AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 2:08 pmFederica wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 4:05 pm Ashvin,
I recognize that you are right in the main principle expressed here. I understand that one can only proceed case-by-case and rigid, in-bulk rejection of experiences should be avoided. But there’s one question I want to highlight. It has to do with “our” versus “my” in:
Ashvin wrote:every manifest phenomenon that has been imploded through our spiritual activity into the karmic organism will also be redeemed through that spiritual activity as it is continually being enlivened and ennobled. In that sense, I don't want my spiritual activity to miss the opportunities for those possibilities to manifest because I have shuffled some manifest phenomena off the redemptive gradient altogether.
Because the consequences of our activity in the world are always collective to some extent, how do you ponder the chasing of redemption opportunities for your spiritual activity with the effects on others who are less developed, when it comes to making decisions in the areas you have control over? In the example of this forum, my understanding is that for some, the chances they will start walking on a path leading to the truth of reality are very low anyway, but for others - I consider myself part of this second group - the possibility to use the remainder of this incarnation to bring about some improvements is at hand. Don’t you think there could be a risk of harsh divide, when certain challenges can lift the spiritual activity of a very small few and at the same time make the way ahead more impervious, or inaccessble, for those who are motivated, but not quite stabilized in their progression yet?
In other words, if we take your example of GPT test, it’s not that I fear that it would become sentient and take over the forum. It’s not that. Rather, I feel there is right now a small open window to allow for some level of ‘scale up’ in spiritual development, so that it can touch slightly more people. Progression has now become possible for a little larger group of motivated seekers, since Cosmic conditions on one side, and our increasing thirst for rediscovering the spiritual on the other side are operating positively, opening up some breaches into the thick veil of materialistic mindset. This is evident nowadays in science, in philosophy, and in society at large. Concomitantly, though, the adversarial forces are also scaling up their offensive, by deploying means such as generative AI, for instance, with the evident goal to close up that window by impairing thinking activity, the only ‘vehicle’ through which we have a chance to extend consciousness through the real fabric of our shared becoming. This push will rapidly increase in magnitude and extension, of course.
So the window is rapidly closing under the presure of those forces, because the general longing and opening towards the spiritual world is a much slower and more diffused process. It's a much bigger and slower gear. For these reasons, my feeling is that it’s crucial to do everything in our power right now to get as many of us through this small window now, when it’s still open, even if it means a temporary sacrifice, and some temporarily missed possibilities of redemption, for those very few who have enough sight to trust their redemptive abilities completely.
What you recently said regarding the general way Cleric’s posts are received, will only become worse under the ongoing attacks against free thinking. We can be sure it will. You said:
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2023 9:13 pm This is practically how everyone feels when encountering the posts here, especially Cleric's. They know there is something of immense value embedded within the posts, that the metaphors and so forth speak to something essential to our living experience, and do so in surprisingly imaginative ways, but we also sense the effort to progressively uncover that value will stretch our familiar and comfortable beliefs and habits too far from 'neutral' position.
In comparison, generative AI will look even more appealing than it already does. In this exact moment, there's still hope since we can still benefit from the impulse towards freedom developed through the scientific era, whilst we are also moved by a longing for the rediscovery of our true self, our full fledged, spiritual self. So we are living through a lucky moment, in which some of us are able to pursue the latter impulse by redirecting with some focus the forces of the former, that still have some strength to them. But our freedom is being jeopardized by adversarial forces from multiple directions. As Cleric wrote today, spiritual freedom is being dangerously understood as ‘easy freedom’ as “license to pursue and experience anything that passes like a storm of desires through the soul”:
Cleric wrote:The human “I” wants to be free. It wants to undress all taboos, all norms, and experience unrestrained freedom. What philosophy could be better suited for this, than the idea that at its core, our self is something completely undetermined, we’re an absolutely free spirit, who can live its fantasies in the senso-spiritual matrix?
This attack against our freedom that leverages our soul nature, adds up to the direct attack against free thinking. Thinking should be easy and seamless, with the help of AI, and that's how the open passage towards higher development with be soon closed. In this sense, I understand and agree when you say that “we need more trust in our living and creative spiritual activity to deal with things on a case-by-case basis”, but I also think that too many of us have not yet reached the sort of break-even point where enough visibility has been gained to generate and support that trust. So maybe the urgent priority is to try and keep that passage towards higher development open a little longer, by sacrificing part of the gradient, so that a few more can make it to the beginning of the right path before the window is shut on humanity, to cut off an immeasurable majority of it. What do you think?
Federica,
Right, these are good questions to contemplate. We should be clear that we are wading into the mysterious depths of karmic flows and there is no rational calculation we can do to figure out the best course of action. That is more true of spiritual experience more broadly, but especially when we speak of the divergent streams of ascending and descending spiritual evolution.
Through the mysterious workings of destiny, it is safe to say that the descending stream will be lifted back up precisely through the future spiritual activity of the 'select few' who manage to continue raising their heads above the flows. These things are hard to comprehend from our myopic perspective, which is why we need the humility to know what we don't know and a certain amount of faith in the wise workings of the Cosmos. We can only control what is within the proximate sphere of our own spiritual activity, including how that activity relates to and influences our fellow beings. We surely can and should inform that activity with a more general picture of World evolution and the forces at play. But I would again caution against making this the exclusive factor by which we evaluate our case-by-case decisions toward the high ideals.
The broader karmic flows are simply beyond our control and purview. Unfortunately, it is safe to say significant portions of the population will succumb to the forces that seek to externalize spiritual activity. These are ticking time bombs whose fuses were lit long ago and cannot be easily snuffed out, if at all. That doesn't mean we should give up trying to help people, but we probably need to approach it in more subtle ways than we are normally used to. We simply can't wage a war against the adversarial forces on all fronts, neither in our personal life nor our collective life. Yet, at the same time, we can have trust that, when we focus on our inner work, the opportunities for broader redemptive transformation will become ripe. I saw a movie some time ago with a great imaginative rendering of the Christ impulse.
The plot is basically that some people go searching for the 'fountain of youth' in a cave, yet when they descend into the cave something interesting happens. They look back through the opening at the surface and see the sky is alternating very rapidly between light and dark. Not only that, but they see the Sun appears to be moving in one direction, from east to west let's say, and then back in the same direction from west to east. So they eventually conclude that every second they spend down there, entire days, months, seasons, years, and decades are going by at the surface. As they make their way further into the cave, the Time-decoherence becomes even greater, more frictious and sluggish. They encounter various historical segments of humanity along the way, eventually encountering the most primitive men. All of that is of course an image for the spiritual involution into the Time-decohered sensory spectrum. It is also interesting how, in this way, all the historical segments of humanity can be imaged 'side by side' in space, which also reflects the reality of our situation - many streams of evolution exist side by side within us and across the World as a whole.
Then something very mysterious happens:
There are many interesting spiritual ideas presented here. Most clearly, the Time-ladder is the Christ impulse that bridged the higher and lower worlds and continues to progressively unfold from various perspectives. Because of the differentiated Time-flow, the surface progressed so far that humanity (perhaps in connection with alien intelligences) developed new technology that could serve the purpose of the ultimate rescue mission for those still stuck in the decohered temporal depths of the cave. We could say Cosmic Ideas and Earthly perceptions were brought completely in-phase, which then instantiates the Time-ladder of cognition through which humanity climbs up and Cosmic intelligence reaches down to meet us. I would remind here of Cleric's post on the 'stroboscopic' flashes of intuition that we experience in our ideas. As we climb the ladder, these flashes become more lively, more consistent, and more encompassing. This also reminds me of the saying, "the night is darkest before the dawn", which points to a real intuition of how the lowest is bridged with the highest.
Everyone is going through this evolutionary process, yet how conscious we are of the true nature of the higher world and our connection with it determines how we experience it unfolding. At first, the woman experiences it as a very frightening experience, with alien hands grabbing at her. Eventually, those hands put the oxygen mask on her and she realizes they were only interested in her well-being the whole time. The adversarial forces can't stop the Time-ladder that has already been won through the Christ impulse, so they try to obscure our consciousness of what's actually happening. There are also people climbing up and through the portal one at a time, so each person who ascends then continues to work in the higher world to support the rescue mission of their friends who remained below. This is an image of the great rescue mission we are all involved in, and I would say this is the superordinate principle of World evolution that should be kept as the foundation stone of our intuitive context when evaluating decisions to be made on the physical plane.
It is a rhythmic process by which we continually bring the light of these overarching principles to bear on particular circumstances - neither pole of the Time-ladder should take undue priority in our stream of experience. We can't presume to know how exactly the Time-ladder is manifesting in future circumstances or what role we will play. For me, the GPT question we are discussing here simply stands in for the whole inner landscape we need to cultivate in order to work more harmoniously with the mysterious higher worlds, both during life (waking life and perhaps sleeping life too) and after death. We don't need to make any broad rational calculations about how to rescue the most people in the shortest amount of time, because those things are already being worked out through higher-order logic by departed souls and angelic intelligences. As we do the inner work and resonate more and more with these intelligences, our flashes of intuition will convey their messages to us, but for that we need to remain completely and humbly open to the fact we don't already know what the messages are.
The other thing to briefly mention and contemplate - what does it mean to "sacrifice part of the gradient"? If we are naturally inclined to delve into mechanical technologies and use them to relieve our thinking effort, i.e. most people prior to entering the initiatory path, then yes it could be called a sacrifice to take a hard line and avoid that tendency. Yet once we are on the intuitive thinking path, and we have committed to developing our thinking forces in freedom, I think we should reflect on whether it is more of a sacrifice to take the hard line or to remain fluid and open to the redemptive possibilities inherent in all new circumstances? The former gives us a ready-at-hand rule to impose on such circumstances, relieving us of any further thinking effort, while the latter requires us to be continuously attentive and creative in our thinking. It is no easy or convenient thing to work out redemptive uses for rapidly developing mechanical technologies.
Ashvin,
Thank you for providing this large intuitive overview. I see it would help to consider future concrete situations, though there's not much I can probe at the moment. Regarding your last paragraph, what I mean by “sacrificing part of the gradient” is on a case by case basis. It's not an a priori decision, but the recognition that there could be situations where the free, conscious decision is to wait, rather than go all into the 'object of redemption'. Then, the possibility to "miss" something is not given, as long as the decision is free, even if "we can't presume to know how exactly the Time-ladder is manifesting in future circumstances or what role we will play", because action (activity) is to be engaged anyway.
Maybe another take on this same question would be to look at the balance between case-by-case approach and principles. You are for a case-by-case approach here, and I agree, to avoid "ready-at-hand rule to impose on such circumstances, relieving us of any further thinking effort". But one could ask, what other than that does a principle - the principles we search for and extract from the indistinct conglomerate of reality, like gold nuggets that we then elevate above time and space, by seeing in them morphological paradigms, structures? As soon as we extend, or reuse a principle (which is just about the only thing one can do with a principle) we are also relieving us from any further thinking effort in a sense?