Saving the materialists

[Federica]

That was a whole enchilada of insinuations and shoulds. I don't even get what you are explaining to me about my feelings in your last perhaps. I don't see that either of us is able to have great neutrality of soul at the moment. Better to let it rest.

[AshvinP]

That was a whole enchilada of insinuations and shoulds. I don't even get what you are explaining to me about my feelings in your last perhaps. I don't see that either of us is able to have great neutrality of soul at the moment. Better to let it rest.

Let it "rest" until you do the exact same thing in the next comment/essay/thread? It may be time to get a bookie to start taking bets on how long before this pattern repeats itself... I am leaning towards under 3 days, although I hope you will take a ceasefire for Christmas

The last perhaps is easy to understand. My whole comment to Guney (and indirectly to you) was about how we can give credit to our academic interlocutors, even if they have displayed abstract and flattened tendencies in the past. This isn't arbitrary credit for the sake of credit, but based on closely resonating with their intuitive movements, trying to feel how they are using philosophical-scientific concepts to symbolically speak about aspects of their living experience. This is exactly what you were failing to do with JP since I brought him up in the LLM discussion (which, to your credit, you finally admitted in response to Cleric). Perhaps you sensed that the comment was directed at you and your recent failure, so you were then motivated to 'get revenge' picking one isolated phrase in the comment and imagine you are defending the hypothetical "academic philosophers" from my "cynical" attacks (when I was actually trying to give JW credit), like you imagined you were defending hypothetical "spiritual seekers" from my "reckless" comments on psychedelics. Instead of participating in and contributing to the real-time discussion of JW's intuitive movements with Guney and myself, you chose to theorize about the whole process from the side to 'call me out' on something.

Yes, this is all perhaps, speculation, but it's worth contemplating such "perhaps" because there must be some mostly subconscious reason why you keep falling into this pattern.

[Federica]

That was a whole enchilada of insinuations and shoulds. I don't even get what you are explaining to me about my feelings in your last perhaps. I don't see that either of us is able to have great neutrality of soul at the moment. Better to let it rest.

Let it "rest" until you do the exact same thing in the next comment/essay/thread? It may be time to get a bookie to start taking bets on how long before this pattern repeats itself... I am leaning towards under 3 days, although I hope you will take a ceasefire for Christmas

The last perhaps is easy to understand. My whole comment to Guney (and indirectly to you) was about how we can give credit to our academic interlocutors, even if they have displayed abstract and flattened tendencies in the past. This isn't arbitrary credit for the sake of credit, but based on closely resonating with their intuitive movements, trying to feel how they are using philosophical-scientific concepts to symbolically speak about aspects of their living experience. This is exactly what you were failing to do with JP since I brought him up in the LLM discussion (which, to your credit, you finally admitted in response to Cleric). Perhaps you sensed that the comment was directed at you and your recent failure, so you were then motivated to 'get revenge' picking one isolated phrase in the comment and imagine you are defending the hypothetical "academic philosophers" from my "cynical" attacks (when I was actually trying to give JW credit), like you imagined you were defending hypothetical "spiritual seekers" from my "reckless" comments on psychedelics. Instead of participating in and contributing to the real-time discussion of JW's intuitive movements with Guney and myself, you chose to theorize about the whole process from the side to 'call me out' on something.

Yes, this is all perhaps, speculation, but it's worth contemplating such "perhaps" because there must be some mostly subconscious reason why you keep falling into this pattern.

Thanks for the demonstration, Ashvin, and the bonus psychoanalytical contemplations
Indeed, I'll be off next week and won't take the laptop with me, so you will be spared my spiritual failures for a while. Though I'll still have a phone, and, as you explained, I can't guarantee my lazy tendencies won't have the upper hand

[Federica]

By the way, when I get a chance I will go back to the dreaming-in-language post on page 17. From your example I realize we are talking about two different things. In your example there is not much reference to wording. It's an example of thought flow. It's much more high level, compared to what I mean with dreaming in language. Surely, if you remain at the level of thought flow, you can say it's casual, it's effortless, but it flows along the elastic tensions, yes. But I was giving an example of something else, something more precise. There are no word-ebbs in your example. There are no formulations that deploy their attraction and take over the steering. In my example specific linguistic anchors are elastic tensions in their own right, and it's not possible to notice that without considering precise wordings. I will come back to that.

[AshvinP]

By the way, when I get a chance I will go back to the dreaming-in-language post on page 17. From your example I realize we are talking about two different things. In your example there is not much reference to wording. It's an example of thought flow. It's much more high level, compared to what I mean with dreaming in language. Surely, if you remain at the level of thought flow, you can say it's casual, it's effortless, but it flows along the elastic tensions, yes. But I was giving an example of something else, something more precise. There are no word-ebbs in your example. There are no formulations that deploy their attraction and take over the steering. In my example specific linguistic anchors are elastic tensions in their own right, and it's not possible to notice that without considering precise wordings. I will come back to that.

That's where I think the fundamental discontinuity comes in, that linguistic forms are somehow different from thought-forms, the latter preserving its flow along the contextual elastic tensions while the former has somehow dropped out of it into their own isolated layer of elastic tensions which necessitate an attraction that takes over the steering. I don't see any possible scenario in which that could be the case... but I will wait for your further comment.

[Federica]

By the way, when I get a chance I will go back to the dreaming-in-language post on page 17. From your example I realize we are talking about two different things. In your example there is not much reference to wording. It's an example of thought flow. It's much more high level, compared to what I mean with dreaming in language. Surely, if you remain at the level of thought flow, you can say it's casual, it's effortless, but it flows along the elastic tensions, yes. But I was giving an example of something else, something more precise. There are no word-ebbs in your example. There are no formulations that deploy their attraction and take over the steering. In my example specific linguistic anchors are elastic tensions in their own right, and it's not possible to notice that without considering precise wordings. I will come back to that.

That's where I think the fundamental discontinuity comes in, that linguistic forms are somehow different from thought-forms, the latter preserving its flow along the contextual elastic tensions while the former has somehow dropped out of it into their own isolated layer of elastic tensions which necessitate an attraction that takes over the steering. I don't see any possible scenario in which that could be the case... but I will wait for your further comment.

Doesn't there exist a 'discontinuity' between incarnated and disincarnated state? and, at a smaller scale, between waking and sleeping? At an even smaller scale, can't it be said that we continually awaken to our thoughts, coming from another state - call it intuitive-contextual, unconscious, or distracted state - in which the thought was not present? You wouldn't imagine calling any of these rhythms "fondamental discontinuities" I am sure. What I'm referring to is of this same nature: it is a thought cycle of descending below clear, reasoning consciousness in the middle of a thought-picture concatenation, only to reemerge at a discontinuous point of the contextual matrix. I am simply describing one modality of what we are already familiar with, that you definitely agreed with: our continuous awakening to our formed thought-images. The difference is only that in the process I refer to, the passages from consciousness to unconsciousness along the parabola of reasoning happen inopportunely, in the middle of the curve, so to say. You find no fundamental discontinuity in the following, I am sure:

What's interesting is that even our thinking trains are of the same nature. This we can notice when in meditation we investigate the nature of our distractions. Just like falling asleep, we're never clearly conscious of being distracted. We say "I used to concentrate on that thought but now I awakened to the fact that there has been an interruption and I have switched to thinking of something else". So in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts.

And I'm saying, language plays a central role in how the micro-derailments happen. Perhaps this phenomenon is on an even smaller scale compared to what Cleric described above as constant reincarnation in our thoughts. This is a particularly fragmented mode of checking in and off the conscious parabola of reasoning, perhaps even one magnitude below the normal distraction patterns in our standard cognition. Where are we with our willed, steering consciousness when a normal distraction kicks in? We are at a less dense and pregnant level than the one in which attention is maintained without interruption, for example to solve a geometrical problem, correct? I'm saying, there is an hyper-distracted state, where the distraction doesn't correspond to a (short and erratic, but still present) emergence in consciousness, within the context of the distracting thought. In this hyper-distracted state the thinker believes the main train of thoughts has never been abandoned. It's believed that continuity of reasoning was maintained. How is this possible? Because the space of distraction in which the mind is dreaming has been hijacked by some distracting force, and language is used as a proxy of thought, that makes us feel as if there is meaningfulness, as if there is continuity of reasoning. But there is not necessarily. Then, we awaken again from that dream, somewhere else closer to our preferences. The loose ends are patched together and the discontinuity remains unrealized. Even scientific work is sometimes executed in this mode, often, but not always, with the great complicity of LLMs (as it's been demonstrated time and again, like when it turns out that papers in major scientific publications have been written with Chat GPT, as an example).

[Güney27]

My response will follow today.

„ If we are to leave metaphysics behind and think anew, we suddenly find that what once seemed obvious becomes difficult. This equally applies to determining a starting point. Under metaphysics, we imagined a world of independent objects which could be studied in their own instance. In doing so, we logically deduced its nature by classifications through linear thought.

But this got us nowhere, and we now at least understand that nothing exists except in relation to something else. The universe is an incomprehensible network of relationships with no starting point, which brings us back to face the enigma of the hermeneutic circle. How do we find the starting point of circle? Seeing there is none, our only path forward is to jump into it - into the universe.

But this immediately brings thinking into the frame of reference. There is no universe without thinking, nor thinking without a universe. Thinking only occurs when thinking of something, and yet in a real way something only exists when thought. But we have yet to think what “something” is. That lies further down the path.

When we free ourselves from subject/object metaphysics we see that our thinking is as physically real as what we observe and entangled. The observation effect of Quantum Mechanics has demonstrated that beyond doubt. We literally create the stuff of the universe through conscious observation. This is true whether we mean this in the reductive manner of wave collapse described in physics, or in the expansive manner of poetic experience. These are the two manners of revelation bestowed upon us.

For that reason, our universe would cease to exist if humanity were to disappear, and didn’t exist before we came to be. The universe begins as our reduction. If thought scientifically, it is a reduction from superposition. If thought poetically, is is the introduction of one aspect of Being experienced through our sensibilities of time and space, our ability to sense a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and thoughtful consideration of the thing revealed. This would be the opposite of reduction, but rather an expansion of our tiny universe. These are solely human experiences, and the universe itself can be thought of as an experience.

At this point is is futile to pursue the question of the state from which we reduce our universe. We only know it negatively as what it isn’t. At least until we reconsider what thinking is. We can, however, question the nature of the universe itself, and how within this universe worlds arise.

I know I didn’t address all of your questions yet, but that will happen along the path of the conversation. Consider this merely our point of entry into the circle. Before going further, I would like to hear your thinking and questions.“

[AshvinP]

My response will follow today.

„ If we are to leave metaphysics behind and think anew, we suddenly find that what once seemed obvious becomes difficult. This equally applies to determining a starting point. Under metaphysics, we imagined a world of independent objects which could be studied in their own instance. In doing so, we logically deduced its nature by classifications through linear thought.

But this got us nowhere, and we now at least understand that nothing exists except in relation to something else. The universe is an incomprehensible network of relationships with no starting point, which brings us back to face the enigma of the hermeneutic circle. How do we find the starting point of circle? Seeing there is none, our only path forward is to jump into it - into the universe.

But this immediately brings thinking into the frame of reference. There is no universe without thinking, nor thinking without a universe. Thinking only occurs when thinking of something, and yet in a real way something only exists when thought. But we have yet to think what “something” is. That lies further down the path.

When we free ourselves from subject/object metaphysics we see that our thinking is as physically real as what we observe and entangled. The observation effect of Quantum Mechanics has demonstrated that beyond doubt. We literally create the stuff of the universe through conscious observation. This is true whether we mean this in the reductive manner of wave collapse described in physics, or in the expansive manner of poetic experience. These are the two manners of revelation bestowed upon us.

For that reason, our universe would cease to exist if humanity were to disappear, and didn’t exist before we came to be. The universe begins as our reduction. If thought scientifically, it is a reduction from superposition. If thought poetically, is is the introduction of one aspect of Being experienced through our sensibilities of time and space, our ability to sense a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and thoughtful consideration of the thing revealed. This would be the opposite of reduction, but rather an expansion of our tiny universe. These are solely human experiences, and the universe itself can be thought of as an experience.

At this point is is futile to pursue the question of the state from which we reduce our universe. We only know it negatively as what it isn’t. At least until we reconsider what thinking is. We can, however, question the nature of the universe itself, and how within this universe worlds arise.

I know I didn’t address all of your questions yet, but that will happen along the path of the conversation. Consider this merely our point of entry into the circle. Before going further, I would like to hear your thinking and questions.“

Thanks for continuing to share, Guney. Yes, I can clearly sense the Heideggerian philosophy in this post and the bold. Particularly from his lectures on 'What is Called Thinking?':

Mythos is what has its essence in its telling-what is apparent in the unconcealedness of its appeal. The mythos is that appeal of foremost and radical concern to all human beings which makes man think of what appears, what is in being. Logos says the same; mythos and logos are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into opposition by philosophy as such; on the contrary, the early Greek thinkers (Parmenides, fragment 8) are precisely the ones to use mythos and logos in the same sense. Mythos and logos become separated and opposed only at the point where neither mythos nor logos can keep to its original nature. In Plato's work, this separation has already taken place. Historians and philologists, by virtue of a prejudice which modern rationalism adopted from Platonism, imagine that mythos was destroyed by logos. But nothing religious is ever destroyed by logic; it is destroyed only by the God's withdrawal.
...
This is why we are here attempting to learn thinking. We are all on the way together, and are not reproving each other. To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time. Depending on the kind of essentials, depending on the realm from which they address us, the answer and with it the kind of learning differs...

Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal...

All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it. This is why he is the purest thinker of the West. This is why he wrote nothing.
...
Thinking has entered into literature; and literature has decided the fate of Western science which, by way of the doctrine of the Middle Ages, became the scientia of modem times. In this form all the sciences have leapt from the womb of philosophy, in a twofold manner. The sciences come out of philosophy, because they have to part with her. And now that they are so apart they can never again, by their own power as sciences, make the leap back into the source from whence they have sprung. Henceforth they are remanded to a realm of being where only thinking can find them, provided thinking is capable of doing what is its own to do.

When man is drawing into what withdraws, he points into what withdraws. As we are drawing that way we are a sign, a pointer. But we are pointing then at something which has not, not yet, been transposed into the language of our speech. We are a sign that is not read.
...
And so, on our way toward thinking, we hear a word of poesy. But the question to what end and with what right, upon what ground and within what limits, our attempt to think allows itself to get involved in a dialogue with poesy, let alone with the poetry of this poet this question, which is inescapable, we can discuss only after we ourselves have taken the path of thinking.

The key to becoming a 'readable sign', of course, is to experientially locate where the 'reduction' happens in our intimate spiritual activity, and thereby also intuit how, in our unbiased reasoning, we are always expanding our 'tiny universe' from the solipsistic point into which it has contracted. That applies to scientific thinking as well, and the task of our poetic thinking is not to abandon the former but to redeem it by bringing its essential nature into focus at our cognitive horizon. Many 20th century thinkers like Heidegger have intuited this general direction, as thinking became more recursive and turned attention to its own structure and dynamics, but most of them tend to declare setting out on the inner 'path of thinking' as something to be discovered by future humanity, at some indefinite future time. Even if they have come across Steiner and esoteric science, they lump it all into pre-modern esotericism and mystical theosophy, which then obscures the intuitive thinking path toward the deeper scales of inner activity. There are even Anthroposophists who try to insert discontinuity between PoF and later spiritual science as one of many ways to justify avoiding the deeper scales (like FB). Here is a recent post by him which is illustrative of this discontinuity - https://www.facebook.com/share/p/LcB7ZpJ8G7x3G4kD/. When people are motivated by deeper anxieties and fears to steer away from esoteric science, they will find many different ways to justify that and remain comfortably speculating on the "path of thinking" from within the intellectual scale of familiar gestures.

[AshvinP]

By the way, when I get a chance I will go back to the dreaming-in-language post on page 17. From your example I realize we are talking about two different things. In your example there is not much reference to wording. It's an example of thought flow. It's much more high level, compared to what I mean with dreaming in language. Surely, if you remain at the level of thought flow, you can say it's casual, it's effortless, but it flows along the elastic tensions, yes. But I was giving an example of something else, something more precise. There are no word-ebbs in your example. There are no formulations that deploy their attraction and take over the steering. In my example specific linguistic anchors are elastic tensions in their own right, and it's not possible to notice that without considering precise wordings. I will come back to that.

That's where I think the fundamental discontinuity comes in, that linguistic forms are somehow different from thought-forms, the latter preserving its flow along the contextual elastic tensions while the former has somehow dropped out of it into their own isolated layer of elastic tensions which necessitate an attraction that takes over the steering. I don't see any possible scenario in which that could be the case... but I will wait for your further comment.

Doesn't there exist a 'discontinuity' between incarnated and disincarnated state? and, at a smaller scale, between waking and sleeping? At an even smaller scale, can't it be said that we continually awaken to our thoughts, coming from another state - call it intuitive-contextual, unconscious, or distracted state - in which the thought was not present? You wouldn't imagine calling any of these rhythms "fondamental discontinuities" I am sure. What I'm referring to is of this same nature: it is a thought cycle of descending below clear, reasoning consciousness in the middle of a thought-picture concatenation, only to reemerge at a discontinuous point of the contextual matrix. I am simply describing one modality of what we are already familiar with, that you definitely agreed with: our continuous awakening to our formed thought-images. The difference is only that in the process I refer to, the passages from consciousness to unconsciousness along the parabola of reasoning happen inopportunely, in the middle of the curve, so to say. You find no fundamental discontinuity in the following, I am sure:

What's interesting is that even our thinking trains are of the same nature. This we can notice when in meditation we investigate the nature of our distractions. Just like falling asleep, we're never clearly conscious of being distracted. We say "I used to concentrate on that thought but now I awakened to the fact that there has been an interruption and I have switched to thinking of something else". So in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts.

And I'm saying, language plays a central role in how the micro-derailments happen. Perhaps this phenomenon is on an even smaller scale compared to what Cleric described above as constant reincarnation in our thoughts. This is a particularly fragmented mode of checking in and off the conscious parabola of reasoning, perhaps even one magnitude below the normal distraction patterns in our standard cognition. Where are we with our willed, steering consciousness when a normal distraction kicks in? We are at a less dense and pregnant level than the one in which attention is maintained without interruption, for example to solve a geometrical problem, correct? I'm saying, there is an hyper-distracted state, where the distraction doesn't correspond to a (short and erratic, but still present) emergence in consciousness, within the context of the distracting thought. In this hyper-distracted state the thinker believes the main train of thoughts has never been abandoned. It's believed that continuity of reasoning was maintained. How is this possible? Because the space of distraction in which the mind is dreaming has been hijacked by some distracting force, and language is used as a proxy of thought, that makes us feel as if there is meaningfulness, as if there is continuity of reasoning. But there is not necessarily. Then, we awaken again from that dream, somewhere else closer to our preferences. The loose ends are patched together and the discontinuity remains unrealized. Even scientific work is sometimes executed in this mode, often, but not always, with the great complicity of LLMs (as it's been demonstrated time and again, like when it turns out that papers in major scientific publications have been written with Chat GPT, as an example).

I generally understand these principles you are discussing above. The issue I have been trying to better understand and address is always related to the more subtle indications that are given, like the bold. I am curious about a few things:

- If we take JW's last post (or the Heidegger quote) about how scientific thinking (which you have also referenced several times) has separated out from the more artistic-poetic layer of thinking in its function of reducing integrated meaning, do you see any echoes of that in your indications here? In other words, how would you differentiate what you are indicating from what he is expressing? Where does he go astray in his reasoning?

- If we take the weather example before which leads into a dreamy, associative, etc. conversation, and imagine this conversation happens entirely in sign language (or, more implausibly, between people drawing animated pictorial storyboards), how would this differ from the conversation unfolding through verbal language, from your perspective? Would the latter be a significantly different kind of 'derailment' than the former? If so, what is the reason for that?

- Earlier you mentioned that language can be redeemed from both the side of thinking and the side of feeling. How do you distinguish these two? I understand artistic pursuits involve the side of feeling, but how can such feeling-based pursuits spiritualize our language without first being illumined through the side of thinking?

[AshvinP]

Doesn't there exist a 'discontinuity' between incarnated and disincarnated state? and, at a smaller scale, between waking and sleeping? At an even smaller scale, can't it be said that we continually awaken to our thoughts, coming from another state - call it intuitive-contextual, unconscious, or distracted state - in which the thought was not present? You wouldn't imagine calling any of these rhythms "fondamental discontinuities" I am sure.

On this point, I also want to briefly add that, yes we can clearly discern the discontinuities between these states from our ordinary perspective, but spiritual science is also all about realizing how they overlap and are superimposed. They are not fundamental discontinuities in that sense, but of course the value comes, not from simply holding the 'continuity' as a thought or theory, but intimately experiencing how the waking and sleeping states overlap. We have used the aliasing metaphor to orient toward how the waking state is a limited aperture of the more integrated meaning experienced in the sleep state, and this is still one of the most helpful metaphors to use for my orientation. Now matter how far we descend along the gradient of inner activity toward receded perceptions approaching 'pure' physicality, we are still on this aliased spectrum of continuous meaning. At the more integrated scales of meaningful activity, we can say our ordinary 'ticking' thoughts are embedded as latent potential, as potential encodings of the meaningful spectrum into more limited apertures of meaning.

What is it that aliases our linear and fragmented thoughts from the imaginative spectrum in this way? Fundamentally it is our narrow and selfish interests, our deep-seated antipathy for the inner life of other beings. Whether we are communicating in verbal language, sign language, pictorial expressions, etc. should have little impact on this aliasing effect, because the root cause is in the soul structure that is modulating all of these forms. This is why I was pointing to examples of two people using the exact same language at the content level but understanding its meaningful significance and depth differently, depending on how closely they resonate with the inner life of the author, particularly the archetypal movements animating that inner life. The same goes for pictorial art and music as well.