AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 2:40 pmAnthony66 wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 1:32 pm Ashvin,
I wish there was some form of thumbs up mechanism I could use to let you know I have read your prior responses. Be assured I have and I thank you again for them. Note, it is not my intention at this stage to provide any significant push back - I'm in an understanding phase.
I think the next two points can be lumped together here. I'll push back a little in order to gain clarity.
I guess the main thing that strikes me here is that these seem derivative, secondary, an abstraction, or conceptual schemes. They don't seem like primary phenomenal experiences. In meditative states, one is able for example to deeply experience the sense of warmth and perhaps break it down into greater levels of resolution perhaps by noting a vibratory aspect or the like. One doesn't juxtapose it with the phenomenons of coldness in these states.AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Sep 01, 2021 4:28 pm 3. Polar essence of all experience, i.e. Eternal-temporal, Unity-multiplicity, Universal-particular, Light-darkness, Warmth-coldness, and infinitely more.
4. Threefold essence of all experience - Willing-Feeling-Thinking, Body-Soul-Spirit, spatial dimensions, and many more (there are almost always threefold relations within the threefold relations, sometimes 3 sets of threefold relations to make nine-fold relation). Many other qualitative numeric relations are very important as well.
- Also note most essential relations are mirrored, i.e. they have relations with inverted qualities within spatiotemporal structure.
I don't see a particular specialness of threefold. We have four-fold essences - the four winds, the four corners, the four-fold taxonomy of consciousness, the four aspects of the human being, the fourfold atman. Likewise we could look at a variety of seven-fold aspects.
All of the these twofold (polarity of One-many, etc.), threefold (W-F-T activities), fourfold (space-time dimensions), sevenfold (evolutionary stages), tenfold, twelvefold, etc. qualitative relations are very important. They are all pointing to the same spiritual realm of meaningful qualities from different angles and, most importantly, to our own thinking involvement in the phenomenal world. We must use abstract concepts to relate these things to each other with speech (although Cleric does a great job using more images of concrete experience), but that's just our own limitation here - the concepts should always be understood as pointing to concrete qualities of experience in every moment of our lives, and the qualitative history of humanity and the Cosmos as a whole. My recent essays on 4th epoch mythology are exploring the threefold and fourfold essences. I will soon be posting an essay on the latter, as it manifests in the space-time dimensions (which is really about as broadly concrete as we can get), and I think that will be very helpful to your questions/concerns above. I will notify you here as well when it is posted (hopefully by tomorrow).
Anthony,
I am circling back on this to make sure you saw the new essay which begins to discuss the fourfold essence. Here is the link - viewtopic.php?f=5&t=552
Much fewer modern thinkers, however, have thought to consider the fourfold quality of Wholeness. Martin Heidegger was one who, in his own unique phenomenology, incorporated the fourth dimension of Time into a threefold consideration of Being. Carl Jung is especially relevant for us today, since it was the images of ancient mythology which led him to consider the fourfold relation as critical to our psychic life; a relation which he found missing from the historic Christian theological world-conception. Jung identified the threefold relation with the conscious functions of the psyche - sensation (also will-desire), feeling, and thinking - while he considered the fourth function to exist within the 'unconscious' as "intuition".
...The process of shedding Light on the collective subconscious is also the integral process of revealing the ancient Spirits who had previously been perceived from without and who were, in the fifth epoch, submerged within. According to Jung, this process was actually what made the field of "psychology" possible in the second half of the 19th century A.D. It is simultaneously the process by which we drink from the wonderful water of the fourth river Euphrates and also begin directing the water from that wellspring of Life to all of Nature; it is the process by which we receive the grace of the Redeemer and by which we also pay forward His redemption to the phenomenal appearances of the world. What we are trying to imagine here as we approach the Center of the Cosmic perfecting process in the 4th epoch - where we begin to transfigure the abstract quantity of linear time into the concrete quality of holistic Time - is how the fragmented souls of the modern world are integrated and once again made Whole. These are not far distant prophecies for us to simply envision and speculate over, but rather they are concrete realities which have already begun taking form in the world around us. Although we will see those concrete expressions in the images of various personalities and thought-systems as we move forward, we should always remember that these considerations only come to life in our own thought. We are not passive observers of these developments but active participants in them. In fact, the developments only reach their fulfillment in each individual's deep commitment to a sense of truth, a feeling of responsibility, and a need for Imagination.Jung wrote:Since all cognition is akin to recognition, it should not come as a surprise to find that what I have described as a gradual process of development had already been anticipated, and more or less prefigured, at the beginning of our era. We meet these images and ideas in Gnosticism, to which we must now give our attention; for Gnosticism was, in the main, a product of cultural assimilation and is therefore of the greatest interest in elucidating and defining the contents constellated by prophecies about the Redeemer, or by his appearance in history, or by the synchronicity of the archetype.
In the Elenchos of Hippolytus the attraction between the magnet and iron is mentioned, if I am not mistaken, three times. It first appears in the doctrine of the NAASSENES, who taught that the four rivers of Paradise correspond to the eye, the ear, the sense of smell, and the mouth. The mouth, through which prayers go out and food goes in, corresponds to the fourth river, the Euphrates. The well-known significance of the “fourth” helps to explain its connection with the “whole” man, for the fourth always makes a triad into a totality. The text says: “This is the water above the firmament, of which, they say, the Saviour spoke: ‘If you knew who it is that asks, you would have asked him, and he would have given you a spring of living water to drink.’ To this water comes every nature to choose its own substances, and from this water goes forth to every nature that which is proper to it, more [certainly] than iron to the Heracleian stone.”
As the reference to John 4:10 shows, the wonderful water of the Euphrates has the property of the aqua doctrinae, which perfects every nature in its individuality and thus makes man whole too. It does this by giving him a kind of magnetic power by which he can attract and integrate that which belongs to him. The Naassene doctrine is, plainly, a perfect parallel to the alchemical view already discussed: the doctrine is the magnet that makes possible the integration of man as well as the lapis.
This German poet of the late 18th century was a living example of how the four-dimensional 'aperspectival', 'time-free' consciousness began to manifest itself in the soul's Imagination. Aesthetics such as poetry and music are for the modern world what mythology was for the ancient world. In their images we find prefigured the holistic spiritual developments which will only later trickle down to the fragmented intellectual spheres of philosophy and science. Hölderlin, in particular, was quite conscious of this flowering consciousness within himself. He passionately contemplated Greek mythology and Plato's dialogues while many thinkers around him were forgetting the Reality of the spiritual altogether. In the verses above, we observe that he placed the subject ("It") after the predicate, ignoring the traditional division into linear sequential parts of subject and predicate. This simple inversion was an expression of his Imagination reaching beyond the limits of abstract space and linear time to perceive both as a unified Whole which could be freely explored, just as we may freely explore the objects in our room right now. The Imagination does not provide total spiritual freedom, but, relative to the abstractions in which the mere intellect imprisons itself, it provides more degrees of freedom than what most people speculate is possible. By way of his Imagination, Hölderlin illuminated the inner meaning of this elegantly simple observation - "Time is long, but the True comes to pass."Holderlin wrote:“I have seen it once, the one thing that my soul sought, and the fulfillment which we pose beyond the stars and push to the end of time—I have felt its presence. The most exalted was there—in this circle of human nature and things, it was there.”