Steve Petermann wrote: ↑Sat Sep 25, 2021 12:27 am
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Fri Sep 24, 2021 10:25 pm
The real appeal is more likely that truly keen folks who are interested in the kind of esoteric topics found here, and actually have some well informed grasp of ontology, are few and far between, and we just crave intelligent conversation with like-minded people, however contentious it may get at times.
Here's the way I look at it. For those who think they may have something helpful to say for humanity and the world, then as "nobodies", it might be disconcerting that there doesn't seem to be much interest. As Eugene says, there is a vast ocean of content out there. With that being the case and if one is not famous, making a noticeable splash in that ocean is unreasonable. But perhaps making a noticeable splash isn't the only way to make a difference but it won't result in feeding one's ego.
Jung talks about the collective unconscious and synchronicity. Rupert Sheldrake talks about morphic resonance. He talks about this in how difficult-to-form crystals form themselves more easily once it is first accomplished. He also talks about how when rats on one side of the world solve a problem, the rats on the other side know how to solve it as well. In my theology, there is a Divine Life (God-as-living). With God-as-living, there is a Mind-as-living. The Mind-as-living is the communion of all minds from the smallest to the largest. There is an entanglement of minds (perhaps represented like in quantum physics). What this means is that even if there is no direct communication between minds, they can still affect each other. It may be subtle and ambiguous but with time and reinforcement, it can become significant.
Discussions like these or an individual's unnoticed ideas may just seem local, but they are not. They contribute to the communal Mind
and influence what is possible for the holistic future going forward.
There is one clear thread which runs through the history of Eastern nondual tradition, Western idealism, Cleric's posts, my posts, and of course what we refer to from Steiner et al. (we have also highlighted how this thread is woven into the fabric of everything from the
Bhagavad Gita to the OT/NT and modern philosophy-science of Goethe, Coleridge, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Gebser, Jung, Sheldrake, Barfield, Bergson, and many others).
We are not other than the Cosmos, Spirit, etc. - all is truly One. For many philosophies (not those mentioned above), this assertion has remained at the purely abstract level, and although they express real truths, they may as well be expressing physicalist truths. The physicalist can say, "
all is matter, energy, field, etc. and therefore all is One". That is actually what the educated physicalists do say. What differentiates the idealist claim to One truth from the physicalist claim? In modern abstract philosophy, almost nothing. The abstract idealist can say, "
I have solved the 'hard problem of consciousness' by substituting 'all is mind' for 'all is matter'". What else? The physicalist can actually go further and say, "
all is matter and here's how the matter interacts with other matter to do this or that". The abstract idealist cannot even say that much, only take what the physicalist has already said and copy-and-paste it onto a world made of "mental stuff". And if anyone finds themselves being offended by what was just written, feeling it to be condescending or belitting or whatever, I would urge that person to ask themselves whether I am just randomly throwing out assertions here or whether they are, instead, held together by that same thread which I mentioned at the beginning and whether, if true, they have real deep significance for how we approach philosophy, science, and the world in general. I posted a quote from Schelling in the topic-specific section which I think is also relevant here:
Schelling wrote:According to these reflections, it just does not seem appropriate to throw the entire burden of this difficulty [re: immanent divinity] only on a single system [of idealist philosophy], especially since the supposedly higher one opposed to it affords so little satisfaction. The generalities of idealism also cannot be of help here. Nothing at all can be achieved with such abstract concepts of God as actus purissumus [purest actuality], the likes of which earlier philosophy put forward, or with such concepts as more recent philosophy has brought forth again and again out of a concern to remove God quite far indeed from all of nature. God is something more real than a merely moral world order and has entirely different and more vital motive forces in himself than the desolate subtlety of abstract idealists attributes to him. The abhorrence of everything real that finds the spiritual befouled through any contact with the latter must of course also blind one’s eye to the origin of evil. Idealism, if it does not have as its basis a living realism, becomes just as empty and abstract a system as that of Leibniz, Spinoza, or any other dogmatist. The entire new European philosophy since its beginning (with Descartes) has the common defect that nature is not available for it and that it lacks a living ground. Spinoza’s realism is thereby as abstract as the idealism of Leibniz. Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole.
And I also love this one from Bergson (for anyone curious, Schelling went through a major shift from his earlier living philosophy to his later philosophy which became much more abstract intellectual, which is what Bergson is referring to below):
Bergson wrote:These conclusions on the subject of duration were, as it seemed to me, decisive. Step by step they led me to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method. “Intuition,” however, is a word whose use caused me some degree of hesitation. Of all the terms which designate a mode of knowing, it is still the most appropriate; and yet it leads to a certain confusion. Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration. Numerous are the philosophers who have felt how powerless conceptual thought is to reach the core of the mind. Numerous, consequently, are those who have spoken of a supra-intellectual faculty of intuition.
But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will.
Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?
Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.
- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)