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.Eugene I wrote: ↑Sat Nov 20, 2021 12:42 am 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.
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.