Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Feb 19, 2023 1:42 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2023 9:49 pm
So this is all still the very bubbling surface of consciousness. The depth layers of these final products, in which I include our intuitive sense of "me", i.e. the nested imaginative, inspired, intuitive activities of higher beings, are quite unimaginable for ordinary sense-based cognition, except by way of analogies and illustrations such as Cleric and Steiner have provided. Those forces reside in the genuine supra-conscious and structure the substances-processes of the subconscious, i.e. the physical, life, and soul processes, at individual and collective scales. Our given conscious aperture is always mediating between these two spheres of ideal forces and perceptual outer-inner phenomena, sort of like a porous membrane through which they flow and swirl into a vortex we experience as 'present I-state of being'.
This is exactly right, the intuitive sense of "me" is indeed buried in the depths of the lawful structures of the human organism nested in the activities of dualistic higher beings. This is all a dualistic hierarchical structure of the dualistic domain. Don't get me wrong, I'm not demonizing the dualistic realm, it has its own evolutionary path, and human organism is designed by the dualistic higher order beings exactly for this dualistic evolutionary path. But this is why for any soul who chooses the nondual path, being in the human form and embedded in the hierarchy of the dualistic realm is not suitable, it would be living in a continuous dissonance with the lawful structures of the human composition and higher-order structures in which it is nested.
It's a rough analogy, but it's like if you worked in the structure of the Democratic party and then converted to being a Republican, you just cannot work for the Democrats anymore without being in a continuous cognitive dissonance, the Dems party structure becomes a wrong place for you to remain in. Just like in US politics ("as above so below"), in the Cosmic organism there are two parties: "duals" and "nonduals", and they have their own structures and realms extending to higher-order levels. Each party has its own evolutionary path and program, its own arguments why their program/path is better, and so on. And, just like in human politics,
each soul decide for themselves which evolutionary path and program they subscribe to.
The dualism living in the thinking-perspective which wrote the above post is staring us in the face, Eugene. It's interesting because, if we look at modern conservatism and liberalism as polar opposites rooted in temperamental tendencies (indeed, as there is polar rhythmic structure above, there is polar rhythmic structure below), then you have created a dualism from the unified polarity in the political domain and then projected that duality right into the spiritual domain with the analogy.
"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." When I point this out to you, the response will be, 'no these are unified domains, all part of the Divine Self, but they have their own evolutionary paths, etc. etc.'. In other words, you will paper over the dualism living in the depths your
current thinking with intellectual abstractions. That is what the intellect does to insulate itself from confronting the inner contradiction which is otherwise obvious to any unprejudiced reader.
As I mentioned to Federica, the circle of concrete knowledge and spiritual evolution is drawn around your current thinking perspective, bounded towards the subconscious below and the supra-conscious above. Everything outside this circle, you claim can only be inferred by our best intellectual guesses based on fragmented data points and instinctive feelings/preferences. The veil will only be lifted from this circle of our current aperture after death, you say. But that is Maya - the threshold of death is a porous membrane, continuous with and permeating the domain of incarnational life, so the veil has already been lifted for anyone who takes responsibility for developing their living thinking which traverses the entire spectrum. We already know there is no "dualistic hierarchical structure of the dualistic domain", as you are intending it. Moreover, we know
why this hard limit speculation is dogmatically held. Because you view the highest wisdom as that in which Earthly human souls in their atomistic state can do whatever their heart desires, but this is foolishness in the eyes of the higher Self across the threshold, the Divine "I", who doesn't only live for or by itself, but the Cosmos as a whole.
The more we spiral the living knowledge of our higher Self into our Earthly state, the more our current heart's desires can be transmuted into those of the Cosmic Heart. Then we begin to realize how it is exactly our 'designed human organism' which reflects the loftiest forces of the Cosmic symphony, and is gifted to us as support for our creative evolution into the Cosmos. The 'nondual mystic' is similar to the materialist transhumanist, in that he views his lower organism as something belonging to his personal nature which needs to be discarded for good, done away with. He looks upon it with disdain, instead of the reverence and sense of immense responsibility it deserves.
Steiner wrote:Something of outstanding significance and importance follows from this. While a man is going about on Earth, he regards his physical body and his etheric body — of which he knows little, but at least he feels it in his powers of growth, and so on — as his own body, but he has no right to do so. Only his Ego and his astral body are his. Everything present in his physical body and etheric body — even while he is on Earth — is the property of the divine-spiritual Beings who live and weave within them, and continue their work while the man is absent in sleep. It would go badly with anyone if he had to care for his own etheric and physical bodies in continual wakefulness between birth and death. Time and time again he is obliged to hand over his physical and etheric bodies to the Gods — especially during childhood, for then sleep is the most important thing of all. Later in life sleep works only as a corrective; the really fructifying sleep is the sleep that comes to a child in the first years of its life. Thus the human being has continually to be yielding up both physical and etheric bodies to the care of the Gods.
In past ages of human evolution this was so clearly perceived that the body was called the temple of the Gods, for so was its wonderful structure experienced. And in all architectural work — this can best be seen in oriental buildings, but also in those of Egypt and of Greece — the laws of the physical body and the etheric body were followed. In the very way the Cherubim are set on the temples of the East, in the attitude of a sphinx, or in the placing of pillars — in all this the work of divine-spiritual Beings in the human physical and etheric bodies has been made to live again. In the course of evolution, consciousness of this has been lost; and to-day we refer to the physical body as our own — with no notion of how unjustified this is — whereas as an earthly creation it belongs in reality to the Gods. Hence, when anyone to-day talks of “my body”, when he speaks of the healthy functioning of his body as due to himself, it is just an instance of the prodigious arrogance of modern man — a subconscious pride, certainly, expressed with no awareness of it, but none the less deplorable. It shows how in speaking of their bodies as their own, people are really laying claim to the property of the Gods, and this pride is embodied in their very speech.
Stranger wrote:Regarding the penetration into those layers, as Ashvin himself admitted, we have no access to them in human form and should not expect to penetrate there.
Not only was this not admitted, but the exact opposite was being suggested if you continued reading the post. "
Nevertheless, that bubbling surface will lead us into the depths if we don't arbitrarily abstract it, chop it up, or otherwise restrict it to what will support our desired conclusions about the depths."
I could have taken your 'this is exactly right' as a complement and remarked how we finally reached 'agreement', but this would be disingenuous. Because clearly you were only using my comment as a springboard to rehash your desired dualistic conclusions about the spiritual depths, while chopping up my post into the tiny bit which seemed to support that conclusion, exactly as I said we should avoid doing.