Phenomenological idealism: definitions of common terms

[Cleric K]

But anyway, think I'm roughly getting it. Under idealism all there is is Cosnciousness/Thinking activity with its phenomenal content. Now, we know from our 1-st-p. experience that we can will and manifest thoughts with meanings, But the sense perceptions seem to arrive to us without the control of our will. Where do they come from? If there is no matter and all is consciousness, then somehow they need to come from other conscious activity that we are directly unaware of. But what can be that activity that manifests the sense perceptions? It must be thinking with meanings (what else could it be)? So, some thinking activity of some other large-scale being or beings (call it Divine or MAL or Christ Consciousness) manifests on us their ideations/meanings that are experienced by us as sense perceptions. So, essentially, all phenomenal experiences are meanings/ideas or their manifestations, but some of them are just disguised as sense perceptions in our phenomenal experiences. Interesting that BK is essentially saying the same thing - our sense perceptions are what MAL ideations look like from our perspectives. But the thing is: this is still a metaphysical view, this is based on the assumption that our sense perceptions are indeed the manifestations of other being or beings ideas. We cannot confirm that directly from our current 1-st person perspective phenomenal experience. This is very reasonable assumption to take and I have no problem with it, the logic is reasonable, but it is still an assumption.

What you say above works with implicit assumption. It takes it for granted that no matter how Cosmic our consciousness becomes it will still feel similarly to our current bodily consciousness - that is, as a kind of enclosure within which we feel our consciousness and beyond which we dimly feel that there's something beyond, completely opaque to our bubble. This feeling is completely shaped by the spatiality we experience through our intercourse with the bodily processes. It is a fact of experience that we feel our consciousness as if enclosed within the bounds of our skin. If we habitually translate this feeling into the disincarnate state, we get completely false idea. This makes it seem that even higher beings feel as spheres within which they have personal representations of reality with local meanings. To certain extent we can still speak of such inside and outside in the astral world, although there thoughts and feelings are now real forces which impress into the souls, in the way our will and speech do in the physical spectrum. But we can no longer speak of such interior and exterior in the spiritual world. The sphere there becomes a Mobius strip. Consciousness has only one side, so to speak. This is not experienced as a limitation. It's not that the spirit loses sense of the 'outside'. It's quite the opposite. From that perspective the spirit sees clearly that inside and outside manifest only when existence is polarized between the archetypal forces of sympathy and antipathy. The reason why we feel as an alter, with distinct inside in relation to the outside MAL is because in our state of being the forces of antipathy are present. This is not to be taken as some moral judgment. Sympathy and antipathy here should be taken completely dispassionately, as we think about positive and negative charge. Good and evil are not equal to sympathy and antipathy, in the same way they are not equal to attraction and repulsion. These are dynamic polar forces which through their rhythmic alterations make it possible to experience a whole world of unique states of being - namely, those that feel sympathy on the inside and antipathy on the outside.

In the spiritual world, the spirit extricates itself from within this astral polarity. Then the world content has only one side, so to speak. Yet this doesn't preclude the fact that this world content can be experienced from infinite different perspectives. This should sound as a contradiction only if we can't differentiate the spiritual perspective from the polarity of sympathy and antipathy. As long as we're unconsciously being carried within the polarization of these forces, any attempt to imagine the spiritual world will imperceptibly project there our feeling for private interior and shared exterior.

Here we arrive from another angle to what I wrote to Dana in the other thread. Momentary glimpses into higher states of being don't in themselves give us complete understanding. Even if we spent a lifetime in mystical meditation, we can still remain oblivious of the astral polarity. Then inevitably the intellect will be forced to postulate that dissociation will be dismantled only after death.

It's very difficult to explain these things in analytical way simply because it's not at all about things being explained in some abstract terms. There's no intellectual sequence of thoughts which when gone through, the last thought in the train will be "Aha, now I get it". We can get it only if we set in motion our whole being. Unless we feel that we can move not only our intellectual thoughts but also the soul forces of sympathy and antipathy, we will never understand even the direction in which true experiential understanding can be found.

Nevertheless, we have no choice but approximate asymptotically these things in the intellect. The different beings in the spiritual world are no more a contradiction than the existence of our own states of being as spread in time. Actually, as far as the intellect is concerned, the integration of memory is the only way through which we can gain some intuition about the spiritual realm. Just as the distinct states of our metamorphosis are integrated through memory-Intuition that lives on 'our' side of being, so the perspectives of beings in the spiritual world are like spread out memory-states which can be grasped through overarching Intuition. This in itself explains the seeming paradox of different perspectives. Note that when we remember a past state of our own life, we are not returning to the absolutely same state. If that was to happen it would feel as time has been rewound and we'll begin to live again from that point onward without having the chance to know that we were teleported there from somewhere else. Instead, we are perfectly aware that we experience meaning which makes sense of (explains) our current state by tracing how its relation to memory perspectives. In a similar sense, the world wouldn't be what it is without the metamorphoses of all those perspectives of being, which form the collective world-memory.

When we encompass in memory the stream of states that have led us through the university, we understand this as a totality united by the idea of getting a degree. In a similar sense, in the spiritual world all this memory of all possible states of being are experienced from the same side - the only side - of being. Different beings are perspectives which make different degrees of sense of the totality. It makes no sense to ask in the spiritual world to whom this or that memory state belongs. We can trace the spiritual being that has lived through these memory states but in the spiritual world they belong to the Cosmos, they are not private property of some being. The only question is can I make coherent sense of the totality. To make sense means to live in the ideas that explain the metamorphoses that we encompass.

Let's take an example. In the other thread I used a metaphor with GR. In the physical realm we recognize the gravitational well of the Sun. Normally we speak of one gravitational well. Even though each one of us experiences it in unique ways, we still accept that we're talking about the same gravity. In the spiritual world GR is something quite real, even though not in the literal physical sense. It's much rather a spiritual combination of GR and QM. When we contemplate the memory panorama of the world, we don't look at things as an external movie but as the superposition of first person memory states. Depending on our level of development, we can understand only states similar to our life or to our closest friends and family. If we took greater interest in the world, the history and development of civilizations, then the panorama is much more rich. All these states make sense because we find them as existing along a underlying curvature of meaning. Just as our idea of a university degree is the curvature along the geodesics of which our student life has unfolded, so the great curvature of the Cosmos is the carrier meaning along whose geodesics the human states decohere. In the spiritual world the meaning of this curvature is on the same - the only - side of being. We will search in vain in the spiritual world for the Divine beings that think this curvature externally to our perspective. This is the thinking from our physical world. We imagine the Sun out there, curving spacetime and we with our planet are forced to move along a geodesic in that curvature. When we naively translate this frame of mind in the spiritual world we expect to see there the Sun as light orb of spiritual light, which bends spiritual space and our personal orbs of soul light are forced to flow along the geodesics. But there's simply no external there. Spiritual reality is a Mobius strip. It's both inside and outside. We understand the beings when we understand the logic in the curves along which the memory states of the world are bent. Then we understand that this logic is not fixed but is spiritual activity vastly greater than our human state. In our human state the spirit bends meaning such that thought-perceptions flow into its geodesics. We are engineering the metamorphosis of thinking and more indirectly that of feeling and willing. Then when we look at the integrated memory image we sense the logic there. We live in the ideas which explain why the states have progressed in this or that way. In the higher states of cognition we attain to Cosmic scale meaning which lives on the same side as our ideas, and makes sense of the curvature along which the states of the world metamorphose.

[Eugene I]

What you say above works with implicit assumption. It takes it for granted that no matter how Cosmic our consciousness becomes it will still feel similarly to our current bodily consciousness - that is, as a kind of enclosure within which we feel our consciousness and beyond which we dimly feel that there's something beyond, completely opaque to our bubble. This feeling is completely shaped by the spatiality we experience through our intercourse with the bodily processes. It is a fact of experience that we feel our consciousness as if enclosed within the bounds of our skin.

Correct, and I do not make such assumption, of course the transcorporeal reality may be very different, which is also what NDE accounts suggest to us.
But even the possibility of the existence of transcorporeal reality as you and NDErs describe is already an assumption and "esoteric" leap of faith for those who have no such personal experience. Most other versions of idealism, including BK's simply deny it or agnostic to it. So, from our current limited perspective, we still need to make an assumption, and act of faith, to adopt such perspective. This assumption is very reasonable, feels intuitively right and confirmed by thousands of NDE accounts, as well as Steiner's teachings. Personally I am adopting it, but I want to emphasize that I am taking an assumption here.

So, to make it clear, we are taking these assumptions that are not directly follow from our current human-form limited phenomenal 1-st person perspective experience. From philosophical standpoint these are metaphysical assumptions, so it is not strictly phenomenology anymore, but a mix of phenomenology and metaphysics:
- There is a reality of transcorporeal existence with multiple personal perspectives beyond the framework of the human form existence This is what BK's idealism and most other versions reject or at least agnostic to.
- There is a rich universe of hierarchical ideal content in the universe of consciousness that is shared between multiple personal perspectives.

Nevertheless, we have no choice but approximate asymptotically these things in the intellect. The different beings in the spiritual world are no more a contradiction than the existence of our own states of being as spread in time. Actually, as far as the intellect is concerned, the integration of memory is the only way through which we can gain some intuition about the spiritual realm.
Different beings are perspectives which make different degrees of sense of the totality.

That's a good point and argument (also often used in non-dual teachings). But the key point to understand here is:
There is indeed a multiplicity of personal beings perspectives in the universe of consciousness. However, it does not create duality. Likewise, there is a multiplicity of time moments and multiplicity of phenomena and forms in the universe of consciousness. Multiplicity is not duality!

Spiritual reality is a Mobius strip. It's both inside and outside.

Exactly, the universe of consciousness is a unity of the same thinking/willing/feeling/experiencing that experiences a rich multiplicity of shared content of ideal forms from the multiplicity of personal perspectives at the multiplicity of temporal moments. It is unity and multiplicity at the same time. Multiunity of emptifulness.

Interesting that many NDE accounts confirm the shared ideal content. My favorite Nancy Danison told about her experience of accessing the "universal knowledge" during her NDE.

Now, regarding the BK's philosophy, as compared to such view, I agree that it is a very "dry" version of idealism reduced to our limited human "enclosed" perspective and to naturalistic views derived from materialism. The multiplicity of personal perspectives is reduced to "dissociation into alters", transcopreal multiple personal perspectives are denied, the MAL is assumed to be instinctive and non-metacognitive. Personally I do not agree with that. I still think that what BK is doing is very important and useful as a first step for turning people from naturalistic materialism to openness to idealism. You cannot expect a naturalistically-minded materialist to turn into a anthroposopist overnight, this requires a gradual process, and BK's philosophy works well as the first step.

To Ashvin: I will be reading the POF.

[Cleric K]

So, to make it clear, we are taking these assumptions that are not directly follow from our current human-form limited phenomenal 1-st person perspective experience. From philosophical standpoint these are metaphysical assumptions, so it is not strictly phenomenology anymore, but a mix of phenomenology and metaphysics:
- There is a reality of transcorporeal existence with multiple personal perspectives beyond the framework of the human form existence This is what BK's idealism and most other versions reject or at least agnostic to.
- There is a rich universe of hierarchical ideal content in the universe of consciousness that is shared between multiple personal perspectives.

Let's make this fully clear.

Phenomenology doesn't imply that every conscious perspective is guaranteed to have access to every phenomena by default. This is not true even in the sensory spectrum. For those who have been in Egypt the Pyramids are sensory phenomena. I've never been there so I assume that they exist. Can I be absolutely certain? Not really. What if I'm in the Truman Show and this whole world is a set up that decided to make me believe there are pyramids while there aren't any. All movies, books, photos - everything is a part of a great conspiracy against me. And this is not as absurd as it sounds. Flat Earth conspiracy, Moon conspiracies and what not, show that the human psyche is fully capable of getting in such modes.

That's why we have thinking. Through thinking we live in perceptions and ideas which are continually integrated in the harmony of the facts. It is true that compared to the total population of the Earth, only very few human beings have had the chance to see the Earthly globe with their own eyes. We can perfectly well know this even at the surface of the Earth but we need to use our thinking. We need to gather some facts which are seemingly separate but are completely united in a whole when understood through the idea of globe Earth, and completely fall apart when seen through the prism of flat Earth.

We're in similar situation regarding spiritual knowledge. Actually, it is thousandfold more probable that one can attain to the facts of higher cognition than flying into space. It doesn't even cost anything, especially if one already has access to the Internet where everything we need is freely available. All that's needed is our healthy spiritual conduct and determination. But even if we don't set out on this path ourselves, all the facts derived from the higher ordering of reality can be perfectly well understood by anyone with healthy thinking. Yes, it requires some effort, just like it requires some effort for the flat Earther to encompass the unity of the facts, if he is to understand their harmony. And it is not even necessary for one to say "OK, I think I'm beginning to understand this, so now I'll believe it." We simply must not stop our cognitive investigation. And here it's not about building an intellectual model of reality which seems logical but is otherwise nothing more than a philosophical curiosity. Genuine spiritual facts are always traceable to ordinary consciousness. For example, in the last few posts I've used GR metaphor. Most readers probably think "what a bunch of sci-fi nonsense!" And it would be, if this was supposed to remain abstract theory, a mere speculation about the supposed structure of MAL. But if we are to take our own idealistic conceptions seriously, it follows that since we're part of MAL, such ideas (the GR metaphor) should have real phenomenological expression in our own psyche too. And they really have! We must simply be willing to make our own being the object of investigation and not build floating airy forms.

If we turn towards our own thinking, we can easily make the following observation. We use our inner voice to think all the time, don't we? But have we turned attention to the fact that there's something more in thinking than the sensory-like words we hear? When we think verbally "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" in what lies the difference between experiencing simply a sequence of isolated words or a whole sentence? Clearly the difference is not in the verbal sound itself. It is exactly the same in all cases. What is different is the meaning that we experience. We should really appreciate that this meaning is something more than the sensory-like sounds of the words. In the most literal sense this meaning is something supersensible (above-sensible). The meaning that we grasp is not something that we see or hear in sensory-like manner. If that was the case the words would have to sound differently in both cases or some other perceptual elements would have to change. But they don't. It is the completely non-sensory meaning which makes the experience different. Now consider how when we think, we actually weave in precisely such meaning. For most people thinking is quite instinctive act. We simply 'push' towards some meaning and words just flow through the inner voice. When we observe this process in meditation it becomes much more clear how we're doing something, we're weaving in meaning, we seek to express that meaning in words. It's useful if we can remember a moment when we have been thinking through something but couldn't find the right word. These short instances betray how on a deeper level we're first and foremost living in meaning and then this meaning resonates with the appropriate words which symbolize the invisible 'geometry' of the meaning.

Now let's get back to GR. It's not about building speculative theories. We're simply being thankful to Einstein because we can borrow the vocabulary to express in images something which it's not clear if Einstein himself has ever conceived would be possible. I presume that he might have. He was deep personality so he might have seen in his theory something more than a physical model. Now we can speak in GR symbols. We can speak of the curvature of meaning in which we are active when thinking, while the thought-perceptions (verbal words for example) are like the mass-energy which flows along the geodesics of the curvature of meaning. Just like in the field equations, the perception of the thoughts in itself feeds back and modifies the curvature. This is what we have spoken of many times, that the curvature of meaning that we experience while the thoughts are being spoken is not the same as that which we experience as meaning when the thought-perceptions (now already in the past) become the object of observation.

These terms are nothing but symbols yet anyone who tries can see that we're speaking of something absolutely living. Something that we can observe within ourselves at any point of our waking life. The symbols point right back to our thinking which is experienced in real time. If we now imagine that through proper concentration we can stabilize the flow of thinking, we can understand at least approximately how the aperture of consciousness can begin to widen such that we live in expanding vortex of meaning-curvature which draws on its geodesics sensory-like elements which begin to form a majestic panorama. If we immediately begin to analyze this panorama, it decoheres and we find ourselves once again in the intellectual habit of jumping erratically from thought to thought. On the other hand, if we succeed to hold on to the images for longer and longer, we gradually learn to think in their language, without decohering them. Or in other words, we learn to bend the curvature of meaning on a different scale compared to the ordinary intellect. At this scale a whole new realm of meaningful dynamics is found, which simply didn't exist for us previously. Yet we understand that our conscious states have always been flowing within its unperceived curvature. Now if we don't place self-imposed limitations on how far this process can go, we can find that the curvature of meaning of our local intellect is embedded in that of the Cosmos. There isn't really any hard boundary between the two but only the specifics of our current organization, which can be expressed as the need to decohere meaning into intellectual concepts connected with sensory life.

It is clear that what we experience at any moment at the tip of our normal thinking is only a tiny point of meaning which is part of our meaningful individual being. Just think how much knowledge we have, how many memories, experiences, plans, dreams and hopes and how little of this can be expressed in a single thought. Yet we intuitively know that the single thought is only a holographic pixel of this meaningful totality. Through the concentration of thinking, when we begin to grasp larger and larger domains of the curvature of meaning as something whole, we gain consciousness of the spiritual organism of which we ordinarily know only pixel at a time (even if these pixels abstractly grasp in concepts the totality). So in this way we have described the approach to what is called Imaginative cognition.

So we see that we need real living knowledge. Not dead schemes, not floating models of MAL. Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity and many other branches of human knowledge have developed a rich vocabulary which we can take advantage of. Not to build abstract models of spiritual reality but to use the dynamics of the terms as symbols for the supersensible. The metaphor with the curvature of meaning is one such example.

Even though not everyone will have the time and dedication to work on higher development and rise into the higher order curvature of meaning, into which the tiny pixels of thinking are fractally embedded, these things can be understood perfectly well by sound and unprejudiced thinking. Not simply abstractly but by stretching thinking into these regions and touchingly feel those curves of meaning, which in other circumstances can be cognized in more panoramic way.

So there's no need to assume any of this. It is perfectly true that none of this is by default available to the average consciousness of modern man but nor are the pyramids. We need not assumptions but openness to think through these things by stretching our thinking degrees of freedom into domains hitherto unexplored and see how the meaning proliferates or diminishes the harmony of the facts.

[Eugene I]

Let's make this fully clear.

Phenomenology doesn't imply that every conscious perspective is guaranteed to have access to every phenomena by default. This is not true even in the sensory spectrum. For those who have been in Egypt the Pyramids are sensory phenomena. I've never been there so I assume that they exist. Can I be absolutely certain? Not really. What if I'm in the Truman Show and this whole world is a set up that decided to make me believe there are pyramids while there aren't any. All movies, books, photos - everything is a part of a great conspiracy against me. And this is not as absurd as it sounds. Flat Earth conspiracy, Moon conspiracies and what not, show that the human psyche is fully capable of getting in such modes.

Cleric, I understand what you are saying. Indeed, the ability of consciousness to cognate and experience meanings is amazing an mysterious and allows for the rich and interconnected universe of meanings to exist in consciousness. However, in philosophical terms phenomenology does not study the meanings and their inter-relations with themselves and with the rest of reality, that belongs to epistemology. Phenomenology studies the raw conscious phenomena themselves, as was quoted from philosophical encyclopedia at the start of this thread, including all sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts and imaginations, and their qualia, but not including the meanings and ideas that the thoughts and imaginations bear. The challenge with studying the meanings is related to their complicated relations with the rest of reality (consciousness itself and the raw phenomena).

For example, I can have a thought bearing an idea/meaning of a "material world" existing beyond consciousness. Using my imagination I can imagine it very vividly. But the question is: how does this meaning relates to the reality? Does such material world actually exist? How do I know if it is true or not? Or I can have an idea of some advanced mathematical construct, for example, an uncountable infinity (Kantor's aleph 1). Does it exists in any way in reality other than just as a meaning of my thought in my imagination? Phenomenology does not address these questions, but epistemology does.

But that problem also applies to what you wrote and to PoF. Yes, by using Imaginative and Intuitive higher cognition we can have very high-level subtle imaginations and ideas, and we can have it in a shared way between a group of people. For example, we can both have intuitions and imaginations about Zodiacs. I can imagine and intuit Zodiacs and their possible relations with the life on Earth. But how do we know and verify in a spiritually-scientific way that the Zodiacs in fact are parts of the structures that govern the phenomenal realities that we experience as sense perceptions (i.e. the realities of the apparent physical world), and that they are not just our shared imaginations? We can imagine together a shared idea of a Pink Unicorn. But how do we know that it corresponds to any actual reality? This is very important question and I think people asked you about it on this forum: how do you know that your higher-cognition imaginations have any relevance to actual reality of the spiritual and/or physical world? What is a way to verify them and not just take them as beliefs? These are, again, epistemological questions.

[AshvinP]

For example, I can have a thought bearing an idea/meaning of a "material world" existing beyond consciousness. Using my imagination I can imagine it very vividly. But the question is: how does this meaning relates to the reality? Does such material world actually exist? How do I know if it is true or not? Or I can have an idea of some advanced mathematical construct, for example, an uncountable infinity (Kantor's aleph 1). Does it exists in any way in reality other than just as a meaning of my thought in my imagination? Phenomenology does not address these questions, but epistemology does.

I just want to comment briefly on this part, mostly as an aside (but certainly related). It also relates to a thread I started before on whether "materialism is correct". No doubt I am playing a bit loose with the language here for effect, but not as much as most people fail to imagine (as revealed on the criticism thread as well). These things become easier to see once we broaden out Time-consciousness to view these modern worldviews as temporal phenomena. There was a time when the idea of "material world existing beyond consciousness" simply would not be thought or concluded by anyone alive. That is because they concretely perceived the spirit-idea working within Nature, standing 'behind' all the appearances of the phenomenal world. Clearly that changed in the modern age due to the evolution of perception-cognition. Now that idea can be thought and felt concretely because that is, in fact, how we perceive much of the world around us. That is how it relates, from 1st-person perspective, to the ideal Reality which is ever-evolving.

Many people fail to understand these temporal phenomena - they treat all worldviews as products of individual thought-constructions (also related to implicit dualism), not unlike they treat sentient living beings as products of mindless energy-particles which combined into ever-more complex configurations and eventually produced consciousness somehow. So it is felt that the thought-constructions were combined up together to form a more complex worldview, rather than the overarching idea of "material world existing beyond consciousness" as a prior condition to all of the particular manifestations in various worldviews, materialist and "idealist" alike. In your comment you ask how can we know our merely shared imaginations are related to the objective Reality of phenomenal appearances. Phrasing it that way ("merely") reveals how the evolving Idea is considered as a mere accretion to the "actual reality" which exists practically independent of it.

The practical significance of this failure to consider the evolved overarching temporal phenomena are many and concerning... again, a lot of it manifested on the criticism thread, where people immediately fell into tribal camps based on whether one identified as "idealist" or "materialist", because both are viewed as mere thought-constructions that we choose to accept or reject. Mark simply could not understand why I would find much value in JW's approach even though he was arguing "energy" as necessary condition for consciousness. The reason is because JW's approach, in the spirit of phenomenology, puts more emphasis on how we concretely perceive-cognize the world, rather than mere outer labels which ignore the inner meaning. Here is a relevant quote from PoF:

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

[Eugene I]

The practical significance of this failure to consider the evolved temporal phenomena are many and concerning... again, a lot of it manifested on the criticism thread, where people immediately fell into tribal camps based on whether one identified as "idealist" or "materialist", because both are viewed as mere thought-constructions that we choose to accept or reject. Mark simply could not understand why I would find much value in JW's approach even though he was arguing "energy" as necessary condition for consciousness. The reason is because JW's approach, in the spirit of phenomenology, puts more emphasis on how we concretely perceive-cognize the world, rather than mere outer labels.

Ashvin, that is actually a good example or testcase (as we call it in engineering). Yes, I understand that JF approaches it from poetic-phenomenological direction, not form abstract-metaphysical, he intuitively "senses" the energy in the world, he "perceives" it with his intuitive vision, he "senses" that it is prior to consciousness. This mystical and intuitive "sense" is sufficient for him to believe that it is true. But I actually approach it from the same angle - I intuitively "see" and "sense" that the world is conscious, that it is only Consciousness, this is founded in my 1-st person spiritual intuitions and experiences of long-time meditative practice. All the philosophical mumbo-jumbo that I'm doing here on the forum comes only after that as just a set of intellectual arguments to make some rational sense of my view. I don't like to talk publicly about my inner spiritual experiences because they are too intimate to me and too inexplicable, so on this forum I talk in formal philosophical language, and that's why you probably get an impression that I'm stuck in abstractions of metaphysics. But that's not the point I'm making, the point is rather this: when I had that dispute with JF, I argued on the metaphysical grounds only (which apparently was pretty useless anyway). But if I would argue from the the spiritual/phenomenological angle, that would still lead nowhere, because all the arguments would be like "but I intuitively sense it this way and I'm confident that it is true, I don't need philosophy to prove it". So here is the problem: we have two different spiritual intuitions on how the world actually is. These intuitions obviously are incompatible, they can not be both true, so one of them must be wrong. But how do we find out which one? What tools or criteria do we use to find it out? JF rejects the 5 criteria, and he has a reason for it. Fine. But if we dump even those criteria, now how do we figure out which view is true and which is wrong?

Basically this is the key question of the spiritual science. Fine, we drop the scientific method derived from materialistic science, we drop metaphysics, we drop analytical philosophy and linguistic analysis. But what criteria of truth are we left with? How do we distinguish true intuitions, senses and imaginations, however high-cognition-level they might be, from false ones? Pragmatic theory of truth? But what if both JF view is pragmatically useful, and idealistic view is also pragmatically useful? Now what? Your thoughts?

[AshvinP]

The practical significance of this failure to consider the evolved temporal phenomena are many and concerning... again, a lot of it manifested on the criticism thread, where people immediately fell into tribal camps based on whether one identified as "idealist" or "materialist", because both are viewed as mere thought-constructions that we choose to accept or reject. Mark simply could not understand why I would find much value in JW's approach even though he was arguing "energy" as necessary condition for consciousness. The reason is because JW's approach, in the spirit of phenomenology, puts more emphasis on how we concretely perceive-cognize the world, rather than mere outer labels.

Ashvin, that is actually a good example or testcase (as we call it in engineering). Yes, I understand that JF approaches it from poetic-phenomenological direction, not form abstract-metaphysics, he intuitively "senses" the energy in the world, he "perceives" it with his intuitive vision, he "senses" that it is prior to consciousness. This mystical and intuitive "sense" is sufficient for him to believe that it is true. But I actually approach it from the same angle - I intuitively "see" and "sense" that the world is conscious, that it is Consciousness, this is founded in my spiritual experiences of long-time meditative practice. All the philosophical mumbo-jumbo that I'm doing here on the forum comes only after that as just a set of intellectual arguments to make some rational sense of my view. I don't like to talk about my inner spiritual experiences because they are too intimate to me and too inexplicable, so on this forum I talk in formal metaphysical language, and that's why you probably get an impression that I'm stuck in abstractions of metaphysics. But that's not the point I'm making, the point is rather this: when I had that dispute with JF, I argued on the metaphysical grounds only (which obviously was pretty useless anyway). But if I would argue from the the spiritual/phenomenological angle, that would still lead nowhere, because all the arguments would be like "but I intuitively sense it this way and I'm confident that it is true, I don't need philosophy to prove it". So here is the problem: we have two different spiritual intuitions on how the world actually is. These intuitions obviously are incompatible, the can not be both true, so one of them must be wrong. But how do we find out which one? What tools or criteria do we use to find it out? JF rejects the 5 criteria, and he has a reason for it. Fine. But if we dump even those criteria, now how to we figure out which view is true and which is wrong?

Basically this is the key question of the spiritual science. Fine, we drop the scientific method derived from materialistic science, we drop metaphysics, we drop analytical philosophy and linguistic analysis. But what criteria of truth are we left with? How do we distinguish true intuitions, senses and imaginations, however high-cognition-level they might be, from false ones? Pragmatic theory of truth? But what is both JF view is pragmatically useful, and idealistic view is also pragmatically useful? Now what? Your thoughts?

Just so you know, I added more in my response before you responded, which is relevant. Mostly this part below and the Steiner quote:

Many people fail to understand these temporal phenomena - they treat all worldviews as products of individual thought-constructions (also related to implicit dualism), not unlike they treat sentient living beings as products of mindless energy-particles which combined into ever-more complex configurations and eventually produced consciousness somehow. So it is felt that the thought-constructions were combined up together to form a more complex worldview, rather than the overarching idea of "material world existing beyond consciousness" as a prior condition to all of the particular manifestations in various worldviews, materialist and "idealist" alike. In your comment you ask how can we know our merely shared imaginations are related to the objective Reality of phenomenal appearances. Phrasing it that way ("merely") reveals how the evolving Idea is considered as a mere accretion to the "actual reality" which exists practically independent of it.

What I am pointing to is that, if we understand modern philosophy as an ideal temporal-phenomena, and all modern philosophies as particular ideal manifestations of that overarching noumenal idea, then we can see how both "spiritual intuitions" (as you label them above) are two sides of the same coin. One side wants to demote abstract "consciousness" and the other abstract "energy-matter" in the world evolution (to be fair, JW seems somewhere in between those extremes). The coin itself represents the demotion of thinking-thoughts to mere accretions to the world phenomena, which occurs because living ideas are no longer perceived as permeating those phenomena or permeating our own spiritual activity. That is why you write the bold and feel that all the "mumbo jumbo" logically reasoned arguments you write have little to do with the underlying spiritual Reality and your intuition. I will once again share one of favorite Bergson quotes here, and I hope you can see how it reads almost as a response to and critique of your post above.

These conclusions on the subject of duration were, as it seemed to me, decisive. Step by step they led me to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method. “Intuition,” however, is a word whose use caused me some degree of hesitation. Of all the terms which designate a mode of knowing, it is still the most appropriate; and yet it leads to a certain confusion. Because a Schelling, a Schopenhauer and others have already called upon intuition, because they have more or less set up intuition in opposition to intelligence, one might think that I was using the same method. But of course, their intuition was an immediate search for the eternal! Whereas, on the contrary, for me it was a question, above all, of finding true duration. Numerous are the philosophers who have felt how powerless conceptual thought is to reach the core of the mind. Numerous, consequently, are those who have spoken of a supra-intellectual faculty of intuition.

But as they believed that the intelligence worked within time, they have concluded that to go beyond the intelligence consisted in getting outside of time. They did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence. An intuition, which claims to project itself with one bound into the eternal, limits itself to the intellectual. For the concepts which the intelligence furnishes, the intuition simply substitutes one single concept which includes them all and which consequently is always the same, by whatever name it is called: Substance, Ego, Idea, Will.

Philosophy, thus understood, necessarily pantheistic, will have no difficulty in explaining everything deductively, since it will have been given beforehand, in a principle which is the concept of concepts, all the real and all the possible. But this explanation will be vague and hypothetical, this unity will be artificial, and this philosophy would apply equally well to a very different world from our own. How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?

Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.

- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)

[Eugene I]

Phrasing it that way ("merely") reveals how the evolving Idea is considered as a mere accretion to the "actual reality" which exists practically independent of it.

I'm really confused here.

So, every idea is part of reality, every idea is real (from idealism standpoint anyway). The world of living ideas evolves in time, form contradicting polarities, transmutates through metamorphoses. We now have a reality of all possible existing ideas, including the ones contradicting each other. An idea of infinity, and idea that "infinity exists", that "infinity does not exist", that "consciousness emerges from energy", that "energy emerges from consciousness", that "Zodiacs are governing life on Earth", that "Zodaics are mere abstractions not affecting the life on Earth" "2x2=4", "2x2=5", and so on. They all equally real and exist in the perfect unity of polarities in the universe of ideal content. This is what reality is all about, as I think you are saying. But there must be a way the reality actually is. Consciousness is not an abstraction, "Consciousness" is a word that points to the actual reality - the reality of our 1-st person conscious experience. We actually, from the 1-st person, experience every idea and phenomenon consciously. So, there must be only one way such consciousness actually is (not the idea about the consciousness, not the idea that "consciousness emerges from energy", but the actual reality of consciousness). This is because Consciousness/Thinking is not an idea and not an abstraction, it is that which manifests thoughts and phenomena and ideas and that which actually experiences them, or in other words, the manifesting and experiencing of all ideas, and we all know it intimately and directly from our 1-st person conscious experience. Ideas can not manifest and experience themselves, it is Thinking that manifests them, and this is not an abstraction, it is our direct and experientially obvious 1-st person experience. I remember RS said the same, something like "Thinking must be already there for ideas to exist". This has nothing to do with ontology or whterh Thinking is more fundamental or not, it's about the fact of the 1-st person experience. So, there must be only one way the reality of consciousness actually is: either consciousness actually emerges from energy, or it actually does not. It can not be a unity of both polarities, it can not emerge from energy and not emerge from energy simultaneously. However, the ideas of "consciousness emerges from energy" and "consciousness does not emerge from energy" are both real and both perfectly co-exist as polarities in the universe of the ideal content, that's true. But only one of these ideas corresponds to the actual reality of consciousness, the way this reality actually is.

Your thoughts?

[AshvinP]

Phrasing it that way ("merely") reveals how the evolving Idea is considered as a mere accretion to the "actual reality" which exists practically independent of it.

I'm really confused here.

So, every idea is part of reality, every idea is real (from idealism standpoint anyway). The world of living ideas evolves in time, form contradicting polarities, transmutates through metamorphoses. We now have a reality of all possible existing ideas, including the ones contradicting each other. An idea of infinity, and idea that "infinity exists", that "infinity does not exist", that "consciousness emerges from energy", that "energy emerges from consciousness", that "Zodiacs are governing life on Earth", that "Zodaics are mere abstractions not affecting the life on Earth" "2x2=4", "2x2=5", and so on. They all equally real and exist in the perfect unity of polarities in the universe of ideal content. This is what reality is all about, as I think you are saying. But there must be a way the reality actually is. Consciousness is not an abstraction, "Consciousness" is a word that points to the actual reality - the reality of our 1-st person conscious experience. We actually, from the 1-st person, experience every idea and phenomenon consciously. So, there must be only one way such consciousness actually is (not the idea about the consciousness, not the idea that "consciousness emerges from energy", but the actual reality of the actual reality of consciousness). This is because Consciousness/Thinking is not an idea and not an abstraction, it is that which manifests thoughts and phenomena and ideas and that which actually experiences them, or in other words, the manifesting and experiencing of all ideas, and we all know it from our direct 1-st person conscious experience, and not as an abstraction. Ideas can not manifest and experience themselves, it is Thinking that manifests them, and this is not an abstraction, it is our direct and experientially obvious 1-st person experience. I remember RS said the same, something like "Thinking must be already there for ideas to exist". So, there must be only one way the reality of consciousness actually is: either consciousness actually emerges from energy, or it actually does not. It can not be a unity of both polarities, it can not emerge from energy and not emerge from energy simultaneously. However, the ideas of "consciousness emerges from energy" and "consciousness does not emerge from energy" are both real and both perfectly co-exist as polarities in the universe of the ideal content, that's true. But only one of these ideas corresponds to the actual reality of consciousness, the way this reality actually is.

Your thoughts?

Right from the outset (bold and underlined) you have a dualism of "idea" and "reality", and a reductionism. Idea is considered a part of reality, and then ideas are perceived to be nothing more substantial than abstract minerlized thoughts, like the examples you listed there, with little thoughts combining to form bigger and bigger thoughts (reductionism), which may model "reality" accurately or inaccurately. Let me ask you - how is that any different from modern materialism-dualism, aside from terminology? Before you answer that, consider this below.

I think you really need to keep in mind the involutionary-evolutionary progress of Idea (Spirit) at all times. Moving along the Time-consciousness spectrum to higher ideal temporal phenomena allows us to start bringing life and mobility back to our perception of ideas, seeing how they are actually much more substantial than the mineralized "private" abstractions that we perceive them to be in the modern age. As Cleric mentioned before, one does not need to personally perceive all the evolutionary stages with spiritual sight to reason our way to them from 1st-person experiential perspective (and if we a priori treat "reason" as mere secondary activity added on top of the world content, this will never make sense... we will simply ignore the whole temporal phenomena like materialism-dualism) .

With living Reason, we can perceive how these stages make sense of what is occurring in the modern age. The involutionary stages can be thought of as the spiritual, noumenal, invisible, ideal (inner meaning), esoteric, etc. - where the eternal Idea descends, differentiates (kenosis of Spirit) - while evolutionary stages (which just blossomed relatively recently from Axial Age and Christ events) associate with the phenomenal, visible, material-real (outer form), exoteric, etc. - where the Idea ascends and integrates (theosis). Modern age cosmology and evolutionary theory simply ignores the involutionary stages altogether, just as it ignores the spiritual-ideal-esoteric underlying the visible world, and reaches all sorts of flawed conclusions from this incomplete image of the holistic ideal process.

So what is the difference between BK's idealism, or "spiritual intuitive idealism", or whatever we want to call it, and that modern age cosmology and evolutionary theory which ignores all that it can no longer perceive (out of sight, out of mind)? How specifically does it incorporate any of the involutionary stages mentioned, which we can think of as a top-down progression of ideal manifestation rather than bottom-up (remembering all of these are simply crude visual symbols)? And I will add, modern science itself does not ignore these things, only the scientists who interpret the results with all of their incomplete assumptions. So we don't need to discard any modern science or its results, rather they should inform and complement our assumption-free understanding as Cleric mentioned in his previous post.

[Eugene I]

Ashvin, I don't care about modern dualism-materialism, I don't care about BK's idealism and modern science here. You don't understand what I'm asking here.

There is my actual 1-st person intimate experience of consciousness as a mysterious reality that manifests and experiences phenomena, ideas and thoughts. This Thinking is not something apart from thoughts and ideas and phenomena, they are inseparable, they are all part of the same reality. This is multiplicity, not dualism, as I said above. This Thinking is NOT AN IDEA!, it is an experiential reality. But Thinking can also experience itself and reflect on itself though a reflective thought/idea. So I have an idea "the Thinking experience is real", this idea points to the experiential fact of Thinking experiencing Thinking itself. But Thinking can also manifest an idea "there is no such thing as Thinking experiencing, it's an illusion (c) Dennett". So now I have two ideas both real and existing simultaneously but contradicting each other as polarities. Imagine that: Thinking is so powerful that it can think that it does not exist! And the idea that "Thinking does not exist" is as real as the idea "Thinking exists" and as real as Thinking itself. WOW! But Thinking in actuality can not exist and not exist simultaneously. The epistemological question now is: which one of these two ideas are the Truth corresponding to the actuality of Thinking? And how do we find this out?