AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 3:24 am
Federica,
My response will be lengthy as well and I tried to hit on most of the points you made.
Federica wrote:Ashvin, I don’t feel immune to any lapsing. I know intuitions don’t grant anything, and I constantly have the painful experience of losing the awareness of ideas, and oftentimes even their memory. I can say this is my number one preoccupation and struggle, and whether or not I will be able to improve this status. It’s true that I am far from neutral, feelingwise, but that part is clearly improving and is not as big of a concern as the lapsing.
I do realize this and it makes me confident that our disagreements here won't really stray you from the most important work on the path. If anything, it makes me comfortable to be more direct and blunt with you on the points in contention. That said, I feel the lapsing (or whatever we want to call it) is still very much an issue.
I first want to point you towards
my comment to Anthony on the other thread, which maybe you already read, especially the part about foundational principles. These are most important for us to grasp first, and then to evaluate any particular phenomenal manifestation within their context. Steiner's quote on the Lucifer, Human/Christ, Ahriman triad is especially important for us. With material technology like VR, we are mostly dealing with an Ahrimanic phenomena. If we declare it universally incapable of pedagogical value, irredeemable, or anything similar, we are essentially creating a duality excluding the Christ impulse which works
through the extremes to balance them within the human soul.
Steiner wrote:Now you may well imagine that it is entirely in the interest of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers to conceal this secret of the triad. For the proper comprehension of this secret enables mankind to bring about the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers; that means, on the one hand, to use the Luciferic tendency toward freedom for the achievement of a wholesome cosmic aim, and on the other hand, to strive to achieve the same with the Ahrimanic element. The human being's normal spiritual condition consists in relating himself in the proper way to this trinity, this triune structure of the world.
Let's be clear - this doesn't mean every single person needs to delve into VR territory as part of their spiritual mission, or that some people should incorporate it as a daily practice. No one is making that argument. The argument is whether we can declare it or any other cultural phenomena universally beyond redemptive uses, which is effectively the position you have been arguing for.
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 08, 2023 9:21 pmI certainly don’t feel tech phenomena are beyond the purview of spiritual processes, and I have said multiple times that I recognize there are insights to glean, and meaning to grasp in VR as a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know why you are forgetting that now, but I want to add what I consider a key question: how do you fit the idea of dead ends of evolution in these collective developments and the ideational activity that shapes them?
My mention of the elemental beings was intended to briefly address the question of the 'dead ends of evolution'. Basically, no such thing exists for a spiritual evolutionary understanding. All the forces which have ever been developed through the spiritual evolutionary process still exist and are embedded in our now-perspective, serving critical purposes, mostly below the threshold of waking consciousness. As a crude comparison, the 'elemental beings' were like the materialists of their time who, remained so adamantly opposed to the spiritual Cosmos for many ages, that they lagged too far behind the healthy spiritual evolution to seize the opportunity to incorporate the Spirit, to become fully human and eventually Gods, and became beings of Nature instead, serving as the sub-sensory support for higher life waves of minerals, plants, animals, humans. Maybe in your view, these are the humans who get so addicted to VR they end up living their whole lives (and even subsequent incarnations) in a virtual kingdom with no knowledge of the Spirit. Nevertheless, even this tragic outcome would serve a critical purpose for future life waves who need to carry out their 'work against nature' for spiritual growth. And eventually those life waves would be tasked with redeeming the VR rejects, like we are now tasked with redeeming the elemental beings.
Ok - Observing that already at the time of language impression on stones, man was impressing language on airwaves too (through speech) I tentatively interpret your idea of growing spiritualized activity as more conscious activity? Is this correct? Though maybe it’s not, because what’s the substantial difference between mastering stone sculpting and mastering airwaves? They present us with different constraints, but they’re all laws of nature, so why should the latter be more spiritualized/conscious? Certainly not because air feels more lofty than stone? All sensorial spectrum is mineral, there’s a slice of mineral in every kingdom, therefore digital signals, as a materialist technology, constitute a wider but equally mineral mastery of the laws of nature, compared to stone, and not necessarily more conscious. If so, I still don’t get in which sense you describe them as more spiritualized. I see them as equally spiritualized, because that is, and always has been, the nature of our activity, while the evolving element in evolution is the expansion of human thinking with respect to itself. Only thinking can manipulate itself and make or break human evolution. The feeling and willing spheres, as expressions of that activity, are more anecdotal. Or not anecdotal, but more free to happen or not happen in specific configurations, especially the sensory spectrum. So in which sense do you speak of such a linear spiritual crescendo, and growing of degrees of freedom linearly reflected in the sensory instruments?
I am realizing that, in order to adequately address some of these questions, I would need to delve even further into spiritual scientific details. I don't quite have the skills to express the principles involved with technical metaphors and such. I'm not sure how fruitful it would be to just list out the relevant details, since it requires a lot of background study. Right now I am interested in hammering down the core principles of spiritual evolution. Yes, the transforming mediums of expression reflect the thinking activity becoming more and more conscious and, therefore, more and more capable of harmonizing understanding between various families, tribes, clans, communities, etc. so that there exists the potential for a truly human family, where individuals understand and love one another on a purely soul-to-soul level, independent of blood ties, national ties, and so forth. As we know from the PoF reasoning, in so far as we merely perceive, desire, or feel, we are personal beings, but when those activities are permeated by thinking, we transcend the personal. All cultural developments can really be seen as the evolution from the sentient soul to the intellectual and spiritual soul, as thinking increasingly awakens to its own reality. While these developments are most noticeable at the cultural and individual soul levels, they also penetrate down into the natural level.
In connection with the elements, I will also share the following diagram. It will no doubt seem very complex at first, but we are only using it to highlight a few principles. We can associate the planes between the 'arupa mental' plane and the physical plane with the sevenfold configuration spaces in Cleric's post on Levin.
The basic principle is that everything we know as 'physical' now, i.e. the earth (solid), water (liquid), air (gas), was once more spiritual and has descended with our mode of consciousness into the physical as we know it. That was our spiritual involutionary phase at the scale of planetary incarnations, Earth rounds and globes. We have much more recently entered our evolutionary phase and, through human thinking renewed by the warmth-fire element of Cosmic Will, the physical elements can be again spiritualized. In that sense, everything we perceive physically is the outer manifestation of the spiritual. The physical, left to itself, is in process of decaying and dying. That is what made our self-consciousness possible - the destructive forces of our intellectual organism - and therefore we are also responsible for resurrecting the physical we have killed through our deeper spiritual activity. It is true that the current elements we experience with normal waking consciousness are all physical, yet they are also
analogs for the higher spiritual (etheric) conditions. Earlier in the thread I made the following metaphor:
As our consciousness delaminates and becomes mired in the convolutions, the 'bureaucracy' of intuitive ideal relations becomes more densified from Fire to Earth. We meet more resistance tunneling through the Earth, or swimming through the water, then we do soaring through the air or expanding into the fire-warmth like a phoenix. It takes more effort to create accurate mirror reflections of our intuitive intents within the more densified stratum. All of that inner resistance manifests as our normally sluggish experience of space-time flow, and fixed objects, which constrain the degrees of freedom through which our intuitive intents can manifest themselves as percepts, concepts, images, etc. which accurately reflect those intents back to our "I"-center of consciousness. We should understand all these nested layers of convolution as overlapping and interpenetrating, just as there is always Fire-warmth interpentrating the elements of Earth, Water, Air.
At each stage of delamination, intuitive intents (archetypal moral Ideas) create spheres of ideal space in which their fulfillment must unfold. We could say the Idea is arrested, so to speak, until its original intent can be redeemed, i.e. it can be made fit for integration into our pure intuitive becoming, through the expanding of degrees of freedom within a lower convolution, allowing for continuity of consciousness. Until then, a portion of our conscious experience is devoted to a more indirect transformation of the space-like mirrored images of our intuitive intents, until they once again resonate with the latter (like the circle smoothed out to resonate with the triangle). That creates a discontinuity of consciousness, demarcated by periods of 'darkness' without accessible memory (integrated intuition). Those ideas/intents which set their ideal aim towards personal desires, passions, preferences, interests, etc. naturally create 'larger' spheres of ideal space, more complex bureaucracies, due to the intended atomization of ideal relations. Instead of creating a circle around the triangle, we create squares, pentagons, hexagons, etc. The very process of working through this indirect transformation with our actively willed thinking, which develops various virtues, also purifies and prepares the arrested Idea for its reintegration at higher (more conscious) stages of completion.
Within the fourth Earth convolution, we perceive-conceive fragmented stones, rocks, etc. and mineral bodies of plants, animals, and humans. As we move back with our consciousness into water (imagination) and air (inspiration) and warmth (intuition), in contrast, the ideal relations are more fluid, interconnected, formless.
So these are analogies but, just like all analogies, they also point to real conditions which existed before in the manifest world and will exist again in the future. Humanity is now tasked with raising the physical condition of the Earth into a more etheric condition through higher consciousness, and we can see the very dim firstfruits of in recent technological developments, such as those mentioned before. Eventually it will return to a more astral condition, etc.
Federica wrote:The CEO doesn’t depend on the middle management to be the CEO, but has to take into account the constraints coming from the management’s activity. The transformation of imagery does not depend less on legs in VR, or more on them in the natural world, it happens as fully spiritualized activity regardless, although when we make it express through legs, yes - it will make do with leg constraints.
Luckily (again!) I expressed the idea that our activity is equally spiritualized all the time, in 3 or 4 more alternative phrasings, the incriminated one being only one of them, so I still have hope that you will change your mind on this point, and grant me that basic level of living understanding.
I can't grant you that. This expression alone in bold gives us a clear signal that we have veered into a 3rd person perspective.
How can this be so? When the average person is in deep dreamless sleep, is his thinking activity equally spiritualized with when he is in full waking consciousness? What is the meaning of "spiritual evolution" if our activity is always equally spiritualized? Perhaps you mean something entirely different by "fully spiritualized" and "equally spiritualized" than what the words suggest, but I can't currently guess what that meaning might be. And the CEO does depend on the middle management, if we are using that as an analogy for the configuration space of human-scale thinking in relation to the soul, life, and physical spaces.
Cleric wrote:Imagine this as clearly as possible. As a thinking being we’re steering in thinking intuitive space. When we think about matter and biology we project our thinking in that direction. Please note – in our intellectual life we don’t experience the full nature of the lower and higher spaces. They only act as constraints to our human-scale flow. Our consciousness spans through all spaces but we are clearly self-conscious only in the steering of thinking space. Other spaces mysteriously impress into our thinking space as various conscious phenomena.
Even though for clarity the spaces are depicted as something separate, we should imagine that they are all one within the others – every space is being bent by all others and it bends all others. So when we say that we’re self-conscious in thinking space this doesn’t mean that other spaces are separated from our consciousness through some membranes. It’s only that our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics.
To be clear, lapsing into this abstracted or dualistic thinking perspective, whether that's what has happened or not, doesn't mean we will completely forget how to live and survive in the world. Our will and our feeling and our subconscious thinking still remain much wiser and more integrated than our surface-level intellect which floats around in abstracted concepts. It simply means that, when confronting certain thinking inquiries, we will forget the foundational principles rooted in the first-person relational perspective for purposes of making our preferred arguments and reaching our preferred conclusions.
As we can observe, the more we move on, the more technology is created to add constraints, rather than to remove them. The more we dwell in the current evolutionary loop, the more the technology birthed in this space is one that supplements, not our understanding, but our sensory spectrum. The energy that should go to improving thinking mastery, goes to improving mastery of senses, and technology is increasingly bent to serve this purpose. In the past, it was used to clear the constraints of the physical plane, so as to enhance the possibilities to deepen religious, mystical, philosophical, and artistic endeavors. But now we are witnessing a reversal, where new technology is less and less focused on eliminating sensory constraints, and more focused on creating new ones.
So it’s a gradient. I don't set VR apart from anything. I don’t have an extreme position just for VR. To get back to the initial question, I think the internet, and the interface constituted by this computer, both eliminate and add conspicuous (and probably comparable) amounts of constraints, so they definitely change the sensory landscape and the way it feeds back into our activity, but do they “supplement my understanding?” What does that even mean… Again, if all activity is equally spiritualized, as it is, holistic understanding increases in the form of expansion of Thinking, independent (and I don’t mean there are no constraints!) of the specific sensory landscape our will and circumstances put under our nose. Thinking has to expand its conscious grip on whatever sensory landscape is experienced, and beyond. It’s a self-generated impulse, not one ignited by the senses. When such impulse is nourished from within, we develop our knowledge/understanding, so that whatever space of constraints can be integrated. When we have that impulse, we also press on the space of constraints with causal agency, to make it as conducive as possible to that same thinking expansion. Does the change to my space of constraints, as produced by my computer, supplement this process? Who knows how alternative configurations would have interacted and integrated? I don’t think it’s an important question, or even an inquirable one.
The first paragraph sounds very much like you are forgetting that our thinking activity, with its increasing DoF, developed the technologies in question. You are treating the technology like something which came into existence entirely independent of that spiritual evolutionary process and then serves to dampen it for
everyone, regardless of whether or how they use it as an instrument of living thinking. Or, alternatively, you are suggesting that the materialist age made our thinking
lose DoF and we are now stuck in a descending loop. But this isn't accurate - the fact that most people are unaware of the increasing DoF when absorbed into sensory technology doesn't mean they aren't still amassing those DoF as a whole, and are not a few inner realizations away from releasing its potential energy. What we are able to do here on this forum, which would be unavailable without the computer technology, should be sufficient to put this issue to rest. But I will also quote a comment from Cleric as a reminder:
viewtopic.php?p=18034#p18034
Cleric wrote:Let's look at this in the context of the speech/writing split. Seen phenomenologically, in our stream of becoming we're continuously impressing our spiritual activity in the perceptual stream. With our spiritual activity we weave in intuitively grasped meaning. When we think, we express in perceptual verbal artforms the invisible meaning that we live in.
These two poles are not independent. Many times the metaphor of the riverbed has been given. Through our intuitively willed spiritual activity we impress the forms of the riverbed but at the same time this activity is being shaped by the riverbed. So we have a classical example of an unitary system which is only seen from two different angles. The best example is probably General Relativity where "Matter tells space how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move". In our case we can say something like "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve (how to fit the perceptions), and intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move." Of course this by no means should remain simply as an abstract conundrum for the intellect (basically perpetuating the bi-stable mode). Instead, it is perfectly possible for modern man to enter livingly into this flow of reality.
In ordinary consciousness we're tempted to anchor ourselves within something apparently stable. We can anchor ourselves either in the perceptual stream and see only the "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve" part (basically materialism or contemplative mysticism) or we anchor ourselves in the 'mind-stuff' and see only how the "intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move" (idealism which however fails to understand why this activity is constrained).
...
When we learn some form of art we develop our motor skills and make them fit to express artistic intuition. So it's the same basic principle at all levels. The perceptual world - the stone, clay, canvas, paints, keys, strings, our body and senses - curve and restrict our intuition. At the same time our intuition tells the art materials how to move and arrange. When we come to our soul life we have the same process. Through our activity we're shaping our character which in turns acts as the riverbed for future activity. So much like with Hegel, we have this dialectic evolution, through which the spirit impresses itself in the resisting perceptual spectrum and transforms it such that in turn it can express even greater degrees of freedom.
Your second paragraph, I will admit, sounds like it somewhat reintegrates the role of our thinking agency in the use of technology, in great tension with the first paragraph. How the phenomenal products of our thinking activity can work to supplement the perfection of that activity is certainly an important and inquirable question, if not THE most important question. What we are speaking of here is nothing other than the polar relationship of Idea to Perception, spiritual activity to riverbed forms. So your tendency to dismiss the critical role of the perception pole as unimportant again reminds me of the speech vs. writing discussion. You may say it is important, but the "equally spiritualized" comments, and all of your subsequent reasoning, practically dismisses it as irrelevant. I really hope you can see this occurring now.
Federica wrote:I like this question! First, why do you see a principal problem in there being nothing to descend into for people with living thinking? Could they not, in principle, put their whole energy into ascension, for example in the detailed ways illustrated earlier in this thread?
That is exactly the question - we can't understand spiritual evolution as a holistic process unless we discern the endless of string of sacrifices (descents) required at every stage, which make the ascents possible. It is again a polar relationship, perhaps we could say
the polar relationship of Cosmic evolution, since it reflects the moral dimension. I hope it is clear from the above why the lapsing, i.e. the severing of the polarity into duality, is the thread running throughout all of your reasoning
on this particular topic. Perhaps because you began with a great antipathy for materialistic thinking and technology. But it's critical to make every effort to keep the polar principle of descent-ascent incarnational rhythms in the background of our living thinking through all these topics.