Re: Conformal Cyclic Meditation
Posted: Thu Dec 29, 2022 4:00 am
Federica,
We should be clear that I am not arguing to 'adopt VR'. Rather the argument is that, the very existence of VR and certain VR experiences is a pedagogical tool for our living thinking, even for people who never have the chance or inclination to experience it themselves, or only try it once in a while. I don't play VR every day for 30-45 min (not sure where you got that from) and don't recommend anyone else do so either. It is not unique from other cultural phenomena in that regard - all natural and cultural phenomena have the potential to be redeemed as fantastic tools for our spiritual growth when we approach them with living thinking and pure intentions, which is a fact that is sorely missed in modern thinking. In the context of Cleric's recent posts on the other thread, we can say that all such outer forms of spiritual activity point to the deeper temporal forces of the shared soul and spirit organism which brought them to manifestation. The very fact that VR is a novel technological development means it must provide us a new angle from which to approach the living forces of that shared inner landscape. It provides us unique analogies and metaphors and illustrations which simply can't be made from within the experience of the normal sensory spectrum. Remember, this is what prompted your comments. No one claimed VR is the go-to spiritual tool that we should all experiment with on a daily basis. Rather we used them briefly as metaphors for how our spiritual activity interacts with the perceptual environment, as one tiny angle of approach among many others, and it's up to others to decide whether they can sense the same pedagogical value as we do from that very limited and idealized use of VR.
The problem with metaphysical conclusions is not having them per se, but deriving them from momentary expressions of the outer physiognomy (natural and cultural forms) of the Spirit. Our metaphysics should be a flexible, open-ended, multiple angle, evolving process of exploring the principle ways in which the Spirit manifests itself through our living first-person consciousness, which is of course the only thing we can possibly know-experience. Our metaphysics should center around the deeper thinking perspective which is formulating the abstract conclusions, along with all other perceptual structures. This is how phenomenology (appearances) spirals into ontology (reality) through epistemology (what it means 'to know'). To recognize archetypal structures and principles of spiritual evolution is a valid metaphysical conclusion as long as we don't idolize it as some abstract model, as an end-in-itself for our knowing assessment, but as a symbol for how our first-person cognitive experience unfolds. These principles are really the only aspect of the spiritual dynamics we can get a confident hold of with our ordinary reasoning. Without them we remain mired in fragmented details of how things appear to us at any given time. In that sense, the principle that all phenomenal forms must provide pedagogical value as analogs to the underlying spiritual processes is something we can know as intrinsic to spiritual evolution. It is logically necessitated by the polar relation between the potential-actual, unmanifested-manifest, idea-perception, etc.
The black box features, the soul attitudes, for VR immersion are the same as for every other cultural phenomena which involves abstracting, externalizing, egoistic thinking. Certainly those can be and have been explored in depth through spiritual science. They generally revolve around desires for comfort, ease, minimal responsibility, stimulation, pleasure, personal power, etc. coupled with a subconscious longing for the spiritual worlds which becomes more and more pathological as it remains in possession of the intellectual, atomistic ego. It's a huge error, in my view, to think that these are unique to people who incline towards VR technology, which will practically be every young person as it becomes more widely available. Likewise it is a mistake to assume that normal sensory technology is not also conditioning our bodily organism at a deep level. The music we listen to also penetrates our etheric organism. In that context, I mentioned that the songs retained in my etheric memory which are brought more into my waking consciousness prompted me to take more active responsibility for what and how I expose myself to the sensory spectrum. Without that greater consciousness, they would still be conditioning my being but entirely outside of my awareness. And without the exposure, I would never have that resistance to work through with my will. There are great lessons to be learned and virtues to be earned from all perspectives, phenomena, obstacles, etc.
Above all we can't forget the role of the conscious thinking participant in determining the 'descent' into or 'ascent' from the sensory-conceptual spectrum. Everything is relative to the mode of consciousness. A being whose natural mode of cognition is instinctive consciousness would be making an ascent to express their meaningful activity through intellectual concepts, while a being whose natural mode is Imaginative would be making a descent to do the same thing. An easy way to see if we are falling into this trap is to ask, 'can my conclusions hold good no matter what develops in the next 100 years?' Can you know that there can be nothing of unique pedagogical value to the VR experience no matter how the technology develops through human consciousness over that time? I know for sure all cultural phenomena have pedagogical value because of the foundational principle of spiritual evolution, the fact that there already is that value with respect to VR for at least two people on this forum and, no matter what happens, there will be enough higher cognitive capacity to retain or expand that value. There really is no absolute descent in spiritual evolution - there is no absolute "dualism", "dissociation", etc. - only a spiral upwards which certain perspectives of the Spirit can participate in or miss out on as they lag behind. The lagging behind is what then allows perspectives to persist in the thinking experience we call "materialism", "dualism", etc. It is not intrinsic to the perceptual forms themselves.
Of course not. And I have never made the argument that we should immerse our entire lives in VR for spiritual growth. In fact I have said a few times that most people should stay away from it altogether, precisely because the risk of "double dissociative boundary" is great for those who are unwilling to bring their first-person thinking activity out of the blind spot (which is unfortunately most people). Again, that is the determining factor if these things become curses or blessings. The advent of materialistic thinking is a great example - it's exactly the sort of development which is integral to our progressive spiritual evolution and which can be redeemed into great lessons for perfection of our whole organism IF we become conscious of the dynamics through which that advent occurred. Without that development, practically none of what we are doing on this forum would be possible. But if it doesn't become conscious for us, it can catapult us back into an animalistic state of being. Why should there be any fundamental difference for the technologies which have resulted from materialistic thinking, as extensions of it? It's very unlikely an idealistic person living in the 18th century would be able to fairly assess materialism in its potential redemptive value, and we are in a similar situation with 21st century technologies. If we stray from the foundational principles of spiritual evolution and judge the metaphysical value of each phenomena as isolated experiences, as they exist now and as we imagine them to be at our current level of development, then this is not sound holistic reasoning.
I was referring to the experience of moving around in a small 4x4 grid in the room and feeling oneself to have travelled many miles through a 3D landscape of corridors, elevators, buildings, etc. I tried this game and it is definitely a unique experience that we can’t have outside the VR setting with ordinary cognition. It has translated our non-Euclidean ideas into concrete perceptual-conceptual experience we normally can't have, for people who have never heard of 'non-Euclidean' before. I imagine there are other similar possibilities which will be manifested through VR. Of course none of this has value unless we are conscious of how the mathematical systems and these spatiotemporal manifestations are reflecting our intimate spiritual activity and its transformations through cognitive states of being. Then we can make the living connection between modes of cognition and spatiotempotal experience.
Above all, I think we should be clear on this below. We are making unique gestures with our spiritual activity from the VR perspective, embedding new degrees of freedom, as 'counter-intuitive' as this may seem. How can we be expanding DoF when we are enslaving ourselves to the sub-sensory loops of VR experience (or any other sensory experience, for that matter)? That is precisely the question. And the answer is our continual rhythmic passing through the 'pinhole of cognition' in which we say to the Cosmos, 'thy Will be done', and thereby inhale new living impulses for all that was once dead in our thinking.
Completely unnecessary for whom, time wasting for whom? There are only relational perspectives of evolving consciousness, so this cannot be made into a universal maxim. It cannot be that every individual who experiments with VR through living thinking consciousness is on the way to the next ring in the materialistic chain of transhumanism. You say you are not treating the VR experience as irredeemable, but what you write above is the very description of something irredeemable.
We should be clear that I am not arguing to 'adopt VR'. Rather the argument is that, the very existence of VR and certain VR experiences is a pedagogical tool for our living thinking, even for people who never have the chance or inclination to experience it themselves, or only try it once in a while. I don't play VR every day for 30-45 min (not sure where you got that from) and don't recommend anyone else do so either. It is not unique from other cultural phenomena in that regard - all natural and cultural phenomena have the potential to be redeemed as fantastic tools for our spiritual growth when we approach them with living thinking and pure intentions, which is a fact that is sorely missed in modern thinking. In the context of Cleric's recent posts on the other thread, we can say that all such outer forms of spiritual activity point to the deeper temporal forces of the shared soul and spirit organism which brought them to manifestation. The very fact that VR is a novel technological development means it must provide us a new angle from which to approach the living forces of that shared inner landscape. It provides us unique analogies and metaphors and illustrations which simply can't be made from within the experience of the normal sensory spectrum. Remember, this is what prompted your comments. No one claimed VR is the go-to spiritual tool that we should all experiment with on a daily basis. Rather we used them briefly as metaphors for how our spiritual activity interacts with the perceptual environment, as one tiny angle of approach among many others, and it's up to others to decide whether they can sense the same pedagogical value as we do from that very limited and idealized use of VR.
The problem with metaphysical conclusions is not having them per se, but deriving them from momentary expressions of the outer physiognomy (natural and cultural forms) of the Spirit. Our metaphysics should be a flexible, open-ended, multiple angle, evolving process of exploring the principle ways in which the Spirit manifests itself through our living first-person consciousness, which is of course the only thing we can possibly know-experience. Our metaphysics should center around the deeper thinking perspective which is formulating the abstract conclusions, along with all other perceptual structures. This is how phenomenology (appearances) spirals into ontology (reality) through epistemology (what it means 'to know'). To recognize archetypal structures and principles of spiritual evolution is a valid metaphysical conclusion as long as we don't idolize it as some abstract model, as an end-in-itself for our knowing assessment, but as a symbol for how our first-person cognitive experience unfolds. These principles are really the only aspect of the spiritual dynamics we can get a confident hold of with our ordinary reasoning. Without them we remain mired in fragmented details of how things appear to us at any given time. In that sense, the principle that all phenomenal forms must provide pedagogical value as analogs to the underlying spiritual processes is something we can know as intrinsic to spiritual evolution. It is logically necessitated by the polar relation between the potential-actual, unmanifested-manifest, idea-perception, etc.
I was not expressing any concerns. I was inquiring what features in people’s ‘black boxes’ could explain a preference for, and an attraction to, VR. You seem to agree it's an interesting question, so what I've found all the more surprising in the essays, to start with, is that you are not interested in inquiring what soul attitudes might explain a preference for locking oneself in these virtual augmentations of the perceptual layers. It’s not even augmentation we are dealing with, it’s a prosthetic perceptual spectrum, aiming to replace the natural world. Kind of an intermediary stage between the traditional approach to natural perceptual spectrum and transhumanism, a more advanced stage of descent into the illusion of mastery and knowledge mentioned in my post above, where the extra layers are not simply externally and exclusively imposed to our senses through a VR kit, but they are grafted into the body, they are pushed through to the other side of the threshold of the physical boundary, as to give a double turn and a double lock to the dissociative boundary.
The black box features, the soul attitudes, for VR immersion are the same as for every other cultural phenomena which involves abstracting, externalizing, egoistic thinking. Certainly those can be and have been explored in depth through spiritual science. They generally revolve around desires for comfort, ease, minimal responsibility, stimulation, pleasure, personal power, etc. coupled with a subconscious longing for the spiritual worlds which becomes more and more pathological as it remains in possession of the intellectual, atomistic ego. It's a huge error, in my view, to think that these are unique to people who incline towards VR technology, which will practically be every young person as it becomes more widely available. Likewise it is a mistake to assume that normal sensory technology is not also conditioning our bodily organism at a deep level. The music we listen to also penetrates our etheric organism. In that context, I mentioned that the songs retained in my etheric memory which are brought more into my waking consciousness prompted me to take more active responsibility for what and how I expose myself to the sensory spectrum. Without that greater consciousness, they would still be conditioning my being but entirely outside of my awareness. And without the exposure, I would never have that resistance to work through with my will. There are great lessons to be learned and virtues to be earned from all perspectives, phenomena, obstacles, etc.
Above all we can't forget the role of the conscious thinking participant in determining the 'descent' into or 'ascent' from the sensory-conceptual spectrum. Everything is relative to the mode of consciousness. A being whose natural mode of cognition is instinctive consciousness would be making an ascent to express their meaningful activity through intellectual concepts, while a being whose natural mode is Imaginative would be making a descent to do the same thing. An easy way to see if we are falling into this trap is to ask, 'can my conclusions hold good no matter what develops in the next 100 years?' Can you know that there can be nothing of unique pedagogical value to the VR experience no matter how the technology develops through human consciousness over that time? I know for sure all cultural phenomena have pedagogical value because of the foundational principle of spiritual evolution, the fact that there already is that value with respect to VR for at least two people on this forum and, no matter what happens, there will be enough higher cognitive capacity to retain or expand that value. There really is no absolute descent in spiritual evolution - there is no absolute "dualism", "dissociation", etc. - only a spiral upwards which certain perspectives of the Spirit can participate in or miss out on as they lag behind. The lagging behind is what then allows perspectives to persist in the thinking experience we call "materialism", "dualism", etc. It is not intrinsic to the perceptual forms themselves.
It's like the advent and development of positivism, or materialism. There are obviously crucial spiritual lessons to learn from such episodes of evolution. But it’s not necessary to live the materialistic life and to adopt materialistic beliefs, in order to comprehend them. Likewise, there are clearly spiritual lessons to learn from many present-day cultural phenomena. However, to refer to your most recent examples from the other thread, it’s not required that we make a career in the meat consumption industry, or that we undergo gender affirming/mitigating surgery, in order to mine those lessons is it?
Of course not. And I have never made the argument that we should immerse our entire lives in VR for spiritual growth. In fact I have said a few times that most people should stay away from it altogether, precisely because the risk of "double dissociative boundary" is great for those who are unwilling to bring their first-person thinking activity out of the blind spot (which is unfortunately most people). Again, that is the determining factor if these things become curses or blessings. The advent of materialistic thinking is a great example - it's exactly the sort of development which is integral to our progressive spiritual evolution and which can be redeemed into great lessons for perfection of our whole organism IF we become conscious of the dynamics through which that advent occurred. Without that development, practically none of what we are doing on this forum would be possible. But if it doesn't become conscious for us, it can catapult us back into an animalistic state of being. Why should there be any fundamental difference for the technologies which have resulted from materialistic thinking, as extensions of it? It's very unlikely an idealistic person living in the 18th century would be able to fairly assess materialism in its potential redemptive value, and we are in a similar situation with 21st century technologies. If we stray from the foundational principles of spiritual evolution and judge the metaphysical value of each phenomena as isolated experiences, as they exist now and as we imagine them to be at our current level of development, then this is not sound holistic reasoning.
Federica wrote: ↑Wed Dec 28, 2022 11:57 am Of course, we don’t need the least VR to understand and experience non-Euclidean geometry. This is a completely arbitrary assertion that only can emerge from a metaphysical position that VR is a fantastic cognitive tool of the future. It’s curious that at the same time you say that you share my antipathy for it, but still spend 30-45 minutes in virtual reality every day.
I was referring to the experience of moving around in a small 4x4 grid in the room and feeling oneself to have travelled many miles through a 3D landscape of corridors, elevators, buildings, etc. I tried this game and it is definitely a unique experience that we can’t have outside the VR setting with ordinary cognition. It has translated our non-Euclidean ideas into concrete perceptual-conceptual experience we normally can't have, for people who have never heard of 'non-Euclidean' before. I imagine there are other similar possibilities which will be manifested through VR. Of course none of this has value unless we are conscious of how the mathematical systems and these spatiotemporal manifestations are reflecting our intimate spiritual activity and its transformations through cognitive states of being. Then we can make the living connection between modes of cognition and spatiotempotal experience.
Above all, I think we should be clear on this below. We are making unique gestures with our spiritual activity from the VR perspective, embedding new degrees of freedom, as 'counter-intuitive' as this may seem. How can we be expanding DoF when we are enslaving ourselves to the sub-sensory loops of VR experience (or any other sensory experience, for that matter)? That is precisely the question. And the answer is our continual rhythmic passing through the 'pinhole of cognition' in which we say to the Cosmos, 'thy Will be done', and thereby inhale new living impulses for all that was once dead in our thinking.
Cleric wrote:For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration. Our grunting intellectual being is left meditating, while our subtler spiritual being begins to find its existence.
Federica wrote:AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Dec 26, 2022 2:03 am This exchange reminds me a bit of our earlier discussion about writing vs. speech - you took a similar position on writing being outside the 'continuum' of the normal flow of spiritual activity, although I know you weren't nearly so antipathetic to writing as to VR. Do you see how a similar thing might be happening here?
I do see how you have come to connect the two exchanges. It’s certainly because I haven’t explained my point well enough in my previous posts. I hope I got better now at showing that I am not separating VR technology from the rest of human physical and spiritual activity, as an exception or discontinuity. It is definitely part of a continuum. As I mentioned, I think the next ring in the materialistic chain, expanding on VR and the metaverse, is transhumanism. There are certainly subconscious reasons why we are engaging more and more in such types of self-secluded worlds, and I tried to sketch some initial reflections that could open to those lessons in my previous post (reflections that you seem to have ignored completely, misinterpreting them as concerns related to VR usage). What I’m saying is, it’s completely unnecessary, and at the very least a time waster, to engage in VR as a practice, hoping to extract spiritual lessons from regular use. And I maintain that: I don't think that adding more copies of copies of copies, inundating our senses with augmented perceptual flows (basically more of the same, but worse) will ever provide metaphors or lessons that are not already available to us through the sensory spectrum of the first-level world content. And so I am left with the same question I had at the end of my previous post. For a materialist VR is understandably a lure and a comfort, but how
Completely unnecessary for whom, time wasting for whom? There are only relational perspectives of evolving consciousness, so this cannot be made into a universal maxim. It cannot be that every individual who experiments with VR through living thinking consciousness is on the way to the next ring in the materialistic chain of transhumanism. You say you are not treating the VR experience as irredeemable, but what you write above is the very description of something irredeemable.