Can Idealism be without thought?

[Federica]

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood you. Well, yes, you need that "desire", but I would rather say, "intention", to experience the pure subjectivity. It is like setting a scientific (spiritually-scientific) experiment where you need an intention and motivation to undertake it. But the best approach is not to set any expectations, but to take an unbiased and open approach and just try different experiments with the phenomenal flow. Like "what happens if I stop all phenomena?", "what happens if I remove the sense of "object" or "self"?", "what does the resulting experiences mean?". In spiritual practice it is easy to fool ourselves by setting some expectations to experience some states, and then these expectations can subconsciously manifest for us the states that we are expecting to experience, so it really becomes a "tail chasing". But even that may be useful because we can investigate how our expectations shape our phenomenal experiences, so that, by understanding this causal loop, we can set more clean spiritually-scientific experiments without setting specific expectations. I think there is an important difference between setting an expectation and setting a plan for an experiment like "I will do such and such and just see what happens".

There was a great thread last November about the meaning of spiritual science:

In what way is spiritual science a science?

If you check it, you will see that “science” in “spiritual science” means something really different from what is commonly intended today with the word "science", so I don’t think we can exactly compare spiritual scientific inquiry with present-day scientific experiments. These are usually intended to test an hypothesis, and even when the experiment is set to “see what happens” it most often comes down to testing a set of hypotheses against another one. As I see it, this should not be the setup of spiritual inquiry as intended in spiritual science.

There should be intention and motivation, and a thirst for knowledge of course. What I have called a desire-first approach is something different. It's when hypotheses are set to test, like: “Can we discover that subjectivity is experienced without any object being experienced?”. This is different from the intention, or motivation to know reality. This approach is the same as having expectations, which as you say, is not the ideal way to go, because it mixes up with the results of the inquiry we what we wish to find. More that that, it's the problem with nondual approaches.

In spiritual inquiry, I certainly don’t agree that it’s possible to set an expectation and then observe from a neutral viewpoint how it shapes the observation. You are really mixing up present-day scientific approach and spiritual science, as if it was possible to play around with various hypotheses, and test various scenarios in mechanical way. It’s illusory to imagine that expectations, beliefs, desires, or soul preferences can be manipulated and played with in the way you suggest. It’s a sort of trivialization of spiritual science that you are suggesting, that keeps the soul preferences at the origin of the approach fully in the blind spot.

This has nothing to do with the desire to know, the thirst for knowledge, that we certainly need at every single step of our spiritual scientific inquiry.

[Stranger]

In spiritual inquiry, I certainly don’t agree that it’s possible to set an expectation and then observe from a neutral viewpoint how it shapes the observation. You are really mixing up present-day scientific approach and spiritual science, as if it was possible to play around with various hypotheses, and test various scenarios in mechanical way. It’s illusory to imagine that expectations, beliefs, desires, or soul preferences can be manipulated and played with in the way you suggest. It’s a sort of trivialization of spiritual science that you are suggesting, that keeps the soul preferences at the origin of the approach fully in the blind spot.

Fine, as I said, if you don't want to do these simple experiments, it's your choice. I agree, it may be a trivial approach, but I was only suggesting to try some phenomenological experimental setups, and then examine carefully and try to process the results. When you spend years with hours of daily meditations, you have plenty of time to try all possible setups without any expectations. At some moment you bump into "what happens if I remove all phenomena", or "what happens if I remove the sense of the object?". But I was just suggesting to save your time and select these specific experiment setups because you might get very interesting insights from their results without spending years in random setups of phenomenological experiments.

So, if you still want to do it, forget about the hypothesis of “Can we discover that subjectivity is experienced without any object being experienced?”, and just run the experiment to see what would be your direct experience without any object or phenomena with no expectations whatsoever. This is actually how I ran into it a while ago: I randomly had a lucid deep sleep experience with literally no phenomena at all, there was literally nothing there, and the result really surprised me and was one of my important spiritual insights.

[Federica]

Maybe it will help if you consider that at the time the above dialogs were led, the phenomenological approach was much mess established here. When I came to the forum the conversations were still heavily into abstract philosophy, where ontological primaries were debated. In that sense, much of the opposition to the 'self' has been that there's no such metaphysical 'entity'. My responses to Eugene at that time were tailored in such a way that I wanted to show that the phenomenological approach doesn't in the least depend on some metaphysical postulation and belief in some abstract entity 'self'. That's why I emphasized that at no point we have to invent some 'self'. As you say, the intuition of being an active spiritual force is inherent in everything we do.

Thanks Cleric. It's clear in this perspective.