lorenzop wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2024 10:01 pm I must be missing something - I fail to see how thinking, a local and finite activity, no matter how exalted, can directly invoke or be equivalent to a Oneness, or Intuitive Whole.
Can a thought convey unboundedness\Infinity\Freedom?
And if this is possible, to invoke a thought as Ideal Principle or Wholeness, what happens when one has to make dinner? Is the Wholeness forgotten or can one maintain Wholeness thinking along with daily chores thinking?
I know we have invoked the TM fallacy a few times, but it is again instructive here. We have to conceive of the normal thinking that we use in philosophy, science, to make sense of everyday experiences, etc. as the lowest expression of a unitary Conscious Activity (CA). It is the very first stage we reach after awakening to the reality of CA from instinctive animal life which is ignorant of that reality. We have used many analogies for this before. Most simply, it is like the frozen state of water, whereas higher modes of CA are akin to the fluid, gaseous, and 'plasma' states. Samadhi is not the plasma state, rather it resides at the threshold of the frozen and fluid states. There is practically no upper limit to how integrated this CA can become and the rest of human, Earthly, and Solar evolution will be an unfolding of the higher states.
The key is that, no matter what state we are speaking of, CA is aimed at making sense of its lawful experiential flow. When you cook dinner, I am sure you would agree there is a lawfulness to the various experiences involved, how the ingredients mix with each other, how the heat affects them, etc. Someone who had never learned to cook, by either observing/contemplating others cook, watching instructional videos, taking lessons, experimenting with ingredients, etc., would not be able to make the same amount of sense of this lawful experiential flow and therefore their cooking would suffer in range, results, and quality compared to someone who had learned more.
We should imagine the fluid and higher states are also exploring the unique lawfulness of the experiential flow at more integrated levels. What is the point of making sense of the experiential flow at ever-higher levels of integration? It's easier to ask, what is not the point of this? The point is not:
- To derive more sensual pleasure for ourselves
- To accumulate wealth and material goods
- To impress family, friends, or snag a mate
- To puff up knowledge and wield it over others academically or otherwise
We could probably add a couple more to that list. Practically everything else in individual and collective life can improve tremendously from this living knowledge. As a simple example, the cure for cancer is not hidden in a secret vault by evil pharmaceutical companies, but is veiled by each individual who is fully capable but nevertheless refuses to explore the depths of their soul life via the fluid state of CA. Such illnesses would disappear of their own accord as a natural result of that living exploration. We could go on endlessly with more examples. We aren't speaking of some one-time feeling of merging with the Whole but the very process by which the Whole differentiated through the 'big bang' of spiritual involution and how the resulting CA will evolve back to the Whole over comparably extensive Time-scales.