Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri Jun 11, 2021 9:08 pm
Thinking without knowing the Experiential Unity is incomplete.
Knowledge of Experiential Unity without the knowledge of ideal meanings and relations through Thinking is an "idiotic" experience and is also incomplete (fully agree with you here, Cleric).
Only integration of both can bring the completeness to the knowledge of Reality (and thereby fully close the Kantian divide)
I tried to give very simple analogy with the book page. It seems you insist that Thinking doesn't
expand the experiential unity but fragments it and obscures it. This is a justified objection if we're dealing with purely abstract thinking but all attempts have been made to show that Thinking (capital T) is something much more encompassing. Let me try once more with pictures:
It must be stressed that these pictures don't represent some third person theories of reality. It's impossible to draw a 'first-person picture'. As soon as we draw a line on the paper, it's already external to us. So it is up to us to make the
inner effort and look at the pictures as
pointers to inner experiential realities.
Above is a picture to which we more or less agree. We have the experiential contents of consciousness (perceptions) which confront our Thinking spiritual activity. The latter weaves ideas through the perceptions, organizes them, refines them and unites them in higher order wholenesses. For example, the page of written text is experiential unity but once worked upon with Thinking it unites the perceptions into larger whole. We can understand the text, we can relate to the biography of the author which is/was a real spiritual being walking the Earth. We can trace the origin of the paper and ink. Paper leads us to the trees, to Nautre, the Earth, water, air, Sun. We see how every perception is connected with invisible threads to all other potential perceptions and we use Thinking to trace and reveal these connections through the corresponding ideal content. This you also agree with. Yet you see it more or less in the following way:
In other words, the ideal content which Thinking weaves into the World of perceptions/experiences, you see as something
in addition, something which is not essential for the true nature of the experiential world. In a way, our ideas just
inflate our personal bubble on the side of ideas, which correspondingly increases the amount of thought-forms. Clearly, you see this as something which brings about
disbalance, something which
obscures the pure (direct) experiential reality. This needs to be balanced with pure experience. If we return to our book analogy this would sound like we're going
astray when we trace and reveal the above mentioned relations through Thinking. We're only adding layers of thoughts/concepts
on top of the pure experience. You agree that this is useful, that there's 'nothing wrong with it' but still you see it as deterring from the purity of direct experience. In other words, you consider that there's something pristine and irreplaceable in the experience of the incomprehensible text, which is
lost once we work upon it with Thinking. Again - I agree that there are many instances where this is exactly the case, as with many modern completely abstract and disconnected from reality scientific and philosophical theories. Yet what we're talking about aims not to replace or reduce the direct experiences but only to make them richer, denser, more encompassing, more interrelated, full of meaning. The only reason you can't see it in this way is because you refuse to explore spiritual activity that goes beyond the personal bubble - that is, all thoughts have completely local significance. They are useful personal bubble idea-model of reality but have no significance for the pure experiential reality. In other words they are useful but
foreign elements to true reality, only adding practical layers of knowledge.
If we at least allow ourselves to think without prejudice about cognitive activity that may stand higher than the personal bubble intellect, we arrive at a picture like this:
We can speak whole essays about this picture but I'll just mention few things here. In certain sense our ordinary consciousness sphere is
concentric with the higher order consciousness spheres. In our ordinary state all spheres are
flattened, so to speak (the yellow arrows showing how the higher spheres are flattened/projected as the surface of the inner sphere). Through the higher forms of cognition we begin to differentiate this flattened experiential surface in its depth (or verticality). This goes together with the experience of the higher order ideas, which are no longer the static, mineral-like concepts of the intellect but the actual creative
forces proceeding from ideating activity of higher beings.
This must be properly understood. By gaining higher knowledge we don't simply stuff ourselves with abstract theories, inflating the ego. Instead we live together with the ideating activity of beings. In Imagination we still
read these activities as they impress into our soul but with the higher forms of cognition we increasingly merge cognitevely with the Cosmic activity.
All of these things have been addressed in the Deep MAL essay. Here I just want to once again point attention to the fact that through development of the higher forms of consciousness we don't simply inflate the ideal content but we enter the domain of Cosmic Thoughts which are the Macrocosmic forces supporting and enlivening reality. I've used this example several times - the flattened experience of the contents of consciousness is like looking at a stereogram (
Magic Eye) but only seeing the flat image. Just as seeing Magic Eye pictures requires certain skill (acquired through slight effort), so we need the specific methods of self-development in order to see the depth of consciousness. Perceptions, willing, feeling, thinking are normally flattened for people of today. We can see how far this goes through the fact that in the West the whole complexity of spiritual experience is called flatly 'mind'. Learning to have clear differentiating experience of the above four elements is already a step forward in development. Through higher development this depth increases. Not in spatial sense (although spatial depth is a great analogy) but in the sense that the elements of consciousness become meaningful, elucidated by
Cosmic Thoughts. For example, the outermost sphere in the picture above, which is the highest form of cognition - Intuition - is related with the physical Cosmos and thus with the physical body. Yet we must not imagine that at that stage we find bodies in space as we do in our ordinary sensory consciousness. As a matter of fact, that highest sphere is weaved of something that we can call color, sound, smell, taste, touch, etc. If we are able to experience these sense elements independently of any objects, as pure realities, we can form some idea of what is meant with physical world in the esoteric sense. It's not a world of atoms, forces, etc. - these we can only conceptualize from the highly specific experience of an intellect confronting manifold sensory panorama. It's the 'substance' out of which the sensory panorama itself is made. Furthermore, this substance, which is inner environment for man, is only the reflection of ideating activity of higher beings, just like verbal thoughts are reflection of our own ideating activity. In the early stages of evolution we may say that the whole Cosmos was weaved out of
inner experiences of smell, taste, warmth, color, etc. (of course not exactly in the form we know them from sensory consciousness. The very fact that in Intuition they are experienced not as something pointing to outer world but as Thought-content of higher beings, hints that there's difference). In the process of involution the patterns and dynamics of these substances become more and more complicated, folded in complex ways, reflecting the complicating ideating relations of beings.
Our inner phenomenological picture is experience of precisely these folds, which are the true reality of physicality. When we approach this complex folded experience with the intellectual concepts we simplify the picture and as a result live with the
ideas, which weave a kind of a
phantom reality supposed to lie behind the world of manifold color, smell, sound, etc. Today we experience the essence of the same primordial Cosmic colors and smells but contracted to the microcosmic sphere of our ego unity. The Macrocosmic color is still there, filling all of space, but we need to go beyond ourselves in order to perceive it. In our ego sphere we perceive from the Cosmic nature of color only as much as we can capture through our intellectual concepts (and these currently form the phantom picture of reality).
We can't decode the folds of the Cosmic sense substance, contracted in the bounds of our body, only with the intellect - the latter operates on a very high level of abstraction. We need precisely the ability to
read the direct experiences, yet not by simply merging unintelligibly with the folds of perceptions (which mysticism suggests). The folds of consciousness become intelligible only when elucidated by the Cosmic Thoughts
which produce the folds in the first place. And in order to find these Cosmic Thoughts we need to go outside our head. In the head the Thoughts become formatted by the brain to microcosmic thoughts (the intellectual phantom reality). To grasp Cosmic Thoughts we need to perceive
through the folds of the brain (Magic Eye), which we innerly experience as the manifold structure of (parts of) consciousness. Just as we materialistically imagine that we have neural activity constrained by the physical structure of the brain, so we have ordinary thoughts constrained by Cosmic Thoughts (which give the general blueprint for the brain). If we are to ascend to Cosmic Thoughts we need to Think not only with our brain but with every part of the body. And not only with the body but with the whole spiritual environment. This of course will sound outrageous for the materialist. Interestingly it sounds outrageous also for the idealist who insists on the absoluteness of the 'dissociative boundary'. Naturally, it should be precisely the nondualists who should embrace with ease the possibility to go beyond the head and live with Cosmic Thoughts. Unfortunately this is exactly what is resisted the most. It's much preferred to focus on the buzzing confusion and its heartfelt unity, rather than to seek the causative forces, the World Thoughts that shape the folds of reality. This results in reality being conceived as Great Mysteriousness where it's pointless to seek deeper understanding of anything. Experience of Cosmic Thoughts require coming to terms with the Higher Self. Most nondualists dismiss any notion of self, let alone Higher Self. With this they dismiss any possibility to live cognitively within Macrocosmic ideational activity. For this reason they are
forced to see any such reports as delusional
ordinary thoughts (the ideal inflation in the second picture). Yet they don't do that because they have verified the facts for themselves (and the path of this verification is disclosed in the greatest details) but because they
must deny Cosmic Thoughts, if they are to support their own view - that direct perception (even if buzzing incomprehension) gives us a
truer 'knowledge' of reality than any ideas that connect and elucidate the direct experience. This view clothes in complete mystery the picture of the 'true experience'. In this view human cognition has nothing to do with the true causes. For example, for the mystic, speaking of
reasons that man has a head, torso and limbs, has significance only for the
local human experience. It might be practical and useful but ultimately anything that we cognize about this has
nothing to do with the true grounds of reality. For the mystic, imbuing experience with ideas may be practical (and even necessary for survival) but ultimately, from the point of view of the 'true' grounds of existence, it can't reveal anything essential of the deepest secrets, it only obscures them.
It is fairly easy to see through the reasons of the above. It's simply that man wants the acknowledge the unity of the Cosmos but doesn't want to admit that there could be forms of intelligence higher than his own, which weave the Cosmos out of Macrocosmic Thoughts. In other cases the higher forms of intelligence are acknowledged but it's assumed that they are of completely different character, lying in orthogonal cognitive spaces as it were. It's so easily overlooked that the only reason we can Think about the World is because we are uniting with the
World Thoughts of beings higher than us that support and enliven the World and our own bodily sheaths.
) fractal of conscious forms, states, ideas and experiences and discovering/experiencing the beauty those forms (mathematical included) worth the suffering.
