Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 4:37 pm Ash, I think you do BK a disservice by saying he hasn't oriented towards a phenomenological approach. He said in the discussion that he shared many of Rupert's intuitions but that he deliberately takes an analytic approach to reach an audience with a literalist materialist mindset (the rational mind is the bouncer of the heart etc). That's his whole purpose, and it's an important one because the dominant materialism and consumerism are leading us into a hopeless quagmire.
If the spiritual agencies you refer to are in charge of our cultural direction, then they're really not doing a very good job! Your diagram looks to me like a hypothesis, not evidence. I would expect to see evidence of a backlash against consumerism and materialism. But if it exists, it's miniscule. However, if physicists and neuroscientists start coming on board (they are our culture's priests), things could start to change. Change won't come by consulting angels!
Ben,
The duality is staring us right in the face. BK shares the intuitions but, unlike Sheldrake and other similar thinkers (probably starting with Goethe in the 18th century), doesn't think they can be embodied in practical scientific research. Why is that? Metaphysicians have been trying to 'reach the materialist audience' for more than a few centuries, but now BK reformulating Schopenhauer in modern terms is suddenly going to shift the tide? No, the reason is because BK feels supersensible intuition and empirical science are entirely different domains of study. He can't perceive the concrete connections between them, so he assumes they don't exist.
It is that abstract thinking which leads us into the hopeless quagmire, whether engaged by the materialist, mysticist, idealist, panpsychist, or any other-ist. These things are so obvious to anyone who takes the first steps in the direction of more enlivened thinking. Sheldrake himself pointed it out in the discussion - abstract philosophers have been debating the same issues for centuries and nothing moves forward. Isn't one definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Materialism lives in the heart not only in the head, and only concrete and intuitive spirituality can reach the former.
On the other hand, we have not yet in the whole of human history had a situation where significant portions of the thinking human population consciously communes with the Angels and higher intelligences structuring the curvatures of destiny. So we can't blame the Angels for our lack of participation. In our enlivened thinking, we are already in such communion. As long as we keep thinking in completely mineralized, spatialized, noun-like, and generally selfish concepts related to personal happiness, pleasure, intellectual curiosity, and so forth, we have no basis for an open dialogue with the higher worlds. We will keep confusing the latter for ancient races of physical beings hiding within the Earth and it will be no wonder that things aren't changing.
The higher intelligences aren't there to serve us life on a silver platter, so we can remain consumptive and helpless children forever, but to provide deeper imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions to those who freely seek them so we can grow our collective consciousness and take hold of our own Earthly destiny.