Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue Aug 17, 2021 3:36 pm
Searching for answers through mathematics has fundamental limitation. To grasp this we must take a step backwards and appreciate the fact that first of all, doing mathematics is really doing
thinking. At the moment we imagine that mathematical thoughts tell us in themselves something about reality, we are making a great presupposition.
Implicitly we assume that reality is created by (conforms to) mathematical thoughts and we try to mirror the external mathematical reality process in our local math thoughts.
In the last few centuries this was justified approach but now we must go further. Instead of trying to make an intellectual model of the supposed reality through mathematical thoughts, we should turn our attention to the very intimate process of producing the thoughts in the first place. Why try to abstractly model (and thus avoid) that which we can directly investigate in its true nature, instead of confronting it directly?
Once our spiritual activity becomes the object of experience we begin to view formal mathematical systems as set of rules that tells us what is possible and what is forbidden to
think. Consider this:
To put that in a simpler analogy, we can imagine an axiomatic mathematical system as rules for walking. A simple such system could be that we're allowed only to take one step at a time and turn at right angles. In this way we can quickly assess that the only reachable places we can step onto, form a kind of grid with one step size. This would correspond to the white tree above - the provable theorems. To prove a theorem means to find a combination of steps and turns which reaches at a specific spot (the theorem). Spots in between the grid are false theorems because it may (or it may not) be possible to show that we can never step there if we comply to the axiomatic rules. If we do step there we must have violated the rules.
This is a crude analogy, not taking everything into account. Now we must translate to thinking. To think within a formal system is similar to accepting some rules (like stepping and turning) but for our thinking. Yet our thinking is very flexible and we can continuously step out of the rules and encompass 'what we've been stepping through' from a higher level. This allows us to make a map of mathematical statements as the one above.
Today we're at a critical threshold of human development where we're bumping into this limit - where the intellectual thinking turns upon itself. Contemporary science and philosophy (even widespread spirituality) don't at all want to approach this point where thinking encounters itself. It is somewhat understandable - it's much more difficult to investigate something incessantly twisting and morphing. This is the great dilemma of the intellect. If it has to investigate itself in the way it feels comfortable with, it must deaden itself - it must freeze itself into immobile mineral forms which are convenient to look at. But this means that all thinking must cease! The other alternative - where thinking livingly experiences itself in mobility and constant metamorphosis is quite impossible to grasp in static concepts and thus it's considered unworthy for scientific exploration. Yet it is precisely there that we must look. We are indeed capable of beholding the mobile and living nature of thinking but we need concepts of another kind, which are fluid, living. Just as we can't learn to ride a bicycle by just holding on to abstract rules but must turn them into living, flowing experience, so the Imaginative experience of thinking is a skill that must be developed. Through it we begin to uncover higher order spiritual processes that ordinarily lie hidden behind the intellect. It's like the intellect is a result of a
standing wave. Normally we are conscious only of the static points (corresponding to intellectual thoughts). The other parts of the 'vibrating medium' don't rise to consciousness. When we begin to glimpse into Imaginative consciousness a whole world of processes and beings becomes apparent - a world of unceasing metamorphosis. There, in the stationary nodes of this world we experience our ordinary ego with its rigid thoughts but now from a higher perspective of our true "I"-being, which we can't really say that we posses but it possesses us.
My whole point is that we should be quite careful when using mathematical conclusions for speculating about the nature of reality. We should never forget that after all we're exercising thinking in this way, and we are voluntarily locking ourselves within certain patterns and shapes of thinking spiritual activity.
Another problem with the Gödel's candy shop is that it
implicitly assumes a certain fundamental character of
time. It is indeed true that at our stage of evolution it is like we're only seeing a tiny aperture of the Spiritual potential at a given time. Yet it is a preconception that this aperture will always stay of the same size, so to speak, and will be able to probe only that much of the potential at a time. Even the most preliminary glimpses in the Imaginative realm already present us with the 'vertical' aspect of the potential and the fact that the aperture actually grows. This really changes the way we view Time. This aperture grows all the time through the integrative process of memory. In our ordinary consciousness we can only think about the memories but in Imaginative consciousness we can really
see that Time-memory is a growth process and the past exists
within the metamorphic organism that we have turned into. The more the evolution proceeds, the more the living aperture of our being encompasses the Eternal, which so to say inflows in our being. This is what DH dismisses - that there's a 'vertical' integration of potential. It's assumed that the potential is explored only 'horizontally' in bits as large as the aperture allows. But the forms of higher cognition available to us through the proper training, clearly present us with the vertical aspect. This actually makes the whole evolution much more profound. We not only explore the candies in a given horizontal plane but at certain stages we rise above and encompass as a whole the domains which
previously we were forced to explore sequentially. Needless to say, this completely transforms our self-image. We see our ordinary self as being spread out in a labyrinth and how it was gradually cohering towards the point where it can see itself as proceeding from a higher order self. This latter part is the main obstacle in our age. People just don't want to even consider that there could be anything of higher order that lives
behind their ordinary thoughts and feelings.