Speculation About the Discovery of Ideal Forms

[Eugene I]

OK. So we need to synchronize the terminology I guess. How would you name the following. I see red surface. Then I turn my gaze away or I close my eyes and recall the experience of the color. It's not necessary to have vivid colorful experience, neither to have a clear intellectual concept/word for it. Just the fact that I'm addressing the same inner experience that I had when looking at the surface, although now the actual perception is not present. In certain sense now I only have half of the experience - the meaning/idea/awareness of redness, without the perception. When I have both the perception and this meaning they are fused together but when I recall the experience I can experience (unless I have super vivid imagination) primarily the ideal content - that which is otherwise fused with the perception now I experience independently. This is how I would call it - meaning/idea. What word would you use?

OK, good, we are finally getting to the bottom of it
My terminology:
1. When a new-born child experiences a perception of redness, there is just a presence of the quale of redness as a visual perception in his direct conscious experience. The child does not interpret or understand it, but the quale of red perception is still present.
2. When an adult experiences the same perception, and then afterward he recalls it and reproduces it in a memory, he experiences a different phenomenon, we can call it "an imaginative-reflective thought" of the original perceptual experience. It's a reflective copy of the original one. But this is still a conscious phenomenon, a quale, but of a different category - of a category of a reflective thought. The ideal content of such thought is still a quale of conscious experience.
3. When an adult experience the same perception, and at the same time has an interpretative thought "red color" - it is a combination of a quale of a visual perception of redness and a quale of a meaning/idea of that thought.

What is important to notice here is that we still equally experience all of the above as qualia, but qualia with different types of contents - the content of a visual perception of color, or the content of a meaning/idea, or a combination of both. And another thing to notice that all of these qualia are equally present and experienced in our direct experience (which are the permanent aspects of these qualia). Obviously (duhh..) we can never experience a quale that would not be present and would not be experienced.

And finally, this is the most mysterious part of it: we do not experience each quale as a separate experience, but we experience the whole content of all qualia together at each moment (of now) as an indivisible wholeness. It's just "THIS". It is only when we analyze them (with thinking) we conditionally in our imagination and interpretation break them into pieces and categorize as different qualia and phenomena. Such categorization is practically needed for us to function efficiently in our lives, so there is nothing wrong with it. But what is essential to notice is that such breaking-into-pieces and categorization is all the result of interpretation. As a fact of actual direct experience, the reality of our experience is always unbreakable oneness. Experiencing and seeing this direct and factual oneness which is not disturbed by the breaking-into-pieces mental interpretative work of the intellect is what is called "non-dual" perception. Such perception does not negate or suppress the breaking-into-pieces mental interpretation, but sort of "transcends" it and sees that no mental interpretation can in fact ever break this actual experiential unity, it can only do such break-up in its imagination. The psycho-spiritual importance of such realization is that it dispels our habitual dualistic perception of reality and stops us to believe that the world is actually divided into pieces, it stops us to interpret ourselves and other conscious beings as separate parts of reality. It restores the fundamental unity of consciousness without disregarding the amazing variety of the qualitative content of conscious experience. We do not need to become thoughtless vegetable-lunatics to experience the unity of consciousness. The unity of consciousness is always unbreakable as a fact regardless of the content and of the presence of perceptions and thoughts. We just need to notice and experientially see this unity of our conscious experience just as it is right here and now.

[Soul_of_Shu]

More on the query about the correlation between light and Consciousness, as expressed by Paul Brunton ...

Brunton’s experiences with Ramana as detailed in A Search in Secret India culminated
with an episode of mystical absorption under Maharshi’s influence in which he was
drawn into the heart and experienced an infinite expanse of supra-physical light. This
appears to have been an exhalted form of savikalpa samadhi, or transcendental
consciousness where the subject-object distinction persists. (His experience was later
clarified by Ramana who said:
"Since the experience is through the mind only, it first appears as a blaze of light. The
mental predispositions are not yet destroyed. The mind is, however, functioning in its
infinite capacity in this experience...When you awaken a light appears, which
is the light of the Self, passing through Mahatattva. It is called cosmic consciousness.
That is arupa (formless). The light falls on the ego and is reflected therefrom."

[Apanthropinist]

One is also reminded here of the Tao Te Ching premise that the names that can be named are not the eternal names ... so just what is meant by an eternal 'name'?

There is no eternal 'name', as suggested in the succedent lines.

"Tao called Tao is not Tao.

Names can name no lasting name.

Nameless: the origin of heaven and earth.
Naming: the mother of ten thousand things.

Empty of desire, perceive mystery.
Filled with desire, perceive manifestations.

These have the same source, but different names.
Call them both deep - Deep and again deep:

The gateway to all mystery."

It's one of the things I love about Daoism, it's terse (in the sense of brevity).

[Cleric K]

I asked this question elsewhere, but it didn't get any traction ... Under idealism, what do we make of the idea of the cosmological constancy of the speed of light, being not provisional, but constant under all circumstances.

Can you clarify what exactly you ask? You mean why c is fixed instead of varying for every photon?

And with that in mind, as idea and percept are inextricable, not-two, why is it that the apparency of trans-corporeal beings are phenomenally experienced as beings of light?

This can be understood if we trace what light is from the standpoint of evolution. In the spiritual world there's no light in the physical sense. There are no sources of light that illuminate objects to be seen. There we must grasp light entirely in its inner aspect. When we don't understand something we say "I'm in the dark on this subject". In the spiritual world light is (one aspect of it) the 'measure' of how attuned we are to our environment. And our environment is spiritual - that is, made of idea-beings. The more our perspective resonates with these beings which reverberate in us from all sides, the more comprehensive and innerly illuminated our state of being is. It is the richness of our state that is experienced as luminous. And this richness is not made of some 'possessions' but of harmonic relations.

With the condensation of the physical organism only some of these resonant relations could be preserved. Our visual system rigidified in such a way that it allows, with no effort on our part, to bring us into resonance with a world elemental beings that we experience superficially as color. For other things, such as our intellectual understandings, we need to put effort and build the resonating structures such that the ideal landscape can be perceived and as such - experienced as illuminated. It's the same for higher development. We begin to see the spiritual world when we attune our thoughts, feelings and will on the same 'frequencies' as the Cosmic thoughts, feelings and will. As long as our thinking, feeling and willing are attuned only to our personal life we experience only them because they are unique to ourselves. To see the Depth of MAL we need to increase the radius of our interests such that we encompass much wider horizons.

I hope that this also answers why in visionary states higher beings are experienced as luminous. This reflects the way their life reverberates in the whole spiritual environment.

[Eugene I]

More on the query about the correlation between light and Consciousness, as expressed by Paul Brunton ...

Brunton’s experiences with Ramana as detailed in A Search in Secret India culminated
with an episode of mystical absorption under Maharshi’s influence in which he was
drawn into the heart and experienced an infinite expanse of supra-physical light. This
appears to have been an exhalted form of savikalpa samadhi, or transcendental
consciousness where the subject-object distinction persists. (His experience was later
clarified by Ramana who said:
"Since the experience is through the mind only, it first appears as a blaze of light. The
mental predispositions are not yet destroyed. The mind is, however, functioning in its
infinite capacity in this experience...When you awaken a light appears, which
is the light of the Self, passing through Mahatattva. It is called cosmic consciousness.
That is arupa (formless). The light falls on the ego and is reflected therefrom."

In the Buddhist practices there is a lot of warnings not to interpret any experiences of whatever (bliss, light, "cosmic consciousness" or else) as something ultimate. Awareness is not the light itself, it s the very experiencing of any light (or dark or else). Sometimes it is called "a clear light of awareness" (in some Buddhist and Advaitic texts) but it is only a metaphor which is not to be taken literally (it is metaphorically called "light" because awareness is what "illuminates" our experiences and makes is "experienceable"). The experience of supra-physical light or cosmic consciousness often accompanies the realization of the awareness in some people's satori experiences (I have it myself once in a while but do not take it seriously, although it does feel great and blissful, no question about that), but confusing awareness with that perception of "supra-physical light" is a mistake (which many unfortunately do).

[Soul_of_Shu]

I hope that this also answers why in visionary states higher beings are experienced as luminous. This reflects the way their life reverberates in the whole spiritual environment.

Cleric ... Thanks for the explication, much appreciated ... need to reflect further upon this

[Cleric K]

My terminology:
1. When a new-born child experiences a perception of redness, there is just a presence of the quale of redness as a visual perception in his direct conscious experience. The child does not interpret or understand it, but the quale of red perception is still present.
2. When an adult experiences the same perception, and then afterward he recalls it and reproduces it in a memory, he experiences a different phenomenon, we can call it "an imaginative-reflective thought" of the original perceptual experience. It's a reflective copy of the original one. But this is still a conscious phenomenon, a quale, but of a different category - of a category of a reflective thought. The ideal content of such thought is still a quale of conscious experience.
3. When an adult experience the same perception, and at the same time has an interpretative thought "red color" - it is a combination of a quale of a visual perception of redness and a quale of a meaning/idea of that thought.

OK, that's fine. But I still think that 2 is not entirely precise. I very well understand what you mean by the reflective thought. But there's still something that is the same when you experience the reflective thought (which if we have vivid imagination could be almost indistinguishable from the actual perception) and the perception. Let me give another example. Imagine that instead of red we take someone dear to you heart. You can have direct perception of them, you can look at a photograph or you can think of them (the reflective thought). These are different perceptual experiences but wouldn't you agree that there's something in common in all three cases? I guess that you wouldn't say that when looking at the photograph or the reflective thought you have simply a 'mere intellectual idea' of the person, while only when you look at them in flesh you have direct experience of their real being. My point is to bring attention to the distinction between the various way of reflection (real visual, photograph, reflective thought) and the fact that in all cases we experience in our soul the same living presence of the same living person. If this example is grasped it should also be easy to understand what I meant for the redness. It's the same thing - no matter the reflective substance, there's something in common. This common thing is what I call the ideal element (the living person or the idea of red). Now how would you modify your words to accommodate for this?

[Eugene I]

Cleric, the "living presence of a person" is a meaning, a result of the work of out thinking and imagination. There are no "persons" other than the meanings of our thoughts. Remember I gave an analogy with the picture of Santa Claus? All these "persons" are Santa-Clauses, they are as real as out meanings (and the meanings are real, no question about that!), but there is no other reality to them that we can find otherwise.

The fact that we experiences the same "redness' when we reflect on the perceptual experience is a result of the work of our memory.

You can still interpret all of those in you way, and I understand what you are saying. This is the paradigm of the objective idea-based idealism, and there is nothing wrong with that. But that is only a particular interpretation of our conscious experience and only one variant of idealism among many others.

[Apanthropinist]

In the Buddhist practices there is a lot of warnings not to interpret any experiences of whatever (bliss, light, "cosmic consciousness" or else) as something ultimate. Awareness is not the light itself, it s the very experiencing of any light (or dark or else). Sometimes it is called "a clear light of awareness" (in some Buddhist and Advaitic texts) but it is only a metaphor which is not to be taken literally (it is metaphorically called "light" because awareness is what "illuminates" our experiences and makes is "experienceable"). The experience of supra-physical light or cosmic consciousness often accompanies the realization of the awareness in some people's satori experiences (I have it myself once in a while but do not take it seriously, although it does feel great and blissful, no question about that), but confusing awareness with that perception of "supra-physical light" is a mistake (which many unfortunately do).

Eugene, in my experience (with visionary plants) there is also the 'dark light of awareness', I don't know how else to put it, contradictory as it may sound. It was even more powerful than the 'bright light of awareness' and felt much more grounding. Your point is well taken though. It reminds me of how Bernado talks about the deceiver in his story at the end of 'More Than Allegory'.

[Eugene I]

Apanthropinist, yes, many experience it as darkness or "Great Void", but it really does not mater.