(Essay) A Phenomenology of Mechanism: The Liminal Spaces of Perception

[Federica]

Oh, Federica, I do get that you think I'm on a tour bus while you are working hard at the office. I've already done my office time, paid my dues and received my social security pension. All I can report from my present seat on an elder branch is that the view is quite liminal and I feel tremendously grateful. In Santo Daime the spiritual saying is Bons Trabalhos, meaning "good works to you!" May your efforts bear good fruits, bring satisfaction to you and gifts to the world.

Thank you Lou!
My wish to you is that you will soon see through the veil of the picturesque views and the edifying feelings!

As soon as we become a more or less self-conscious spiritual being, then it is already within our hands to at least attune our being towards the future we want to experience. It belongs to our essential freedom to make this choice. If the Divine ray in us wants to experience dissolution, who can stop it? So even though much of the journey, the stages of metamorphosis and so on, are currently determined by forces greater than us, it is within our jurisdiction to have clear vision for the path we would Love to experience as evolutionary journey.

There's an interesting self-test with which we can find something about ourselves. There are various wells of attraction within the invisible potential. Even if we feel that it is not yet our time to do anything deliberately, that we still expect things to unfold by Divine ordainment, we can still see where we stand through our inner attitude to prayer.

Let's consider this with the utmost seriousness. We don't know where our destiny drags us. We're not sure within whose gravity well we are. The fact that the free fall feels pleasant says nothing about where it leads us. Many of the things that feel pleasant in our life lead to the bottom.

Prayer is our technique for spiritual attunement. Even if we have accepted our free fall for the moment, we can at least test ourselves to see whether we have made a choice for the direction in which we would like to be falling. We can say something like:

"Oh Great Being, who gives me my life and thinks its unfoldment,
Even though in this moment I've completely let go myself into you,
I beg you - draw me nearer to you and flow into me.
With all my soul I desire to walk the path that leads me stage by stage into the Divine.
Watch over me, pull me towards you, don't allow me to stray and fall into
The wells which lead my soul into oblivion.
Fill my being with your strength so one day I can start walking on my own
In absolute freedom and out of Love
For the Good of all beings."

Of course, it is not at all the goal here to have some spatial image of the Being that we address. It is our whole soul disposition that should express these words. It's the feeling that there are many wells where our world line can take us but we desire to be attracted by the well leading to the abundant Life.

If we feel inner resistance to summon such a soul disposition within ourselves, it simply means one of two things:
1. We're overly confident that other forces are responsible to take our worldline to the green pastures and still waters. We believe that not only we can free fall but we can even let our self-determination free fall, believing that other beings should take care and make sure we don't end up in the abyss.
2. We're simply indifferent whether our worldline will spiral through the fractal levels of Time integration or it will dissolve into the darkness of Cosmic sleep.

If we have determined for ourselves which path we would Love to experience as our unique evolutionary journey, yet we have accepted free fall for the time being, then the least thing we can do is to fill our soul with the mood of prayer and desire to be attracted on the path of Light that we'll tread in full consciousness and freedom.

[AshvinP]

Let's consider one small example. We could take our experience of life on Earth with a physical body. Observation reveals this body is composed of the same elements and through the same physical forces we see around us in the mineral kingdom. It also reveals that when we die, this same body decomposes and returns to that kingdom. Careful reasoning here suggests to us that there must be something else, in addition to the physical body, which keeps the latter intact, growing, maintained, etc. for a certain portion of our lives. This something else - referred to as etheric body, life body, vital body, body of formative forces - is supra-sensory, so it cannot be directly perceived by the normal waking intellect. This is a really simplistic version of the argument and we can go into more details if necessary. Here we have an example of current living experience/observations and logical reasoning concluding a reality which is beyond our current conscious awareness. I shouldn't have said it is beyond experience before - what we can logically reason to is always bound up with our experience, since we couldn't experience anything without conceptual activity. And we are always seeking to understand these supra-sensory bodies, not only as isolated concepts, but in terms of our current living, holistic experience. If it doesn't have practical ramifications for our first-person experience of the world, then it's still too abstract and generalized.

You are correct that we should not confuse the logical conclusion for knowledge proper, as in, consciousness of this etheric body from the inner perspective. The normal waking intellect is conscious of how its inner thinking activity relates to its physical body, to some limited extent (much less than what is normally assumed), but it can't say the same for the etheric body. To become inwardly conscious of this body is to start becoming creatively responsible for the unfolding of its development, however limited at first. So the only reason we can say we are arriving at an 'ontology' is because we have concluded, on phenomenological grounds, that the only Reality we can become aware of is of thought-nature which is, of course, the same thought-nature which lives in us. Our concept of 'etheric body', integrated into a living, holistic idea, is a real aspect of the etheric body itself and its functions in our experience. This is how our logical thinking can participate in spiraling together appearance and reality through its living concepts even prior to becoming inwardly conscious of various aspects of that reality. Average humanity has almost no consciousness of inner perspectives responsible for most aspects of its living experience, but if we couple this logical approach with meditative practice, there is endless practical experience and insights we can attain in our current lifetime.

Just to be clear, the real spiritual convictions do arise through inner experience. Nothing can substitute for the experience of having worked something out conceptually and then discovering it as inner reality via higher consciousness, or discovering it within and then coming across the same thing in conceptual form. These are immensely powerful 'road to Damascus' moments. Yet we should get in the habit of understanding the whole thing as a gradient of experience - there is nothing we work out conceptually which will prove to be insignificant for future inner revelations. Outer events in general, during the collective course of human evolution, are being re-experienced inwardly in the human soul. The physical plane and all its forms serve quite definite purposes in aiding this re-membering of the spiritual worlds through us. Since you made it through PoF, it may be worthwhile to start on Theosophy and see how it all fits into a holistic logical tapestry for you. We don't need to call what we are reaching "ontology", if we simply understand that we are reaching firm conclusions about ever-deepening aspects of the only thought-reality we can ever know.

This isn't a separate pursuit than higher cognitive knowledge. It actually serves as the basis for what we can perceive and comprehend in higher modes of thinking. We are gaining more and more refined conceptual instrumentation which can resonate with various aspects of higher worlds. Similarly, meditative and non-meditative investigation of higher worlds are not completely separate. The approaches are certainly different and we should maintain strict boundaries between them, i.e. we shouldn't use higher consciousness to navigate the sensory world, but the approaches and knowledge should also be complementing one another the entire way, bridging the gap. What I imaginatively discern from my inner life should elucidate what I gain from outer conceptual reasoning and vice versa, each one giving living feedback on how to adjust and improve the other. It is very much the same as all polar relations, such as our spiritual activity and its impressions into written texts

(...)

I hesitate to keep debating the Steiner lecture, because clearly the question is whether there actually is a discontinuity, not whether Steiner says there is one or not. I am curious what you think about Cleric's post about the continuity between spiritual activity impressed in airwaves and that same activity impressed in the sand (paper, etc.), for ex.

I am pretty confused as to how you say the mention of writing at the end of the lecture is completely tangential, though. Let's take one more look at that last paragraph.

"If true presentations of spiritual-scientific material, for example, are examined, 8 it will be found that the true spiritual scientists who have written these things also seriously worked on them to form each sentence creatively, that the position of the verb is not an arbitrary decision."

The formation of sentences and positioning of verbs is exactly what we have been calling 'syntax'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax

In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/)[1][2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency),[3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics).

Add to this the PoF quotes which also reference the syntax. And I can assure you he lectures on it in other places as well.

(...)

It seems to me that the careful reasoning you exemplify here can only be conducted by one who has already integrated the basics of what reality is, and how it arises, as per the PoF. It doesn't seem to be something that we can immediately and exclusively extract from mere observation. For instance, I doubt the naive realist would adhere to this logic. They would maybe accept that “there must be something else” which science has not yet discovered - as they would put it - but that this ‘something else’ is supra-sensory, I doubt they would accept, as a necessary logical consequence of observation. I am trying to say that this logical reasoning requires a pre-existing worldview, it descends from it. Yes, it provides a means to go beyond current conscious awareness, but only when the primacy of thinking as the supra-principle that brings reality to life is leveraged. Without such a foundation, the bridging cannot be acted, not exclusively from within the given. So I can’t see a real distinction between this supposedly pre-occurring phenomenology and the philosophy of freedom in itself.

“Our concept of 'etheric body', integrated into a living, holistic idea, is a real aspect of the etheric body itself and its functions in our experience.” Right, this is the one thing that I need to pin down and secure into place, and keep in focus all the time, so it doesn’t slip back to its dualistic nest while I'm not looking. Still not self-evident!
To recap - I do see, as you explain it, the role of logic in the spiraling together of maya and thought-nature of reality, as one of the two sides that can be activated. Only I don’t see how this can be done as a purely phenomenological step, prior to PoF.
Though the concept of gradient of experience is particularly useful to someone like me, who has a tendency to tidy up the playground conceptually, as it were, in a rigid way, and needs to take a more interactive approach to things. I see this same tendency at a higher magnitude in my parents for example, when I happen to have conceptual discussions with them. I consider myself much more fluid in comparison, but clearly I haven’t completed that work of freeing myself from that ingrained habit. I have to immerse myself more in the idea of unity in all its possible dimensions of manifestation.

Federica,

Let's remember, PoF is a phenomenology, a phenomenology of cognition. And this is the only valid phenomenology - we cannot understand phenomena without also investigating our spiritual activity which is a precondition for coherently experiencing any phenomena, and our concepts which are an integral part of the phenomenal world. This is the key point to hang onto in all topics and inquiries into the world content. Progress in knowledge today relies on deepening our understanding of the knowing instrument we use and its conceptual role in all experience. And since there isn't any conceivable experience apart from this thinking instrument, what we call the phenomenal world and the principles which unite its manifold appearances must be of the same thought-nature. For us to discover a non-thinking reality, we would have to step outside of our first-person thinking perspective and we know this cannot be done even in principle.

As soon as we speak of thoughts, we are speaking of supra-sensory perceptions and activity. Most people don't perceive their thoughts (or desires, feelings) and no one perceives their present thinking activity, as Steiner illustrates in PoF, yet both of these are undeniable aspects of reality (or should be undeniable for anyone who hasn't left thinking in the blind spot). So the supra-sensory aspects of our inner reality are a given of experience - we don't need to conclude them. It's hard to deny the supra-sensory aspects of outer reality as well - the force of gravity or the ultraviolet spectrum, for ex. What is supra-sensory should always be understood from the first-person, relational perspective - what is supra-sensory for me is not necessarily supra-sensory for the person next to me. As soon as we enter the realm of inner non-spatial activity, we are dealing with supra-sensory reality for normal waking consciousness. If there is another bodily organization which maintains physical vitality, yet it cannot be perceived by normal waking consciousness (which is bounded by spatial dimension), it is, by definition, supra-sensory. That doesn't mean we have figured out its deepest inner essence, but simply the fact that it must exist and be integral to our experience of life.

None of this requires a preconceived worldview or ontology. It only requires we grant reality to our own thinking, taking it out of the blind spot. The rest unfolds from there through holistic observation and reasoning. Meaning we observe the world phenomena as they present to us as living interconnected, interwoven, evolving processes. And we don't arbitrarily stop observing the phenomena or reasoning through them at any given point. We don't isolate only one measure from the song and try to derive our conclusions about reality, as a whole, based on that. We don't take only one song and ignore the composer and his corpus. We don't take the composer and ignore the general musical trends of his age. So on and so forth. As long as we resist the idolizing tendency, then we are attaining genuine knowledge of the continually metamorphosing World Process.

Thanks for suggesting the appropriate next book! I am eager to move on to it, and especially one that explains the four bodies, why they are called bodies and more, like Theosophy seems to do (reading the lecture you have lately suggested about sickness, it became clear that I am lacking a basic understanding of these. Therefore I put the lecture on standby). However, I might need to stay a little longer with PoF. I cannot say I fully "made it through it" yet. I reread some chapters sometimes, hoping they will feel completely natural and straightforward, but it’s often not yet the case. I still have to go slowly, and I doubt I’d be able to properly explain everything organically to someone else including countering objections, which to me is the sign that I am not yet on top of things as I would like. On a side note, one thing I did catch at first reading, is the almost imperceptibly humorous strokes woven in the reasoning here and there. I imagine this is not the most common type of comment one can find on PoF, so I thought I would mention it. One such passage that I remember is:

Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the opposition of object and subject, which has meaning only within the perceptual realm, to purely fictitious entities outside this realm. Now the distinct and separate things within the perceptual field remain separated only so long as the perceiver refrains from thinking. For thinking cancels all separation and reveals it as due to purely subjective conditions.

Maybe I'm weird, but I find this humorous : ) No doubt this could be used in various situations, with spectacular effects on materialistic, scientistic, or gladiatorial pride : ) With this, I hope I’m not giving off the impression that such nuances are my main takeaway from the book. In fact, my idea was to soon go to your recent ‘PoF Summarized’ post and revisit the book content through that check. I will see if I find the time. I have to be careful with being carried away and spending time that I don’t have, even if I know this is the most important thing I am doing with my time. I have been shrinking down the time I used to put into work preparation, and although that’s been instructive, making me realize that I can do just as good or maybe even better work, with less preparation and more improvising, I shouldn’t push it too far. The other day I was late to an online meeting. That had never, ever happened before. The hard to admit truth is that I didn’t login to the meeting because I was lost somewhere here, reading… until a kind email popped up from the background, 9 minutes in... I want to be very careful not to fall into such amateur behavior again.

Yeah he is chock full of humorous insertions like that. He often refers to how the 'philistines' are wrong, even according to their own reasoning! He also comes up with priceless quotes like this pretty often.

It is not a question of knowing things in an abstract sense but above all of calling for a changing of ways, for an effort to be made; the old easy ways must go, and a spiritual approach must be seen to be the right way. And the effort must be made to find energies through spiritual science, not the kind of mere satisfaction where people say: Wasn't that nice! I feel really good!’ — and float around in Cloud-cuckoo-land where they gradually go to sleep in their satisfaction at the harmony which exists in the world and the love of humanity which is so widespread.

[Lou Gold]

Oh, Federica, I do get that you think I'm on a tour bus while you are working hard at the office. I've already done my office time, paid my dues and received my social security pension. All I can report from my present seat on an elder branch is that the view is quite liminal and I feel tremendously grateful. In Santo Daime the spiritual saying is Bons Trabalhos, meaning "good works to you!" May your efforts bear good fruits, bring satisfaction to you and gifts to the world.

Thank you Lou!
My wish to you is that you will soon see through the veil of the picturesque views and the edifying feelings!

As soon as we become a more or less self-conscious spiritual being, then it is already within our hands to at least attune our being towards the future we want to experience. It belongs to our essential freedom to make this choice. If the Divine ray in us wants to experience dissolution, who can stop it? So even though much of the journey, the stages of metamorphosis and so on, are currently determined by forces greater than us, it is within our jurisdiction to have clear vision for the path we would Love to experience as evolutionary journey.

There's an interesting self-test with which we can find something about ourselves. There are various wells of attraction within the invisible potential. Even if we feel that it is not yet our time to do anything deliberately, that we still expect things to unfold by Divine ordainment, we can still see where we stand through our inner attitude to prayer.

Let's consider this with the utmost seriousness. We don't know where our destiny drags us. We're not sure within whose gravity well we are. The fact that the free fall feels pleasant says nothing about where it leads us. Many of the things that feel pleasant in our life lead to the bottom.

Prayer is our technique for spiritual attunement. Even if we have accepted our free fall for the moment, we can at least test ourselves to see whether we have made a choice for the direction in which we would like to be falling. We can say something like:

"Oh Great Being, who gives me my life and thinks its unfoldment,
Even though in this moment I've completely let go myself into you,
I beg you - draw me nearer to you and flow into me.
With all my soul I desire to walk the path that leads me stage by stage into the Divine.
Watch over me, pull me towards you, don't allow me to stray and fall into
The wells which lead my soul into oblivion.
Fill my being with your strength so one day I can start walking on my own
In absolute freedom and out of Love
For the Good of all beings."

Of course, it is not at all the goal here to have some spatial image of the Being that we address. It is our whole soul disposition that should express these words. It's the feeling that there are many wells where our world line can take us but we desire to be attracted by the well leading to the abundant Life.

If we feel inner resistance to summon such a soul disposition within ourselves, it simply means one of two things:
1. We're overly confident that other forces are responsible to take our worldline to the green pastures and still waters. We believe that not only we can free fall but we can even let our self-determination free fall, believing that other beings should take care and make sure we don't end up in the abyss.
2. We're simply indifferent whether our worldline will spiral through the fractal levels of Time integration or it will dissolve into the darkness of Cosmic sleep.

If we have determined for ourselves which path we would Love to experience as our unique evolutionary journey, yet we have accepted free fall for the time being, then the least thing we can do is to fill our soul with the mood of prayer and desire to be attracted on the path of Light that we'll tread in full consciousness and freedom.

Cleric's words are well-stated. My experience affirms them. Thank you for the sharing.
I also affirm the truth of Thich Nhat Hanh saying, "If you haven't seen the suffering, you haven't seen anything."
There are definitely roses and thorns.

[Federica]

Federica,

Let's remember, PoF is a phenomenology, a phenomenology of cognition. And this is the only valid phenomenology - we cannot understand phenomena without also investigating our spiritual activity which is a precondition for coherently experiencing any phenomena, and our concepts which are an integral part of the phenomenal world. This is the key point to hang onto in all topics and inquiries into the world content. Progress in knowledge today relies on deepening our understanding of the knowing instrument we use and its conceptual role in all experience. And since there isn't any conceivable experience apart from this thinking instrument, what we call the phenomenal world and the principles which unite its manifold appearances must be of the same thought-nature. For us to discover a non-thinking reality, we would have to step outside of our first-person thinking perspective and we know this cannot be done even in principle.

As soon as we speak of thoughts, we are speaking of supra-sensory perceptions and activity. Most people don't perceive their thoughts (or desires, feelings) and no one perceives their present thinking activity, as Steiner illustrates in PoF, yet both of these are undeniable aspects of reality (or should be undeniable for anyone who hasn't left thinking in the blind spot). So the supra-sensory aspects of our inner reality are a given of experience - we don't need to conclude them. It's hard to deny the supra-sensory aspects of outer reality as well - the force of gravity or the ultraviolet spectrum, for ex. What is supra-sensory should always be understood from the first-person, relational perspective - what is supra-sensory for me is not necessarily supra-sensory for the person next to me. As soon as we enter the realm of inner non-spatial activity, we are dealing with supra-sensory reality for normal waking consciousness. If there is another bodily organization which maintains physical vitality, yet it cannot be perceived by normal waking consciousness (which is bounded by spatial dimension), it is, by definition, supra-sensory. That doesn't mean we have figured out its deepest inner essence, but simply the fact that it must exist and be integral to our experience of life.

None of this requires a preconceived worldview or ontology. It only requires we grant reality to our own thinking, taking it out of the blind spot. The rest unfolds from there through holistic observation and reasoning. Meaning we observe the world phenomena as they present to us as living interconnected, interwoven, evolving processes. And we don't arbitrarily stop observing the phenomena or reasoning through them at any given point. We don't isolate only one measure from the song and try to derive our conclusions about reality, as a whole, based on that. We don't take only one song and ignore the composer and his corpus. We don't take the composer and ignore the general musical trends of his age. So on and so forth. As long as we resist the idolizing tendency, then we are attaining genuine knowledge of the continually metamorphosing World Process.

Ashvin,

I know all that, sorry for having made you restate it all. It's a matter of getting on the same page with words, what is a worldview, etc. I was just saying, a naive realist would not agree, hence this initial step, although emerging from given + careful reasoning only, does not seem to be a universally sharable view (as one could imagine based on the premises).

[AshvinP]

Federica,

Let's remember, PoF is a phenomenology, a phenomenology of cognition. And this is the only valid phenomenology - we cannot understand phenomena without also investigating our spiritual activity which is a precondition for coherently experiencing any phenomena, and our concepts which are an integral part of the phenomenal world. This is the key point to hang onto in all topics and inquiries into the world content. Progress in knowledge today relies on deepening our understanding of the knowing instrument we use and its conceptual role in all experience. And since there isn't any conceivable experience apart from this thinking instrument, what we call the phenomenal world and the principles which unite its manifold appearances must be of the same thought-nature. For us to discover a non-thinking reality, we would have to step outside of our first-person thinking perspective and we know this cannot be done even in principle.

As soon as we speak of thoughts, we are speaking of supra-sensory perceptions and activity. Most people don't perceive their thoughts (or desires, feelings) and no one perceives their present thinking activity, as Steiner illustrates in PoF, yet both of these are undeniable aspects of reality (or should be undeniable for anyone who hasn't left thinking in the blind spot). So the supra-sensory aspects of our inner reality are a given of experience - we don't need to conclude them. It's hard to deny the supra-sensory aspects of outer reality as well - the force of gravity or the ultraviolet spectrum, for ex. What is supra-sensory should always be understood from the first-person, relational perspective - what is supra-sensory for me is not necessarily supra-sensory for the person next to me. As soon as we enter the realm of inner non-spatial activity, we are dealing with supra-sensory reality for normal waking consciousness. If there is another bodily organization which maintains physical vitality, yet it cannot be perceived by normal waking consciousness (which is bounded by spatial dimension), it is, by definition, supra-sensory. That doesn't mean we have figured out its deepest inner essence, but simply the fact that it must exist and be integral to our experience of life.

None of this requires a preconceived worldview or ontology. It only requires we grant reality to our own thinking, taking it out of the blind spot. The rest unfolds from there through holistic observation and reasoning. Meaning we observe the world phenomena as they present to us as living interconnected, interwoven, evolving processes. And we don't arbitrarily stop observing the phenomena or reasoning through them at any given point. We don't isolate only one measure from the song and try to derive our conclusions about reality, as a whole, based on that. We don't take only one song and ignore the composer and his corpus. We don't take the composer and ignore the general musical trends of his age. So on and so forth. As long as we resist the idolizing tendency, then we are attaining genuine knowledge of the continually metamorphosing World Process.

Ashvin,

I know all that, sorry for having made you restate it all. It's a matter of getting on the same page with words, what is a worldview, etc. I was just saying, a naive realist would not agree, hence this initial step, although emerging from given + careful reasoning only, does not seem to be a universally sharable view (as one could imagine based on the premises).

Well certainly it's not universally shared, because 99.9% of modern intellectuals don't even know what 'phenomenology' is, or they have an entirely flawed conception of it. They don't even know that it, along with pragmatic philosophy, are options for arriving at essential truths. They don't consider anything that is first-person and relational to be also "essential", because the former has been reduced and equated to mere personal subjectivity. So that is to say, the problem lies 100% in the soul-plumbing and related arrogance/ignorance of these modern intellectuals, whereas even the tiniest bit of housekeeping, such as you have done, would be sufficient to get off the metaphysical merry go-round and get to real work with living experience and logic.

[Federica]

Oh, Federica, I do get that you think I'm on a tour bus while you are working hard at the office. I've already done my office time, paid my dues and received my social security pension. All I can report from my present seat on an elder branch is that the view is quite liminal and I feel tremendously grateful. In Santo Daime the spiritual saying is Bons Trabalhos, meaning "good works to you!" May your efforts bear good fruits, bring satisfaction to you and gifts to the world.

Thank you Lou!
My wish to you is that you will soon see through the veil of the picturesque views and the edifying feelings!

As soon as we become a more or less self-conscious spiritual being, then it is already within our hands to at least attune our being towards the future we want to experience. It belongs to our essential freedom to make this choice. If the Divine ray in us wants to experience dissolution, who can stop it? So even though much of the journey, the stages of metamorphosis and so on, are currently determined by forces greater than us, it is within our jurisdiction to have clear vision for the path we would Love to experience as evolutionary journey.

There's an interesting self-test with which we can find something about ourselves. There are various wells of attraction within the invisible potential. Even if we feel that it is not yet our time to do anything deliberately, that we still expect things to unfold by Divine ordainment, we can still see where we stand through our inner attitude to prayer.

Let's consider this with the utmost seriousness. We don't know where our destiny drags us. We're not sure within whose gravity well we are. The fact that the free fall feels pleasant says nothing about where it leads us. Many of the things that feel pleasant in our life lead to the bottom.

Prayer is our technique for spiritual attunement. Even if we have accepted our free fall for the moment, we can at least test ourselves to see whether we have made a choice for the direction in which we would like to be falling. We can say something like:



Of course, it is not at all the goal here to have some spatial image of the Being that we address. It is our whole soul disposition that should express these words. It's the feeling that there are many wells where our world line can take us but we desire to be attracted by the well leading to the abundant Life.

If we feel inner resistance to summon such a soul disposition within ourselves, it simply means one of two things:
1. We're overly confident that other forces are responsible to take our worldline to the green pastures and still waters. We believe that not only we can free fall but we can even let our self-determination free fall, believing that other beings should take care and make sure we don't end up in the abyss.
2. We're simply indifferent whether our worldline will spiral through the fractal levels of Time integration or it will dissolve into the darkness of Cosmic sleep.

If we have determined for ourselves which path we would Love to experience as our unique evolutionary journey, yet we have accepted free fall for the time being, then the least thing we can do is to fill our soul with the mood of prayer and desire to be attracted on the path of Light that we'll tread in full consciousness and freedom.

Cleric's words are well-stated. My experience affirms them. Thank you for the sharing.
I also affirm the truth of Thich Nhat Hanh saying, "If you haven't seen the suffering, you haven't seen anything."
There are definitely roses and thorns.

A side question: I have appreciated many of Thich Nhat Hanh's talks and for some reason, reading this quote, I can't imagine it coming out of his mouth. Something makes me doubt he would have expressed it in these words. I am probably wrong, but for me there's a dissonance that makes me curious: is this an exact quote?

[Lou Gold]

Thank you Lou!
My wish to you is that you will soon see through the veil of the picturesque views and the edifying feelings!

Cleric's words are well-stated. My experience affirms them. Thank you for the sharing.
I also affirm the truth of Thich Nhat Hanh saying, "If you haven't seen the suffering, you haven't seen anything."
There are definitely roses and thorns.

A side question: I have appreciated many of Thich Nhat Hanh's talks and for some reason, reading this quote, I can't imagine it coming out of his mouth. Something makes me doubt he would have expressed it in these words. I am probably wrong, but for me there's a dissonance that makes me curious: is this an exact quote?

Thank you, Federica, for this side question, which may actually lead us closer to the conversational core we are trying to reach. It took me awhile to find it in the mass of Thich Nhat Hanh youtubes. Thay was, is and continues to be for me a stellar example of the real deal that vibrates the universal more than sectarian.

My remembrance was inexact. The exact text is located at minute 6:38 in "WALK WITH ME" narrated, magnificently, by Benedict Cumberbatch':

You aspire to see the truth.
But, once you have seen it,
you cannot avoid suffering.
Otherwise, you have seen nothing at all.

[Federica]

A side question: I have appreciated many of Thich Nhat Hanh's talks and for some reason, reading this quote, I can't imagine it coming out of his mouth. Something makes me doubt he would have expressed it in these words. I am probably wrong, but for me there's a dissonance that makes me curious: is this an exact quote?

Thank you, Federica, for this side question, which may actually lead us closer to the conversational core we are trying to reach. It took me awhile to find it in the mass of Thich Nhat Hanh youtubes. Thay was, is and continues to be for me a stellar example of the real deal that vibrates the universal more than sectarian.

My remembrance was inexact. The exact text is located at minute 6:38 in "WALK WITH ME" narrated, magnificently, by Benedict Cumberbatch':

You aspire to see the truth.
But, once you have seen it,
you cannot avoid suffering.
Otherwise, you have seen nothing at all.

Thanks Lou, for the… work you put in the inquiry! Indeed, beautifully narrated and filmed, thank you for the sharing too. Listening to it I was thinking that, interestingly, every word in this journal would pass the sifting of a spiritual-scientific validity test. Or at least this is my guess. Maybe I'm biased.

Still, in this journal, it’s not about seeing (others') suffering, as in your personal take on it - as far as I understand it. It’s more about the necessary inner tear that knowing the truth brings forth, which could extend to the responsibility that knowing the truth brings forth. What do you think?

[Lou Gold]

A side question: I have appreciated many of Thich Nhat Hanh's talks and for some reason, reading this quote, I can't imagine it coming out of his mouth. Something makes me doubt he would have expressed it in these words. I am probably wrong, but for me there's a dissonance that makes me curious: is this an exact quote?

Thank you, Federica, for this side question, which may actually lead us closer to the conversational core we are trying to reach. It took me awhile to find it in the mass of Thich Nhat Hanh youtubes. Thay was, is and continues to be for me a stellar example of the real deal that vibrates the universal more than sectarian.

My remembrance was inexact. The exact text is located at minute 6:38 in "WALK WITH ME" narrated, magnificently, by Benedict Cumberbatch':

You aspire to see the truth.
But, once you have seen it,
you cannot avoid suffering.
Otherwise, you have seen nothing at all.

Thanks Lou, for the… work you put in the inquiry! Indeed, beautifully narrated and filmed, thank you for the sharing too. Listening to it I was thinking that, interestingly, every word in this journal would pass the sifting of a spiritual-scientific validity test. Or at least this is my guess. Maybe I'm biased.

Still, in this journal, it’s not about seeing (others') suffering, as in your personal take on it - as far as I understand it. It’s more about the necessary inner tear that knowing the truth brings forth, which could extend to the responsibility that knowing the truth brings forth. What do you think?

Thank you, Federica, for connecting me with it again. So loving and lovely. Indeed, I was so happy with it that I played the devotional Namo Avalokiteshvara chant as I drifted off to sleep (yeah, I know one is supposed to do this to wake up but it was quite late for me ).

Listening to it I was thinking that, interestingly, every word in this journal would pass the sifting of a spiritual-scientific validity test.

I can't affirm this as an insider but I hope so and want to agree with you. This is what I meant in saying Thay is a "real deal that vibrates the universal more than sectarian."

Still, in this journal, it’s not about seeing (others') suffering, as in your personal take on it - as far as I understand it.

That would not be my take. The first noble truth is that everyone is suffering (self and others). About the larger truth revealed to him in his great vision he says:

My true nature, I realized, was much more real,
both uglier and more beautiful than
I ever could have imagined.
(2:37)

It’s more about the necessary inner tear that knowing the truth brings forth, which could extend to the responsibility that knowing the truth brings forth. What do you think?

I totally agree. The "inner tear" is what motivates the Bodhisattva to compassionately remain here to reduce the suffering. Connecting to the post theme, it seems to me as a most liminal perspective.

I would like to continue this conversational line but I don't want to to distract from the good discussion of meditations you are having with Ashvin and Cleric. What do you think of splitting off a new thread?

[Federica]

Thank you, Federica, for connecting me with it again. So loving and lovely. Indeed, I was so happy with it that I played the devotional Namo Avalokiteshvara chant as I drifted off to sleep (yeah, I know one is supposed to do this to wake up but it was quite late for me ).

Listening to it I was thinking that, interestingly, every word in this journal would pass the sifting of a spiritual-scientific validity test.

I can't affirm this as an insider but I hope so and want to agree with you. This is what I meant in saying Thay is a "real deal that vibrates the universal more than sectarian."

Still, in this journal, it’s not about seeing (others') suffering, as in your personal take on it - as far as I understand it.

That would not be my take. The first noble truth is that everyone is suffering (self and others). About the larger truth revealed to him in his great vision he says:

My true nature, I realized, was much more real,
both uglier and more beautiful than
I ever could have imagined.
(2:37)

It’s more about the necessary inner tear that knowing the truth brings forth, which could extend to the responsibility that knowing the truth brings forth. What do you think?

I totally agree. The "inner tear" is what motivates the Bodhisattva to compassionately remain here to reduce the suffering. Connecting to the post theme, it seems to me as a most liminal perspective.

I would like to continue this conversational line but I don't want to to distract from the good discussion of meditations you are having with Ashvin and Cleric. What do you think of splitting off a new thread?

Lou, I had that curiosity about Thich Nhat Hanh' quote, but I am neither particularly well-versed in his vision, nor, to be honest, I feel inclined to ‘work’ in that direction. Time is already tight on various fronts. Also I don’t see the value in considering suffering as such, as a starting point, or as an initial truth. Its reasons and consequences are better understood by assuming a more encompassing approach ‘from the ground up’. So I wouldn’t be a very appropriate or inspired contributor to a new thread on Buddhism, or on Thich Nhat Hanh, and I cannot commit to such a conversation.