Anthroposophy as Fascio

[Anthony66]

Manyness is not fundamental. Oneness is not fundamental. The polarity of the Manyness and Oneness forces is fundamental (also known as "ideational activity"). Manyness and/or Oneness considered outside the polarity are abstractions.

Oh, got it! Unity in polarity. It makes sense, and that's what the Heart Sutra is saying too - Oneness is no other than Manyness, Manyness is no other than Oneness, and that is actually what we see in the direct experience, they are inseparable and undifferentiatable.
And you are right, no "hard problem". You convinced me

So, go to the extreme of the polarity of Manyness and ignore Oneness, and we are stuck in the dualistic mode of fighting egos.
Go to the extreme of Oneness and disregard Manyness, and we get stuck in the "mystical reductionism" and escapism from the world.
Restore the wholeness and the balance of both polarities, and we get to the next level of the spiritual evolution.

The Advaitists say "not one and not two". So, it's both One and Many together inseparably. In a way, can-be called "diversified Super-Unity", but the labels don't really matter.

It always warms my heart when a moment of convergence is attained. But I wonder how this polarity, or continuum of Manyness/Oneness really works in light of some aspects of experiential reality. From what you have written, you've tasted of the experience of Oneness and this no doubt motivates your argumentation over the past few months. For you, and from what has been reported from many others, the experience of Oneness has a binary aspect - you've either had it or you haven't. And from the vantage point of Oneness, the cosmos will never look the same again. For some, such a view can be unsettling or disorientating. For others, peace, insight, and clarity.

So what I'm grappling with is how this experiential quantum leap of Oneness squares with a polarity continuum. Perhaps the initial taste of Oneness, while being seismic in nature, is still lying in an experiential gradient from the pole of Manyness to the pole of Oneness where both extremes are asymptotically approachable. A state of pure Oneness is an unattainable abstraction.

[Federica]

Well I wasn't correcting any of your comments. But I think it makes a difference if people are interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves. These things need to be understood somewhat clearly if any inner contradictions are to be noticed. Otherwise it will just feel like semantic nitpicking.

Ashvin, I know, you were offering yet another concrete and well substantiated illustration to help. My point is that, at this stage, it's very likely to be useless. Let's even say, I am convinced it's useless, and maybe even counterproductive. You and Cleric have been offering countless posts, pages and pages and pages of insightful illustrations. Every post is like a pristine lake, in which reflection the intellectual arrangements jubilate and take delight in admiring themselves, without ever dipping not even the little finger, let alone letting the substance of the waters purify and inflow understanding.
I am still happy and thankful for all your attempts, insofar as they are precious for us who are interested in improving our understanding, but as far as Eugene's position goes, they defeat the purpose of helping him make any progress. As you recently noticed, he has not changed one iota in his beliefs since last year. So, unfortunately, people are not "interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves". The pattern of these exchanges has now continued for long, and it is repeating itself ad nauseam. Enough is enough. Evidently, it's not possible to build anything at all, before the old constructions are dismantled. So the only way is to bring to the surface and under the spotlight, the continuously overlooked contradictions. It has to be made incontrovertible how one is crushed by his own abstract concepts, as soon as they are made the foundation of beliefs of choice that remain in the blind spot, taken for higher revelations. Dismantling is gross and not fun, still it is necessary groundwork. I can do it, it's unskilled work, that doesn't require much competence or expertise.

[AshvinP]

Well I wasn't correcting any of your comments. But I think it makes a difference if people are interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves. These things need to be understood somewhat clearly if any inner contradictions are to be noticed. Otherwise it will just feel like semantic nitpicking.

Ashvin, I know, you were offering yet another concrete and well substantiated illustration to help. My point is that, at this stage, it's very likely to be useless. Let's even say, I am convinced it's useless, and maybe even counterproductive. You and Cleric have been offering countless posts, pages and pages and pages of insightful illustrations. Every post is like a pristine lake, in which reflection the intellectual arrangements jubilate and take delight in admiring themselves, without ever dipping not even the little finger, let alone letting the substance of the waters purify and inflow understanding.
I am still happy and thankful for all your attempts, insofar as they are precious for us who are interested in improving our understanding, but as far as Eugene's position goes, they defeat the purpose of helping him make any progress. As you recently noticed, he has not changed one iota in his beliefs since last year. So, unfortunately, people are not "interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves". The pattern of these exchanges has now continued for long, and it is repeating itself ad nauseam. Enough is enough. Evidently, it's not possible to build anything at all, before the old constructions are dismantled. So the only way is to bring to the surface and under the spotlight, the continuously overlooked contradictions. It has to be made incontrovertible how one is crushed by his own abstract concepts, as soon as they are made the foundation of beliefs of choice that remain in the blind spot, taken for higher revelations. Dismantling is gross and not fun, still it is necessary groundwork. I can do it, it's unskilled work, that doesn't require much competence or expertise.

Sure, you can try. I think I already tried quite a bit of that 'dismantling' over the last few weeks/months. Just two days ago I posted 3 fresh quotes on Manyness which contradicted the most recent agreement that the One-Many rhythmically influence one another, and these were completely ignored. He literally refused to see them and then demanded a quote. I suspect that's exactly what will happen with your attempts as well. I think the rest of us need to continue deepening and enlivening our own understanding of these ideas which are undoubtedly unfamiliar and hard to grasp for the intellect. There are probably still others who are reading and not commenting, who may be more interested in what 'nested hierarchy' actually means than whether Eugene will finally awaken to his inner contradictions. If Eugene chooses to learn something with the rest of us in the process, then that's all the better.

[Stranger]

It always warms my heart when a moment of convergence is attained. But I wonder how this polarity, or continuum of Manyness/Oneness really works in light of some aspects of experiential reality. From what you have written, you've tasted of the experience of Oneness and this no doubt motivates your argumentation over the past few months. For you, and from what has been reported from many others, the experience of Oneness has a binary aspect - you've either had it or you haven't. And from the vantage point of Oneness, the cosmos will never look the same again. For some, such a view can be unsettling or disorientating. For others, peace, insight, and clarity.

So what I'm grappling with is how this experiential quantum leap of Oneness squares with a polarity continuum. Perhaps the initial taste of Oneness, while being seismic in nature, is still lying in an experiential gradient from the pole of Manyness to the pole of Oneness where both extremes are asymptotically approachable. A state of pure Oneness is an unattainable abstraction.

Right, targeting Oneness only is unattainable and it does not need to be attained, it is a distorted unnatural state, as I said, "Go to the extreme of Oneness and disregard Manyness, and we get stuck in the "mystical reductionism" and escapism from the world." If we engage in practices of "reductionist mysticism", we can change our perception and beliefs into only focusing on Oneness and disregarding any validity and reality of Manyness, which would be just another distorted mode of consciousness. For many people the realization of Oneness often is a very seismic experience, what they call "sudden awakening", and in its shocking move it can pull people to a position of rushing into Oneness and dumping Manyness as "unreal", so it is understandable why it sometimes happens this way, especially if people experienced a lot of suffering in the world of Manyness while in the dualistic mode. But usually people after some time move along to embracing Manyness again but now in a different mode inseparable from Oneness. This happened to me also, but I recovered

The path of convergence, the experiential gradient, is leading to what we can call "Super-Unity", or, what Sctott calls it, "mumorphism", which is realization that in reality there is not only Oneness and not only Manyness, but inseparability and mumorphism of Oneness and Manyness. "Oneness is no other than Manyness, Manyness is no other than Oneness" (Heart Sutra). In our distorted perception and limited focus of attention in mundane human dualistic mode we disregard the experience of Oneness and only see Manyness. And even after initial realization of Oneness it usually happens that the habitual way of dualistic perception pulls us back from the experience of Oneness, so it usually takes a long time of a persistent practice to change the Karmic patterns and transmute the soul structures and its perception mode in order to change the perception of reality into more-or-less stable experience of Oneness-Manyness mumorphism. The point is, our state of consciousness and perception is malleable, even though very inert, it can be changed using appropriate spiritual practices, so the key is to align it with Reality as it actually is as much as we possibly can.

[Cleric]

When reading forum posts I am constantly distracted. Because of that, it takes me a long time and uses up lots of mental energy.

Here I may throw a practical hint. It's no secret that in the last decades humans have been forced to use their senses and cognition in ways which were nonexistent before. Today we browse with few open tabs, constantly switch between them, respond to emails, check messengers and so on. If we observe ourselves in these daily routines we can see how hectic and erratic our cognitive activity is. When this is combined with emotional stress, always in a hurry, chasing deadlines, we're like a person whose feet run faster than the torso can follow or vice versa.

There's a simple way to work on these tendencies: slow down! It is actually quite easy to convince ourselves on the purely logical level that the time we lose in constant jumping of attention, losing track, starting over, is more than the time it will take us if we simply slow down.

Of course, in our times where we're drowning in information it is indispensable that we can also filter. So it is useful to be able to 'diagonal read' an article or forum post just to catch if there's something of interest. Yet if we decide to read it from beginning to end and we find that we're jumping around a lot, it's worth the try to slow down.

This slowing down has to be accompanied with certain smoothness, fluidity. We can connect this directly with the two kinds of eye movements: Saccadic and Smooth Pursuit (check out the videos). When in the hurry of our daily rhythm, our eyes move primarily in saccades and we can sense this by the way our visual focus jumps around the text. This can be counterbalanced by slowing down our breathing or even holding it for a while. Then we can try to focus our gaze in the beginning of the sentence and then start reading smoothly, moving the gaze only in one direction and reading the words clearly. If we're still erratic - slow down even more. Our business mind will rebel that we're wasting time but we have to reach the point where we can move our reading gaze smoothly without interruption, as if we move a pencil and want to draw a nice continuous line. We may have to slow down so much that it is really impractical but even if we read in that way only one or two sentences we'll still benefit something for the transformation of our habits. The thing is that we can't learn to read smoothly and with concentration at normal speed if we can't do it at slow speed.

All of this is directly related to our cognitive life and these skills translate in a very interesting way also in our meditative time. The ordinary beta brainwave rhythm of modern man is tightly related with the saccadic movement of the eyes. When we have trouble to calm down and concentrate we'll almost surely find out that our eyes are constantly moving much like in the rapid eyes movement (REM) sleep state. Even though we may not be looking at anything outside, the eyes still follow our attention as it moves in saccadic patterns through our thoughts and imagination.

Considerations like these only remind us that we can't that easily separate our soul states from the bodily context. Otherwise we can very easily imagine that our inner state is highly spiritual while we're completely oblivious about the ways that state is shaped by the other layers (as it happens in psychedelic and superficial mystical states). It is true that our real focus in modern meditation has to be led in the point of spiritual activity but our bodily state is also important because it shapes our context. Otherwise we're like someone who can't meditate because of toothache but is so fixated on his effort that he doesn't recognize the source of the problem. In a similar sense, we can benefit if at the start of meditation we relax our physical eyes (and the rest of the body of course). Then we can slow down and work with our thought in such a way that all our inner movements are like 'smooth pursuit'.

[Anthony66]

Well I wasn't correcting any of your comments. But I think it makes a difference if people are interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves. These things need to be understood somewhat clearly if any inner contradictions are to be noticed. Otherwise it will just feel like semantic nitpicking.

Ashvin, I know, you were offering yet another concrete and well substantiated illustration to help. My point is that, at this stage, it's very likely to be useless. Let's even say, I am convinced it's useless, and maybe even counterproductive. You and Cleric have been offering countless posts, pages and pages and pages of insightful illustrations. Every post is like a pristine lake, in which reflection the intellectual arrangements jubilate and take delight in admiring themselves, without ever dipping not even the little finger, let alone letting the substance of the waters purify and inflow understanding.
I am still happy and thankful for all your attempts, insofar as they are precious for us who are interested in improving our understanding, but as far as Eugene's position goes, they defeat the purpose of helping him make any progress. As you recently noticed, he has not changed one iota in his beliefs since last year. So, unfortunately, people are not "interested in now understanding what it means more precisely, even if they didn't earlier or contradicted themselves". The pattern of these exchanges has now continued for long, and it is repeating itself ad nauseam. Enough is enough. Evidently, it's not possible to build anything at all, before the old constructions are dismantled. So the only way is to bring to the surface and under the spotlight, the continuously overlooked contradictions. It has to be made incontrovertible how one is crushed by his own abstract concepts, as soon as they are made the foundation of beliefs of choice that remain in the blind spot, taken for higher revelations. Dismantling is gross and not fun, still it is necessary groundwork. I can do it, it's unskilled work, that doesn't require much competence or expertise.

This counsel seems to assume that convincing another is achieved through "countless posts, pages and pages and pages of insightful illustrations". But in matters of which are discussed here, a new perspective can shine forth from a single phrase. I know that is true of myself - often a few words from a many thousand word post can have the greatest weight. And insights don't happen linearly or formulaically. I know of people who have been exposed to the Christian message for decades and then one day the lights came on and it finally makes sense to them.

And remember that there are the onlookers like me who have benefited greatly from these interactions. I haven't posted much lately due to the business of work but also because Eugene has done such a great job in stimulating the various responses and illustrations from you guys.

I'd also add that I don't think "side SS" has really displayed an understanding of non-dual experience. There have been the many illustrations of the Oneness/Manyness spectrum, but I've never got the sense that the seismic shift in perspective described by those who have a non-dual awakening is appreciated and explained.

[AshvinP]

So what I'm grappling with is how this experiential quantum leap of Oneness squares with a polarity continuum. Perhaps the initial taste of Oneness, while being seismic in nature, is still lying in an experiential gradient from the pole of Manyness to the pole of Oneness where both extremes are asymptotically approachable. A state of pure Oneness is an unattainable abstraction.

Anthony,

I think it has been discussed before, but it's worth remembering that the polar reality is like palindrome. It can be read forwards and backwards, so to speak. In this context, when we approach the pole of Manyness, we actually encounter the spiritual forces of Oneness. For ex., the mineral kingdom we perceive outwardly is the most fragmented in appearance, but the forces at work in the mineral kingdom are the most universal to the Cosmos, relative to those of life (plant-animal-human), soul (animal-human), and thinking (human). Or we could take spacetime - as we move from spatial phenomena to temporal phenomena, we go from more fragmented to more unified. Yet our spatial consciousness allows for simultaneous perception of all rhythms ascending the structured Time-potential. Right now we can simulatenously perceive the daily Good Friday rhythm with the Earth's Spring rhythm with the 2020s rhythm with the Sun entering the constellation of Aquarius rhythm. Of course the intellect is not accustomed to think of it this way, but that is in fact what we are perceiving as objects and processes in space - the superimposed rhythms and their mutual influences.

This aspect the polar relation is habitually ignored by the mystic reductionists, because the mode of cognition remains the same even if there is polarization of consciousness to one extreme. Through higher cognition, we can say what was once only perceived as One now becomes Many, differentiated in its living structure. For ex. the normal oneness of our inner soul life is differentiated into its TFW activity expressed through the subtle organic structure. What is still unknown remains as the Oneness potential above. That is the living polar gradient you mention which we are continuously ascending and descending, in rhtyhmic alternation. Time progressively becomes Space, but in an inward and participatory way rather than externalized way. What is ignored is not the abstract conceptual schema just mentioned, but the seeking of what it all means as inward experience of our transforming first-person states of being. Where can we precisely locate these dynamics in our Earthly experience? There is simply no motivation to put in that seeking effort when the living gradient is replaced by the comfort of the unattainable abstraction.

[Stranger]

To clarify, I always pointed to the Oneness-Manyness unifying experiential realization, here for example - see the quote below. I just did not have a proper ontological formulation of it. I was aware of Scott's mumorphism before but did not have a clear understanding of how it works out ontologically, but after Scott clarified it for me it just clicked to me that the ontology of mumorphism perfectly matches this direct experience of final integration.

The third stage is the final integration which happens with realization that the World is as real as the Self and not different from the Self (“I am everything”, “The World is Brahman”). In this state there is no longer a distinction or separation between permanent and impermanent, real and unreal, everything is simultaneously Oneness and multiplicity, permanent and impermanent, One and many, inseparable but diverse. Or more precisely, these old dualistic concepts simply no longer apply, they turn out to be abstractions no longer relevant to Reality. That does not mean that this state is non-explicable, it just means that it is directly and experientially known with new meanings. It is the same Thinking that knows Itself intimately and directly in all its forms beyond the outdated dualistic concepts.

[Federica]

Oh, thanks for counting me on the side of those who delve into actual spiritual science! The reality is, though, that I also don't have a great focus with exercises. But I know I can improve, and you probably mean something similar, and future-oriented, when you say " I seem unable".

Interesting. My initial response was to say that, while I know it is possible to improve, I had doubts that I will. But thinking about it, I realized that I will not "give up". Many a time I have thought about doing that, and hope for a stronger will in my next life, but that thought passes quickly.

May I ask (if you feel like sharing a few thoughts, and if not, sorry for the inappropriateness): from the standpoint of your accomplished and refined philosophical understanding, how do you see your philosophical-spiritual way forward?

I suspect my philosophical understanding might have reached its end, barring some new "Aha!" moment. Which is how it started, with the realization that no strictly spatio-temporal entity, like a computer, could have a perception of something extended in space and/or time, since every micro-event in a computer is separated by space and/or time from all others. But we can have such perceptions, so we are not strictly spatio-temporal. To be sure, it took about 30 years, and lots of help from Coleridge (via Barfield's What Coleridge Thought) and others before I got it packaged into shape to use it effetively in forum debates, mostly with mystical reductionists. But now that it is packaged, I don't really know if there is a further direction to take. In a way, what it shows is a limit to intellect, since tetralemmic polarity is not understandable in the way normal intellect understands concepts. And since it is an intellectual product, who knows what higher cognition would make of it, if anything.

As for spiritual way forward, I think it is just keeping working on gaining more control over my thinking. When reading forum posts I am constantly distracted. Because of that, it takes me a long time and uses up lots of mental energy. One might say that this from Steiner has been inspirational (from Occult Science):

All civilized life and all spiritual effort really consists in the one work, which has for its object to make the ego the master. Everyone now living is engaged in this work whether he wishes it or not, and whether or not he is conscious of the fact.

So I would say that my current work is trying to do this work more consciously.

What keeps you interested in following SS discussions, is it a kind of preparation, an inexplicable appeal, something else?

I guess I find them inspirational, and that if I had more mental energy I would be able to get a lot more out of them.

Thank you for sharing these thoughts!
Yes, to me "I seem unable" means there's an appearance, and there's an underlying reality. And the reason for highlighting the appearance, must be that it's not fully coincident with its reality.

What higher cognition would make of the "packaged" philosophical understanding... there is only one way to tell
What this accomplished philosophical product can deliver (delivers) right now, I would guess, is a comfortable pedestal to approach SS with a rare level of trust, confidence, and ability to attune oneself to the course change SS facilitates, benefitting from the sound reasoning and the grounded common sense Steiner often speaks of.

Regarding the struggles with mental energy and distractions, and the reason for not "giving up" - I have just read what Ashvin has quoted from Cleric, about the spaceless nested quality of reality and our being nested within higher intelligences through the activity of our higher selves. The reading made me think, in connection with this exchange, that, when we see ourselves in dynamic terms, not as bodies accessorized with a mind, but as trajectories of becoming who continuously operate a willed narrowing down of a certain potential becoming that's structured and shaped from above - and who get the result of this navigation through the sea of becoming in form of continuous print-out on the screen of perception - what we do with our mental energy - i.e. how we stir our becoming along the shape of the constraints - is just as important as what we don't do with it. Not doing, or resisting, certain actions, is just as important as doing. Both equally exist before us as undifferentiated potential, until we decide to extend our grasp to encompass and realize a certain step and leave behind other ones. And so an alternative (and possibly more accessible?) way to willfully determine our becoming is to resist certain actions, or distractions.
A simple method (nothing to do with Steiner, I just find it helpful) to train our mental energy in this direction, and gain control over distractions is the five minute rule. When a distraction impels us to consider it, we can tell ourselves that we will give in, but not now, only in five minutes. I think that even one minute postponement is useful!

[Güney27]

When reading forum posts I am constantly distracted. Because of that, it takes me a long time and uses up lots of mental energy.

Here I may throw a practical hint. It's no secret that in the last decades humans have been forced to use their senses and cognition in ways which were nonexistent before. Today we browse with few open tabs, constantly switch between them, respond to emails, check messengers and so on. If we observe ourselves in these daily routines we can see how hectic and erratic our cognitive activity is. When this is combined with emotional stress, always in a hurry, chasing deadlines, we're like a person whose feet run faster than the torso can follow or vice versa.

There's a simple way to work on these tendencies: slow down! It is actually quite easy to convince ourselves on the purely logical level that the time we lose in constant jumping of attention, losing track, starting over, is more than the time it will take us if we simply slow down.

Of course, in our times where we're drowning in information it is indispensable that we can also filter. So it is useful to be able to 'diagonal read' an article or forum post just to catch if there's something of interest. Yet if we decide to read it from beginning to end and we find that we're jumping around a lot, it's worth the try to slow down.

This slowing down has to be accompanied with certain smoothness, fluidity. We can connect this directly with the two kinds of eye movements: Saccadic and Smooth Pursuit (check out the videos). When in the hurry of our daily rhythm, our eyes move primarily in saccades and we can sense this by the way our visual focus jumps around the text. This can be counterbalanced by slowing down our breathing or even holding it for a while. Then we can try to focus our gaze in the beginning of the sentence and then start reading smoothly, moving the gaze only in one direction and reading the words clearly. If we're still erratic - slow down even more. Our business mind will rebel that we're wasting time but we have to reach the point where we can move our reading gaze smoothly without interruption, as if we move a pencil and want to draw a nice continuous line. We may have to slow down so much that it is really impractical but even if we read in that way only one or two sentences we'll still benefit something for the transformation of our habits. The thing is that we can't learn to read smoothly and with concentration at normal speed if we can't do it at slow speed.

All of this is directly related to our cognitive life and these skills translate in a very interesting way also in our meditative time. The ordinary beta brainwave rhythm of modern man is tightly related with the saccadic movement of the eyes. When we have trouble to calm down and concentrate we'll almost surely find out that our eyes are constantly moving much like in the rapid eyes movement (REM) sleep state. Even though we may not be looking at anything outside, the eyes still follow our attention as it moves in saccadic patterns through our thoughts and imagination.

Considerations like these only remind us that we can't that easily separate our soul states from the bodily context. Otherwise we can very easily imagine that our inner state is highly spiritual while we're completely oblivious about the ways that state is shaped by the other layers (as it happens in psychedelic and superficial mystical states). It is true that our real focus in modern meditation has to be led in the point of spiritual activity but our bodily state is also important because it shapes our context. Otherwise we're like someone who can't meditate because of toothache but is so fixated on his effort that he doesn't recognize the source of the problem. In a similar sense, we can benefit if at the start of meditation we relax our physical eyes (and the rest of the body of course). Then we can slow down and work with our thought in such a way that all our inner movements are like 'smooth pursuit'.

Hi Cleric,
When I let my thoughts slow down, I don't have the feeling that something is slowing down, I just draw the thought longer. However, after 2-3 minutes of pulling the thought for so long, my thinking clashes with my breathing.
And then I lose my mind. The word disappears, only the letters that are extremely long remain.
Also, after a certain point, it's hard to draw the thought out any longer and my focus dwindles.
It was easier for me than I thought only vowels, in a rhythmic tempo.
I can't say exactly what the difference is, it makes it harder to keep focus, but there is a noticeable difference.
Does it make a difference in the effect if we think at a steady pace instead of dragging our thoughts longer, or is it just the important point to lose the thought?