KASTRUP AND SHELDRAKE ON THE COSMIC MIND

[AshvinP]

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.

[lorenzop]

The really interesting thing to me is that, because Bernardo refuses to seriously understand the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies, he is forced to write articles with conclusions like this below, because he still maintains a duality between Earthly physical-biological life and Cosmic soul-spiritual being. He can't conceive that the living archetypes are also actively and intelligently shaping the flows of Earthly destiny. Also, because of that duality, he has nowhere left to go with analytical idealism, gets bored, and starts weighing in on international politics and UAPs

I would hope that BK doesn't move in the direction of suggesting "the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies" until some such evidence exists, or some reason exists to think so.
For example, if we found an 'improbable item', such as the planet Saturn had created a spoon . . . some item unexplainable by the laws of Physics and Chemistry - explainable only as Saturn has intentionality as does life.
Having said this - there was a link to a video posted recently (by Micheal Levin I think was his name), a biologist who has conducted experiments indicating that some biological processes where evolution appeared to be goal-driven. But these experiments are re 'life', living agents, not planets, stars, etc.

[Cleric K]

On the whole, though, the Sun's behaviour follows predictable laws (luckily for us - a lawless universe would be chaotic) and behaves more like a computer program than a Greek God.

To say that the archetypes are alive and have their own independent telos (rather than being the natural properties or resonant frequencies of the Universal Mind) is not, I think, something that can be demonstrated empirically. Can you share any evidence you have for this?

Ben, it's interesting to me that you see the two things above as mutually exclusive. Does this mean that when you speak of 'natural properties' you simply call physical nature 'mind' but without it having any mind-like qualities (in other words, you simply rename the physical world to 'universal mind', probably as a kind of panpsychism)?

As I read the above I remembered a random video from the yt feed that I watched recently:



As we know, there are still puzzles about the unexpected stability of the Solar System*. Things go even crazier if we consider biological life. Is this stability within chaos that you call natural properties and resonant frequencies? In other words, you recognize that there are higher order organizing principles but you see them as mechanical resonant phenomena?

[AshvinP]

The really interesting thing to me is that, because Bernardo refuses to seriously understand the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies, he is forced to write articles with conclusions like this below, because he still maintains a duality between Earthly physical-biological life and Cosmic soul-spiritual being. He can't conceive that the living archetypes are also actively and intelligently shaping the flows of Earthly destiny. Also, because of that duality, he has nowhere left to go with analytical idealism, gets bored, and starts weighing in on international politics and UAPs

I would hope that BK doesn't move in the direction of suggesting "the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies" until some such evidence exists, or some reason exists to think so.
For example, if we found an 'improbable item', such as the planet Saturn had created a spoon . . . some item unexplainable by the laws of Physics and Chemistry - explainable only as Saturn has intentionality as does life.
Having said this - there was a link to a video posted recently (by Micheal Levin I think was his name), a biologist who has conducted experiments indicating that some biological processes where evolution appeared to be goal-driven. But these experiments are re 'life', living agents, not planets, stars, etc.

This is like a person saying, 'please don't suggest the existence of Pythagorean theorems... I don't see evidence of that theorem anywhere in my consciousness." To discover the reality of the theorem, one must learn to think mathematically. We have been over this too many times, and every time the simple logic is ignored, so I won't elaborate beyond that.

The fact is, you don't know what maintains your physical body from decaying like a corpse. You don't know where your thoughts, feelings, or desires come from or why they flow in the patterns they do. You don't know how your intent to walk to the couch translates into the actual perception of your body moving. These trivial experiences of daily Earthly life are all complete mysteries for most people, let alone what's going on in the deepest reaches of the Solar system and Galaxy. None of those simple experiences can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Yes, Levin's research points to just how much standard science fails to grasp about the most basic functions of living and intelligent organisms. Until we recover a sense of humility and wonder about these daily experiences, we will always miss the evidence for the Cosmic archetypes even though it is directly under our noses. 'As above, so below'. It is up to us to freely enliven our thinking and discover just how practically real that saying is - no philosopher, scientist, alien race, or god is going to do it for us.

[Lou Gold]

The fact is, you don't know what maintains your physical body from decaying like a corpse. You don't know where your thoughts, feelings, or desires come from or why they flow in the patterns they do. You don't know how your intent to walk to the couch translates into the actual perception of your body moving. These trivial experiences of daily Earthly life are all complete mysteries for most people, let alone what's going on in the deepest reaches of the Solar system and Galaxy. None of those simple experiences can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.

YUP! And the wind-up paragraph of Adam Gopnik's recent timely tale on the story of the Magi seems quite fitting...

What all the mythology and history of the magi suggests is that no bright lines exist to separate fakery from faith, or cunning machinery from magical apparatus. There aren’t any sharp margins between the irrational and the rational, between what we guess at and what we are sure of, between the wisdom we revere and the fakery we mistrust. We never know exactly who is who, or which is which, just as we will never know exactly where we are. The ambiguities of the Magi’s apparition remain a lesson in whom to call wise, and why to call them so. All knowledge is labile, all identity liminal. Wide-eyed wonder becomes blind faith, just as sharp-eyed skepticism curdles into narrow-minded cynicism. How, then, are we to find our way home? It helps to imagine a star. ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultu ... f-the-magi

[lorenzop]

The really interesting thing to me is that, because Bernardo refuses to seriously understand the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies, he is forced to write articles with conclusions like this below, because he still maintains a duality between Earthly physical-biological life and Cosmic soul-spiritual being. He can't conceive that the living archetypes are also actively and intelligently shaping the flows of Earthly destiny. Also, because of that duality, he has nowhere left to go with analytical idealism, gets bored, and starts weighing in on international politics and UAPs

I would hope that BK doesn't move in the direction of suggesting "the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies" until some such evidence exists, or some reason exists to think so.
For example, if we found an 'improbable item', such as the planet Saturn had created a spoon . . . some item unexplainable by the laws of Physics and Chemistry - explainable only as Saturn has intentionality as does life.
Having said this - there was a link to a video posted recently (by Micheal Levin I think was his name), a biologist who has conducted experiments indicating that some biological processes where evolution appeared to be goal-driven. But these experiments are re 'life', living agents, not planets, stars, etc.

This is like a person saying, 'please don't suggest the existence of Pythagorean theorems... I don't see evidence of that theorem anywhere in my consciousness." To discover the reality of the theorem, one must learn to think mathematically. We have been over this too many times, and every time the simple logic is ignored, so I won't elaborate beyond that.

The fact is, you don't know what maintains your physical body from decaying like a corpse. You don't know where your thoughts, feelings, or desires come from or why they flow in the patterns they do. You don't know how your intent to walk to the couch translates into the actual perception of your body moving. These trivial experiences of daily Earthly life are all complete mysteries for most people, let alone what's going on in the deepest reaches of the Solar system and Galaxy. None of those simple experiences can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Yes, Levin's research points to just how much standard science fails to grasp about the most basic functions of living and intelligent organisms. Until we recover a sense of humility and wonder about these daily experiences, we will always miss the evidence for the Cosmic archetypes even though it is directly under our noses. 'As above, so below'. It is up to us to freely enliven our thinking and discover just how practically real that saying is - no philosopher, scientist, alien race, or god is going to do it for us.

"We don't know" is a perfectly acceptable and humble answer to questions we don't have an answer. Needless to say, "Living Cosmic Archetypes" is not really an answer.

[Ben Iscatus]

Cleric said: "Ben, it's interesting to me that you see the two things above as mutually exclusive. Does this mean that when you speak of 'natural properties' you simply call physical nature 'mind' but without it having any mind-like qualities (in other words, you simply rename the physical world to 'universal mind', probably as a kind of panpsychism)?"

Cleric,
I’m only extrapolating from the belief most people have, that we are each a single centre of experience. If emotions and thoughts are independently alive within us, then if we stop feeding them, do we starve them? If we stop having them, do we kill them, or do we place them in a dungeon whence they try to escape? Such notions are disquieting, I prefer put them to one side.

[AshvinP]

I would hope that BK doesn't move in the direction of suggesting "the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies" until some such evidence exists, or some reason exists to think so.
For example, if we found an 'improbable item', such as the planet Saturn had created a spoon . . . some item unexplainable by the laws of Physics and Chemistry - explainable only as Saturn has intentionality as does life.
Having said this - there was a link to a video posted recently (by Micheal Levin I think was his name), a biologist who has conducted experiments indicating that some biological processes where evolution appeared to be goal-driven. But these experiments are re 'life', living agents, not planets, stars, etc.

This is like a person saying, 'please don't suggest the existence of Pythagorean theorems... I don't see evidence of that theorem anywhere in my consciousness." To discover the reality of the theorem, one must learn to think mathematically. We have been over this too many times, and every time the simple logic is ignored, so I won't elaborate beyond that.

The fact is, you don't know what maintains your physical body from decaying like a corpse. You don't know where your thoughts, feelings, or desires come from or why they flow in the patterns they do. You don't know how your intent to walk to the couch translates into the actual perception of your body moving. These trivial experiences of daily Earthly life are all complete mysteries for most people, let alone what's going on in the deepest reaches of the Solar system and Galaxy. None of those simple experiences can be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Yes, Levin's research points to just how much standard science fails to grasp about the most basic functions of living and intelligent organisms. Until we recover a sense of humility and wonder about these daily experiences, we will always miss the evidence for the Cosmic archetypes even though it is directly under our noses. 'As above, so below'. It is up to us to freely enliven our thinking and discover just how practically real that saying is - no philosopher, scientist, alien race, or god is going to do it for us.

"We don't know" is a perfectly acceptable and humble answer to questions we don't have an answer. Needless to say, "Living Cosmic Archetypes" is not really an answer.

In this case, I used "you don't know" for a reason. Notice how often you use "we" for questions of 'not knowing'. I think this has been mentioned a few times in the last month alone.

If the planet Saturn were to suddenly spawn a spoon, plenty of people would be all too happy to say, "we don't know if spoon-making is a result of completely intent-less and mechanical processes, so let's just assume it is until more 'evidence' comes in." Indeed, this is how many people already conceive the intentional activity of human beings - it's just a reflection of mechanical processes that somehow became conscious of themselves and confused the processes for "intention". Of course we don't take such ideas too seriously yet, since we still get out of bed in the morning and act as if our intents make a difference in the world, but as the Buddha said, "what you think, you become."

It's true we don't need to know where our thoughts come from and how they are structured as some passive head-knowledge, some abstract metaphysical speculation, but if we want any creative participation in what we will become, we need to know ourselves inwardly in ever-more expansive ways. The realm of the living Cosmic archetypes - the Kingdom of God - is within us. These realities have been known for millennia. Now every thinking individual is in a position to restore that knowledge anew from within, in the sphere of individual freedom. The words we use, like "living Cosmic archetypes", are only symbolic pointers to inner avenues of continual investigation of the forces that structure our entire ideal, psychic, biological, and physical stream of metamorphosing experience.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,
I’m only extrapolating from the belief most people have, that we are each a single centre of experience. If emotions and thoughts are independently alive within us, then if we stop feeding them, do we starve them? If we stop having them, do we kill them, or do we place them in a dungeon whence they try to escape? Such notions are disquieting, I prefer put them to one side.

Such questions would be disquieting for me too. But luckily for us, they only arise because we approach the whole matter in the wrong way. For example, imagine that you perform a yogic asana. One can ask: “What happens with this asana when I’m not performing it?” Aside from this question not making much sense, it can only be asked from a standpoint clothed in layers and layers of preconceived ideas. We fantasize the asana as some creature and wonder what happens with it when we’re not petting it.

When we think, it’s like we assume asanas with our innermost being. Every thought-form is an asana that we put our intuitive will into. When we begin to imagine these asana thought-forms as creatures, we’re already going into fantasy. What’s important is to focus on the inner movements of our intuitive thinking-will, through which we assume the thought-form-asanas. Then the important questions become like: “What do these thinking movements tell me about the degrees of freedom of my inner being? In what other directions I can move my activity? How these movements cohere or decohere with this or that feeling?” As you can see, in all of this we’re grounded in pure phenomenology of our inner experience. There’s no need to fantasize anything, there’s no need to assume that the contents of our consciousness are like little creatures with paws and fluffy tails. What counts is to realize that our ordinary inner life consists in extremely templated activity of producing such thought forms. As soon as we try to meditate or even only hold our focus still for few seconds, we see how most of the time we’re completely dragged along by a stream of inner life of which we have almost no control. Yet with some persistence we quickly find out that such strength can be cultivated and then we discover new degrees of freedom of our inner being which so far have been completely suppressed. It is this new and expanding inner life that becomes the object of our scientific inquiry – its degrees of freedom, how it is resisted or assisted by various feelings, sympathies, antipathies and sensory phenomena. At no point we need to fantasize fluffy thought-critters. It is this completely phenomenological experience that we call spiritual and not that we postulate some subtler speculative realm in order to ‘explain’ the life of our fluffy thoughts.

[Ben Iscatus]

Cleric said: “It is this new and expanding inner life that becomes the object of our scientific inquiry – its degrees of freedom, how it is resisted or assisted by various feelings, sympathies, antipathies and sensory phenomena. At no point we need to fantasize fluffy thought-critters. It is this completely phenomenological experience that we call spiritual and not that we postulate some subtler speculative realm in order to ‘explain’ the life of our fluffy thoughts.”

Cleric,
It seems to me that you have retreated from the idea of thoughts actually being independently alive (or, alternatively, I completely misunderstood you before). Are you saying you don’t believe in elementals that are capable of manifesting as living forms, or in higher dimensional angels that can appear to the devout? Are you saying that elementals and angels are not beings independent of us? If not, then your use of the term “living” for thoughts and emotions is metaphorical; you seem to be implying something like “conscious properties and habits of mind which are not fixed; they're something we can change and build on”, in which case I completely agree with you.