Right, so in this example what I did is I identified (with your help) and questioned one of my unconscious beliefs that turned out to be just an unwarranted assumption. And I did it by testing it against my actual 1-st person experience. So now the belief that the phenomena and meanings are separate turned out to be simply an assumption that does not contradict with experience, but neither it can be proven by the experience. As we discussed above, the fact of the experience is that the meanings are indistinguishable and inseparable from any conscious phenomena. But the fact that they are indistinguishable does not automatically mean that they are identical. The experience is inconclusive about whether they are identical or not and leaves the door open to interpreting them either way. So, the experience indeed does support the assumption that they are identical, and so enables us to adopt such assumption. But the experience does not prove it and still leaves the other alternative still possible.Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue Nov 30, 2021 6:21 pm One of the most valuable extract that we can take from one such experience is to appreciate that this understanding is not really something that is added on top of other intellectual ideas. It's actually the opposite. It's as if we've been caught into some corner case. Leaving this corner actually feels as if we gain an inner degree of freedom. If we use QM analogy, it's like previously we experienced a collapsed state of meaning, which made it that we see only a certain perspective, while now we see the superposition. That's why we feel we've gained a degree of freedom. It's a completely spiritual experience - previously we were locked into some cognitive pattern, now we feel how we can zoom in and out of it at will. This zooming out of the pattern is the inner experiences which we imaginatively describe as "I've been programmed". This is simply to say "I was phase-locked with that cognitive pattern". But now we're free.
Please note that the above is not always the case. Sometimes a person may simply assume or believe that there's inherent meaning in every state of being, without really understanding it. In this case the idea is simply patched upon the intellectual being of the person but it doesn't fit very well there. The act of understanding the ideas coincides with its coherent embedding into the totality of the thinking organism. Only then it really becomes an inner degree of freedom. This is the distinguishing factor. When ideas are taken up in purely mechanical way, they are experienced as weight. Every such idea simply makes our state more difficult to bear. On the contrary, when ideas are understood in the real sense, they become degrees of freedom for our spiritual activity. If we use again the no-arm-movement analogy, if we simply take up in purely abstract way the ideas about the various ways the hand can move, we're weighed down by dry facts. It feels as if we're forced to memorize a long list of random dates and numbers, they don't fit organically with anything. But if the idea is internalized, then it unlocks degrees of freedom. Now the idea doesn't weigh us down but opens up new potential. Our wave function becomes much more richer, we can unfold our activity from a richer palette. Previously we've been locked in specific colors of the palette, now we move freely between them.
The bottom line from this is that the "phenomena are identical with meanings" is still an unprovable assumption, but it is a legitimate assumption to adopt that complies with experience, and so we can adopt it as a working hypothesis to progress in our spiritual practice.
But the above is a good example of how spiritual science should be applied: we should always identify and question all our implicit beliefs as only assumptions and test them against our 1-st person experience to find out whether the experience can support them or not. This approach should be applied without exceptions and include the beliefs and assumptions of any worldviews including the one that we are actively using as the basis of our current spiritual practice.
That is definitely the right practical approach with the disclaimer that in most cases living through the thoughts/ideas will not prove them true in any absolute sense, but can only prove them to be pragmatically and conditionally true as practically useful hypotheses/assumptions.The whole point is that, as Ashvin reminded of the no-arm-movement, there are things that we can verify only by stepping into the experience. You, as an engineer should be able to appreciate that mathematics is one such example. In the light of the above you'll see how inappropriate your objections are. You gain nothing if you simply accept the Pythagorean theorem as unquestionable truth. You must live through it with your thoughts. If you stand outside and want to prove its truthiness through non-mathematical means, in order to avoid falling in the trap of a math-sect, you'll forever remain outside the reality of mathematical thinking. It's the same with PoF. The thoughts are not to be assumed, accepted or believed. This will simply turn them into weight that will crush us down. They are to be experienced. Then if they are true, they will be understood and will turn into inner degrees of freedom.