Nietzsche and Christianity - Metaphysical Idealist Critique

[SanteriSatama]

We can go the other way: if we experience the undivided state can we claim that we merge with the Whole MAL and experience the perspectives of all possible beings (human and otherwise) at the same time, as some Cosmic superposition?

Possibility of such experience would require that an infinite set could be actually true. The speculative postulation of Cantorian "actual infinity" is both bad philosophy and bad theology in my view. Process philosophically and spiritually, Cosmic superposition can have other meanings besides infinite set.

This is key observation - even though we are practicing nonduality this doesn't change the fact that even without any sense and thought of self, we still experience a unique Cosmic perspective. Abolishing our thoughts about this doesn't in any way dissolve the perspective itself.

This depends from what we mean by "self". If instead of closed interval [] we allow Self mean open interval <>, sense of self changes.

they are still individual spiritual beings, for the simple reason that they experience unique spiritual perspective

I would be very careful not to identify "individual" and unique perspective and experience, if and when we strive for accurate and meaningful philosophical terminology. The concept "individual" continues to carry way too much colonizing and set theoretically separating baggage of alienating objectification. BK's term 'alter' is already a step towards better direction and taking the process of an open interval into more serious consideration in our mutual and interrelated processes of gnothi seauton, as well as the qualitative continua that create and give unique perspectives, these costumes and filters that spirit wears in our endless variety.

It's more helpful to speak 'Holomovement' than 'whole', even though the latter is faster to type. Our thinking patterns, especially in language like English, tend to objectify and close the 'whole' in a way that filters out the modes of experiencing you are speaking.

The point of the perspective of this commentary does not mean to object to the philosophical and empirical argument you are making, only to help to clarify the philosophical terminology and to make it less potentially confusing to any reading.

(Here it might be asked: If the Christ is not the highest being why focus on him? Why not go straight to the top?

Let's keep in mind that in the stories of Jesus he's most focused in paying attention to the lowest, the bottom of the pecking order. The shepherd and the lost lamb, etc. Archetypal Buddhism of various Boddhisatvas has also the type called Ksitigarbha.

[Cleric K]

@ Cleric ... allow me a more specific line of inquiry: what do you feel might be the benefit, if any, for the 'seeker' to imagine a personified, gender-specific Godhead 'out there' somewhere, a notion I've never resonated with since having inexplicably been blown away into that state transcending any subject><object dynamic that I've poetically named emptifullness ~ the most comparable example offered by the mystic who coined the descriptor "consciousness without an object",
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, ~ such that there in no doubt left whatsoever regarding That which one is in essence.

I feel several different threads here. For the record I would say that 'personified, gender-specific Godhead 'out there' somewhere' is something that I don't resonate with either.

I won't address the 'what's the benefit' because I don't think this is the core issue. To make it more closer to home I can ask what's the benefit to call your wife by name if at the fundamental level it's all one?

[Eugene I]

I see Eugene, I thought we were focused on the mystical state that's why I didn't sense your drift.

I don't think I'll be of much use here because now we are talking metaphysics, from what I see. I think that I understand well the model that you describe but honestly, I don't see how this can be verified by direct experience. To me it seems like a Kantian trap. The first bold text defines the individuated spaces of experience - which is all that we can ever know - and we specifically say that they don't integrate into some wholeness. The second bold part speaks of continuous space of Awareness. But how can we experientially verify this if we assume that the individuates spaces have no means of interpenetrating/integrating? After all, the only way to verify the continuity would be to at least temporarily experience (integrate) other individuated spaces into some larger whole, such that they can be experienced as a part of continuum. Otherwise how can we know that such continuum and other individual spaces at all exist?

You are asking good questions, Cleric.

First, I did not say that they cannot integrate into the wholeness, I just said that they do not have to, and their continuation as segmented and individuated spaces of experience does not constitute a dualistic state and therefore is not problematic (unless it gets developed into a dualistic state). Yet, I don't deny a possibility of integration into the wholeness, and it's quite possible that both venues may exist and happen as possible ways of consciousness development.

Now, regarding the second bold, as it was know to philosophers since Kant and Hume, it is true that what we actually experience is only the content of our "individuated" space of awareness and our individuated awareness as such. We have no way to verify and prove that other similar individuated spaces, or anything else in addition to them, ever exist. So that accepted, what are our options? We can stay agnostic and say that we do not know if other spaces of awareness exist, they may or may not, but that is a difficult and arguably psychologically problematic existential position and I do not see many people around who would adopt it. Or we can take a solipsism position and deny the existence of other experiential spaces, but I don't think it's a good choice either for multiple psychological and spiritual reasons. Another choice it to accept an inference that other similar spaces of awareness exist, and that is what we do in idealism. This definitely is an unverifiable/unfalsifiable inference step, and we just knowingly accept it as a reasonable inference. Now, once we accept it, it is also reasonable to accept that in other experiential spaces the phenomenal content of experience may vary and be different from ours, but the experiencing/awareness of phenomena is of the same kind as we have in our individuated space. In other words, there is only one kind of awareness/experiencing across the multiplicity of the spaces of experience. In addition to that, we learn from experience that the contents of the experiential spaces can interact and communicate with each other, thus there must be some common continuum or network through which such interaction can happen. This is also an inference of course. This is basically it, we can stop here (and that's what I prefer to do), or we can continue and add more elements and inferences to the model and develop it into different variants of objective, subjective, theistic or non-theistic idealism. (And I'm also sort of doing it but only conditionally considering some of those elements/inferences). Or we can also infer a "material" property to it and develop it into a panpsychism or dual property monism. However, all of it requires making more unverifiable inferences, and we are free to do it if we want. But my personal preference is not to and stay as parsimonious as possible, with the exception of inferring the existence of other experiential fields and thus avoiding the trap of solipsism.

By the way, one of those additional inferences that are often found in non-duality teachings (Advaita, some Buddhist schools, Rupert Spira etc) is that the Awareness IS the ontic fundamental. It is a reasonable inference, because the Awareness, being unchangeable, unconditional and ever-present, would easily qualify for such ontic role, and we would not have to assume the existence of some other more fundamental ontic fundamental (which would not be very parsimonious assumption to make). Personally, I'm open to it but cannot say that I completely believe in it. Awareness may be the ultimate ontic fundamental, or it may not and there may be some more fundamental level or reality. And I do not think there is ever a way to sort it out, because we can never step out of the Awareness an look at what is "there underneath" it. As a matter of fact of our direct experience, for us, the Awareness is the very bottom of our conscious reality and there is no way to penetrate any deeper. The beauty of it is that, as opposed to "matter" (as an ontic fundamental) that we can never experience directly, the Awareness is accessible to us in our direct experience. How wonderful is that! We can actually experience the ontic fundamental of reality directly!

However, there is another option to the above paragraph, which is to stay away from any ontology whatsoever and accept the reality of our conscious experience just as it is without assigning any role to the "ontic fundamental" to anything. and that is a reasonable position too (that's what Zen Buddhists do actually).

[Soul_of_Shu]

I won't address the 'what's the benefit' because I don't think this is the core issue. To make it more closer to home I can ask what's the benefit to call your wife by name if at the fundamental level it's all one?

Well, my wife, bless her heart, isn't what I had in mind when referring to a seeker imagining what the Godhead might be. Anyway, I think that by not really addressing my question, you've actually answered it.

Mooving on, what do you think about Ramana Maharshi's bovine friend Lakshmi ... enlightened or no?

[AshvinP]

Now, I have no reason to deny that the astral world populated with angelic, demonic and spiritual beings exists. In fact, it is supported by large body of NDE and regression therapy accounts. The question is - does this world represent the ground reality, or is it a result of collective manifested fantasies? Now, there is nothing wrong with manifesting and fantasizing, this is what we do in art and music and this is the only way we can create. However, what makes a difference is whether we know that this is only a manifestation, only the forms of conscious experience, or whether we instead start to believe that they represent some existing realities/entities. And the latter is what we do when we take the appearance of the material world as the ground reality, as well as if we take the appearance of the astral world as the ground reality. You may still argue that the playground of the astral world might be as necessary learning experience as the playground of the (apparent) material world, and there might be plenty to learn through living as astral spiritual selves, whether as individuals, or as a collective "Christ-consciousness" community, and that might also be true. It's like "material playground" is an elementary school and the "astral playground" as a middle or high school. However, many NDE accounts also suggest that we are in fact already beings of the spiritual/astral world, simply incarnating into the "material" one to gain certain experiences and learnings, and part of our soul never leaves the spiritual realm. But at some point we become mature enough to move on and graduate from the playgrounds of both astral and material dream-realities and move on to a more mature stage...

After "awakening" to the non-dual reality the experience of the world does not go away, the only thing that happens is dropping the veil of our interpretation of the world, which consists of either "the world of material objects", or the "world of astral spiritual beings", or "the world of separate selves/experencers/doers", or perhaps countless other variants of the dream-worlds. It's like looking at the clouds in the sky - we watch them and may identify/recognize some animal or human figures there, so we create these mental images of animals and humans in our imagination and then believe that they represent some real animal and human entities existing "out there". we "personify" the clouds and imagine them to be some real "subjects and objects". In this way we live in a fantasy world or "real animal and human entities", while imagining our "self" to be one of them and to be the subject of the experience. And the reality of consciousness works in such a way that it adapts to our imaginations and shapes the clouds the way we want to manipulate them. But when we closely examine these perceptions, we find that they are no more than our imaginations plus our beliefs in their reality, but what is actually happening in the direct experience "as it is" is simply clouds appearing, forming into beautiful shapes, and disappearing in the boundless sky of awareness. (And if you are an idealist and do not believe that there is anything exists other than consciousness, you should be able to understand it : what those "clouds" could ever possibly be other that simply conscious experiences and ideations? What other reality can there be to them in addition to their reality as phenomena of direct conscious experience?) And once that happens, we regain our true freedom and creative potential, because we are no longer captives of our dreamworld. We can create dreamworlds, and there is nothing wrong with it, but we do not get mentally enslaved and fooled by them. Here is where we can really unleash our creative potential, but we can't even imagine what we can do until we get to that point by awakening from the daydreaming. To repeat again, there was nothing wrong in this daydreaming playground phase of our growing, it was necessary to learn some basics. But that is only a temporary stage that is meant to be left behind once we grow up and are ready to move alone.

This daydream-playground model of the current Earthly life is very similar to the traditional dogmatic Christian models you were earlier criticizing. The latter also speaks of our lives within this Earthly realm as a virtual spiritual training camp, after which we are raptured or otherwise removed from our VR headset into the ultimate Reality which cannot be described or apprehended by our ego consciousness in any way. Often they will come up with various schemes in which the current Earth is not totally destroyed and our personal perspectives remain intact, because they know scripture is clear on those points, but it still leaves a huge separation between our current experiences-knowledge and those after we are "saved" and "redeemed" in a final sense. I can't help but feel that same alienating sense of discontinuity in the description above.

[SanteriSatama]

Yet, having experienced the non-dual state myself, I'm puzzled about why any divine being existing in a non-dual state would want to create a world populated with creatures (humans) genetically designed/programmed to experience the world dualistically?

Natures (devine enough beings?) can and do give birth also to their languages, and in many forms languages have a speaker (subject) and listener (object-person 2) and topic of discussion (object-person 3). Even though such masking of speech acts is not a necessary condition for speaking (asubjective, non-dual language remains possible), person-masking adds more variety to language and it's ability to create and express various unique relations.

[Eugene I]

This daydream-playground model of the current Earthly life is very similar to the traditional dogmatic Christian models you were earlier criticizing. The latter also speaks of our lives within this Earthly realm as a virtual spiritual training camp, after which we are raptured or otherwise removed from our VR headset into the ultimate Reality which cannot be described or apprehended by our ego consciousness in any way. Often they will come up with various schemes in which the current Earth is not totally destroyed and our personal perspectives remain intact, because they know scripture is clear on those points, but it still leaves a huge separation between our current experiences-knowledge and those after we are "saved" and "redeemed" in a final sense. I can't help but feel that same alienating sense of discontinuity in the description above.

Well, my answer to this is that any experience, Earthly or "redeemed", is a playground, it is only a flow conscious phenomena that are being experienced here-now, a fantasy or a phenomenal content of consciousness. I repeat:

And if you are an idealist and do not believe that there is anything existing other than consciousness, you should be able to understand it : what those "clouds" could ever possibly be other that simply conscious experiences and ideations? What other reality can there be to them in addition to their reality as phenomena of direct conscious experience?

There is no more and no less reality to them, they are absolutely real as phenomena of conscious experience, yet we have no evidence or reason to assume that they represent anything other than that, including the experience in the "redeemed" state. The only difference is, repeating again:

However, what makes a difference is whether we know that this is only a manifestation, only the forms of conscious experience, or whether we instead start to believe that they represent some existing realities/entities. And the latter is what we do when we take the appearance of the material world as the ground reality, as well as if we take the appearance of the astral redeemed world as the ground reality.

For a non-dualist approach, the non-dual state of consciousness/perception IS the redeemed state. Redeemed from the illusion of misrepresentation of any playgrounds as if it is the actual ground reality.

What those playgrounds actually are is only consciousness fantasizing the role games to entertain itself and cope with the eternity of its existence. We ARE that consciousness that fantasizes, with part of the fantasy created within our individuated conscious field, and another part created from/by other individuated conscious fields. Even the fact that part of this fantasy is created by some "divine" super-intelligent activity of consciousness ("Christ" or "Shiva" or else) does not make it any more real than it actually is - just a fantasy. And there is nothing wrong with it, otherwise what else can consciousness ever do? It can never create anything "outside" of itself, only something "inside", which is to create fantasies/ideations/imaginations. But for many of us knowing that those are simply fantasies is too boring. We want to add to it the thrill of "reality", we want to forget that it is a fantasy and pretend that this is all for real. And oh boy, what a range of thrilling experiences we can then have. But there is also a cost to it - we will suffer, and often suffer immensely, but for many of us it is still worth it. And, arguably, we also learn from it and develop. But at the end, it is still nothing else than VR games to entertain. But there is another choice. I personally don't play VR games, just not interested. I prefer to stay sober, I don't want to trick myself into believing in the reality of nonexistent things. Instead, I find satisfaction in the artistic creativity - I create forms of consciousness, and I know that there is no more reality to them other than them being just forms of conscious experience, but that does not bother me at all, I still enjoy their beauty and draw an immense satisfaction from the creative process. I also enjoy communicating with other fields of experience and I do not need to fool myself into believing that they represent any actual "beings"/"entities"/"selves", I just accept them for what they are - just active/creative flows of conscious phenomena in the individuated spaces of conscious experience.

[Eugene I]

Natures (devine enough beings?) can and do give birth also to their languages, and in many forms languages have a speaker (subject) and listener (object-person 2) and topic of discussion (object-person 3). Even though such masking of speech acts is not a necessary condition for speaking (asubjective, non-dual language remains possible), person-masking adds more variety to language and it's ability to create and express various unique relations.

Well, I do not believe in the reality of subjects and objects. As per you scheme, they are simply language forms. But yes, such language games have all rights to exist and they do exist. Hello, Wittgenstein

[SanteriSatama]

This is what our talk is about. Even though the thought and feeling of subject><object are transcended this doesn't change the fact that we still experience a specific spiritual vantage point within the Awareness. What Eugene says that "In the non-dual state there is not only a dissolution of the sense of separate self, but also a dissolution of the sense of any "perspective" whatsoever" should be specified further. If we are speaking of sense of perspective, I would put that together with the sense of self. But what would it mean that the perspective itself within Awareness dissolves? One possibility is that everything dissolves into vague uniformity, bordering on unconsciousness. Another possibility is that we experience the truly undifferentiated Awareness but if we are true to the principles of nondualism, this would mean that we should be able to experience simultaneously all possible conscious perspectives.

In the generalizing mythopoiesis, "Eastern" approach is often characterized by kenoma, the void of mental awareness; and "Western" Neoplatonic etc. approach by the pleroma, the fullness of feel, sentience-awareness.

Comprehended together, what else can the relation of kenoma and pleroma be, than the Holomovement of Cosmic breathing, the Spirit?

Dana's 'Emptyfullness' is another very nice way of speaking spirit.

[Cleric K]

To repeat again, there was nothing wrong in this daydreaming playground phase of our growing, it was necessary to learn some basics. But that is only a temporary stage that is meant to be left behind once we grow up and are ready to move alone.

Clarifying abstractions will call forth questions out of an eagerness to go deeper into the train of thoughts, to be immersed in the power of their symbols, while non-clarifying ones will call forth questions out of sheer confusion or incredulity.

This comes in very timely, thanks Ashvin. This is exactly where we are in this moment and what I had in mind previously, that sometimes speaking too much does more harm than good.

Eugene, what you describe as the liberation is actually what we've been talking about here many times already. The true liberation is when we manage to reach the core of thinking. Every metaphysical, philosophical, mathematical, whatever, judgment is already a product of thinking. These judgements may all turn out incorrect but the one constant is always thinking itself. In relation to thinking we experience the world content as perceptions and ideas. Even if this is not the way you would describe it, your post speaks from that position. When you say 'material world' or 'dream/astral world' you recognize precisely the world of perceptions - the totality of color, tone, feelings, etc., etc. You recognize that we confront this totality and experience uncertainty about its nature. The only certain things are the perceptions themselves and the fact that we can think about them, and relate them through thoughts. We are not responsible for the perceptions. To say that we fantasize these perceptions is not something that is confirmed by the given. The perceptions are there as objective facts. It's only the thoughts that we attach to them that we are truly responsible for and yes, they can be quite fantastic.

We should take a minute and appreciate that this is the only certainty - the totality of perceptions and the fact that through thinking we discover concepts and ideas that relate the perceptions in some way.

First, I did not say that they cannot integrate into the wholeness, I just said that they do not have to, and their continuation as segmented and individuated spaces of experience does not constitute a dualistic state and therefore is not problematic (unless it gets developed into a dualistic state). Yet, I don't deny a possibility of integration into the wholeness, and it's quite possible that both venues may exist and happen as possible ways of consciousness development.

The thing that you don't deny is actually the only thing that can lead to real resolution of the unsolvable choice between the intuitively felt to be correct existence of other's individual perspectives and solipsism. Not only that it can be done but it is in precisely this direction that all the mysteries of existence find their answers.

Return on the perception / thinking / idea. Your concern is that the astral world could be just another illusion that we stuff with our own ideas (just like we stuff the real sensory perceptions with ideas that they represent some objective material world 'out there'). I confirm that this concern is real and we'll have much more troubles of this sort in the future. For example in psychedelic states the world of perceptions becomes extremely mobile and we experience the most bizarre cognitive patterns and ideas that try to match it. Yet without proper spiritual training, when one has only the intellect at disposal, it all boils down in the end to interpretation of the perceptions. Is it a world? Are these movements real entities? And so on. It's actual divination! Not in principle different from favomancy. So your concern is perfectly healthy because in these visionary states people really simply choose the interpretation that suits them best. The materialist will see brain activity, the spiritually inclined will see some energies, astral 'matter', etc.

When I speak about the astral body, soul organs, etc. I have something different in mind. Now the logical question should be "How can it be in any way different? In the final run we simply have some inner experiences that we have to decide how to interpret". And that's perfectly correct - as long as we operate in the intellectual mode of cognition.

Here I'll try to be increasingly sparing with words because we really get to the crux of the matter. The only thing that can give us some certainty is if we can trace the process which gives rise to our thinking. While we are thinking intellectually we create mental pictures that we match against perceptions but we can never move beyond that through thinking alone. Mystical states that lead us into vague undivided states don't help us either because in the end we are still back in our normal consciousness and we have to decide for ourselves what the experience means in much the same way as psychedelic visions. The only thing that would lead to cardinally different picture of things would be if we are able to reach in for the processes that precede the formation of our thoughts. Materialists are somewhat more objective here because they imagine that the thoughts are only the output of some hidden layers of processing. The trouble is that they don't accept as possible that consciousness is able to penetrate into these processes. For them consciousness is like the pixels on a screen - there's nothing in the pixels (which are the consciousness) from the whole computational and electric process in the computer that causes them to flash on and off. So the materialists have their excuse to look entirely in the sensory world. In our analogy this would mean to experience pictures/models of the circuits on the pixel-screen, but the 'real' computer remains forever unknown. Spiritually inclined people have their own excuses. They simply believe that everything that is to be known is already in front of them. For the nondualist this conviction is even stronger because through the experience of removing thoughts from existence one feels that he perceives the whole explanation of the thoughts. But this explains thinking in much the same way as if we imagine that by flashing the light in our room on and off, we create the furniture ourselves from the substance of the darkness. This is the key moment. If we are to ever approach these things we need such humility and self-renunciation that are rarely considered. As long as we believe that we are the complete masters of our thinking and that we experience it emerging from the actual grounds of existence (and there's nothing else in between or behind) we can never approach this mystery. We should simply make a self-test with us and consider the idea that there may be many hidden layers of spiritual activity, completely unconscious to us, which shape our being and we experience only their end product at the surface as thinking. Pondering on this idea can tell us a lot about ourselves.

If we consider the above question in depth we'll reach the conclusion that even though we have reached the core of the intellectual mode of consciousness (in thinking about perceptions), even this liberated mode, looking fully objectively and detachedly on perceptions, is itself still Maya - we simply don't perceive the hidden layers of the spiritual world, on the surface of which we experience our thoughts and identify through them as a liberated no-self.

I've talked many times that this can be accomplished only through meditation that follows the thread of our intellectual spiritual activity. Through proper development, this thread leads us to the actual spiritual world where the forces behind our thinking are discovered, and together with this a completely different experience of what we are.

These things can be spoken about even intellectually but as Ashvin properly noted, this depends on certain openness. One should at least feel that there's something to be understood. Otherwise one simply grasps the words and uses them as bricks to build thicker and thicker walls around him. And this is not something unique only valid for esoteric science. One can't force-teach a student mathematics. Unless the student feels that the teacher communicates something that must be comprehended, that there's something real, even though the student can't exactly grasp what it is, it's of no use to force him. He'll simply defend himself against the attacks of some weird math words and symbols.

In the essay that I've posted some time ago I tried to show the principle direction of what we are here speaking of. If nothing of this resonates, there's no need to try to explain further because it will only increase the sheer confusion and incredulity.