only brings to attention the simple fact that we blind ourselves for half of reality as soon as we decide that we already know what consciousness is. Instead, we should be open that we haven't even begun to see what consciousness is. This shouldn't cause despair. In fact, it can become our greatest inspiration because there's so much more to learn, so much more to be awestruck by!

What I try to understand is whether there's any consciousness that this is happening. Or it is so deeply embedded and feels like 'pure consciousness' that one doesn't even allow himself to question it. Basically, the ego self-promotes itself - it renames itself to 'pure consciousness' or 'true self', and from that point on, the inner gaze is directed only down the cone. Everything is seen as phenomenal fragments, quests for golden calves, etc.

At this point I still don't have a conclusive opinion on whether there's something that can be communicated which may give an awakening signal, or one is so deeply unwilling to even consider the Toruk Makto possibility, that they would rather wait for death.

[Federica]

To describe the inertial space this forum has reached I’d say there seems to be a problem with appearances. One tries to save them, only too late too little, another one tries to look as if they didn’t count, safe trying to gather some undercover, another one doesn’t seem to notice how’s influenced, another one believes one can bypass them, another one lives inside them, and so on. Unfortunately it seems to create parallel worlds that could keep rotating one around the other without ever producing any harmonious interplay, only screeching noises at the occasional crossovers (with one clearly resounding exception of course). It’s a strange situation, like a multi-level game, but one that can’t self-regulate. At this point I’m not sure what’s the right way to think/do.

[AshvinP]

Of course, there are quite different individualities here, but how this is relevant to the question I asked, I fail to see.

And I thought it was agreed that, in what you and Cleric attempt to convey, there are indeed clear facts to understand and integrate. Besides, Ashvin, you have often warned people of the effects of sympathies and antipathies here, and your answer seems to contain a reminder of that.

More generally, it seems to me that, sooner or later, the search for truth requires sacrifices in terms of search for other things, and that the preferred objects of sacrifice can be influenced by sympathies and antipathies, likes and dislikes, just like anything else. Finally, yes, we all know that this is a public forum and posts are read by some more than one person. And here I will simply repeat one last time my opinion that there might be inverted results when the attraction of certain curvatures is allowed to, well, attract.

I have read this a few times but, honestly, I can't figure out what you are suggesting. Maybe you can elaborate with a bit less crypticism

But more generally, I just don't see much value in arguing about "who is worthy of being responded to". It's an individual decision based on particular circumstances which are always evolving. We all think about these things. There have been a few comments from Lorenzo that I never responded to because I felt it was fruitless. I'm sure the same can be said for Cleric. But circumstances can change such that a new avenue opens up for exploration, and even if exploring it ends up elucidating no one else but ourselves, that could still be very useful for future discussions as Cleric's last comment suggested. We are dealing with archetypal forms of resistance expressed through the prism of particular personalities and we will never stop encountering these same forms as time goes by (also within ourselves), in fact, it is likely we will only encounter them more and more. Each individual can decide whether any particular interaction provides the basis for learning/teaching opportunities or not.

[AshvinP]

And I thought it was agreed that, in what you and Cleric attempt to convey, there are indeed clear facts to understand and integrate.

Sorry, this part was pretty clear. The facts on this inner path are ones that cut across everything we have been conditioned to think about 'how reality works', 'what are ideas and thoughts', 'what is meaning', 'what is death', 'what is time', etc. What I meant was that it is to be expected that some of us will have a much more difficult time than others orienting to this completely unfamiliar intuition and integrating these facts. That is especially the case if some have been hesitant or, for whatever reason, unable to do the prayer/meditation work that reorients our way of thinking and feeling with regards to inner realities.