KASTRUP AND SHELDRAKE ON THE COSMIC MIND

[Cleric K]

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.

My post above aimed to dismantle a very common misconception. It is something very simple. When a person grounded in the physicalist world view of today hears that in our inner life we’re dealing with living realities, things are pictured in a completely caricatured form. For example, one pictures a triangle and then thinks “So these dudes tell me that this triangle is a living being. This is laughable.” And indeed it is. This thought-perception is as alive as a bone or nail clippings. But what about our thinking activity which impresses the thought-perception? We surely feel alive when we think. Even if we don’t have philosophical definitions of what life is, there’s no need for someone to explain to us what it is to feel alive.

So if I show you some bones, rattle them with a stick, and say “Look, it’s alive”, you have all reasons to be suspicious. At the same time, if you observe your thoughts, for example you move an imaginary triangle, would it be correct to say “This triangle moves because I'm alive. The movement of the triangle is simply a testimony of my inner life.”?

So the goal is not to fantasize life where we don’t find it. It’s about being precise in our observations. And in this sense, the modern materialist who says that his sense of being alive is an illusion, is exactly as superstitious as the one who looks upon the triangle-perception and fantasizes it to be some creature.

The above is a very simple phenomenological statement and can really be used as a self-test to see to what extent we’ve been damaged by modern reductionism. If we try to feel our inner life and we can’t help but imagine some bone-thoughts (corresponding to matter, energy, information, ‘mind’ etc.), and picture how these bones rattle together and somehow miraculously our consciousness emerges from that, then we’re doing the exact same thing which we otherwise laugh at. It’s a very peculiar double standard. In one case we laugh and mock, in the other we summon all the powers of superstition and fantasize how from rattling bones, life and consciousness emerge.

These are very simple things. We’ve often mentioned something very basic about any unprejudiced approach to reality – do not discard from the given that which can’t be recovered in any other way. This is so obvious, yet somehow we do the exact opposite when it comes to life and consciousness – these must be reducible to something else!

I don’t know if I was able to make my point. In short, my previous post was about not looking for life where it is not to be found. When we’re observing our thought images and sensory perceptions we’re dealing with the bones of reality. When we’re looking at our loved one, we’re still seeing only the bones of reality. Not that the real person is the bones but our inner color perceptions. Their soul and spirit are not contained in the perceptions. We can only find them if we try to empathize with their feelings and think the ideas that they think.

Clearly, in the previous post I didn’t say anything about the living aspect of reality and that’s why it seemed that I have abandoned that idea. It was simply not in the focus of the post.

This was the simple message: don’t fantasize life where you see only its bones. Seek life where it is already a fact – in our own intuitive activity. Then the living aspect of the Cosmos will be found in the same living arena of our inner life and not in the boneyard. In other words, when we speak of living thoughts and beings it is not meant movements of inert perceptions that we arbitrarily decide to interpret as representing something alive, but coming to know more intimately the deeper arena of our soul and spiritual life. In this arena, inner life is a direct fact of experience, just like color is in sensory life.

[lorenzop]

This is not an issue of physicalism vs various flavors of idealism, nor does finding life require intuitive thinking, most human beings can walk through a landscape and easily find life.
If Saturn were a living being, or if there were a god of lightning, it shouldn’t require special abilities to spot these beings.

[Cleric K]

This is not an issue of physicalism vs various flavors of idealism, nor does finding life require intuitive thinking, most human beings can walk through a landscape and easily find life.
If Saturn were a living being, or if there were a god of lightning, it shouldn’t require special abilities to spot these beings.

It's not so straightforward, Lorenzo. Think of a dream. You see there landscapes, plants, animals, humans. Are they alive? What does it even mean 'alive' in this context? Biologically alive? Are we going to find blood and bones if we cut a dream rabbit in half? Even if we do, does this 'prove' that it is alive or simply dream imagery fills the opened fractal boundary?

This is the whole point. We don't know life and consciousness because we somehow find them as self-evident facts contained inside our perceptions of color, sound and so on. This is also how the seduction of solipsism comes about. It is when we take to the extreme the fact that perceptions in themselves don't give us any understanding of how they come about, whether they represent something with inner life or are only ethereal pixels in our own consciousness.

We know life only because we have an example of it within ourselves. We don't consider that we're alive because we see our human form in the mirror and philosophically conclude "I see that form wiggle so it should be alive". It goes the other way around. We know our inner life of thinking, feeling and willing as something given and the perceptions in the mirror only as a testimony of it. The most immediate testimony of this inner life is within thinking itself. Notice how if we intentionally imagine a rabbit, all those questions above become unnecessary. This is simply due to the fact that we already know the intuition that we try to express through the mental picture.

Unless we dismantle the illusion that we understand life and consciousness because we see it inside our perceptions, nothing of what we speak about will ever be clear. Then one will insist: "I stare and stare at Saturn through the telescope and see nothing remotely alive." But the thing is that even if we could see some life-like behavior of the planet, this still wouldn't give us certainty whether there's inner life. We'll be facing the same conundrum as now people face when thinking about AI. This attempt to judge about life and consciousness only based on sense perceptions, breeds the worst kinds of superstition today.

We can only understand inner life where we can find it. As a very simplified metaphor, consider that we are in a dark room and see neither ourselves nor another person standing next to us. In front of us there's an illuminated blackboard. We draw something with a chalk. Then we see other drawings appear - these come from our friend. If we draw a rabbit, is it alive? What about if our friend draws the rabbit? What if he even draws so quickly that it appears as animation? It is clear that the images are only secondary. We only understand their meaning if we understand the inner life of our friend.

Such a metaphor gives us some hint about the Imaginative state (we shouldn't imagine that the physical world and its life forms is 'drawn' like this). We can only understand that state if we conceive that our soul space is not exclusively our own real estate. And if we understand the blackboard metaphor it will also be clear that we can't expect to see the reality of spiritual beings in the chalk figures in the same way we see neither our true being, nor that of our friend in the chalk shapes. They are only invitations to know their inner life, which alone is the explanation for why the images appear and what is intended through them. And to know this inner life it is pointless to dissect and analyze the chalk particles.

And what was thus described through the metaphor applies only to the Imaginative stage of consciousness. To approach the ideal perspective of a spiritual being we have to go further than the chalk figures (imaginations). We need to put the sensory and imaginative shapes aside and set our intuitive being in motion. Only by making our ideal being self-similar to that of other beings we can understand their inner life.

These things are not so difficult to understand. In fact, they are even germinally contained in Bernardo's philosophy. The problem is that one has fallen in love with the dissociated state. Even though logically our inner space is a shared medium, we simply prefer to conveniently ignore this fact and assume that dissociated bubbles can only communicate through exchange of mental photons across bubbles. It's rejected that there could be kinds of spiritual life that can look through our bubble and even impress something in it. In this way, such a philosophy becomes nothing but rephrased materialism.

From such a standpoint it's natural to say "I'll believe that there's such a thing as Saturn being only when I see that ringy gas ball speak to me and cook me a dinner." We need to push the boundaries of our imagination. Even Einstein said it: “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” This is not to say that in the picture we find the full reality. These pictures are still chalk figures, but they are nevertheless the transitionary phase where before we can live in pure understanding, we have to anchor intuition in some way (metaphorical and artistic expressions). If we push beyond our default zone of comfort, we'll see that that there are plenty of ways to approach that intuition. For example, we can conceive that we might be within that being, that it might be the Cosmic 'carrier wave' on top of which our own inner life is modulated. If we follow this line even for a while, it will be immediately clear why all demands to see the higher beings as sensory creatures, make no sense. We need quite other ways to approach the ideal perspective from which this Cosmic carrier wave makes sense. Then we also understand our own life better, because it is embedded in that wave.

[Ben Iscatus]

Cleric, the whole point of science is that speculations such as "there may be life on Saturn but we can't see it" are rendered irrelevant, like Bernardo's "there may be a teapot orbiting Saturn, but it is not a useful subject of enquiry". Lorenzop is implying that if life does not betray its presence, then it is effectively dead to us. We need spend no more time on considering it, because spending time on it can never produce a definitive answer which we could communicate to others and which would enrich our lives. Communication is necessary between lifeforms for a meaningful relationship. But aside from all this speculation, if you yourself do in fact have a meaningful relationship with an independent being that is incorporeal, please tell me what it says about itself or humans, what it does and how it lives. I'd be interested!

To say that we are "in love with dissociation" suggests
(a) that we as individuals chose it. How can you know this?
(b) that the superior lifeforms we cannot detect (like the supposed denizens of Saturn) are in some manner not dissociated - this means they are not independent agents or beings. This could easily take us back to "semi-autonomous complexes in the Universal Mind".

[Cleric K]

Cleric, the whole point of science is that speculations such as "there may be life on Saturn but we can't see it" are rendered irrelevant, like Bernardo's "there may be a teapot orbiting Saturn, but it is not a useful subject of enquiry". Lorenzop is implying that if life does not betray its presence, then it is effectively dead to us. We need spend no more time on considering it, because spending time on it can never produce a definitive answer which we could communicate to others and which would enrich our lives. Communication is necessary between lifeforms for a meaningful relationship. But aside from all this speculation, if you yourself do in fact have a meaningful relationship with an independent being that is incorporeal, please tell me what it says about itself or humans, what it does and how it lives. I'd be interested!

To say that we are "in love with dissociation" suggests
(a) that we as individuals chose it. How can you know this?
(b) that the superior lifeforms we cannot detect (like the supposed denizens of Saturn) are in some manner not dissociated - this means they are not independent agents or beings. This could easily take us back to "semi-autonomous complexes in the Universal Mind".

Ben, before answering - did you understand the blackboard metaphor? I'm not asking if you find it plausible but whether you comprehend what could it mean if your inner soul space is not entirely shaped by your own ego?

For example, in the other thread Guney posted a video about active imagination. I don't endorse this approach but this kind of experiences are certainly possible. In your view, what is the explanation? Are these additional dissociated entities entirely within our own human complex (that is, we play hide and seek with ourselves)? Or you conceive as a possibility that maybe also other entities beyond our own bubble can impress their activity within our perspective of inner space? Not 'horizontally' through the mediation of the sensory interface but 'vertically' in the way our own spiritual activity 'vertically' impresses in our imaginative space?

[Güney27]

Cleric, the whole point of science is that speculations such as "there may be life on Saturn but we can't see it" are rendered irrelevant, like Bernardo's "there may be a teapot orbiting Saturn, but it is not a useful subject of enquiry". Lorenzop is implying that if life does not betray its presence, then it is effectively dead to us. We need spend no more time on considering it, because spending time on it can never produce a definitive answer which we could communicate to others and which would enrich our lives. Communication is necessary between lifeforms for a meaningful relationship. But aside from all this speculation, if you yourself do in fact have a meaningful relationship with an independent being that is incorporeal, please tell me what it says about itself or humans, what it does and how it lives. I'd be interested!

To say that we are "in love with dissociation" suggests
(a) that we as individuals chose it. How can you know this?
(b) that the superior lifeforms we cannot detect (like the supposed denizens of Saturn) are in some manner not dissociated - this means they are not independent agents or beings. This could easily take us back to "semi-autonomous complexes in the Universal Mind".

Ben, before answering - did you understand the blackboard metaphor? I'm not asking if you find it plausible but whether you comprehend what could it mean if your inner soul space is not entirely shaped by your own ego?

For example, in the other thread Guney posted a video about active imagination. I don't endorse this approach but this kind of experiences are certainly possible. In your view, what is the explanation? Are these additional dissociated entities entirely within our own human complex (that is, we play hide and seek with ourselves)? Or you conceive as a possibility that maybe also other entities beyond our own bubble can impress their activity within our perspective of inner space? Not 'horizontally' through the mediation of the sensory interface but 'vertically' in the way our own spiritual activity 'vertically' impresses in our imaginative space?

Cleric,

I think everyone can relate to the fact that there are processes ( thoughts, images.....) in one's Consciousness (maybe the term psyche would fit better ), for which one doesn't feel responsible.

I realize it more intensively the more I try to concentrate on my prayer (Jesus prayer ).
I try to say the prayer as often as I can with full concentration, and I can see more clearly, how thoughts appear, for which i can not say that I intended them.
I now have the prayer which I say in full concentration, and other thoughts, and there is a difference.

Did you have experiences with active imagination?
I didn't really try it out, but as far as I know the theoretical aspect of it, it doesn't imply that the images that appear ( the beings one interact with) are autonomous beings.
Maybe they are personal embodiments of subconscious and repressed problems.

The images in them self doesn't answer the question.

When there is only one Soul space, does that imply that there is only one soul?

[ScottRoberts]

Cleric, the whole point of science is that speculations such as "there may be life on Saturn but we can't see it" are rendered irrelevant, like Bernardo's "there may be a teapot orbiting Saturn, but it is not a useful subject of enquiry". Lorenzop is implying that if life does not betray its presence, then it is effectively dead to us. We need spend no more time on considering it, because spending time on it can never produce a definitive answer which we could communicate to others and which would enrich our lives.

Apparently you did not follow up on my recommendation in the Channeling thread to read my Idealism vs. Common Sense essay. In it, I point to evidence that, though in our current stage of evolving consciousness, it is the case that "life does not betray its presence, [and so] is effectively dead to us", but a couple of millennia ago, this was not the case. The ancients were naive idealists. We are naive dualists. Philosophically we can convince ourselves that idealism is true. And so, we can appreciate that our current (dualist) consciousness is fundamentally "wrong", and so we should be "spending time" on "considering it", which is to say, making the effort to move on to the next stage of consciousness -- where we find the life behind what is now dead to us.

[Ben Iscatus]

Scott,
If you look at the comments below your essay, you will see that I read it and enjoyed it at the time. But I now think that “final participation” is a promissory dream. Even if it’s not, I choose what I perceive or currently experience over what I’m sometimes asked to believe. For instance, I perceive that Mars is a dead world, so if I’m asked to believe that it’s the Buddha’s new home, I am sceptical, even if Mars has incorporeal planes of existence (which I cannot perceive). But if you can perceive them, or believe in them with the promise of one day perceiving them, then OK: perhaps that means you’re more evolved than me. Still, in my defence, I do reject the label of "naive dualist".

[Cleric K]

I realize it more intensively the more I try to concentrate on my prayer (Jesus prayer ).
I try to say the prayer as often as I can with full concentration, and I can see more clearly, how thoughts appear, for which i can not say that I intended them.
I now have the prayer which I say in full concentration, and other thoughts, and there is a difference.

Did you have experiences with active imagination?
I didn't really try it out, but as far as I know the theoretical aspect of it, it doesn't imply that the images that appear ( the beings one interact with) are autonomous beings.
Maybe they are personal embodiments of subconscious and repressed problems.

Yes, there’s difference. You have heard the term ‘splitting a hair’. This is something that we do in concentration in relation to the ‘now’ moment. Initially our concentration feels as a blurry sphere of inner activity but with time our focus becomes sharper and sharper. And as implied, this doesn’t involve simply spatial focus but temporal. This may sound contradictory because we often mention the Time-Consciousness spectrum and how higher cognition leads us towards these curvatures that give us intuition of the World flow spanning greater periods of time. And this is true. However we don’t reach this intuition by simply inflating our ego over the mental image of time. For example, everyone can think of the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe as two poles, but even if we try to imagine them very vividly, they are still experienced only as two mental images side by side in our present.

One way we can gain some intuition of this apparent contradiction is by picturing that the more we split the now moment towards its center, the more we find self-similarity on all scales. So even though we seem to be narrowing down towards the now, at the same time the intuition that connects with this state concerns also self-similar but much greater timespans. It's like the intuition of the tone in the center is self-similar to the intuition of the whole song.

Why am I telling all this? Because in this way we can understand how to relate to these bubbling thought-images. We can of course begin examining them, it’s even possible to get in some kind of dialog with them but this can’t lead us very far. Ashvin did a great job to point out how in this kind of active imaginations we remain enmeshed in our personality. If these experiences are all that we know, we can only remain under the impression that the soul world is something inherently chaotic, structureless. There are entities that come and go, everything is morphing, and as seen in the video, some regions even feel to be completely amoral. Such is the nature of the lower astral world. It’s like a psychic jungle. Imagine walking in a dark dungeon, you sense movements but can’t see them, things whisper in your ear and then disappear, something slimy touches and you shudder. Even if we develop the inner strength to move without fear in these regions, we won’t learn too much. Even if we manage to resolve some of our blockages, traumas and so on, in the end we still remain a psychic self within these sticky regions. The voices there will even try to convince us that this is simply the nature of the spiritual world – inherently structureless ebb and flow of soul beings, each following their self-interests.

When we concentrate and split the moment, it feels as if the split peels are fragments of our personality – of both bodily and psychic phenomena. They feel like tectonic plates from which our inner spiritual being differentiates. They feel like they move around us, while we become more and more centered. These tectonic plates can be very richly textured. Thought-images like those that spontaneously appear in your prayer, feel like abundant vegetation that sprouts from these plates. If we try to grasp all of them we’ll be overwhelmed. It is precisely in these moments that we should continue to split the moment with even greater precision. The voice that we care about goes through our own clear cognition. The facts of the higher worlds are spoken through our own inner voice as we are Inspired by deeper intuition. A very interesting fact is that even though we split the moment towards an ever crisper, infinitesimal thin core, if you pray with the depth of your spiritual being (even if nonverbally), you’ll find out that this doesn’t in the least take you out of this focused state. It’s even quite the opposite – this allows you center better and more easily relax the tectonic plates of your lower being.

I say all this in order to point out that we make greater progress if we resist focusing on these spontaneous thought-images that pop up and instead continue splitting the moment. Now, we shouldn’t be fanatical about it. We can, of course, contemplate also the spontaneous images. Often we won’t be able to help ourselves anyway, they’ll suck our attention, but we should always remember that there’s a deeper intuitive being that can Inspire our inner voice.

In the beginning there’s no need to stress about the nature of the spiritual beings. It's better not to expect that we’ll hear voices that will give us some knowledge. Steiner has been very clear that hearing voices is actually one of the lowest kinds of psychic experiences, bordering on the pathological. For the luminous beings freedom is something sacred. They gently help us reach the intuition but we explicate it our voice. It is as if we have some intuitive insight and simply explain things to ourselves. This is actually the fruitful mood in our meditation – we feel as if we’re solving a problem. We’re brooding over it and the solution comes as insight, something in our intuitive context snaps into place and we explicate the insight through our voice. Our understanding of the nature of spiritual beings will come completely naturally as we begin to explicate deeper and deeper intuition. When we begin to reach the intuition about what reality feels like for, say, an Angelic being, and we begin to explain this intuition to ourselves, we’ll also understand the true way in which we are related to that being.

When there is only one Soul space, does that imply that there is only one soul?

In archetypal sense, yes. Yet the Universal Soul is experienced from many different perspectives, each unfolding through specific constellations of planetary forces.

"What we call spirit and soul are two inner realities
corresponding to the two great creative principles – masculine
and feminine – known as cosmic Spirit and universal Soul. So,
like them, we too are creators. Yes, we too have the power to
create, but on one condition: that we provide our spirit and soul
(the masculine and feminine principles in us) with all the
conditions necessary for their expression.
The activities that make us true creators are prayer, meditation,
contemplation and identification. In our desire to elevate
ourselves and enter into the universal Soul, we fertilize the
light, the very matter of creation, with our spirit. Thus, our
soul receives seeds from the cosmic Spirit and gives birth to
divine children – to inspiration, joy and actions that are
just, kind and noble."

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

[Lou Gold]

WORDS
Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always--
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.