Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[AshvinP]

To be clear, we agree that the unity is experiential fact which happens before we intellectually reflect on it, but what I was referencing was how that unity arises, i.e. what glues the percept-concepts together. One answer is our thinking, which is what truly belongs to us, and we can arrive at that answer by reflecting on our thinking process. You seem to give a different answer in the rest of your post, but I am going to leave that aside to discuss the other issue of higher order unities (even though the first issue is also a very important distinction).

I do not think its "arises", but it is just a fundamental property of consciousness/awareness. It's definitely not our thinking because it takes place even without any thinking (which I verified many times in meditations)

Yes the argument is that thinking is a fundamental ontic aspect of consciousness, which fits with panentheistic conception of God(s). The response to meditation argument is that the fundamental thinking is still present even if we convince ourselves it is not through meditative process - it never disappears since it is fundamental. Again, "thinking" is being used in very broad sense of cognition which goes beyond merely rational cognition.

It convinces us that a philosophical (intellectual) quandary trumps any empirical observations.

I'm not sure it this parallel holds in our case. I am actually referring to my empirical observations. I do have occasionally "telepathic" communications (I once in a while know people's answers in exact phrases before they say it, as well as sometimes feel people's emotions). But I do not experience them as "their" thoughts and emotions exactly the way they experience, but rather like communications and emotional "resonances". Again, I may be mistaking here, but that's all I know. Basically, I do not have sufficient empirical data to come to a definite conclusion here. And the intellectual quandaries trumping empirical observations is exactly what I'm always trying to avoid, and if I do accept (always conditionally) any quandaries, I always try to be honest with myself and admit that these are only my inferences and beliefs. anyway, may be Cleric will give us more insights on this topic.
...
But let me return this question back to you: if you would want to infer that the communities of beings have any "telepathically" shared original experiences (rather than each being would experience its own telepathically produced instance of it), what empirical observations would support such inference?

The empirical observation which supports that is the given of our experience without adding any philosophical assumptions - there is unity and continuity of experience within individual and between individuals, including feelings and thoughts. The fact that we can communicate, empathize, share in the same thoughts as we do on this forum, etc. The notion that these are qualia "copies", "telepathic" messaging between fundamentally separate spheres of experience, etc. are assumptions being added on to the givens of experience. Most likely due to the self-imposed philosophical combo problems which are function of Cartesian and Kantian ontological-epistemic limits (that's my working hypothesis, anyway).

[Cleric]

Cleric, what are your thoughts about this puzzle?

Well, actually I already gave my position in the previous posts. I don't know if it was simply not well understood or considered unfeasible. I'll try to reiterate.

I would say that both #1 and #2 and neither but I don't mean this in some confusing Derrida way. It is perfectly possible for the intellect to have understanding of this.

#2 is correct in the sense that, as spoken many times, we never experience anything else than our own individual space. The recombination problem is really a problem. The view of the air bubbles, also of the whirlpools, although appealing and convenient to the mind, are misleading if taken too far. Thoughts like these force us to imagine things like the Markov blankets, etc. The trouble is that we try to derive our spiritual existence from sensory image. In the sensory realm we have everywhere multiplicity. Please note, I'm not speak of the supposed world-out-there, but simply of sensory perceptions, without any concern of what may actually lie behind them. In our consciousness we experience multiplicity of perceptions and also the unity of the awareness container so to speak, which was addressed in the posts above. We perform cognitive error when we take one of the multiplicity elements (for example air bubble or whirlpool) and take it to represent our individual conscious space. Such an analogy may be useful in some cases but if we take it too far we arrive at unsolvable enigmas - one of which is the so called recombination problems.

Eugene says:

You may ask then why two or more spaces could not "unite" into oneness in a similar way? The answer is: they are (hypothetically) screened from each other by "Markov blankets" and so appear to be separated (as it appears from within each of the spaces), while still being united in the common ground of Consciousness/Awareness.

This is an example of the unsolvable enigmas when we try to model reality after the contents of the intellectual mode of consciousness. The bolded part represents a logical inference - we first assume that conscious spaces are separate and then infer that they should have some common ground. We realize that at some point it should be the case that there's only one space of awareness and ours should be only a limited region of it. And with this arise all the questions of how this limited air bubble/whirlpool forms, when it dissolves, etc.

I already tried to present how these problems are solved through the color disc drawings.
We must be clear that if we are to solve this enigma we need to exert ourselves a little. We shouldn't imagine that this is an easy job. It is not difficult in the sense of doing complex algebra but in the sense that it's not about understanding some intellectual facts X, Y, Z but about actual living experience of our spiritual organism. These things can only be resolved if we strive to be constantly 'meta' about the way we think and how we snap back into old semi-automatic patterns of thought.

So as we said, the fact of experience is that we never experience more than one conscious space. We can't even imagine what that would mean. So in certain sense solipsism is correct. I really hope this won't be misunderstood, that's why I emphasize on the certain sense. We can never know any other than one conscious space experienced from the first-person perspective so to speak. We can take this to represent the fact that there's really only one Consciousness.

One way we can approach the issue is by saying the following: every being experiences a unique world of perceptions. As always - I remind that this world is not limited only to sensory perceptions but practically to anything that can become object of thinking - including thinking itself. In other words there's One awareness but infinite perspectives that it can experience. On the other hand there's only One world of ideas. So unique perspectives (experienced as unique world of perceptions) but sharing the same world of ideas. The qualia belongs to the unique perspective. Here we should make something very clear and I assure you that it's not something easy to understand in depth - especially if it's resisted. What are ideas in reality we don't experience very clearly. What we experience are thoughts that, so to speak, embody the ideas. And the perceptions of these thoughts are part of the unique perspective that every being experiences.

We can only approach the true nature of ideas if we don't confuse them with our thoughts that extract mineral shards out of them. The world of ideas is something real and is what we are actually moving through and probing. Within the totality of our unique perceptual perspective we experience, if I may use this expression, a symbol of the unique idea-configuration that we are experiencing in the 'now'. If we are able to make the distinction between the unique symbol perspective and the ideal meaning that we experience we're a step closer to solving the enigma. The enigma perpetuates only because we insist that the ideal content what we experience is also unique and private, just as the world of perceptions. This causes us to imagine the totality of our experience as an air bubble or whirlpool. This is what I tried to illustrate with the color disc and as you can see it's simply impossible to represent everything at once. The drawings in no way illustrate the crucial distinction that we're here making - unique perceptual perspective and shared ideas. These are 'mixed' so to speak in the drawing.

In modern times it's often spoken about the consensus reality. This is something practically impossible to understand through whirlpool analogies. It's not at all clear where lies the boundary between what we are forced to conform to and what is our creation. This causes the greatest confusion in spiritual circles, from absolute theistic determinism to escapism-like conceptions, believing that it's enough to think away reality in order to free oneself from it. This is where we simply can never make any sense of reality if we don't consider the hierarchical structure of the world of ideas. And once again, I know that it's difficult to break away from this but we really need to make the effort if we're ever to reach any clarity - we shouldn't confuse the world of ideas with our thought extracts of it. That our intellectual concepts form hierarchies is self-evident. But we can only approach reality if we consider that this hierarchy is the actual shared world of ideas. This is where solipsism becomes the pernicious philosophy that it is known for. Solipsism has a healthy side when we recognize the objective fact that all reality is always experienced from only one first-person perspective and we create unsolvable hard problems if we imagine separate conscious spaces. There are infinitely many perspectives within that space but the space is only one, with only one "I"-dentity. The pathological side of solipsism is when we imagine that the ego is directly responsible for its unique perspective. That this is not the case is obvious from every living experience. So the pathology occurs when we insist that within our ego we're somehow the creators of all, even when the facts prove us wrong at every step.

We approach the facts when we realize that the world of ideas is 'bigger' than the ego. The ego is only part of the unique perspective, only part of the symbol which reflects the idea-configuration. The ego is the idea and symbol that the one "I"-dentity of the one Cosmic Consciousness experiences within the limited context of our incarnate being. This already hints at the fact that this self-experience transforms dramatically based on the different levels of arrangements within the world of ideas. For reference, from the most ancient times, these levels of self (above our Earthly) have been known as Manas, Buddhi and Atma. For all practical purposes we should look upon these levels of self as something independent from what we experience as our Earthly ego. Just for a taste of how much we should change our thought habits - There's only one Atma for the whole humanity. We can think of this as the Cosmic Idea of Man - something which we are now exploring bit by bit through time, in multiplicity of unique perspectives but still each experiencing the same Atma Idea within the same one conscious space.

So our ego condition is exploring a labyrinth within the world of ideas and constantly experiencing the perspective, the unique symbol of the specific constellations of ideas. We can only approach the reality of the world of ideas if we are open to the possibility that we are truly experiencing only a mineral shadow of its totality within our ego experience. The reality of these ideas is something living and metamorphosing and within these ideas there are infinite other possible perceptual perspectives, which we call simply beings. We only get proper sense for our situation if we feel that we are embedded within this hierarchy of ideas, as if in a labyrinth. The whole quest of evolution is the gradual harmonization of ideas towards a unity. Here again, it's not only a question of having the harmony of the thoughts expressing these ideas - the real ideas are larger than us, we live and move through them, their harmonization will only happen through evolution in time and only if we participate constructively in the process. After all, each of us experiences at each moment a unique idea-constellation and it is our task to attune it with the Cosmic Idea.

This part is probably the most problematic - the fact that that we may be dependent in some way on some constellation of Ideas larger than us. But here it's simply that we should come clean with the facts. No one can deny that we are fully dependent within Earthly life. Self, family, nation, humanity, Earth, Sol, etc. Who can deny that we are embedded and fully constricted in this context? Yet it's generally believed that this whole context is simply some consensus reality that simply vanishes beyond the threshold of death (assuming one is free from desires towards that reality). But this is simply not confirmed by the facts of higher cognition. And if it's not already clear, higher cognition doesn't mean some god given powers to look in some arcane and beyond world. It is arcane but it is not beyond - we are living in it all the time. It is occult only in the sense that mathematics are occult for those who have not explored the math ideas. The experience after death is such that we simply find ourselves precisely in the same hierarchy of ideas in which we live anyway also while in a body. Actually nothing really changes in death, we simply lose part of the symbol that was allowing us to support our fictitious ideas about the nature of the beyond - we lose the scratchboard on which we used to scribble our theories. We are in the same beyond even in this very moment, we are living in the same hierarchy of ideas. That's also the reason that it is actually here on Earth that we have the conditions to understand these ideas. We are not yet free to do what we want in the disincarnate state. We can compare this in the following way: at the moment of death we are launched on a 'psychedelic' trip where we are utterly out of control of what is happening! Our whole disincarnate trip consists in the struggle of making sense of the experience and trying to grasp at something concrete, something stable. And ultimately we truly grasp this concrete thing. After all the bashing along the waves of the trip, of which we simply can't make any sense, we finally grasp at something stable and begin to pull ourselves towards it. The more we pull towards it, the more our perspective begins to take shape, begins to become recognizable, sensible. What we thus pull ourselves into is nothing else but our new incarnation. So we see that we should really take things seriously. What we can achieve here, while we have the firm support of our brains we can never achieve in the disincarnate state. Unless we find the point of stability, the center of our being which is independent of a physical body, while here on Earth, it is practically impossible to find it in the disincarnate state. If we can't recognize and experience the living ideas of thinking, feeling, willing, nation, humanity, animals, plants, etc. while here on Earth we won't recognize them in their reality in the disincarnate state too. As long as we look upon Earthly life as a mere floating dream picture, that we hope to free ourselves from after death, that's exactly what will happen - we'll be free from that picture because we lose it together with the sensory organs of the body. But at the same time we'll be left with nothing. We'll be left with something only if we experience and orient within the world of ideas while in a body. Then this structure that we have thus lived through will also be the recognizable structure of what we are moving through in the absence of sensory organs.

I said that our spiritual existence is a continuous, solipsistic as it were, stream but I haven't really addressed the fact that nevertheless we need to experience these transitions between the different configurations of ideas and corresponding perceptions, between the different levels of self. As said, Atma is one, so after all there's some kind of recombination. This is very deep topic and this post is long enough but I'll only mention that this transition between stages of self has something to do with sacrifice, death and resurrection. As mentioned, we should really relate to the higher members of the self as something more than the ego. It is true that the essence of our first-person experience, the "I"-dentity of the Cosmic Consciousness is always the same, but the way in which this "I" understands and perceives its self-image is different at the different levels of self.

Also I didn't speak of the shared experiences. In short: if we, so to speak, merge with the soul experience of another being, like with someone who we love dearly, it is still the case that the cognition of this experience is unique to our perspective. But some feelings may be truly shared. This leads us to something that I haven't mentioned very often - we shouldn't imagine the living idea-beings only as something 'mental'. In quite real sense what we call Love, pain, etc. are real idea-beings and as such they can be common experience, just as any other mental idea. This doesn't mean that they'll be experienced in exactly the same way in each unique perspective. This is true for mental ideas too, our unique constellation within the world of ideas makes the individual ideas to be experienced in different proportions and relations so to speak. But nevertheless in their archetypal forms they are truly one and the same for everyone.

[Cleric]

Now, I prefer to say, here is what I see or grok, for example, "I see God in the tree because I see the tree as a tree." I'm not here saying your vision is wrong. I asking if it is powerful enough for you to own it, or is it still a belief?

PS: I'm doing this in a friendly way, perhaps urging toward a more powerful lingo. Your lengthy texts often sound to me like efforts to prove, which implies a weakness that must be overcome. Alternatively, I offer the example of the approach of the musical JC who says, "SANCTIFY don't JUSTIFY." I invite you to shine the glory of your vision.

It's more than powerful. It's the fabric that I live and breathe. The idea of justification falls away if you grasp that I'm always speaking of the One world of ideas that we live and move through - the very same the you live and move through. What appears as justification is in reality building staircases of materials (concepts) the we are all familiar with. They lead to various vantage points within the world of ideas. I remind you of this. I'm never trying to make a picture of something the 'reality' of which should be believed to exist somewhere out there in the beyond. The living experience of the ideas is the only thing that matters. As we experience ideas from different angles, as in the picture above, we understand that we are exploring something unseen, we begin to sense the inner 'geometry' of our own existence. To experience absence of thoughts and flow with some nebulous totality is not that much. But when we experience that the actual structure of the Cosmos is one and the same with our own 'geometry' of consciousness, the 'geometry' of the world of ideas, then our whole existence receives totally new meaning. This is probably one of the most enlightening moments that we can have on Earth.

[Lou Gold]

Now, I prefer to say, here is what I see or grok, for example, "I see God in the tree because I see the tree as a tree." I'm not here saying your vision is wrong. I asking if it is powerful enough for you to own it, or is it still a belief?

PS: I'm doing this in a friendly way, perhaps urging toward a more powerful lingo. Your lengthy texts often sound to me like efforts to prove, which implies a weakness that must be overcome. Alternatively, I offer the example of the approach of the musical JC who says, "SANCTIFY don't JUSTIFY." I invite you to shine the glory of your vision.

It's more than powerful. It's the fabric that I live and breathe. The idea of justification falls away if you grasp that I'm always speaking of the One world of ideas that we live and move through - the very same the you live and move through. What appears as justification is in reality building staircases of materials (concepts) the we are all familiar with. They lead to various vantage points within the world of ideas. I remind you of this. I'm never trying to make a picture of something the 'reality' of which should be believed to exist somewhere out there in the beyond. The living experience of the ideas is the only thing that matters. As we experience ideas from different angles, as in the picture above, we understand that we are exploring something unseen, we begin to sense the inner 'geometry' of our own existence. To experience absence of thoughts and flow with some nebulous totality is not that much. But when we experience that the actual structure of the Cosmos is one and the same with our own 'geometry' of consciousness, the 'geometry' of the world of ideas, then our whole existence receives totally new meaning. This is probably one of the most enlightening moments that we can have on Earth.

The idea of justification falls away if you grasp that I'm always speaking of the One world of ideas that we live and move through - the very same the you live and move through. What appears as justification is in reality building staircases of materials (concepts) the we are all familiar with.

Actually, I grokked what you say better as I read your current lengthy dialogues. I was reminded of a story from my days with my first meditation teacher. He was giving a workshop on seeing auras. I complained, "I don't see colors." He invited me to come near, close my eyes as he moved my hand randomly near parts of torso. Periodically, he would say, "What color?" and I would respond, "red" - "blue" - "yellow" - etc. At the end, when I opened my eyes everyone was laughing because I had called all the chakra colors correctly. I objected saying, "But I didn't see any colors - those words just came to me." The teacher responded, "Lou, that's how you see." And it's true also for me in my dreams and visions. It's extremely rare for me to see a color but the words come anyway. Reflecting on this self-experience, I thought, "Maybe those lengthy texts are the way Cleric 'sees'. Do you resonate with such a view? I ask because I don't presume that we see the same, which is why I say "I" and not "We". Similarly, in communion, I don't see hierarchies. I see peers, or perhaps more metaphysically, and experientially, I recognize aspects of myself.

[Cleric]

Reflecting on this self-experience, I thought, "Maybe those lengthy texts are the way Cleric 'sees'. Do you resonate with such a view? I ask because I don't presume that we see the same, which is why I say "I" and not "We". Similarly, in communion, I don't see hierarchies. I see peers, or perhaps more metaphysically, and experientially, I recognize aspects of myself.

Yes, Lou. This is exactly what it is. At our stage of evolution it's much more important to 'see' the ideas. When I say 'ideas' this shouldn't be considered only in the narrow sense of intellectual concepts. We can't do much only with them. We need to proceed to the mobile living ideas. Before we can discover these ideas directly from reality we need to exercise, to prepare for their cognition. Think of a seed that sprouts and grows into a plant. If we turn this into a meditation it's of the greatest importance to keep our focus on our own thought activity, how we experience the growth of the plant through our thought. It's not important to visually see the plant (in certain sense it's even better if we don't) but to experience the shape and metamorphosis of our own spiritual activity as we grow it, if that makes sense. Almost as if our thinking becomes a fluid substance and we make it into the shape of a growing plant. And this is something that is not taught today. From the earliest age kids are mummified with dead, rigid, mineral-like concepts - numbers, letters, forms. When we develop our inner activity in such a fluid and mobile way we also begin to recognize processes and beings that can only be captured by such kind of cognition. They are simply invisible for the rigid concepts. Remember the Himba tribe. They don't see colors that we see because they don't have concepts for them. On the other hand they have concepts and see fine grades of colors which we can hardly distinguish. This is a clear example that we can perceive only what we have (or can discover) concepts for. But the vaster part of reality can't at all be captured by mineral-like concepts. We need to set our thinking in motion, to turn it into something completely different. Not to use it for chaining together trains of dead concepts but to feel with our fluid thinking the structure of the world of ideas. When we develop our spiritual activity in such fluidic way, we begin to literally perceive processes and beings that can only be captured by such living ideas. And we don't perceive them as something external, outside of us - our very spiritual activity is the touching organ that explores the living geometry of the spiritual world - which is what we are. As far as color and other similar sensations, they also come later but they shouldn't be our primary goal. It's much more important to begin with the living ideas. As a matter of fact developing visionary seeing is much much easier! But then we are faced with a panorama of visions that we still need to interpret with the intellect. In certain sense the spiritual world remains external to us and we can only resort to divination.

You can find peace with the hierarchies in the same way - when you stop looking for them outside of you. Here's a simple hierarchy: Think of Love. Not only as some feeling but the archetypal idea, what it means for your and for the whole. Then think how other ideas can be in harmony or not with Love. For example watering a dried out plant or not. In certain sense the ideas are independent, like peers. But it's also true that Love is a much more encompassing being - it relates to everything. So it's up to you to see the bright side of hierarchy. Not as power structures but as unities of Love. If your Love increases, not only as feeling but as real touching of reality through your liberated spiritual activity, you find there living ideas that are in different degrees of harmony with each other.

[SanteriSatama]

Yes the argument is that thinking is a fundamental ontic aspect of consciousness, which fits with panentheistic conception of God(s). The response to meditation argument is that the fundamental thinking is still present even if we convince ourselves it is not through meditative process - it never disappears since it is fundamental. Again, "thinking" is being used in very broad sense of cognition which goes beyond merely rational cognition.

A metacognitive/meditative observation of thinking appears as a temporal layering. Here writing is the slowest layer, emerging from less slow spoken speech and internal speech (prototypical thinking) which emerge faster and faster layers, "smaller and smaller" durations of sensations/meanings.

I don't claim this observation is universal to all perspectival multinatures of others biological species and spiritual realms of gods etc. archetypes. "Bubble" is a fitting description of speed of light as a top speed for a certain kind of region in idealist ontology, and in this bubble bodies of muscle and bone can move faster than "speed of thought". On the other hand, some perspectival aspect (OBE, astral bodies, mathematical thinking etc. imagination) can move and jump effortlessly in the dark regions which are both "outside" and intermingled with the subluminal bubble.

Thinking likes to think about thinking, but for philosophy we need also to make some distinctions between thinking, sensing, feeling, moving etc. I think the point you are making is that our daytime patterns of thought and perspectives can be present in the dark regions and interactions with archetypal forces and elements to various degrees, and as experience grows, evolve into more and more comprehensive metacognitive realizations.

[Eugene I]

The "always" can be questioned. U.G. Krishnamurti describing his transformation and and experiencing hints towards lack of unity of his sensual experiencing. I can't speak from his experience, but the suggestion seem to be that sensual "elements" can function more independently, and "naturally" (as he uses the word), without unifying force mixing them into more coherent whole.

The unity is always there, the "split" only happens in an extra interpretative layer (as a content/meaning of interpretative thoughts). The interpretation never really breaks the unity, but simply veils it. One needs meditation experience to see that: identify the interpretative though-layer, turn it on and off and see how it all exactly works, What you will find is: you turn the interpretation off and experience the unity, then turn it back on and the unity is seemingly broken according to the interpretative meaning, however, you will still notice that the unity "underneath" the interpretative thought layer is still there. It's only when we narrow our attention and disregard/neglect the unity of the direct experience (it falls off our focus of attention), we get an "impression" that the unity is broken. This is how the illusion of duality works.

[Eugene I]

Yes the argument is that thinking is a fundamental ontic aspect of consciousness, which fits with panentheistic conception of God(s). The response to meditation argument is that the fundamental thinking is still present even if we convince ourselves it is not through meditative process - it never disappears since it is fundamental. Again, "thinking" is being used in very broad sense of cognition which goes beyond merely rational cognition.
ontological-epistemic limits (that's my working hypothesis, anyway).

As Santeri also pointed, the only way to differentiate between different aspects of consciousness is to study them practically in meditation and learn how to differentiate thinking and its products from other aspects such as awareness itself, perceptions, feelings etc. The products of thinking are always meanings or meaningful imaginations. We can say that meanings are the qualia of thoughts. You are right that many of them happen unconsciously and we do not notice the difference between the raw content of the direct conscious experience and the meanings produced by thoughts. This is of crucial importance, because inability to distinguish the reality of experience from the meanings leads to confusions: we take the meanings for reality. Kids imagine Santa Claus (that's a meaning/content of a thought) and, since they are unable to differentiate between meanings from reality of raw experience, they believe that Santa is real (and this belief is also another meaning). Note that meanings of thoughts are also part of our direct conscious experience, but they are the "content" (qualia) of thoughts, while thoughts themselves are the primary phenomena of conscious experience.

So, buy gaining this skill of differentiating meanings from direct experience one can also see that the unity of the space of experience, by its experiential quality, is not a meaning of a thought, but a fact of the direct raw conscious experience. But this is an experiential observation/fact and you really need to experience it and study in meditation, you can't arrive at this conclusion only intellectually.

The empirical observation which supports that is the given of our experience without adding any philosophical assumptions - there is unity and continuity of experience within individual and between individuals, including feelings and thoughts. The fact that we can communicate, empathize, share in the same thoughts as we do on this forum, etc. The notion that these are qualia "copies", "telepathic" messaging between fundamentally separate spheres of experience, etc. are assumptions being added on to the givens of experience. Most likely due to the self-imposed philosophical combo problems which are function of Cartesian and Kantian ontological-epistemic limits (that's my working hypothesis, anyway).

I agree with that and I said it before: the unity of our private space is am experiential fact, but the rest are only intellectual inferences. But if you want to arrive at a different model, it needs to be logically consistent and you need to explain how to integrate the experience of multiple spaces into unity without breaking "into pieces" the unity of each private space. I'm not saying it's impossible, but you need to come up with a consistent model of it.

Basically what we are doing here is a spiritual science of consciousness and cognition. But we cannot do science only by intellectual exercises, we need a strong experimental/experiential basis to be able to verify/falsify our hypotheses as much as possible. and such experiential basis can only be achieved with much meditative and spiritual work. Theoretical physics could not do anything without a lot of work and progress in experimental physics, and the same applies to the spiritual science.

[SanteriSatama]

The unity is always there, the "split" only happens in an extra interpretative layer (as a content/meaning of interpretative thoughts). The interpretation never really breaks the unity, but simply veils it. One needs meditation experience to see that: identify the interpretative though-layer, turn it on and off and see how it all exactly works, What you will find is: you turn the interpretation off and experience the unity, then turn it back on and the unity is seemingly broken according to the interpretative meaning, however, you will still notice that the unity "underneath" the interpretative thought layer is still there. It's only when we narrow our attention and disregard/neglect the unity of the direct experience (it falls off our focus of attention), we get an "impression" that the unity is broken. This is how the illusion of duality works.

"One", "unity", etc. You, Cleric, etc. are still speaking from a number theoretical conditioning and projecting it to the bubbles, spheres, individuals of experience.

Experientally, we can travel outside of all bubbles into the void. How can you say that the void is "One" or "unity", when it is outside and independent of mathematics and all form? Void is not even "sunyata" or "zero" or "void". Same argument can be done also philosophically, logically and mathematically. "One" and "unity" are not fundamental and foundational, they can be derived from more-less relation.

Better, and more accurate expression is love (agape, passion, loving-kindness, compassion, etc., pick your term). Love is not "One", it is a choice. Love as such does not depend from number theory. "One" is not indivisible, it can be only divided, and divided individuals in their gnothi seauton keep on reaching towards the "Height" of their birth/origin. It's all fine, but not the end of it. With love comes also its other, strife and war, as those manifest in our phenomenal world, and in any case, a seed of war, separation etc. Love is greater than war, because love is the other of the void, hence war etc. dukkha is part of love.

We are all here having these discussions because we have chosen love. In Buddhism, some paths seek escape, weary of the dukkha aspect of love, some paths choose love, like the boddhisatva paths.

'One' is an object of faith, and as Badiou sees and explains, a gap, a cut, and as such, a force of creation. I love mathematics, and mathematics is much more than "One", and much less. Our love does not depend from One, staying confined inside the bubble of One.

[AshvinP]

Yes the argument is that thinking is a fundamental ontic aspect of consciousness, which fits with panentheistic conception of God(s). The response to meditation argument is that the fundamental thinking is still present even if we convince ourselves it is not through meditative process - it never disappears since it is fundamental. Again, "thinking" is being used in very broad sense of cognition which goes beyond merely rational cognition.

A metacognitive/meditative observation of thinking appears as a temporal layering. Here writing is the slowest layer, emerging from less slow spoken speech and internal speech (prototypical thinking) which emerge faster and faster layers, "smaller and smaller" durations of sensations/meanings.

I don't claim this observation is universal to all perspectival multinatures of others biological species and spiritual realms of gods etc. archetypes. "Bubble" is a fitting description of speed of light as a top speed for a certain kind of region in idealist ontology, and in this bubble bodies of muscle and bone can move faster than "speed of thought". On the other hand, some perspectival aspect (OBE, astral bodies, mathematical thinking etc. imagination) can move and jump effortlessly in the dark regions which are both "outside" and intermingled with the subluminal bubble.

Thinking likes to think about thinking, but for philosophy we need also to make some distinctions between thinking, sensing, feeling, moving etc. I think the point you are making is that our daytime patterns of thought and perspectives can be present in the dark regions and interactions with archetypal forces and elements to various degrees, and as experience grows, evolve into more and more comprehensive metacognitive realizations.

Thinking in the broad sense is the unity of percepts and concepts. Thinking. Feeling, Willing. Yes all three are a Tri-Unity, fundamental and inseparable, we will never find only one without the others, but they can be distinguished as you say. My basic point to Eugene was that thinking is not added on to sensations ex post facto under this panentheistic framework.