Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Breaking Bad Habits

[AshvinP]

Think about it this way - Hoffman claims science so far has been about studying the dynamics of our user interfaces, for no other reason than it implicitly assumes flawed physicalist starting points. Does he stop there? No, he goes on to change the assumptions which then allows him to start with conscious activity and build mathematical models to be tested against experience and other well-established mathematical models. Under your view above, he is not actually getting any closer to the noumenal structure of Reality, just viewing it from a different abstract perspective, and moreover he can never, in principle, get any closer. Same goes for the entire progression of science from its inception to current day.

No that’s not my view. We get abstractions that are indeed closer and closer depictions of the perceptible aspects of reality. But they will always be abstractions. Just imagine Hoffman comes up with his ‘final equation’, and then Wolfram finds a formulation of his model which predicts Hoffmans equation as well as, SR, GR, QM etc. So we end up with a single model out of which all the phenomena and behaviour of the world can be derived. Then what? All you have is a very, very useful blueprint of how nature behaves. Ignoring whether this will ever explain anything at all about experience, will etc, it’s still just an equation. It’s a description of what nature does, not what nature is. Even if it describes how all agents interact, it will never actually be a relationship, be an interaction etc. Maybe it will lead to new ways to understand consciousness, maybe it won’t. It seems likely there is only so much you can establish when working on the representation, just like there is only so much you can tell about a person from a photo of them (smaller and smaller pixels don’t help!).

Under the spiritual scientific view, however, he might be capturing the structure more accurately with his models and perhaps it will lead him naturally towards the tools of higher cognition, where abstract models are abandoned altogether for direct experience.

This is a leap that makes no sense to me at all. You would have to explain what you mean here by science, as you seem to have jumped to meditation because science has got to a certain point.

It sounds like you are assuming exactly the sort of dualism Kant and others did - that the "perceptible reality" arrives to us in a complete form and human thinking is about making an ideal copy within ourselves that approximates the Reality 'outside' of us. I hope the next part of my essay will clear this major misconception up. For now, let me ask you this - why do humans need to use abstractions like mathematical models and physicalist language when describing the ideal Reality they are investigating? Is there some scientific rule which says noumenon must be described with re-representations even if we can directly perceive the ideal relations? Or is it a fundamental limit baked into the structure of Reality which prevents us from such direct perception and forces us re-represent everything we encounter?

Hoffman, as you know, would likely say it is due to natural selection processes in evolution. But, again, he does not stop there and say, "since evolution has wired us to only perceive user interfaces we must admit defeat be satisfied that we can never scientifically examine the underlying Reality". He goes on to start building various models of the underlying Reality we are encountering using most recent mathematical tools and make predictions with those models. Do you think he is still examining smaller and smaller pixels of a photo, a photo which does not resemble the noumenon whatsoever, with those models? And do you then think it is impossible, in principle, to stop examining the pixels and start examining what the photo is representing to us?

To go into high speculation mode, I can imagine a reality where time and space are emergent from a substrate that itself has dimensionality of a sort, and maybe this is a realm in which our individual minds move, and in which they are connected to all that represents as matter. Maybe we could find “tools” that can somehow probe this realm directly, to that which is the source of the representations. But all such tools will tell you is again, how it behaves. We may be able to infer things from this which could improve our philosophy and poetry, but I can’t see how science could possibly draw out the essence. No more than I can have a glass of wine and a chat with the Mona Lisa.

Woa … I think I disagree with every word there . From what I have been able to work out, thinking seems to be a kind of emanation from something I call “I”, which then echos around some kind of ego ‘chamber’. It’s like a self reflective loop in awareness, which is filtered, merged and fed back via various instinctual structures represented by different parts of the body, mostly the brain. Poor description I admit but thinking is a process, not an organ.

there is no reason why our perception must be limited to a "physical" world as opposed to a "spiritual" one, which, under idealism, are in essence one and the same world. Under this view, we come to a realization that the rigorous scholastic theologians were not merely living in a world of detached abstract thoughts about God, but they already sensed that the world of reasoned thoughts can reveal a good deal about the spiritual realm that we do not perceive with our normal senses. When viewed in that light, we see reason and science are not at odds with spiritual belief and Divine revelation.

I don’t believe they are at odds in any way whatsoever.

Right, well, there is nothing wrong with trying to work things out ourselves, but there is something wrong with assuming anyone who disagrees with what we have worked out should be dismissed out of hand. For starters, scholastic philosophers-theologians completely disagree that thinking is a "self reflective loop in [personal] awareness". Rather, they viewed it is a means for penetrating the Divine order of the world in a very real way. Not the Kantian way of creating an internal copy to resemble the outer reality, because such a hard dualist notion still did not exist at their time, but the spiritual scientific way of viewing spiritual activity (thinking activity in a broad sense) as that which truly connects us into the spiritual realm of ideal-beings/content, because we all emanate from the same Spirit.

[Simon Adams]

It sounds like you are assuming exactly the sort of dualism Kant and others did - that the "perceptible reality" arrives to us in a complete form and human thinking is about making an ideal copy within ourselves that approximates the Reality 'outside' of us.

Surely you need to distinguish between experience, meta-cognition and abstraction? Science, I would argue, falls into the latter. Our theories are ways to explain what happens in nature that work within a certain bounded area of nature. When a new and better theory is found, the old one is usually seen to be a misunderstanding of what is actually happening, and so on and so on. So our experiences of the world are a genuine connection to the image of those things, not an ideal copy, and as we develop a relationship with them we learn more of the thing itself (part ‘knowing’, part meta-cognising). But all of our abstractions must be a kind of dualism. If it was not, there would be nothing we did not know. We would also not need to unpack them to use them, by feeding real world data into them.

In deep states of meditation we can experience the unity of things, the mystic experience can move our perspective so that the important stuff subsumes the trivial stuff that consumes us normally. When a new scientific discovery is made, it’s often the imagination that has touched something in these realms, and distilled that into a better theory, so it’s not as if there is no connection between what is, and our abstractions of it. There are not dual realities, but there is a duality between reality and our abstraction of reality.

I hope the next part of my essay will clear this major misconception up. For now, let me ask you this - why do humans need to use abstractions like mathematical models and physicalist language when describing the ideal Reality they are investigating? Is there some scientific rule which says noumenon must be described with re-representations even if we can directly perceive the ideal relations? Or is it a fundamental limit baked into the structure of Reality which prevents us from such direct perception and forces us re-represent everything we encounter?

I do think nature is ordered according to something like mathematical formulas. But the very process of science is a bit like writing an autobiography about someone. No matter how good that book is, how well it leaves it’s reader able to know what they think, to know how they are likely to respond in any situation, the book is never going to be the same as the person. You could say it has captured something of the essence, but it will never be the same as the essence.

Hoffman, as you know, would likely say it is due to natural selection processes in evolution. But, again, he does not stop there and say, "since evolution has wired us to only perceive user interfaces we must admit defeat be satisfied that we can never scientifically examine the underlying Reality". He goes on to start building various models of the underlying Reality we are encountering using most recent mathematical tools and make predictions with those models. Do you think he is still examining smaller and smaller pixels of a photo, a photo which does not resemble the noumenon whatsoever, with those models? And do you then think it is impossible, in principle, to stop examining the pixels and start examining what the photo is representing to us?

I think what Hoffman is doing is really interesting, but I’m not sure he would describe it in the same way you are. In the analogy, maybe you could say that what he is doing is a change from looking at the types of pixels in the picture, to the objects that make up the picture. Yes makes it a potentially better way of understanding what is happening in the picture, but it’s still just picture.

Right, well, there is nothing wrong with trying to work things out ourselves, but there is something wrong with assuming anyone who disagrees with what we have worked out should be dismissed out of hand. For starters, scholastic philosophers-theologians completely disagree that thinking is a "self reflective loop in [personal] awareness". Rather, they viewed it is a means for penetrating the Divine order of the world in a very real way. Not the Kantian way of creating an internal copy to resemble the outer reality, because such a hard dualist notion still did not exist at their time, but the spiritual scientific way of viewing spiritual activity (thinking activity in a broad sense) as that which truly connects us into the spiritual realm of ideal-beings/content, because we all emanate from the same Spirit.

I don’t think I’m dismissing anything out of hand. I genuinely agree that the way we have compartmentalised knowledge through science versus the reality of our experiences has been devastating to mankind's ability to understand the meaning of our existence. However I don’t see the answer as ‘cramming’ the ways of knowing together. Rather my answer for myself is more similar to the scholastics, in that I have the more important grand narrative, and the other narratives (including science, history, relationships, enjoyment, charity, work, hobbies etc) fit into that, inform it, and in turn it brings meaning to those. To me that gives a centering balance, and helps me fit things into the right place in the hierarchy of my life, and my understanding of how things are. At least that’s what I aim for after bobbing all over the place with different approaches, the reality is more of a messy work in progress!

[Cleric K]

Again, if thinking is, in essence, a perceptual organ,

Woa … I think I disagree with every word there . From what I have been able to work out, thinking seems to be a kind of emanation from something I call “I”, which then echos around some kind of ego ‘chamber’. It’s like a self reflective loop in awareness, which is filtered, merged and fed back via various instinctual structures represented by different parts of the body, mostly the brain. Poor description I admit but thinking is a process, not an organ.

Simon, you have actually very well described why it is justified to call thinking also an organ of perception. Maybe you were misled because Ashvin mentioned only the word 'perceptual' which can easily be understood as completely passive. The best way to view this is if you consider the sense of touch with our hands while blindfolded - in order to perceive the objects we need to be active, we need to move our fingers and feel the shapes of the objects. If we are not active with our fingers we won't perceive anything. This is precisely what we have with thinking and you have actually described it very beautifully. How do you know about the ego chamber, the reverberation from the body? It's exactly because you have touched these constraints with your thinking. You know about the ego chamber not because you see it through the bodily senses but because your thinking activity encounters certain restrictions, it bumps into a spiritual structure. If this is realized we already know that through thinking we live in the fullest sense within the spiritual world. This is the moment where the Kantian divide can be resolved. The thought 'ego chamber' is abstracted out of experience but you would agree that it is being abstracted out of reality. Now if we don't place self-imposed limitations on what our spiritual activity (of which intellectual thinking is only a concrete form) can touch, we arrive at the basis of the spiritual-scientific method of investigation. And this ties with the mystery of the Christ because it is the Word that is behind your "I" from which the thought emanations proceed. That's the quiet voice you have real relation with. In the same way you have explored the microcosmic interior where your thoughts reverberate, it is possible to explore the Macrocosmic space within which the Word reverberates. Of course this requires a kind of sacrifice in humility and prayer. We need to die for our identification with the microcosmic interior in order to resurrect in the Cosmic chamber. At that point Paul's words become truly comprehensible: "Not I but through Christ in me". Our microcosmic chamber doesn't disappear, nor we should be deluded that we are the Christ in his completeness. No, we are still the Earthly ego and the Christ is infinitely larger than us, but now the Spirit of God's Word flows through us and gives us Life... and gives it abundantly. It's now up to us to channel this Loving Life force appropriately in the sensory world, through our spiritual activity - the microcosmic Word. This is what it means to do God's Will. This Will is not meant to restrict us but to connect us to the Macrocosm, to Cosmic Life. We resist God's will when we insist to live entirely microcosmically - that is, for ourselves. When we go beyond ourselves our Earthly Life becomes extension of Cosmic Life and our spiritual activity can flow and touch not only the microcosmic interior but also the beings of the Spiritual World.

[Simon Adams]

Simon, you have actually very well described why it is justified to call thinking also an organ of perception. Maybe you were misled because Ashvin mentioned only the word 'perceptual' which can easily be understood as completely passive. The best way to view this is if you consider the sense of touch with our hands while blindfolded - in order to perceive the objects we need to be active, we need to move our fingers and feel the shapes of the objects. If we are not active with our fingers we won't perceive anything. This is precisely what we have with thinking and you have actually described it very beautifully. How do you know about the ego chamber, the reverberation from the body? It's exactly because you have touched these constraints with your thinking. You know about the ego chamber not because you see it through the bodily senses but because your thinking activity encounters certain restrictions, it bumps into a spiritual structure. If this is realized we already know that through thinking we live in the fullest sense within the spiritual world. This is the moment where the Kantian divide can be resolved. The thought 'ego chamber' is abstracted out of experience but you would agree that it is being abstracted out of reality. Now if we don't place self-imposed limitations on what our spiritual activity (of which intellectual thinking is only a concrete form) can touch, we arrive at the basis of the spiritual-scientific method of investigation. And this ties with the mystery of the Christ because it is the Word that is behind your "I" from which the thought emanations proceed. That's the quiet voice you have real relation with. In the same way you have explored the microcosmic interior where your thoughts reverberate, it is possible to explore the Macrocosmic space within which the Word reverberates. Of course this requires a kind of sacrifice in humility and prayer. We need to die for our identification with the microcosmic interior in order to resurrect in the Cosmic chamber. At that point Paul's words become truly comprehensible: "Not I but through Christ in me". Our microcosmic chamber doesn't disappear, nor we should be deluded that we are the Christ in his completeness. No, we are still the Earthly ego and the Christ is infinitely larger than us, but now the Spirit of God's Word flows through us and gives us Life... and gives it abundantly. It's now up to us to channel this Loving Life force appropriately in the sensory world, through our spiritual activity - the microcosmic Word. This is what it means to do God's Will. This Will is not meant to restrict us but to connect us to the Macrocosm, to Cosmic Life. We resist God's will when we insist to live entirely microcosmically - that is, for ourselves. When we go beyond ourselves our Earthly Life becomes extension of Cosmic Life and our spiritual activity can flow and touch not only the microcosmic interior but also the beings of the Spiritual World.

I should apologise to Ashvin as I did misunderstand what he was saying - I read it as if saying that we perceive through thoughts alone, and in the (maybe eastern?) way I use the word, I can perceive without a single thought. The distinction between “thought” and “direct perception” is tricky however, and I guess it does depend on your definition of “thought”. I can perceive something quite complex in an instant (maybe you could call it an experience or an idea), and then I think about it and unpack it. If you include both of those processes as “thought”, then Ashvin’s statement maybe makes more sense.

Nonetheless, although thought and perception are inseparably bonded together as one, I do also think there is a significant difference. If I had to try to put my finger on the difference between the way I see things, and the way you and Ashvin see things, it’s mainly related to your idea of god. I’ll try to bridge the gap. From my perspective, we are made in the image of god. You could say that the root of “I”, where thoughts ultimately bubble up from, is our equivalent of the father. The aspect of us that is thought (in the sense of when we think in language), is our equivalent of the son. To fully know ourselves, the image-of-father and the image-of-son must be united, which is my understanding of the eastern ‘enlightenment’. The christian way is to align ourselves with that which we are the image of, through the incarnation. When we do that, we resonate with him, and the Holy Spirit which is the bond of love between the father and the son, bonds us to him in a unity.

So when you say “And this ties with the mystery of the Christ because it is the Word that is behind your "I" from which the thought emanations proceed”, this is a rearrangement that doesn’t make sense to me. I do think there is a sense in which there is a trace of the divine in everyone and everything. But that’s a big jump away from saying that Christ is the same as our self. I’m no substance dualist, but I think there are dualities of different types.

[AshvinP]

Simon, you have actually very well described why it is justified to call thinking also an organ of perception. Maybe you were misled because Ashvin mentioned only the word 'perceptual' which can easily be understood as completely passive. The best way to view this is if you consider the sense of touch with our hands while blindfolded - in order to perceive the objects we need to be active, we need to move our fingers and feel the shapes of the objects. If we are not active with our fingers we won't perceive anything. This is precisely what we have with thinking and you have actually described it very beautifully. How do you know about the ego chamber, the reverberation from the body? It's exactly because you have touched these constraints with your thinking. You know about the ego chamber not because you see it through the bodily senses but because your thinking activity encounters certain restrictions, it bumps into a spiritual structure. If this is realized we already know that through thinking we live in the fullest sense within the spiritual world. This is the moment where the Kantian divide can be resolved. The thought 'ego chamber' is abstracted out of experience but you would agree that it is being abstracted out of reality. Now if we don't place self-imposed limitations on what our spiritual activity (of which intellectual thinking is only a concrete form) can touch, we arrive at the basis of the spiritual-scientific method of investigation. And this ties with the mystery of the Christ because it is the Word that is behind your "I" from which the thought emanations proceed. That's the quiet voice you have real relation with. In the same way you have explored the microcosmic interior where your thoughts reverberate, it is possible to explore the Macrocosmic space within which the Word reverberates. Of course this requires a kind of sacrifice in humility and prayer. We need to die for our identification with the microcosmic interior in order to resurrect in the Cosmic chamber. At that point Paul's words become truly comprehensible: "Not I but through Christ in me". Our microcosmic chamber doesn't disappear, nor we should be deluded that we are the Christ in his completeness. No, we are still the Earthly ego and the Christ is infinitely larger than us, but now the Spirit of God's Word flows through us and gives us Life... and gives it abundantly. It's now up to us to channel this Loving Life force appropriately in the sensory world, through our spiritual activity - the microcosmic Word. This is what it means to do God's Will. This Will is not meant to restrict us but to connect us to the Macrocosm, to Cosmic Life. We resist God's will when we insist to live entirely microcosmically - that is, for ourselves. When we go beyond ourselves our Earthly Life becomes extension of Cosmic Life and our spiritual activity can flow and touch not only the microcosmic interior but also the beings of the Spiritual World.

I should apologise to Ashvin as I clearly misunderstood what he was saying - I read it as if saying that we perceive through thoughts alone, and in the (maybe eastern?) way I use the word, I can perceive much without a single thought. The distinction between “thought” and “direct perception” is tricky however, and I guess it does depend on your definition of “thought”. I can perceive something quite complex in an instant (maybe you could call it an experience or an idea), and then I think about it and unpack it. If you include both of those processes as “thought”, then Ashvin’s statement maybe makes more sense.

Nonetheless, although thought and perception are inseparably bonded together as one, I do also think there is a significant difference. If I had to try to put my finger on the difference between the way I see things, and the way you and Ashvin see things, I’ll try to bridge the gap. From my perspective, we are made in the image of god. You could say that the root of “I”, where thoughts ultimately bubble up from, is our equivalent of the father. The aspect of us that is thought (in the sense of when we think in language), is our equivalent of the son. To fully know ourselves, the image-of-father and the image-of-son must be one, which is my understanding of the eastern ‘enlightenment’. The christian way is to align ourselves with that which we are the image of, through the incarnation. When we do that, we resonate with him, and the Holy Spirit which is the bond of love between the father and the son, bonds us to him in a unity.

So when you say “And this ties with the mystery of the Christ because it is the Word that is behind your "I" from which the thought emanations proceed”, this is a rearrangement that doesn’t make sense to me. I do think there is a sense in which there is a spark of the divine in everyone, breathed into us with our life, and even in which god is present to everyone. But that’s a big jump away from saying that Christ is the same as our deepest self. That deepest bond comes through relationship and alignment. To me that feels like maybe pantheism, but certainly different from my understanding.

No apology necessary. I don't think you were misunderstanding very much. Perception and thought can only be separated in the abstract - in reality, they are "inseparably bonded together as one" like you say. We do not perceive and then think about perception later, but rather we perceive because we are also thinking at the same time. The confusion may come in the fact that we can only observe a past state of thinking, not the thinking we are currently engaged in. Every time we start thinking about our thinking, there is another 'layer' of thinking behind our thinking which we are not observing. This is very important to note because we then see how thinking is the only aspect of our experience we know for certain emanates from our own spiritual activity. The act and the object of that act are as One.

I will let Cleric address the rest of your post, because I kind of lost you guys and am also interested in the answer.

[AshvinP]

I think what Hoffman is doing is really interesting, but I’m not sure he would describe it in the same way you are. In the analogy, maybe you could say that what he is doing is a change from looking at the types of pixels in the picture, to the objects that make up the picture. Yes makes it a potentially better way of understanding what is happening in the picture, but it’s still just picture.

Right, well, there is nothing wrong with trying to work things out ourselves, but there is something wrong with assuming anyone who disagrees with what we have worked out should be dismissed out of hand. For starters, scholastic philosophers-theologians completely disagree that thinking is a "self reflective loop in [personal] awareness". Rather, they viewed it is a means for penetrating the Divine order of the world in a very real way. Not the Kantian way of creating an internal copy to resemble the outer reality, because such a hard dualist notion still did not exist at their time, but the spiritual scientific way of viewing spiritual activity (thinking activity in a broad sense) as that which truly connects us into the spiritual realm of ideal-beings/content, because we all emanate from the same Spirit.

I do think nature is ordered according to something like mathematical formulas. But the very process of science is a bit like writing an autobiography about someone. No matter how good that book is, how well it leaves it’s reader able to know what they think, to know how they are likely to respond in any situation, the book is never going to be the same as the person. You could say it has captured something of the essence, but it will never be the same as the essence.
...
I don’t think I’m dismissing anything out of hand. I genuinely agree that the way we have compartmentalised knowledge through science versus the reality of our experiences has been devastating to mankind's ability to understand the meaning of our existence. However I don’t see the answer as ‘cramming’ the ways of knowing together. Rather my answer for myself is more similar to the scholastics, in that I have the more important grand narrative, and the other narratives (including science, history, relationships, enjoyment, charity, work, hobbies etc) fit into that, inform it, and in turn it brings meaning to those. To me that gives a centering balance, and helps me fit things into the right place in the hierarchy of my life, and my understanding of how things are. At least that’s what I aim for after bobbing all over the place with different approaches, the reality is more of a messy work in progress!

It does not really matter how we describe it as long as we acknowledge that, through proper science, we are moving towards less abstraction and more true knowledge of the ideal relations. Of course, when the dominant paradigm was materialism-dualism, we were caught in a vicious cycle of increasing abstraction in philosophy and science. What the metamorphic process of Spirit shows is that we have already left that paradigm behind. The scholastics are a unique example of how it was seen the "grand narrative" and other narratives can touch through our spiritual activity, but still they had no other choice but to say some "faith" in Church dogma was necessary because Reason cannot take us the entire way to the Divine essence. In the wake of the modern scientific paradigm, we are no longer in such a position. That is the essence of what I am trying to convey with the metamorphic essays, or certainly a huge part of it.

[Simon Adams]

No apology necessary. I don't think you were misunderstanding very much. Perception and thought can only be separated in the abstract - in reality, they are "inseparably bonded together as one" like you say. We do not perceive and then think about perception later, but rather we perceive because we are also thinking at the same time. The confusion may come in the fact that we can only observe a past state of thinking, not the thinking we are currently engaged in. Every time we start thinking about our thinking, there is another 'layer' of thinking behind our thinking which we are not observing. This is very important to note because we then see how thinking is the only aspect of our experience we know for certain emanates from our own spiritual activity. The act and the object of that act are as One.

I think we have a different understanding of perception, which for me seems more like a blank screen. Thoughts and the qualia of experience then pattern that screen, whether ‘passively’ in experience, or actively in terms of thinking and acting. So yes they can’t be separated, but along with the will that drives the active patterns, I do think they are different aspects. Think about when you imagine something, which is often involved in thinking. The will starts and direct the process but it’s more like riding a horse than painting something in mindspace.

I will let Cleric address the rest of your post, because I kind of lost you guys and am also interested in the answer.

I think I’m a bit old school for you guys. We run the risk of the board becoming about theology rather than metaphysics, and my theology is very primitive anyway.

[Cleric K]

I should apologise to Ashvin as I did misunderstand what he was saying - I read it as if saying that we perceive through thoughts alone, and in the (maybe eastern?) way I use the word, I can perceive without a single thought. The distinction between “thought” and “direct perception” is tricky however, and I guess it does depend on your definition of “thought”.

I think most misunderstandings can be avoided if we speak of spiritual activity. I prefer this expression because it is more general. Thinking is usually understood as chains of words/symbols arranged through grammatical/logical laws. What Ashvin said, that there's always thought when we perceive can be comprehended if we consider that movement of attention is also spiritual activity. It could be completely thoughtless activity, yet the focusing of attention on perception already connects meaning/idea to it.

I can perceive something quite complex in an instant (maybe you could call it an experience or an idea), and then I think about it and unpack it.

This is very nice. In spiritual training we need to develop this skill consciously. We can call it pictorial cognition in the most general sense. It doesn't necessarily need to be visual picture but in all cases it's a higher order complex that can be encompassed holistically. That's why the word 'picture' is appropriate because it is the most approachable way to describe this kind of activity. For example, when we look at our surroundings we have a holistic experience of our room. If we are to unpack this pictorial experience into words we might need to write a small book.

Pictorial thinking is a necessary preparation for higher cognition (Imaginative consciousness). It's actually something that we practiced all the time as a child but was slowly replaced primarily by verbal thought. The exercises for pictorial thinking are very pleasant. For example, if we are going to prepare a breakfast, most adults usually think verbally about what they are going to do. Instead, we can mute our inner voice and imagine ourselves cooking in the kitchen, taking the products that we want and preparing the meal. Through exercises like these we (re)discover inner degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity which are absolutely necessary for Imaginative cognition. Our activity must become something mobile, metamorphosing, able to condense into a point and expanding as the universe. Only through such kind of inner mobility we have a chance to capture the processes in the soul body. Then things like those that you grasp intuitively, like the ego chamber, the reverberation in the body and brain, become perceptible. Our activity becomes fluid-like and explores the constraints of our astral organism. And these constraints aren't something geometrical (although they can be seen in this way in relation to the physical body). The more important constraints are in soul life. For example, the relations with the members of our family are such constraints. We gain to seeing within our soul body when we are able to experience in such a fluid-pictorial way how our soul life is shaped through the interference with the souls of our family members. Of course it's not all about technique. Every step towards the unveiling of the soul processes presents more and more the true picture of what we are, and this is not always something that is undisturbing. Yet it's a process that no one can bypass. It's the casting out of the beam from our eye.

From my perspective, we are made in the image of god. You could say that the root of “I”, where thoughts ultimately bubble up from, is our equivalent of the father. The aspect of us that is thought (in the sense of when we think in language), is our equivalent of the son. To fully know ourselves, the image-of-father and the image-of-son must be united, which is my understanding of the eastern ‘enlightenment’. The christian way is to align ourselves with that which we are the image of, through the incarnation. When we do that, we resonate with him, and the Holy Spirit which is the bond of love between the father and the son, bonds us to him in a unity.

So when you say “And this ties with the mystery of the Christ because it is the Word that is behind your "I" from which the thought emanations proceed”, this is a rearrangement that doesn’t make sense to me. I do think there is a sense in which there is a trace of the divine in everyone and everything. But that’s a big jump away from saying that Christ is the same as our self. I’m no substance dualist, but I think there are dualities of different types.

Actually your description of the image is quite in place. The question of the alignment is key. If we really experience this alignment in depth we cannot fail but find that we are in certain sense concentric to the Trinity. I too wouldn't use the expression that "Christ is the same as our self". I would say that the Christ is the higher self, in respect to which we're not even a toddler. Yet it's precisely the alignment process which transforms our egoistic self into a servant of the higher Macrocosmic nature.

The question before the soul is how much alignment is too much? Is there such a thing? If we think that there is, what are the reasons? The usual feeling is that we are being arrogant if we think that we can have such an intimate relation with the Divine. Most often this happens because it's imagined that such an intimate alignment reaches undeservedly for the 'benefits' of the Divine. In other words it's seen as pride. But this rests on misunderstanding mainly because of the twisted forms of Christianity (especially, as you say, in the USA). If things are penetrated in their depth it'll be reckoned that it is only through seeking this intimate concentric relation, that we can comprehend how to serve the Divine world. This is something individual. In other words it's the question "What would the Representative of Man do with my life in my place?" The only way to know this is if we align with the Divine such that we desire to think, feel and act as the Divine. This can be seen as expression of pride only if we confuse the Divine life on Earth for life of joy, dancing and lying on the grass. In fact it's a life of work and sacrifice. By sacrifice it's not meant destroying ourselves. The Divine has no use of such sacrifice. What should be sacrificed is our egoistic life in exchange for the Life that flows from the Divine in service for all. Everyone suffers in some way. The difference is that some know why they are suffering. Through the Divine Life we comprehend that what we go through is no different from the labor pain of a mother. Paradoxically as it may sound, if we understand this deep into our being, we are grateful for all the suffering because we know that something is being born through it. If things are seen in this light it very often turns out that 'too much alignment' is not resisted because of humility but because we don't want to take the full weight of the cross.

Suffering is a side effect of higher development. We cannot avoid it in attaining insight. Human beings will one day say to themselves: ‘I am grateful for the joy the world gives me, but if I had to face the choice of keeping my joys or my sufferings, I would want to keep my sufferings for the sake of gaining insight. Every suffering presents itself after a certain time as something we cannot do without, because we have to grasp it as part of the development contained within evolution. There is no development without suffering, just as there is no triangle without angles.
[…]
By overcoming egotism, human beings get over the mood of depression and feeling lamed or paralyzed. In this phenomenon we can see something that is good: strength out of insufficiency or inadequacy. Thank God that I am encouraged by an inadequate deed–that is, by its failure–to further action! Human striving is not a vague matter of luck. Only those whose free will turns away from the destiny of the human being remain unredeemed. In the synthesis of the world process, suffering is a factor.

[Simon Adams]

Hi Cleric

I think there is wisdom in much that you say here, especially about suffering. However there is also a lot here that conflicts fundamentally with my experience and understanding. When I say “alignment”, I am talking about a creature aligning with creator, not lower self aligning with higher self. This relationship and the significance of god being entirely “other” is so important that all the rest becomes trivial. The fact that god can be present to and in us, to the extent that we get less and he gets more, may seem very similar to what you are saying, but it’s turning everything important upside down and inside out. It jars completely with my experience and my understanding of scripture, and of the views of the church fathers that lived with and learnt from the apostles. Jacob’s Ladder, or the ladder on which John of the Cross rose to a mystical union, is indeed an inner experience. So I can see the conclusion that as this all happens inside us, that it is simply a movement from lower self to higher self. However this is one of my biggest concerns about the flatness of raw idealism, in that it hides the vertical dimension within reality. We can move along this vertical just as we can move along the horizontal plane: we can live in the depths of hell, or we can touch the divine in heaven.

Yes this all happens within us, but this is a spiritual movement, not a movement of our focus between different aspects of ourselves. In fact a healthy idealism could also help avoid this confusion, for if all is mind, and we are distinct from the rest of reality, then surely movement within reality need not be movement on the plane of representation? This is why prayer and worship are so crucial, for without them we have no spiritual legs, we cannot walk along the vertical plane, and rather stay frozen within this plane. Of course they are not the only ways we move in this plane, being thankful, forgiving, brave, humble, kind etc all help to detach from the things that pull us down this vertical plane, as Dante described so well. Nonetheless, prayer - the regular lifting of the heart and mind of creature towards creator - even when completely without words, is the step by step engine that moves us onwards and upwards. It’s that relationship that integrates the different parts of the person, and aligns with the creator, so that creator is in creature, and creature is in creator. We are in the image of him, but he is entirely ‘other’, and so although it is like a returning to the source, a completion, a union, it is nonetheless one of those few things that will always and unavoidably be a duality. Creator and created.

Apologies if this sounds a bit ‘preachy’, but I thought it necessary to make this fundamental difference clear. Of course you are free to have your view and I see some deep insights in many areas, but this is just reality to me. So although I try to be open minded as I know so little about so much, this is my solid ground.

[AshvinP]

Hi Cleric

I think there is wisdom in much that you say here, especially about suffering. However there is also a lot here that conflicts fundamentally with my experience and understanding. When I say “alignment”, I am talking about a creature aligning with creator, not lower self aligning with higher self. This relationship and the significance of god being entirely “other” is so important that all the rest becomes trivial. The fact that god can be present to and in us, to the extent that we get less and he gets more, may seem very similar to what you are saying, but it’s turning everything important upside down and inside out. It jars completely with my experience and my understanding of scripture, and of the views of the church fathers that lived with and learnt from the apostles. Jacob’s Ladder, or the ladder on which John of the Cross rose to a mystical union, is indeed an inner experience. So I can see the conclusion that as this all happens inside us, that it is simply a movement from lower self to higher self. However this is one of my biggest concerns about the flatness of raw idealism, in that it hides the vertical dimension within reality. We can move along this vertical just as we can move along the horizontal plane: we can live in the depths of hell, or we can touch the divine in heaven.

Yes this all happens within us, but this is a spiritual movement, not a movement of our focus between different aspects of ourselves. In fact a healthy idealism could also help avoid this confusion, for if all is mind, and we are distinct from the rest of reality, then surely movement within reality need not be movement on the plane of representation? This is why prayer and worship are so crucial, for without them we have no spiritual legs, we cannot walk along the vertical plane, and rather stay frozen within this plane. Of course they are not the only ways we move in this plane, being thankful, forgiving, brave, humble, kind etc all help to detach from the things that pull us down this vertical plane, as Dante described so well. Nonetheless, prayer - the regular lifting of the heart and mind of creature towards creator - even when completely without words, is the step by step engine that moves us onwards and upwards. It’s that relationship that integrates the different parts of the person, and aligns with the creator, so that creator is in creature, and creature is in creator. We are in the image of him, but he is entirely ‘other’, and so although it is like a returning to the source, a completion, a union, it is nonetheless one of those few things that will always and unavoidably be a duality. Creator and created.

Apologies if this sounds a bit ‘preachy’, but I thought it necessary to make this fundamental difference clear. Of course you are free to have your view and I see some deep insights in many areas, but this is just reality to me. So although I try to be open minded as I know so little about so much, this is my solid ground.

Simon,

I am sure Cleric will offer a more helpful response later, but I just wanted to remark briefly... it is very interesting that what you consider "so important the rest is trivial", i.e. "god being entirely 'other'", is what I find so important in the complete opposite direction. That God is not other feels so important to me, not merely intellectually, but actually feels. I am sure you could have guessed that from my posts and essays, otherwise I would not bother writing them. It is true that your view has a strong foundation in the early Church, but it is equally true that another understanding was already present at that time and runs through the entire history of the Western Church, although was almost eradicated in the last few centuries.

I would further argue that many of those Christian theologians you may think support your view are not quite as supportive as imagined due to the metamorphic spiritual progression we are involved in. Many theological views we find so "central" to Christianity are artifacts of the modern age. I will be posting the first part of my last part of the essay today, and I hope you get a chance to read it, because I would love to hear your thoughts. Obviously I feel these are the most important questions we could be asking and exploring as humans, let alone humans interested in idealist philosophy.