Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed May 17, 2023 1:34 pm
Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue May 02, 2023 5:00 pm
The depth of PoF, which turns out is very hard to grasp for many, leads us to the idea that the more we undress the layers of conditioning of personality, family, nation, race, gender, religion, the more we discover ourselves as a spiritual being that draws upon a holistic source of inspiration, which is inherently coherent.
Cleric,
I'm still pondering this sense perception/intuition distinction. What I'm struggling with is how we understand intuitions that appear in our consciousness before we "undress the layers of conditioning". If we haven't reached the state of intuitive cognition, how do we have intuitions? Can we understand them as murky, convoluted shadows of pure intuitions?
Anthony,
As we await a response from Cleric, let me offer some thoughts. We should understand imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions as weaving the entire manifest world we experience - not only our dim soul-life of shadowy thoughts, feelings, and will impulses, but also the human, animal, plant, and mineral kingdoms, the experience of light/color, air/breath, water, etc. They weave even the social relationships we enter into, the destiny we encounter on our life path. It is the meaningful
depth of these experiences, of which we normally only pay attention to the quantitative structure and the superficial life of sensory impressions or dim thoughts. Higher cognitive development resurrects this meaningful depth of experience, which is always implicitly present, in and through our thinking consciousness. Our capacity to think is what awakens us to the presence of these cognitive forces which weave the World, but at first only as the convoluted shadows you mention. We use them to build up a world-conception through laws, principles, models, etc. (previously our ancestors experienced them as the spiritual beings of mythology and religion - the relations between cosmic and elemental spirits - which is more accurate).
When we observe the world, at first, we are presented with living impressions of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, textures. This much is given. But as soon we try to bring order into these impressions through arrangements of thoughts, the living quality recedes and we are left with increasingly grayed out mental pictures and verbal tokens. The spiritual world is continually dying in our thoughts. We can distinguish between the ‘living’ and ‘dead’ as follows: what is alive impels us to bring our organism into movement. Few people can enter a stadium with the rhythmic pulsation of music and stand as stiff as a board, failing to sway with the beat. Even fewer people can hold their hand close over a flame and fail to move it after some quick duration of time. How many people, on the other hand, can sit and think about the mathematical structure of a piece of music, or the chemical properties of a flame, without this compelling their life of feeling or impulses of will in the slightest?
In the corpse of our thought, sundered from the compulsive life of sensory impressions, also resides the key to our freedom. When we are not impelled to react in one way or another to our thoughts, we gradually gain the degrees of freedom to steer our thinking according to our desired ideals. That is where we are now. Our abstract thoughts, as reflections or shadows, force us to think in one direction or another so long as we remain unaware of their reflective nature and idolize them into the power that is causally prior to their appearance. When we have awakened to that reflective nature, we can then freely choose the direction of our thinking. To keep our thinking attached to personal desires - our thoughts dragged along helplessly by dark instincts and hedonistic pleasures - is ignorance of and enslavement to alien impulses of will. Instead, we can choose to devote its energy towards the archetypal and the Good, which alone is capable of enlightening, and thereby redeeming, the personal and the sensuous, recovering the higher cognitions which were always within them. That is the path of spiritual freedom.