Here we should make a distinction.lorenzop wrote: ↑Thu Jun 06, 2024 2:51 pm If you are asking ( using an example from materialism) can there be, or can one develop an Earth Consciousness . . . where a finite mind can know the ethos of the planet, know the ethos of all earth beings, perhaps know the contents of mind of all earth beings . . . Yes I suspect this is possible, and I can see how this state could be seen as quite desirous.
However, a being in such a state could (still) be unsettled and envious of unbounded consciousness, and true freedom and liberation.
So then the thought might be - I need to 'capture' more territory . . . Solar System consciousness, Galaxy consciousness . . . it never ends.
(I think) You are proposing that CC can be fully realized through development and expansion of thinking . . . maybe this is possible, but I think it's treacherous and difficult.
The question is: Can one think one's way to CC?
I'm voicing the more traditional approach - - proposing calmness\silence is the means -- or perhaps a 'moment of Zen' (silence by another means)
On one side you rightly speak of a finite mind developing Earth Consciousness, Solar consciousness, etc. In a sense, we as human beings are still a small sphere nested within these greater and greater spheres of inner space. For a human being to have Earth consciousness it is like attuning our sphere anchored at our physical complex to the greater Earth sphere. In this way, something of the Earth being is able to be stepped down and translated into human gestures. This is the task of the spiritual scientist and you are fully right that this is difficult (and could indeed be treacherous if we venture blindly into these realms).
On the other hand, we should conceive of the Earth consciousness as a holistic being on its own - an autonomous level of CC. Not as a human sphere that has been 'upgraded' with Earth consciousness sensations, but as CC consciousness that naturally belongs at that scale.
When you say 'capture' more territory, this sounds as if the being that is doing the capturing is lawfully destined to consciously know itself only at its particular scale (for example, human scale). Knowing itself in a greater sphere is like sending out tentacles that spread out consciousness into spheres that do not lawfully belong to that being. And this is indeed the case for a human being. When through resonance the consciousness of the Initiate reaches into, say, the Solar sphere, this doesn't mean that he becomes that sphere in its fullness. It's much rather that he 'visits' that sphere by 'touching' it with expanded cognition. Everything thus experienced is nevertheless refracted through the prism of our own Earthly evolution.
Yet in the long run, evolution goes through metamorphoses that lead to, for example, planetary-scale existence. Now, such a perspective of CC doesn't feel as a small biological-scale sphere that spreads its tentacles and trespasses in a planetary-scale sphere of being. In the same sense, our ego-perspective of CC doesn't feel like, say, a cell that shoots its rays into the whole volume of the body and 'conquers' it. Instead, the human ego feels like the lawful center of being at this scale. There are spheres of inner space smaller than us, spheres greater than us, but at our scale we feel as a unitary being.
I hope this has been cleared. I'll repeat. We need to distinguish between two things: 1/ human-scale existence that shoots its rays into Cosmic spheres of the unbounded inner space, and in a sense surrenders to these higher minds, allowing them to think through the human being, thus precipitating certain images and intuitions about the nature of existence that the One Self experiences at the corresponding higher sphere. 2/ is the existence that the Self experiences at the corresponding sphere of Cosmic integration, where the Self feels right at the lawful center, just like our ego feels as belonging to our human scale. In other words, 1/ is like a human being expanding and knowing something of the consciousness of a godly being, while 2/ is the experience of the godly being in itself, as its own center (not through a human prism).
Now it is obvious that we can imagine 2/ only through 1/. We can know 2/ in its reality only when we ourselves evolve to become such a CC perspective at the corresponding level. But nevertheless, through 1/ we can understand the kind of development that leads the evolving Self through the greater spheres that integrate more and more of the Oneness of Being. This is why we need Initatic science - because this is how we can understand the direction in which our development should be guided. This is the price of freedom. If we're securely and automatically led on the ascending path of evolution, we are not completely free. To be free means that we can potentially lead our flow of existence also toward destruction. Then it is through our comprehension of existence that we should freely align ourselves with the ascending or descending currents that our Love unites us with.
Thus we should be clear. Through the path of Initiation, spreading our thinking rays and uniting them with the higher spheres of Being, we do not directly become CC at these scales. Our human-scale sphere still feels as the baseline. We need that higher knowledge in order to guide our long-term evolutionary development, which alone leads CC to know itself at home at the higher scales.
Now, hoping that the distinction between 1/ and 2/ is clear, and putting 1/ to the side for a moment, is it conceivable that CC having a higher sphere as its natural state has truer, more encompassing self-knowledge than the CC which feels at home at a human scale and experiences its Zen moment? I emphasize this again because it is key: I'm not asking whether a human Initiate who has expanded his consciousness into higher spheres knows himself better than CC experiencing at human-scale its Zen moment, but whether non-human scale CC who has a higher sphere for its natural consciousness, has greater experience of the Oneness of all?
Now you may object that the oneness is not greater because, say, two planetary-sphere consciousnesses are just as distinct as two human-sphere consciousnesses. If I understand your argument correctly, it is something like this:
except that we should imagine the video backwards. We are zooming out, yet never reaching a top triangle. By saying that this can go on infinitely, you emphasize that no matter how much we zoom out it always seems that we are horizontally surrounded with other triangles. Depending on the scale, these may represent other human beings, other planets, stars, galaxies, universes, multiverses, etc. But your point is that in this way, no matter what scale CC experiences as its native, it won't be effectively different from the human-scale. A planetary-scale experience of CC, you imagine, should feel just like a planetary ego having relations with other planetary egos - maybe debating about the nature of existence just like we do now on the human scale. CC in that situation would still seek its Zen moment to know true Oneness, because otherwise, no matter to what scales it evolves, you suggest that it will feel like surrounded by separateness. Thus the Zen moment is the only conceivable way out.
All this, however, presupposes that the scales simply repeat the same human-like relations everywhere. For example, star-scale consciosnesses can hate each other, deceive each other, etc. But if we investigate the sensory shadow of the Cosmic totality, we see the more we zoom in, the more unified things become. There are infinite forms of organisms, fewer ways in which atoms can be combined in molecules, even fewer kinds of atoms, even fewer kinds of quarks, and so on. It is similar on the scale up. Stars are grouped in galaxies, galaxies in filaments but at the greatest scales this granularity seems like uniformity. As far as we can see with our telescopes, the clumping doesn't go on indefinitely.
Thus we may conceive that we, human beings who are somewhat in the middle of this scale gradient, experience a somewhat 'deformed' landscape.
Here, horizontally, each triangle is not the same as the others, just like no two human forms are just the same. But now we can imagine that the more we zoom in or zoom out, the more the image becomes more and more perfectly self-similar. Try to feel what that means. Imagine a perfectly self-similar landscape like the previous video. Then we can't say "I'm this triangle, you are that one" because everything is perfectly self-similar. If we know our triangle, we know every triangle.
I know that this sounds highly abstract but if we take it in a living way, it really hints at why the higher spheres of CC grasp Oneness in a more and more real way - not only as an unbounded Zen feeling projecting from a human-scale sphere but as growing into the Universal lattice of Oneness within which every state of existence is embedded.
