Re: Can Idealism be without thought?
Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2023 8:54 pm
Stranger wrote: ↑Thu Feb 23, 2023 3:57 pm
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:
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.