Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces

[Cleric K]

Sad indeed. The conversation could have gone in an interesting direction if the question was pursued: Avatars of what? What is it that expresses through these avatars? And even more interestingly - in what relation does the human "I" exist toward these beings who express through avatars? I think people are OK with speaking about avatars and how they are all equal but would prefer not to concern themselves with the Intelligences that work through them, let alone to consider that our evolution depends on entering into living exchange with these higher Minds, directly, and not through the avatar sensory proxies. But it seems the door has been one-sidedly closed for such conversations

[Federica]

Meanwhile, because of this inner discrepancy that leads to lack of spiritual insight and pride, purely physical 'countermeasures' are envisioned as the best way to deal with environmental problems. Instead of harmonizing our soul rhythms with the Earthly and Cosmic rhythms, truly submitting our soul life to the Divine impulses, we seek to impose more of our disorderly soul life on the Divine. That is not to say technological interventions are always off the mark, but they must always be carried out in the light of genuine moral intuition. So we see that, in the absence of higher cognitive development, the humble receptiveness to the Divine Will is only preached on paper, but in practice the exact opposite is sought.

One countermeasure that has been rarely considered in the past, but has recently gained renewed attention is geoengineering. Geoengineering refers to deliberate, large-scale interventions in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change by either removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface... There are good reasons to be skeptical of any further human intervention.

However, geoengineering the atmosphere remains the only way out to avoid a climatic collapse. It remains the only credible tool for mitigating the worst impacts of climate change.

Ashvin, on that post on geoengineering in particular, I thought I would comment directly, but I later changed my mind. I can't find a balanced approach and it would not serve any constructive purpose (btw, in case the thought crossed your mind that I may have said something very similar in our recent discussions about technological decisions on the transhumanism thread... it's not so )


Thinking now about the moment when the resistence emerged, that is when you explicitly mentioned the Christ impulse, I was wondering how long one can delay explicit reference to the Christ impulse. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or evil to you. I only mean that, if there is any strategy to loosen the catch-22, it seems to me that delaying that moment could be one option. I know what that resistance is. It's baked into the soul curvatures, but until one knows well enough that one should pay attention to those curvatures, and why and how, it's hardly possible to set oneself apart from the resistance.

For you who had a natural interest in Christianity before you even learned about the existence of PoF and higher cognition, moreover coming from a different cultural-religious background through which the idea of Christianity couldn't have been obfuscated by any dark feelings directly (like it easily can for those who were born in it) I guess it's different. But I know exactly how one may feel irritated and disappointed when the philosophical-spiritual field is "suddenly rewired" by means of a "religious" reference, that "little has to do with the inquiry". It feels partial, and unwarranted, especially when the reference subconsciously evokes social aspects and/or unexamined unpleasant experiences, but even without. These things can be very charged, and so Eastern spirituality in comparison appears so neutral, pure, simple, natural, truly human, luminous and sublime. If one is submerged by all that at once while one still doesn't notice well enough the soul curvatures, a rejection is practically inevitable. It's as if one is confronted again by something one has tried to emerge from during one's whole adult life of thought: "For goodness sake, not that, please".
So along these lines I was wondering if there could be any value in trying to awaken consciousness with a heavy dose of phenomenology, coming to the soul element by those means, but leaving the evolutionary aspects less in focus for longer...

[AshvinP]

Meanwhile, because of this inner discrepancy that leads to lack of spiritual insight and pride, purely physical 'countermeasures' are envisioned as the best way to deal with environmental problems. Instead of harmonizing our soul rhythms with the Earthly and Cosmic rhythms, truly submitting our soul life to the Divine impulses, we seek to impose more of our disorderly soul life on the Divine. That is not to say technological interventions are always off the mark, but they must always be carried out in the light of genuine moral intuition. So we see that, in the absence of higher cognitive development, the humble receptiveness to the Divine Will is only preached on paper, but in practice the exact opposite is sought.

One countermeasure that has been rarely considered in the past, but has recently gained renewed attention is geoengineering. Geoengineering refers to deliberate, large-scale interventions in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change by either removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere or reflecting sunlight away from the Earth's surface... There are good reasons to be skeptical of any further human intervention.

However, geoengineering the atmosphere remains the only way out to avoid a climatic collapse. It remains the only credible tool for mitigating the worst impacts of climate change.

Ashvin, on that post on geoengineering in particular, I thought I would comment directly, but I later changed my mind. I can't find a balanced approach and it would not serve any constructive purpose (btw, in case the thought crossed your mind that I may have said something very similar in our recent discussions about technological decisions on the transhumanism thread... it's not so )


Thinking now about the moment when the resistence emerged, that is when you explicitly mentioned the Christ impulse, I was wondering how long one can delay explicit reference to the Christ impulse. I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or evil to you. I only mean that, if there is any strategy to loosen the catch-22, it seems to me that delaying that moment could be one option. I know what that resistance is. It's baked into the soul curvatures, but until one knows well enough that one should pay attention to those curvatures, and why and how, it's hardly possible to set oneself apart from the resistance.

For you who had a natural interest in Christianity before you even learned about the existence of PoF and higher cognition, moreover coming from a different cultural-religious background through which the idea of Christianity couldn't have been obfuscated by any dark feelings directly (like it easily can for those who were born in it) I guess it's different. But I know exactly how one may feel irritated and disappointed when the philosophical-spiritual field is "suddenly rewired" by means of a "religious" reference, that "little has to do with the inquiry". It feels partial, and unwarranted, especially when the reference subconsciously evokes social aspects and/or unexamined unpleasant experiences, but even without. These things can be very charged, and so Eastern spirituality in comparison appears so neutral, pure, simple, natural, truly human, luminous and sublime. If one is submerged by all that at once while one still doesn't notice well enough the soul curvatures, a rejection is practically inevitable. It's as if one is confronted again by something one has tried to emerge from during one's whole adult life of thought: "For goodness sake, not that, please".
So along these lines I was wondering if there could be any value in trying to awaken consciousness with a heavy dose of phenomenology, coming to the soul element by those means, but leaving the evolutionary aspects less in focus for longer...

Federica,

I think you are correct, it is better to delay any explicit references that could be taken in a religious way as much as possible. I only decided to bring it up once it was clear that he would not engage in the phenomenological considerations of spiritual activity, but would continue thinking that he was and that we were basically speaking of the same approach, and that Aurobindo had already covered in great depth everything I was drawing attention to.

As soon as he pushed back on my comment on 'active thinking' as a means to penetrate the higher spaces and further stated "the Logos isn't logical", it was clear exactly where the discrepancy was, as Cleric also mentioned here, and then it became about how to bring his attention to the fact we are not speaking of the same thing and he is still missing the concrete overlap between higher consciousness and intellectual thinking. We saw a similar thing with Eugene where we could dialogue for pages upon pages and he would respond something like, "yes, isn't this what I have also been saying all along?", until we finally quote Steiner on some spiritual scientific details and the discrepancy we knew of all along was made more clear to him.

In general, I would say we shouldn't get too analytical about how to dialogue on these issues. After many similar conversations with many intelligent and spiritually-minded people, it seems that either the soul has a predisposition for seeking the Truth of the inner situation no matter what, to the point where all preconceptions can be put on pause and it feels painful that there are gaps and inconsistencies and unexplored intuitions in the first-person experiential flow, or it doesn't. If it's the latter, then they will always find ways to avoid the inner phenomenology or pretend they are already doing it when actually layering metaphysics on top in accordance with secret preferences.

[Federica]

Federica,

I think you are correct, it is better to delay any explicit references that could be taken in a religious way as much as possible. I only decided to bring it up once it was clear that he would not engage in the phenomenological considerations of spiritual activity, but would continue thinking that he was and that we were basically speaking of the same approach, and that Aurobindo had already covered in great depth everything I was drawing attention to.

As soon as he pushed back on my comment on 'active thinking' as a means to penetrate the higher spaces and further stated "the Logos isn't logical", it was clear exactly where the discrepancy was, as Cleric also mentioned here, and then it became about how to bring his attention to the fact we are not speaking of the same thing and he is still missing the concrete overlap between higher consciousness and intellectual thinking. We saw a similar thing with Eugene where we could dialogue for pages upon pages and he would respond something like, "yes, isn't this what I have also been saying all along?", until we finally quote Steiner on some spiritual scientific details and the discrepancy we knew of all along was made more clear to him.

In general, I would say we shouldn't get too analytical about how to dialogue on these issues. After many similar conversations with many intelligent and spiritually-minded people, it seems that either the soul has a predisposition for seeking the Truth of the inner situation no matter what, to the point where all preconceptions can be put on pause and it feels painful that there are gaps and inconsistencies and unexplored intuitions in the first-person experiential flow, or it doesn't. If it's the latter, then they will always find ways to avoid the inner phenomenology or pretend they are already doing it when actually layering metaphysics on top in accordance with secret preferences.

Yes - this is all accurate.
And it makes sense that, beyond the exact conceptual trajectory it's about the inner disposition and predisposition.

If the "compulsion" (as Steve Hale calls it) to cognize the realm of the causes, rather than that of the effects, is not strong enough, or has been weakened by the materialistic forms of reasoning too much, there's only so much that can be done by editing the exact train of thoughts in the discussion.

It is with the activities engendered by cognition of the causes, or ideas that stand behind effects, and act as the creative impulse for their coming into being as material representations, that man’s attainment of a higher development lies. This is made possible because the activities of the energy, forces, and substances of the bodily complex while they are engaged in the realm of causation is qualitatively superior, and thus they seek to build themselves up in a transmutative process having its basis in the compulsion for attaining an intimate relationship and association with this causal realm and its pure, metaphysical ideas.

[Federica]

I finally decided to add this as a comment to the geoengineering essay:

Marco, supposing there’s agreement that, from the perspective of a post-material worldview, reality at its core is of ideal nature, and the material world - including the climatic events Earth manifests in time - is the densest layer of a unitary whole (as above, so below) only transduced in the heavily aliased “ideational byproduct” that the human physical five senses of today are able to record, a question has arisen from this reading. In your prefiguration of material solutions to the present human crisis, I notice that the reference to the suprasensible, conscious alignment of being that would constitute, in primal and crucial sense, a way out of the present crisis, is left out. What is the purpose with this take? Do you agree that it’s only when we become the change we want to see in the world, first and foremost in our consciousness, through active development of our suprasensible (thinking and feeling) faculties - individually and collectively - that we gain a chance to apprehend the higher orders of being, hence to orient our future deeds towards the good, through conscious moral action in the world, not when man merely attempts to impact the physical layers of reality through rational-logical devices, elaborated by the intellect, if the latter remains unaware of its depth structure?

[Federica]

The discussion got a few more back and forths, but going nowhere so far - tyvärr (too bad).

Though I've borrowed various expressions from Cleric's and Ashvin's vocabulary, I've tried to come up with some new ones as well, and so I submit: "the smorgasbord approach", and spirituality as "conceptual add-on"

I will soon read Steiner's Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. He gives it as a short manual for practical communication of spiritual science. As I understand it, it's about how the many can integrate spiritual science in everyday life, in a concrete way, before any level higher cognition is reached. Has anyone read it?

[Federica]

I will soon read Steiner's Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. He gives it as a short manual for practical communication of spiritual science. As I understand it, it's about how the many can integrate spiritual science in everyday life, in a concrete way, before any level higher cognition is reached. Has anyone read it?

Now that I've read it - this actually speaks to Anthony's question -how spiritual science does not disturb (any unprejudiced scientific practice and) any religious faith.

[AshvinP]

I will soon read Steiner's Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. He gives it as a short manual for practical communication of spiritual science. As I understand it, it's about how the many can integrate spiritual science in everyday life, in a concrete way, before any level higher cognition is reached. Has anyone read it?

Now that I've read it - this actually speaks to Anthony's question -how spiritual science does not disturb (any unprejudiced scientific practice and) any religious faith.

Thanks for sharing this, Federica.

It would be interesting to come up with a list of theological questions and try to inwardly sense what they are really asking about, in so far as they are oriented towards understanding how the Divine Spirit manifests itself in our experience and guides us towards a salvific telos. At the most basic level, it is all about how something we can't see or touch or sense in general, can't easily comprehend, can't encompass with our thoughts, can't locate in space, etc. nevertheless exists and is involved in streams of destiny. What else could intellectual religious people, just like theoretical scientists, possibly be wondering about? The only difference is that one thinks of it as destiny/fate and the other as random chance, one as divine intelligence and the other as quantum fields, but they both wonder how something we can't sense or even conceive is structuring the experiential flow of reality.

The remarkable thing is that we have intimate experience on a moment to moment basis with something that fits all those negative descriptions, our own spiritual activity, yet this reality is continually missed by the believers and skeptics, the faithful and the heretics, alike. The very activity asking the question is also the answer to the question. It is the person who can't find his glasses anywhere because he is wearing them! It never ceases to amaze me the self-imposed obstacles we create for ourselves in order to avoid getting serious and concrete answers to our own questions. On the other hand, I have felt enough resistance within myself to inward transformation such that I realize how much momentum there is to keep the status quo of endless theoretical questions undisturbed.

[Federica]

I will soon read Steiner's Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. He gives it as a short manual for practical communication of spiritual science. As I understand it, it's about how the many can integrate spiritual science in everyday life, in a concrete way, before any level higher cognition is reached. Has anyone read it?

Now that I've read it - this actually speaks to Anthony's question -how spiritual science does not disturb (any unprejudiced scientific practice and) any religious faith.

Thanks for sharing this, Federica.

It would be interesting to come up with a list of theological questions and try to inwardly sense what they are really asking about, in so far as they are oriented towards understanding how the Divine Spirit manifests itself in our experience and guides us towards a salvific telos. At the most basic level, it is all about how something we can't see or touch or sense in general, can't easily comprehend, can't encompass with our thoughts, can't locate in space, etc. nevertheless exists and is involved in streams of destiny. What else could intellectual religious people, just like theoretical scientists, possibly be wondering about? The only difference is that one thinks of it as destiny/fate and the other as random chance, one as divine intelligence and the other as quantum fields, but they both wonder how something we can't sense or even conceive is structuring the experiential flow of reality.

The remarkable thing is that we have intimate experience on a moment to moment basis with something that fits all those negative descriptions, our own spiritual activity, yet this reality is continually missed by the believers and skeptics, the faithful and the heretics, alike. The very activity asking the question is also the answer to the question. It is the person who can't find his glasses anywhere because he is wearing them! It never ceases to amaze me the self-imposed obstacles we create for ourselves in order to avoid getting serious and concrete answers to our own questions. On the other hand, I have felt enough resistance within myself to inward transformation such that I realize how much momentum there is to keep the status quo of endless theoretical questions undisturbed.

You mean a list like for example this one?
by Stephen Weller in a post "On Protestantism" (not to say that I agree with the post)

...Catholics and Protestants should at least consider if they were raised to be a flag burner, how would they know and see the mistake? Of course, this is what we have already seen, where the most crucial acts of the Catholic faith are seen by Protestants as leading away from Christ and vice versa. Objectively, either Catholicism or Protestantism leads to Christ and salvation, not both. Just like burning the Flag is either a desecration or a worthy homage. Subjectively, both are trying to honor and obey “Christ.” The spirit of our times tells us that only the interior intention matters, only the heart. Yet Our Lord Jesus Christ commands otherwise, saying in John 4: 24 “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” I will consider the following topics in later posts, though I could consider more:

--> Sola Scriptura: Either a method unsubstantiated by scripture or Church tradition for undercutting the divine authority of the Church, cutting out essential Church practices, morals, and dogmas, and sowing confusion about the truths of the faith; Or a way to safeguard the substance of the true faith found in the Word of God against the inventions of man.

--> Perfection, Punishment, and Purgatory- Either desiring Perfection and Punishment for sin is a precondition of going to heaven, or a fools errand that minimizes Christ´s work of the Cross which took all our punishment.

--> Assurance of salvation, either a form of pride that leads to hell in all cases save that of a rare supernatural private revelation; Or a integral part of faith itself that leads to Heaven and in many cases is a condition of going to Heaven,

--> Honoring the Blessed Virgin: Either emerges from or detracts from a love of Christ.

--> A Transubstantial Eucharist: Either the localized presence on earth of Emmanuel, God with Us, Christ and the living, eternal Bread of Life; Or a superstition that leads people into idolatry worshiping bread and distracts people from having a true relationship with Christ.

--> A Sacrificial Mass: Either the highest form of worship of God and how we participate in the sacrifice of Calvary; Or a sacrilege that detracts from and scandalizes the sacrifice on Calvary.

--> A Priesthood with faculties to forgive sins: either how our sins are forgiven or misleading people from going directly to our true redeemer Christ.

In each of these views the first view is the Catholic one, the second view the protestant one. Objectively speaking, it is ignorant to think both Protestantism and Catholicism could lead to heaven, when on all of these crucial points there is direct opposition. They do not worship or serve the same Christ. They cannot be inspired by the same Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth.
...

[Federica]

I finally decided to add this as a comment to the geoengineering essay:

"Marco, supposing there’s agreement that, from the perspective of a post-material worldview, reality at its core is of ideal nature, and the material world - including the climatic events Earth manifests in time - is the densest layer of a unitary whole (as above, so below) only transduced in the heavily aliased “ideational byproduct” that the human physical five senses of today are able to record, a question has arisen from this reading. In your prefiguration of material solutions to the present human crisis, I notice that the reference to the suprasensible, conscious alignment of being that would constitute, in primal and crucial sense, a way out of the present crisis, is left out. What is the purpose with this take? Do you agree that it’s only when we become the change we want to see in the world, first and foremost in our consciousness, through active development of our suprasensible (thinking and feeling) faculties - individually and collectively - that we gain a chance to apprehend the higher orders of being, hence to orient our future deeds towards the good, through conscious moral action in the world, not when man merely attempts to impact the physical layers of reality through rational-logical devices, elaborated by the intellect, if the latter remains unaware of its depth structure?"

MM: "One should never judge looking only at one piece of the puzzle. Where could the other pieces possible be? "


Reply: "If you ask me, I love jigsaw puzzles, but I personally don’t find them to provide a viable analogy for reality. So I wouldn’t judge even if I had the entire game to look at."


MM: "Maybe you might like to take a look at some other pieces of the puzzle. For example, that I'm not that techno-freak I might appear, can be read here:
https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/techno ... -delusions
https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/toward ... -worldview
As to the environmental issue I suggest reading the "age of light" I wrote about here: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/its-ti ... llapse-b99
Moreover, the next post will be about the notion of Nature from a more spiritual perspective Stay tuned..."


Reply: "Marco, thanks for the references. I find your work outstanding, and especially the brave professional choices and quest for meaningfulness lying in its background. Nonetheless, in my humble opinion, the same point I made about the macrocosm of reality is applicable to the microcosm of our own human individuality. The puzzle metaphor misses the mark here. In the same way that reality evolves as an interconnected whole, wherein the material layer amounts to a stupefying panorama of collapsed and precipitated symbols, so in the microcosm of our individuality it’s impossible to be truly post-material by horizontally composing a puzzle picture where material pieces are juxtaposed to spiritual ones (un colpo al cerchio, un colpo alla botte). Rather, the only path is vertical. It starts from within our own thinking-feeling being, so that each and every element of our activity has eventually a chance to harmonize with the higher order designs. To squeeze that into a visual metaphor: a Sierpinski triangle, rather than a puzzle. By the way, in your piece on technological delusions, you seem to choose the same approach of *complementing* the outward material technological progress with the psychological, existential and spiritual perspective. We cannot *only* have a technological perspective, you say. We need to complement it with the spiritual. But again, the smorgasbord approach - while it has the merit of questioning materialism - only leads to an illusion of holistic understanding, as long as one has not made the free choice to engage the self-transformation of one’s entire being, starting from the augmentation of one's conscious cognitive potential. That the world - the universe - is on the same side as our spiritual being starts to become an experience then, rather than a conceptual add-on.
In anycase, I look forward to reading your next post on Nature from a more spiritual perspective!"


MM: "Federica, I wonder wherefrom you have the impression of a “smorgasbord approach” or read of a "horizontal puzzle composition." Nowhere do I feel of having done that. Complementing is not an exercise of addition. So, I can’t relate to this and, thereby, answer to your objection."

Reply: "It’s the dichotomy that appears between a statement of holistic understanding from the first-person perspective, and an elaboration that snaps back into third-person view, as it balances out the spiritual-psychological and the rational-material perspectives one against the other, as two puzzle pieces to fit into one another. But the wholeness of truth can’t emerge from holding the two pieces from the side and “complementing” the one with the other. They inevitably remain a nicely composed, very well balanced, smorgasbord of views. That is, there are eyes that hold those views from a seamless vantage point in the background. In this way, the first person-perspective can consist of a tag on an idea *about* perspective, held from a third-person perspective.
I hesitate to further elaborate, firstly because the phenomenology of human cognition has been already put in incomparably better concepts and words than I could ever come up with - by known as well as unknown thinkers, for example in the previously mentioned series of phenomenological essays - which btw do not make use of any religious concept - and secondly because grasping it depends on the willingness to freely do whatever it cognitively takes to know the truth from within, including bringing the inquiry to the inside of one’s own cognitive activity, not experienced as a place for the boiling down of ideal contents, but as a force that can itself be observed, educated, sensitized and grown in consciousness. However, if one is satisfied within the 'homeyness' of a certain worldview and feels that progress is basically a matter of filling the boxes of the various life problems with thoughts, aligning groups of essays in a logical ensemble, then there can’t be any interest in setting sail for the progressive discovery of truth by learning to dive into the sea of consciousness from the pinhole of one’s own cognition."

***

From here, either something extraordinary is about to happen (I have seen that someone has just been visiting the essay link) or a final rebuttal comment is about to be dropped