Philosophical Speculations

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 3:56 pm So my still=death comment was in reference to this concept that everything must be balanced out and therefore it is wrong to speak of ascension without descension, upward movement of consciousness without downward, etc. Cleric discussed the ways in which such a maxim would become absurd and unproductive, such as we must strive for health and sickness at the same time, truth and lies, wisdom and stupidity, etc. Do you disagree?

I disagree. As a resilient immune system demonstrates, health and sickness co-arise. Too much health is as dangerous as is too much sickness. Similarly. wisdom is the child of many mistakes and error is absolutely essential to science. There is nothing absurd or unproductive about a balanced appreciation of all and, indeed(!), they are often pursued at the same time. Vaccinations as well as natural herd immunity are based on it.

I should note that I have this argument with lawyers all the time. They tend to see the scales of justice as a way to prove which adversarial side is pushed down by the weight of evidence. I tend to see the scales as a tool for finding a delicate balance depending on the still point of a fulcrum and appreciating all.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 3:56 pm So my still=death comment was in reference to this concept that everything must be balanced out and therefore it is wrong to speak of ascension without descension, upward movement of consciousness without downward, etc. Cleric discussed the ways in which such a maxim would become absurd and unproductive, such as we must strive for health and sickness at the same time, truth and lies, wisdom and stupidity, etc. Do you disagree?

I don't disagree, but qualify. Aufhebung/sublation of a polar opposition requires taking it as a whole (both-and), instead of picking a side of either-or.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 2:11 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 1:53 pm

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 9:21 am In the abstract domain, intuitionist logic without LEM does not really differentiate from classical logic in the finite area of math. Intuitionist logic originates in criticism of Hilbert's extension of LEM to transfinite/infinite domains, which leads to loss of constructibility. Brouwer and others criticized that loss of constructibility leads to loss of consistency and violates LNC.

In other words, transfinite/infinite MAL holding on to LEM would not be able to construct alters that can consistently communicate. If you think that your feet are in your head, and that feet can't be both left and right, your feet go crazy and you can't walk normally.

I will need to think on that some more before responding, because that's pretty damn abstract as far as abstractions go

Yeah, it's not easy, and I also keep struggling and digesting the critical aspects of logic in my slow pace. My efforts to give concrete examples should be taken with a grain of salt, as the silly walk joke suggested.

A further note on your earlier "still = dead" comment. You can lie or sit still, but as long as you breath in and out, expanding and deflating, you are alive. As long as you breath (Latin aspirare), the Spirit is in you. Very simple. It gets more complex when we start to explore different ways and forms of breathing/spirit, such as plant breathing etc.

Sure enough, continuing that thought, between each breath is a tiny duration of still, and that can be expanded into longer durations of still. If absence of breathing is death, then it's consistent to say that death is also always present, and we are both dead and alive on the lever where we observe both the movement of breathing and pauses of breathing. Acceptance of that both-and can be very hard. It was so in my case.

Or, as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas, "Tell them that I am movement and rest." And, yes, as the Passion of Son-of-Man/Son-of-God demonstrates, both/and can be very hard.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 11:50 pm All existence lives on the spectrum of the vertical duality. The lower we go the more extreme the horizontal dualities become. The higher we go, the more the horizontal dualities work co-creatively.

Not a bad graph. The horizontal middle axis could be also defined as the social sphere.

The basic/archetypal structure of theater drama can help to understand how the areas/vibrations above and below relate. The basic structure of drama is to first go Below, into the thick vibes of Shadow stuff to bring deep problems into collective consciousness of the audience. The soothing vibrations in the Above come after, to release and balance the tension. That's what Aristotle calls katharsis in his treatise of theater.

If theater was just unicorns and rainbows, nobody would watch. And if nobody watched, or wanted only unicorns and rainbows, the shadow stuff would stay in the subconscious, could not be dealt with and would be projected in a way that would make life suck more extending more pollution also in the Above.

The best theater production I've seen was a many-role monologue about a dying child. In short, the plot was about child cancer patient given only week to live, so the child decided to live a decade in a day, to have a full life. Pretty hard stuff to deal with, and the production absolutely matched the challenge.

Through the whole play, the audience switched from sobbing to laughing to sobbing to laughing in machine gun pace, pretty much nothing between those emotional reactions. The audience was truly played in almost excessively kathartic process.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 11:50 pm Here's an attempt to show the way things are being mixed up. It all lies in the understanding of the cross and the fact that we have vertical and horizontal dualities.

All existence lives on the spectrum of the vertical duality. The lower we go the more extreme the horizontal dualities become. The higher we go, the more the horizontal dualities work co-creatively. I hope this shows clearly the difference between the horizontal dualities, that through back and forth oscillations gradually find their balance, and the vertical for which 'balance of the two' doesn't make sense. Movement along the vertical is experienced in time through involution and evolution, it's not a static balance.



PS: This is still not a complete Cosmic Map. There are many other things not captured here but nevertheless, it traces something fundamental.

What is missing is that by focusing on any spectrum where the extremes become more apparent (higher, lower, left, right, whatever) the obvious sweet spot of integration is often missed. It is at the intersection of vertical and the horizontal where child-of-God and child-of-man and self and other all meet that the conflicts, tensions and extremes vanish into a peace that passeth understanding and one is launched off the cross. All else is commentary,

PS: Why is death lower?

Lou Gold wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 4:31 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Mar 10, 2021 3:56 pm So my still=death comment was in reference to this concept that everything must be balanced out and therefore it is wrong to speak of ascension without descension, upward movement of consciousness without downward, etc. Cleric discussed the ways in which such a maxim would become absurd and unproductive, such as we must strive for health and sickness at the same time, truth and lies, wisdom and stupidity, etc. Do you disagree?

I disagree. As a resilient immune system demonstrates, health and sickness co-arise. Too much health is as dangerous as is too much sickness. Similarly. wisdom is the child of many mistakes and error is absolutely essential to science. There is nothing absurd or unproductive about a balanced appreciation of all and, indeed(!), they are often pursued at the same time. Vaccinations as well as natural herd immunity are based on it.

I should note that I have this argument with lawyers all the time. They tend to see the scales of justice as a way to prove which adversarial side is pushed down by the weight of evidence. I tend to see the scales as a tool for finding a delicate balance depending on the still point of a fulcrum and appreciating all.

I will let "too much health is as dangerous as too much sickness" speak for itself. These are the types of absurd conclusions we reach when projecting out a desire for "balance" onto anything and everything because it's simply easier than trying to understand the distinctions.

Apparently you know a lot of lawyers and they are somehow interested in arguing metaphysics. I have not come across a single one of those so far. I hope you aren't in any trouble... I can't think of any other reason to torture yourself with their company "all the time"

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 2:42 am
I will let "too much health is as dangerous as too much sickness" speak for itself. These are the types of absurd conclusions we reach when projecting out a desire for "balance" onto anything and everything because it's simply easier than trying to understand the distinctions.

Apparently you know a lot of lawyers and they are somehow interested in arguing metaphysics. I have not come across a single one of those so far. I hope you aren't in any trouble... I can't think of any other reason to torture yourself with their company "all the time"

These are the types of absurd conclusions we reach when projecting out a desire for "balance" onto anything and everything because it's simply easier than trying to understand the distinctions.

Such a projection is your obvious strawman. Balance does not act that way.

I can't think of any other reason to torture yourself with their company "all the time"

I don't hang out much with lawyers but in the past I did find two excellent reasons to do so:

1) In the environmental realm, despite the fact that about 90% of "environmental lawyers" work for industry, the dedicated warriors of public interest environmental law were our strongest and most productive allies.

2) Self-deprecating "lawyer jokes" were some of the best I've heard.

Lou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 2:22 am
What is missing is that by focusing on any spectrum where the extremes become more apparent (higher, lower, left, right, whatever) the obvious sweet spot of integration is often missed. It is at the intersection of vertical and the horizontal where child-of-God and child-of-man and self and other all meet that the conflicts, tensions and extremes vanish into a peace that passeth understanding and one is launched off the cross. All else is commentary,

PS: Why is death lower?

These are the Great Poles of existence. The whole and the many. Clearly life manifests alternating between these. What I said in the other thread refers to this archetypal axis. Up is integration, harmony. Down is dissipation, ultimately leading to unconsciousness. I assume you ask this question because you are thinking about the Gate of Death, which is something different. It is being born in the spiritual world - as a butterfly casts down the chrysalis, so does man casts down the mineral shell. We've spoken many times that things are not monotonic - everything is rhythms within rhythms. After death we move up the vertical then we dive down again. Going into incarnation is actually submerging towards the realm of death, where our physical being is constantly threatened by dissolution. This is being constantly balanced by the life (etheric) forces. Actually, what we perceive with our senses is only the mineral realm. Without spiritual training we don't perceive the etheric, astral, mental, etc. forces. We are preoccupied with what represent death. That's why science, naturally, sees everything as dead and tries to explain life as the patterns which what is dead makes on its tumbling downhill. We admire the beauty of Nature, of plants, animals and humans but interestingly, what we see with our eyes is actually the part of life that has already become dead. The processes and forms in the etheric realm are infinitely more beautiful and vibrant. In comparison, the mineral forms are only their rigid, sclerotized versions.

So as you see, things are not simple. It's not only talking about multi-aspect, multi-direction processes. We need to recognize all these processes at their proper place. And this is not that easy. We have to constantly make effort to see things from many different angles. There's no convenient intellectual point of view that captures all at once, just as there's no 3D perspective that shows all sides of an object at the same time. The sweet spot you mention sounds more like finding the 'center of mass' of all that exists and observe life unfolding from there. But this center of mass is itself moving and its of the utmost importance to be aware of its direction. Otherwise it'll be impossible to conceive that the existence of disease is only a temporary stage. To say that too much health is dangerous implies that the Earth was created once and for all, with both noble and vicious beasts and things won't ever change, so it's in our best interest to learn and live with them. But things are always transforming. What is now our immune system won't be needed in the same form in the future. Then this task will be taken on by the aura. It's our spiritual skin that doesn't allow anything harmful (ideas, desires, beings, etc.) to enter. As said last time, man today suffers from disease because he is intermingled with the spiritual beings of disease. This is what makes it possible for the physical pathogens to take foot in the human body. When the soul becomes a Spring of Divine Life, it constantly purges all that is dark and harmful and becomes filled with what is beneficial for all Life. Then the immune system evolves into a spiritual immune system - our fully conscious discernment of what is beneficial and what is harmful for Life. Obviously we have a long way to go in that direction but if we don't recognize the direction we'll never reach there. It is this direction that is envisioned when it's said:

Mark 16:18 They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
Luke 10:19 Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 10:15 am That's why science, naturally, sees everything as dead and tries to explain life as the patterns which what is dead makes on its tumbling downhill. We admire the beauty of Nature, of plants, animals and humans but interestingly, what we see with our eyes is actually the part of life that has already become dead.

The simple fact of physical light is that it comes from the past, all you see that way is already history.

The processes and forms in the etheric realm are infinitely more beautiful and vibrant. In comparison, the mineral forms are only their rigid, sclerotized versions.

Beauty is is in the eye / eyes of the beholder.