The bold text is really the subtle troublemaker. From our phenomenological perspective we pass judgement about the ultimate nature of reality. But what gives us the right to do that? What justifies us to say that "the Divine exercise intuitive and imaginative Willing and Thinking the same way we do?" You answer with "because it is the same Willing-Thinking acting everywhere in the whole Cosmos". But this is circular reasoning. We support our point by simply postulating it to be so (here we're questioning not that ultimately all spiritual experience is part of a unity but whether the way/form we experience our consciousness and spiritual activity - even in the enlightened state - is the same as the way it is experienced by a higher Divine being).Stranger wrote: ↑Tue Feb 28, 2023 9:21 pm Of course, I agree with such distinction between the image of imagination and a memory of some percept happened in the past. or a percept happening now. Similarly, I can have an imagination of a picture, draw it and show it to you, and for you it becomes a lawful visual percept and will be recorded in your memory. Or, I can communicate it to you telepathically with a similar result. Likewise, the images or ideas in the Divine or higher-order beings precipitate into our precepts, but I agree that it may involve some communication mechanisms unknown to us in our human form, so you are right, we cannot extrapolate our human cognition mechanisms to the Divine on the Cosmic scale.
But what we can extrapolate is the common "ground" of the reality that we all share: the Divine exists in the same way we exists (so there is only one Existence in the whole Cosmos), the Divine consciously experiences in the same way we consciously experience (so there is only one Awareness in the whole Cosmos), the Divine exercise intuitive and imaginative Willing and Thinking the same way we do, because it is the same Willing-Thinking acting everywhere in the whole Cosmos. And so, this same Existence-Awareness-Willing-Thinking produces ideations and imaginations in the same way everywhere in the whole Cosmos, and by communicating these ideations and imaginations across the Cosmos between its individuated spiritual activities the ideations/images on the "transmitting" side of communication precipitate as percepts on the "receiving" side. If we would not share the same common ground, if we would not be "made" of the reality of the same common nature, we would not be able to communicate. The very fact that we communicate means that we share the same common nature of reality "through" which we communicate that does not change in time or space or from one person to another. And because this nature is common, it is indivisible. This simple intuitive realization of the common ground is reflected in philosophical thinking as the idea of "ontological monism", but we do not need to refer to abstract philosophy to intuitively understand it. Anyway, sorry for "going nondual" again , but this is not to argue against what you said above. I'm listening to you and waiting for the next steps.
Now you'll of course object that this has nothing to do with logical reasoning but that it is direct intuition. Yet this is the point where we have to be maximally honest with ourselves. And we can do that only if we really observe as tightly as possible what we're really doing with our thinking spiritual activity when we pass such judgments.
There have been so many attempts to point this out to you by Federica, Ashvin and me. I tried even to illustrate it in many ways - the Cantor Dust fractal, the Moiré patterns, the nested eyes and the eye at the periphery and so on.
The whole point is as simple as it can be and it has been stated numerous times - we should not conflate our general intuition that reality is something Whole, with the idea that our present (enlightened) consciousness is already representative of what consciousness can be in the higher orders. There's simply a logical disconnect here. These are two completely independent things.
We can take the first one and set it to be our high ideal. Then every day we can make small steps and in the course of evolution we'll discover more and more of the reality of that ideal. But to say that it is the same Willing-Thinking acting everywhere in the whole Cosmos, is a completely ad-hoc statement. We are not in a position to claim that just because we have reached a state where we feel to be boundless consciousness. It is one thing to feel as boundless, it is completely different thing to claim that the way this boundlessness is experienced is fundamental for every spiritual being all the way to the Divine.
This is so simple. Consider the image that is used very often:
Yes, we can say that it is all the same convoluted consciousness but this is only a general statement. Let's say our Earthly state is at the center, where our conscious experience results from the many times folded Cosmic potential. When we dissolve the intellect we unfold only one of the convolutions. Yet the geometry of our consciousness is still several convolutions folded. We simply have no right to claim that this geometry (and thus the specific way we experience our consciousness and spiritual activity) is the same everywhere. We can do that only by assuming that we have completely deconvoluted the Cosmic structure and there's nowhere to deconvolute further. This however we simply can't know. It's like walking backwards (without seeing where we go), passing through few gates then stopping and saying "That's it, I went trough the final gate. There are no more gates behind me. There's even no need to turn around and verify if this is really the case. I'll just trust my intuition which tells me that I've reached the foundational level. At this level the spiritual activity of the Divine is practically of the same form as mine, only more free and powerful."
This is all so simple that trying to explicate it further only makes it look more complicated than it really is.
Until this point is cleared it won't be possible to continue further in our studies. It's because we assume an unnatural position, where we imagine that all reality consist of floating decals and worst of all, we imagine that this is how things look for the Divine too. We practically put the lid on our own progress by believing that we've already fully deconvoluted the Cosmic manifold.
It's been said many times. At every step our form of consciousness can be likened to a Moiré pattern, where we live in the interference pattern but don't yet know what interferes. At every deconvolutionary step our self-consciousness awakens at a deeper level. Only now we're in position to cognize something of what has been interfering. But this is still only one step. Even this higher state is still a folded one for which we don't cognize directly what interferes.
Here we should draw the distinction. We can even at this moment say with confidence that we're One with all that which interferes and is folded multiple times, and the Moiré patterns of whose interference is the geometry and phenomena of our present state. But this ultimate Oneness is an eternal ideal for us. With every deconvolution something of it is unfolded and unveiled. Thus only in retrospect we can see what we have been One with (and now there are still higher levels which are still folded and within whose interference patterns we exist).
I don't think we can make things any more clear than this. The rest is up to the individual. One simply has to investigate tightly the cognitive process and ask themselves "What gives me the certainty that I have already unfolded the whole Cosmic structure? If I place before myself the question 'what if there's more to be deconvoluted?' how do I react to that question? How do I excuse pushing it away?"