idlecuriosity wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 11:04 pm
However, to extrapolate from this that our consciousness follows from something that shares our values is not much different than abrahamic religion or what those historically did when they described a faultily assumed material reality with material terms.
IC, this post has something about the objectivity of moral life:
viewtopic.php?p=12165#p12165
idlecuriosity wrote: ↑Mon Oct 25, 2021 3:58 am
lastly, when you say the 'spirit' within us, that does imply your spirit and mine are different, yes? Although both incomplete (mine more so, probably.)
What is you feeling about this image?
https://i.ibb.co/MhfLXk7/rend-deep.jpg
Try to feel the difference with the whirlpool metaphor - in the latter, self-knowledge means better and better understanding of our own whirlpool but no matter how deep we go towards the eye of the vortex, this point is just one in the ocean (even though of the same essence as the ocean). Compare this with the image above where the deeper we go in the subconscious layers, the more we find forces which we are all part of. And who isn't part of the nation he's born in, the language he speaks (and thinks in!), the dynamics of the epoch, the shared biological blueprint of the body, and so on. The only thing is that the materialistic view says that all of these are simply convoluted arrangements of particles. In the image above they are hierarchy of spiritual processes - which are independent be-ings. The deeper we go, the more universal and archetypal beings we encounter which act like the fractal moulds which persist as shared carrier waves as the perspectives differentiate further. Thus our individuality is like a slice of all this depth. Modern man is almost exclusively conscious at the bodily level. All his intellectual thoughts and related feelings, always have something to do with bodily life. If we think of a nation we don't feel anything real that runs as something living. For example, the ancients could still feel that language ran like living spiritual being, interpenetrating the souls, uniting them through the medium of shared thoughts. Today no consciousness of this has remained. We feel our thoughts as completely local and only impressing in between humans on basis of air pressure waves (sound, spoken word). And in a sense it is completely necessary for our evolution that we pass through this period of complete loneliness. This may seem strange to say, since we live in a world full of people, what loneliness? This is only because modern man doesn't have anything to compare his state with. In comparison to the consciousness in the deeper layers where we live with thoughts and feeling of beings, in our bodily consciousness we are utterly alone. It's not that there's hard boundary between the layers, it's just that our spiritual gaze is fixed in the inner etheric reflections as moulded by the bodily senses and nervous system. It's much like how today people stand to each other yet everyone is looking at their phone. They stand next to each other yet communicate by chatting on the phone. The reality of the World we know only through our personal symbols. The only reason the question of solipsism is such a heated one these days is because people are already living in solipsistic mode within their bodies. When we step outside the senses and brain, we find thoughts and feelings filling the Cosmos, just like air lives both within and in between us in the physical world. All talks about solipsism become meaningless. As Ashvin addressed in his recent essay - it is true that we always experience reality from unique perspective and we can never, even in principle, know about some supposed consciousness completely opaque to ours, but it's a simple prejudice of our epoch (based on the lonely period of our evolution) that we can't find the thoughts and feelings of other beings in the expanded field of our conscious perspective.
The key to notice in the above picture is that self-knowledge ultimately becomes the same as World-knowledge.
ParadoxZone wrote: ↑Sun Oct 24, 2021 6:14 pm
Also, you'll come across references to "Guardians at the Gate" and seeing particular colours - I haven't seen any colours and don't particularly care if I never do. And the "Guardians" might be metaphorical too, I don't know.
The Guardian on the Threshold is a metaphor but as every genuine metaphor it points to something real. It is true that we won't meet creature holding a sword, standing between us and the passage to the higher worlds, in the way we meet creatures in the sensory world. Yet this is
effectively what happens. If we live through the metaphor deeply, then we strip away the sensory image (the creature with a sword) we're left only with the meaning of something
preventing us from gaining higher consciousness.
I can give the following analogy (only an analogy). Most people can remember the first time they heard recording of their voice. For most the reaction is like "Do I really sound like that? Do everyone hear and know my voice as sounding like this?" To this people would answer "Of course, why would we know your voice in any other way?" It depends on the individual but for many people it is difficult to identify with their own voice sounding externally. They are used to hear their thinking and speaking in another voice and it feels creepy to hear themselves in another voice. Of course it's a matter of adaptation - singers, modern youtube content creators, hear their own voice all the time, so they get used to it.
Now imagine that we go through a similar process but we need to do it out of free choice. We need to hear the real voice with which we speak our thoughts, the real being that feels and wills. When we go deeper in ourselves, our Earthly persona becomes spread before us. The elemental spiritual processes that constitute what we are, our habits, patterned thoughts and speech, mechanical bodily gestures, grimaces, reflexive emotions, snap-judgments and so on, everything begins to become perceptible before the eye of the spirit. All these processes move a little further away from our spirit's eye, in the same way a
mask can move away from our face and we then begin to see the inner side of what was hitherto
indistinguishably merged with our conscious experience. Our Earthly persona is a patchwork of all these elements (very often quite tasteless, almost kitsch-styled). Then if we haven't done the preparatory work, all this may be too much to bear. We're like "Do I really sound, think, feel, will like that? Do I really move in the labyrinth of all these ideas and desires?" The more out-of-phase our patchworked personality is with the perspective of the spirit, the more disturbing any such premature glimpse in our soul and spiritual organism can be. This panorama is subconsciously felt by everyone. The
instinctive unwillingness to see ourselves from the perspective of the spirit, is what the Guardian is. The Guardian is the subconscious part of our true being. On the surface we may say "Oh, I want to know all the secrets, I'm a curious person." But even though our deeper being is our true self, from the surface of our intellect it seems so alien that it stands as an independent being. To meet the Guardian means to align ourselves with its spiritual perspective, to see reality and ourselves from that perspective. As long as we want to increase our intellectual possessions but are not interested in hearing our true thinking voice, seeing our true passions and so on, the perspective of our higher being stands as an
obstacle between our Earthly persona and higher consciousness. Higher knowledge
passes through the perspective of what we are and continues deeper and deeper, gaining consciousness of the higher order layers of reality.
If we hope that we can gain knowledge of the depths of reality without passing through the perspective which reveals what we are, we're heading for the murky waters. Then we seek psychedelics, trances, hypnosis, mediumism and so on. All of these seek to squeeze some visions from the deeper strata but without us having to cross the threshold. We stay on our side. That's also the reason why visions never give us satisfaction. Ultimately, it's up to our Earthly intellect to decide how to
interpret the visions and what to do with them. And even if by some chance these visions present something true (which in our age is almost an impossibility - instead the most varied illusions precipitate) we'll still be just a speculating intellect cut clean from the reality of the higher worlds from whence the visions come.
That's why any genuine path for spiritual development begins with 'ground school'. We must live through all these things in
thoughts and feelings. When we think about them we very gradually accustom ourselves to see and think from the perspective of our higher being. When we think these things we also experience some of the disturbing feelings but in homeopathic doses, no more than we can handle. In this way we can gradually, bit by bit, adapt. This process of accustomization is not mere intellectual dribbling. Real changes in our thinking and feeling structures happen. Just as learning mathematics will have measurable effect on our brain as new connections are spun, so thinking livingly about the descriptions of higher experiences, as if
we are going through them, already transforms our subtle organism, tectonic plates shift and rearrange, new rivers begin to flow, where previously were only deserts and so on. Then when the time is right, the panorama of our being will gradually emerge before us. When this is done in the proper way, it's not a shocking, earth-shattering experience but deserved fruit of our efforts. Everything that we have probed in thought gradually becomes more and more real, we practically begin to perceive what we have been moving and weaving through all this time.