KASTRUP AND SHELDRAKE ON THE COSMIC MIND

[Lou Gold]

(Lou, you may also appreciate this if you don't get too caught up on the term "primitive man" ):

Primitive Man is unpsychological. Psychic happenings take place outside him in an objective way. Even the things he dreams about seem to him real; that is his only reason for paying attention to dreams... God now speaks in dreams to the British, and not to the medicine-man of the Elgonyi, he told me, because it is the British who have the power. Dream activity had emigrated. Occasionally the souls of the natives emigrate, and the medicine-man catches them in cages as if they were birds; or strange souls immigrate and cause diseases.

This projection of psychic happenings naturally gives rise to relations between men and men, or between men and animals or things, that to us are inconceivable. A white man shoots a crocodile. At once a crowd of people come running from the nearest village and excitedly demand compensation. They explain that the crocodile was a certain old woman in their village who had died at the moment when the shot was fired. The crocodile was obviously her bush-soul. Another man shot a leopard that was lying in wait for his cattle. Just then a woman died in a neighboring village. She and the leopard were one and the same.

Levy-Bruhl has coined the expression participation mystique for these curious relationships. It seems to me that the word "mystical" is not well chosen. Primitive man does not see anything mystical in these matters, but considers them perfectly natural. It is only we who find anything strange about them, and the reason is that we seem to know nothing about such psychic phenomenon. In reality, however, they occur to us too, but we give them more civilized forms of expression. In daily life it happens all the time that we presume that the psychic processes of other people are the same as ours. We suppose that what is pleasing or desirable to us is the same to others, and that what seems bad to us must also seem bad to them.
...
Equality before the law still represents a great human achievement; it has not yet been superseded. And we still attribute to "the other fellow" all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves. That is why we have to criticize and attack him. What happens in such a case, however, is that an inferior "soul" emigrates from one person to another. The world is still full of bêtes noirés and of scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.
...
The simple truth is that primitive man is somewhat more given to projection than we because of the undifferentiated state of his mind and his consequent inability to criticize himself. Everything to him is perfectly objective, and his language reflects this in a radical way... we often represent a person as a goose, a cow, a hen, a snake, an ox, or an ass. As uncomplimentary epithets these images are familiar to us all. But when primitive man attributes a bush-soul to a person, the poison of the moral verdict is absent. Archaic man is too naturalistic for that; he is too much impressed by things as they are to pass judgment readily...

The theme of bush-soul, which seems so strange when we meet with it in primitive societies, has become with us, like so much else, a mere figure of speech. If we take our metaphors in a concrete way we return to a primitive point of view... since all unconscious psychic life is concrete and objective for archaic man, he supposed that a person describable as a leopard has the soul of a leopard. If the concretizing goes further, he assumes that such a soul lives in the bush in the form of a real leopard.

These identifications, brought about by the projection of psychic happenings, create a world in which man is contained not only physically, but psychically as well. To a certain extent he coalesces with it...

In the primitive world everything has psychic qualities. Everything is endowed with the elements of man's psyche - or let us say, of the human psyche, of the collective unconscious, for there is as yet no individual psychic life.

- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

Ashvin,

Thank you. This is quite wonderful. It seems dazzlingly true. (No problem with the word 'primitive'.)

[Lou Gold]

(Lou, you may also appreciate this if you don't get too caught up on the term "primitive man" ):

Ashvin,

Thank you. This is quite wonderful. It seems dazzlingly true. (No problem with the word 'primitive'.)

I should add that the point I was hoping to make (too awkwardly) is that the modern indigenous shamans participating in a therapeutic encounter do not fit the label 'primitive man'. They also have evolved but in ways different than the psychological therapist. Now, in process, they learn with each other.

[Lou Gold]

And here's another way of viewing the terrible treasure trove:

The Two Souls Within: Hermann Hesse on the Dual Life of the Creative Spirit

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) considered the inner life of the creative spirit in a poignant passage from his 1927 novel Steppenwolf (public library), painting the artist as a divided creature that yearns for wholeness and turns that yearning into the creative act:

"Many artists… have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man."

For Hesse’s artist, riven by these inner tensions, “life has no repose.” And yet out of that restlessness comes the artist’s gift to the world:

"[Artists] live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happiness of their own."

[Ben Iscatus]

Ashvin said: "But no one is asking for your belief or wants to prove these ideas to you, even if we could, because that would rob you of spiritual life and freedom. We are simply giving you hints in which direction to look so you can freely experience the ever-deepening layers of meaning in the perceptual flow for yourself, to which no other experience in life can compare. It would be an unspeakable travesty for either the Gods or us 'mere mortals' to rob you or anyone else of that experience."

This conversation has proved useful to me. I realise that you very much talk in terms of an individual's development. What Scott is talking about (from Barfield) is a paradigm shift, which is a cultural rather than an individual phenomenon.. It occurs to me that gullibility can actually be useful in cultural evolution. So if, as I would hope, a paradigm shift in our current materialist/consumerist culture to an idealist culture is ever to happen, I must believe (have faith) that it has happened before. So I’ll change my tune and say that in spite of my sluggish rationality, such a shift is possible. So how would it work? Well, this time, it must come from the top. The current priests (physicists and neuroscientists) must understand that materialism doesn’t work and tread new ground. BK says this is happening (privately, his work at Essentia has given him insights into the minds of these, our priests). Once some of them come out of the closet, then others will follow, and then the rest of us can jump on the new bandwagon (yes, mimicry and gullibility, idolisation of the priesthood, will play a big role). It could happen (not saying it will – but it could).

Your own gradualist approach is focused on individual changes rather than our culture as a whole. I suggest that it cannot have a broad cultural effect or provoke a paradigm shift unless it influences and captures the imagination of our cultural priests.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin said: "But no one is asking for your belief or wants to prove these ideas to you, even if we could, because that would rob you of spiritual life and freedom. We are simply giving you hints in which direction to look so you can freely experience the ever-deepening layers of meaning in the perceptual flow for yourself, to which no other experience in life can compare. It would be an unspeakable travesty for either the Gods or us 'mere mortals' to rob you or anyone else of that experience."

This conversation has proved useful to me. I realise that you very much talk in terms of an individual's development. What Scott is talking about (from Barfield) is a paradigm shift, which is a cultural rather than an individual phenomenon.. It occurs to me that gullibility can actually be useful in cultural evolution. So if, as I would hope, a paradigm shift in our current materialist/consumerist culture to an idealist culture is ever to happen, I must believe (have faith) that it has happened before. So I’ll change my tune and say that in spite of my sluggish rationality, such a shift is possible. So how would it work? Well, this time, it must come from the top. The current priests (physicists and neuroscientists) must understand that materialism doesn’t work and tread new ground. BK says this is happening (privately, his work at Essentia has given him insights into the minds of these, our priests). Once some of them come out of the closet, then others will follow, and then the rest of us can jump on the new bandwagon (yes, mimicry and gullibility, idolisation of the priesthood, will play a big role). It could happen (not saying it will – but it could).

Your own gradualist approach is focused on individual changes rather than our culture as a whole. I suggest that it cannot have a broad cultural effect or provoke a paradigm shift unless it influences and captures the imagination of our cultural priests.

Ben,

I am not only speaking of an individual's development. As we deepen our intuitive activity to resonate with higher-order perspectives that structure the perceptual flow, we discern that the Cosmos is weaved of self-similar rhythms of development at all scales. It is fundamentally the very same rhythm that we find in our experience of thinking-perception, where coherent ideas meet and organize the 'chaos' of perceptions.

We could think of it crudely as follows. Spirit contracts from the infinite, superimposed potential of states of being into relative perspectives that traverse this potential and go through rhythms of development. These rhythms can all be likened to that of the plant growing and differentiating from a seed state of potential (manvantara, incarnation, etc.), and then contracting its forces back into a seed state of potential (pralaya, disincarnation, death, etc.) from which new forms will grow (reincarnation, rebirth), so on and so forth. At the plant scale, this rhythm is still repetitive and circular, but at the human cognitive scale, this rhythm becomes creative and every new iteration builds on the previous - that is what we experience as 'learning' and 'evolution'. Yet, as the Spirit contracts from the infinite potential, not all relative perspectives are at the same scale - they are all nested at different scales. It is as if the Spirit stops contracting at a certain scale of coherence and begins undergoing rhythms of development, and these rhythms form the 'medium' in which other relative perspectives that continue to contract will experience their lower-order rhythms.

There is no need to imagine any of this as some metaphysical objects 'out there'. These terms are only symbols for the first-person experience of the inner temporal rhythms through which our lives unfold. It is only at our human scale that many encompassing rhythms are experienced as an outer spatial world. We are acquainted with the Cosmic scale rhythms (viewed from the 'outside') - that of day and night, the four seasons, the planets orbiting the Sun, the Sun traversing the Zodiac. But let's take an example closer to home - language. When we type posts here, we experience a certain local rhythm in which we experience meaningful ideas in our intuition and then condense that meaning into a relatively organized set of word-perceptions through our inner voice and our keyboard. We continually alternate between these poles of the rhythm - idea and perception - to construct a post. Yet we know this local rhythm is also unfolding within overarching linguistic constraints - we can say our local cognitive activity is flowing through the linguistic 'riverbed' which shapes the perception of our inner voice. It is well known that the language we think in greatly shapes the way we think and the sort of thoughts we generate. Of all the possible ideas we could have and ways we could be steering those ideas, our thinking language will filter out a subset of those.

At the same time, the flow of our local thinking is also working back on the riverbed, like in erosion, gradually reimagining its constraints to allow for greater degrees of cognitive freedom. This is fundamentally the principle of evolution - the rhythmic feedback between spiritual activity and the riverbeds through which it flows, which leads the former to ever-expansive degrees of freedom (of course language isn't the only one, there are also the riverbeds of our personal character and temperament, our sociocultural atmosphere, our physical inheritance, the sensory world, and so forth). This is how languages evolve over time. The greater degrees of freedom are experienced in the fact that the linguistic riverbed accommodates a greater palette of thinking-states which we can experience. So the linguistic riverbed is itself evolving through rhythms of development, which is conceptually explored through the study of philology. That is what Scott pointed to in his essay and one (of the many) transformations that Barfield, Gebser, and others used to discern the evolution of collective cognitive consciousness in clear contours.

As an aside, we can see how the above knowledge can also have quite practical relevance for our times - if someone comes along with an agenda to fix the language in stone, it's like they are crystallizing the riverbed so the flow of thinking is tied to the channels that have already been carved out and these channels lose their pliability. The thinking individuals can only know themselves in the reflection of these limited linguistic pathways which respond less and less to their creative feedback. This greatly caps their potential for further cognitive development. In that sense, many so-called attempts to 'protect' people through such political measures are hampering their inner development. The policies that strictly 'police language' only serve to rigidify the pathways of inner cognitive development. I only point this out as an example of why the above is not only abstract head-knowledge but can help us gain practical insight into what promotes and what hampers the evolution of greater degrees of individual and collective freedom.

All of this is pretty abstract and isn't intended as some overarching metaphysical explanation of reality or evolution - it is only pointing to the fact that there are no rigid boundaries between the evolutionary rhythms of the individual and the collectives. These are in dynamic relation with one another and, most importantly, are in the process of spiraling together through imaginative thinking. We have already arrived at the point where individuals can think somewhat independently of linguistic constraints, for ex. in mathematical thinking. Regardless of which linguistic riverbed our activity flows through, we can meet with others in shared understanding through mathematical thinking, where we ourselves participate in fashioning new riverbeds of 'mathematical languages' (which of course is the basis for most modern science). It is the same thing with many forms of philosophical, artistic, and religious thinking. Yet all of these efforts are capped in their potential until they are also turned toward the very spiritual activity that makes them possible.

Just think about all the thinking effort that is funneled into this or that science, art, religion, philosophical view, political system, economic system, marketing scheme, etc. Every field of inquiry and practice has many sub-fields and each one of these has been refined to the most detailed knowledge and expert strategies. If only a tiny fraction of that spiritual activity was redirected toward investigating the structure of the activity itself, i.e. phenomenology of spiritual activity, we would witness something like this:





Indeed, this is how it is experienced at the individual scale - we go from trudging along from perceptual fact to perceptual fact as passive observers, building ever-more complicated and confusing models of reality with diminishing returns, to an inversion point where every new insight into the perceptual flow feeds back exponentially into new insights that are, at the same time, active participation in reimagining the perceptual riverbed constraints, starting with the rigid dogmas, beliefs, assumptions, habits, etc. that we have adopted with and through the 'high priests'. The more the riverbeds are 'eroded', the more momentum our spiritual activity gains to accomplish further erosion more quickly and effectively. This is the very process by which the individual and the collective are reconciled in spiritual degrees of freedom, as the relative perspectives of the Spirit across all scales harmonize their self-similar rhythms of activity. The higher-order scales are already relatively harmonious - as we see in the symphonic functioning of the Cosmos and Nature - and are waiting for the human scale to freely attune its rhythms, instead of spreading its cacophony into the whole organic system.

[Lou Gold]

This is the very process by which the individual and the collective are reconciled in spiritual degrees of freedom, as the relative perspectives of the Spirit across all scales harmonize their self-similar rhythms of activity. The higher-order scales are already relatively harmonious - as we see in the symphonic functioning of the Cosmos and Nature - and are waiting for the human scale to freely attune its rhythms, instead of spreading its cacophony into the whole organic system.

Please consider this unrehearsed spontaneous improvisation, which may be an emergent creative alternative to the dismal cacophony:

[AshvinP]

This is the very process by which the individual and the collective are reconciled in spiritual degrees of freedom, as the relative perspectives of the Spirit across all scales harmonize their self-similar rhythms of activity. The higher-order scales are already relatively harmonious - as we see in the symphonic functioning of the Cosmos and Nature - and are waiting for the human scale to freely attune its rhythms, instead of spreading its cacophony into the whole organic system.

Please consider this unrehearsed spontaneous improvisation, which may be an emergent creative alternative to the dismal cacophony:

This is impressive, Lou, and a great example of the human spirit at work. Thanks for sharing. It shows what we are capable of when we direct our attention to a central inspirer of our spiritual activity (remember, singing is a form of imaginative thinking activity) and truly desire to resonate with others in harmony.

Yet we can also notice how these same people will leave the concert and go back to their relatively cacaphonic sensory existence. Their 'inspiration' for conducting their spiritual activity will be patched up from the most disjointed sources, from friends, teachers, movie stars, musicians, athletes, political leaders, advertisements, and plain old instinctive pleasure-seeking habits.

What I was speaking of above was Inspiration that goes deeper and is more lasting, where the Divine directly conducts our attuned spiritual activity, even during normal sensory existence. It is a gradual and subtle process of transformative attunement, of course. In a certain sense, it requires us to withhold the forces that come to expression in our outer singing and repurpose them toward singing inwardly. Then we come to know the essence of the forces that we are always relying on as the support and medium of our spiritual activity, which by acting as that support and medium, are merged into the background and therefore ignored.

[Lou Gold]

This is the very process by which the individual and the collective are reconciled in spiritual degrees of freedom, as the relative perspectives of the Spirit across all scales harmonize their self-similar rhythms of activity. The higher-order scales are already relatively harmonious - as we see in the symphonic functioning of the Cosmos and Nature - and are waiting for the human scale to freely attune its rhythms, instead of spreading its cacophony into the whole organic system.

Please consider this unrehearsed spontaneous improvisation, which may be an emergent creative alternative to the dismal cacophony:

This is impressive, Lou, and a great example of the human spirit at work. Thanks for sharing. It shows what we are capable of when we direct our attention to a central inspirer of our spiritual activity (remember, singing is a form of imaginative thinking activity) and truly desire to resonate with others in harmony.

Yet we can also notice how these same people will leave the concert and go back to their relatively cacaphonic sensory existence. Their 'inspiration' for conducting their spiritual activity will be patched up from the most disjointed sources, from friends, teachers, movie stars, musicians, athletes, political leaders, advertisements, and plain old instinctive pleasure-seeking habits.

What I was speaking of above was Inspiration that goes deeper and is more lasting, where the Divine directly conducts our attuned spiritual activity, even during normal sensory existence. It is a gradual and subtle process of transformative attunement, of course. In a certain sense, it requires us to withhold the forces that come to expression in our outer singing and repurpose them toward singing inwardly. Then we come to know the essence of the forces that we are always relying on as the support and medium of our spiritual activity, which by acting as that support and medium, are merged into the background and therefore ignored.

Ashvin,

I'm so happy to know that you appreciate what JC is bringing into practical performance. Some hail him as a modern Mozart of paradigm shift. I love listening and seeing him performing and analyzing his process. Here are some more examples of its many levels plus a lovely John O'Donohue poem on the spiritual process.





“I place on the altar of dawn:
The quiet loyalty of breath,
The tent of thought where I shelter,
Waves of desire I am shore to
And all beauty drawn to the eye.

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.

May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.”

~ John O’Donohue
excerpt from A Morning Offering,
To Bless The Space Between Us

[Cleric K]

Ashvin said: "But no one is asking for your belief or wants to prove these ideas to you, even if we could, because that would rob you of spiritual life and freedom. We are simply giving you hints in which direction to look so you can freely experience the ever-deepening layers of meaning in the perceptual flow for yourself, to which no other experience in life can compare. It would be an unspeakable travesty for either the Gods or us 'mere mortals' to rob you or anyone else of that experience."

This conversation has proved useful to me. I realise that you very much talk in terms of an individual's development. What Scott is talking about (from Barfield) is a paradigm shift, which is a cultural rather than an individual phenomenon.. It occurs to me that gullibility can actually be useful in cultural evolution. So if, as I would hope, a paradigm shift in our current materialist/consumerist culture to an idealist culture is ever to happen, I must believe (have faith) that it has happened before. So I’ll change my tune and say that in spite of my sluggish rationality, such a shift is possible. So how would it work? Well, this time, it must come from the top. The current priests (physicists and neuroscientists) must understand that materialism doesn’t work and tread new ground. BK says this is happening (privately, his work at Essentia has given him insights into the minds of these, our priests). Once some of them come out of the closet, then others will follow, and then the rest of us can jump on the new bandwagon (yes, mimicry and gullibility, idolisation of the priesthood, will play a big role). It could happen (not saying it will – but it could).

Your own gradualist approach is focused on individual changes rather than our culture as a whole. I suggest that it cannot have a broad cultural effect or provoke a paradigm shift unless it influences and captures the imagination of our cultural priests.

Ben, I'm trying to understand your view. Let's assume that the paradigm shift has already happened, that somehow the Church of Essentia has converted enough scientists and politicians and now those at the top of the power hierarchy can make changes. CNN, NBC, FOX, everyone say: "Breaking news: enough people now believe that materialism is wrong and idealism is true. The paradigm has shifted."

OK, now what? In your view how do you imagine this should affect the individual pawns? What would change for them? Or even more interestingly: how it would affect you? What would be the first thing that you would change in your life after you see the news? Or maybe you won't change anything until it is officially decreed as a law by the new Idealistic state?

[Lou Gold]

Ashvin said: "But no one is asking for your belief or wants to prove these ideas to you, even if we could, because that would rob you of spiritual life and freedom. We are simply giving you hints in which direction to look so you can freely experience the ever-deepening layers of meaning in the perceptual flow for yourself, to which no other experience in life can compare. It would be an unspeakable travesty for either the Gods or us 'mere mortals' to rob you or anyone else of that experience."

This conversation has proved useful to me. I realise that you very much talk in terms of an individual's development. What Scott is talking about (from Barfield) is a paradigm shift, which is a cultural rather than an individual phenomenon.. It occurs to me that gullibility can actually be useful in cultural evolution. So if, as I would hope, a paradigm shift in our current materialist/consumerist culture to an idealist culture is ever to happen, I must believe (have faith) that it has happened before. So I’ll change my tune and say that in spite of my sluggish rationality, such a shift is possible. So how would it work? Well, this time, it must come from the top. The current priests (physicists and neuroscientists) must understand that materialism doesn’t work and tread new ground. BK says this is happening (privately, his work at Essentia has given him insights into the minds of these, our priests). Once some of them come out of the closet, then others will follow, and then the rest of us can jump on the new bandwagon (yes, mimicry and gullibility, idolisation of the priesthood, will play a big role). It could happen (not saying it will – but it could).

Your own gradualist approach is focused on individual changes rather than our culture as a whole. I suggest that it cannot have a broad cultural effect or provoke a paradigm shift unless it influences and captures the imagination of our cultural priests.

Ben, I'm trying to understand your view. Let's assume that the paradigm shift has already happened, that somehow the Church of Essentia has converted enough scientists and politicians and now those at the top of the power hierarchy can make changes. CNN, NBC, FOX, everyone say: "Breaking news: enough people now believe that materialism is wrong and idealism is true. The paradigm has shifted."

OK, now what? In your view how do imagine this should affect the individual pawns? What would change for them? Or even more interestingly: how it would affect you? What would be the first thing that you would change in your life after you see the news? Or maybe you won't change anything until it is officially decreed as a law by the new Idealistic state?

Or, perhaps there is a full spectrum of plausible possibilities within the polarity?
One might discover a "Liiter Treasure"