This speaks to the above point about how without the indelible, experiential Realization of knowing ThySelf, if it remains just a conceptual exercise that at best offers an inkling of the truly profound implications you are speaking to, then regardless of how brilliant an analytical philosopher one may be, still what is focused on determines what is missed, and they are no more Self-realized than the vast majority. Indeed, there are many more non-philosophers who being ripe for it, in a highly intuitive way, have known the indelible experiential element. Or perhaps it takes an extreme event like an NDE. However, some philosophers like Jean Gebser have known this indelible, foundational experiential Realization, and it is no surprise that he was attracted to the teaching of Ramana Maharshi. This excerpt from a bio is surely indicative of this indelible Knowing ...AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 2:45 am- Why have so many brilliant philosophers failed to realize something as simple as the phenomenon and noumenon being united in their own thinking activity? Can we really assume so many people would have gone their entire lives missing this connection when they are studying precisely that epistemic issue?
Gebser had confided to close acquaintances that he had had an enlightenment experience (satori). “It was sober,” he put it, “on the one hand happening with crystal clarity in everyday life, which I perceived and to which I reacted ‘normally,’ and on the other hand and simultaneously being a transfiguration and irradiation of the indescribable, unearthly, transparent ‘Light’–no ecstasy, no emotion, but a spiritual clarity, a quiet jubilation, a knowledge of invulnerability, a primal trust.”
Gebser unexpectedly had this experience while he was visiting Sarnath in 1961, the place where 2,500 years ago the Buddha preached his first sermon. A year later Gebser published his Asienfibel (Primer on Asia), subsequently reissued in expanded form under the title Asien Lachelt Anders(Asia Smiles Differently), in which we meet Gebser the thoughtful traveler and bridge builder. He regarded the East/West encounter as central to our contemporary task of personal and cultural integration. He wrote, “The view that East and West are opposites is wrong. It is not permissible to apply opposite-creating rational thought in this context, which can, if we continue to persist in this faulty opposition, even lead to the suicide of our culture or civilization. West and East are complementarities. In comparison with the dual, divisive character of opposition, complementary is polar and unifying.”
Gebser, as a spiritual pilgrim, also visited Tiruvannamalai in South India, where Ramana Maharshi, one of modern India’s finest sages, had lived and taught until his death in 1950. But where he felt most in the presence of the emergent arational-integral consciousness was in the Pondicherry ashram of the twentieth-century philosopher/yogi Sri Aurobindo. the creator of “integral yoga,” who, incidentally, also died in 1950
And if his Winter Poem is any indication, Gebser was surely intuiting this Realization from very early on ...
The shining winter sky
is close enough to touch;
and you too are this sky.
No reason to distinguish.
For all the stars flow through your veins.
No reason to hearken after
the echo of ancient myths,
for the angel is on its way
to nest again into the heart,
until the human crown is covered with hair:
for the dream of moon and earth has melted away,
since it knew heaven;
knew it once and for all.
