Just to note that this re-configuration starts with something very close to home. Trying to grasp our thinking as a process of soul and spirit reality, is already a very major re-configuration. As a matter of fact, if we make this step, most other things will be seen to fit very naturally.Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 20, 2022 12:16 amThe structure of "2" is what concerns me here. Our present state of conscious evolution means there is a veiled reality to which we can only speculate about without a re-configuring of our soul.Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Apr 16, 2022 10:36 pm You're on the borderline and you equally consider that:
1/ the Cosmos is a dark abyss and lost sparks of thoughts bubble up and coalesce in quasi-stable formations before they sink back into the void
2/ the Cosmos is of Thought-nature, like Goethe's Idea which is inner Light, and our current existence is actually hierarchically filtered Thought-Light. Thus evolution is the experience of the living being, which currently recognizes itself in the filtered light-sparkles (intellectual thoughts), gradually finding its Comic nature within the levels of the Thought-Ocean which thinks the world.
We should be aware that there's always a wide spectrum of beings operating on different levels of integration. The Central Be-ing of the Cosmos has been known always. We can see it even in the most ancient Hindu teachings. Those souls who descended more towards the world of fragmentation began to deal more with the Natural spirits because they were more immediate in their environment. Even for native Americans, who through their shamanic practices came into contact primarily with the spirits of Nature, we can still see the general feeling for the Great Spirit. It was felt that there's an unifying life force flowing through all.Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 20, 2022 12:16 am But my observation of the movement of thought throughout history is that we have moved from a picture of a world governed by a scattered array of spiritual forces, gods, and other entities bustling about, all competing for influence. Rather, the best of philosophy has arrived at classical theism - where the world is ordered by the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason absolutely immanent to all things. I might be totally misunderstanding things but SS seems to lead to a retrograde movement.
If anything, it is precisely SS which brings back the importance of plurality. The monotheistic feeling has its proper place. It can be said that it serves as a focal point for the development of the human "I". Without it, man would always feel the tendency to dissipate in the Great Spirit. He would seek the unity but would try to approach it only by dissolving in nebulousness. On the other hand, the idea of a Center brings forth the possibility that we find the concentric relation of microcosm and macrocosm.
Yet, simply focusing on a singular concept in the mind doesn't really equate to approaching the macrocosmic perspective of being. This is where monotheism becomes degenerative (when it becomes reduced to one grand concept in the intellect). So now, once we have our stable Center, which is a manifestation of the Cosmic Center, we can begin finding the musical lawfulness of plurality. But this time not by dissolving merrily in it but by attaining to the meaningful unities which lie behind it.
As an analogy we can take language. If we hear words (let this represent spirits) and we vaguely feel that there's underlying unity of meaning (the Great Spirit) yet we don't understand the language, it's like listening to a favorite song in an unknown language. We dissolve in it, we vibrate together with the sounds, we're one with them but there's no meaning (this is where mysticism and psychedelics lead). To move from this kind of unity (which is really only smeared out plurality) to unity of Cosmic speech, it is not enough to simply form an abstract concept of the One and bow to it. We can only do that if we re-configure our soul such that we merge not merely with the sounds but with the meaning of the words. And not only to the meaning as such but to the fact that this meaning is coherent expression of spiritual activity when seen from the proper center, just like our own thoughts are generally coherent expression of our "I"-being (that is, the successions of thought-forms are organized by the unity of meaning that we experience).
And here's really the big objection. People (including in this forum) say that there are islands of meaning (souls) but there's no overarching perspective which can grasp all the isolated perspectives as words that have even higher order unified meaning.
I can not formally prove that this overarching spirit exists but we can easily reckon that we never find an obstacle on our path towards it which is not self-imposed. In other words, to reject this spirit in a rigorous way, we should stumble upon an obstacle that basically tells us "Here, we reached a stage of plurality for which no further overarching unity can be found." And people actually claim this. Eugene for example says that fundamentally there are 'interest soul group' which have fundamentally incompatible nature.
But if we think this more thoroughly we'll see that it conflicts with the most basic nature of our "I". Contrary to what many believe, the true essence of our "I" is not to separate. It is precisely that in our "I" we can find the unity of the separate beings. We can't find that unity only if we postulate fundamentally and ontologically separate bubbles of consciousness for each being (or groups of beings). But the most beautiful characteristic of our "I" is that we can always enlarge the radius of our interests and accommodate with living understanding the viewpoints of other beings too.
Imagine that I confront another person and we're in conflict. I say "we're fundamentally different soul beings. There's no point of contact between us. Each one of us is completely incapable of comprehending the viewpoint of the other. It's like our souls are built of cognitively orthogonal substances. It's like my soul operates with square-shaped phenomena, while yours with triangle-shaped. The most we can know about each other is that we live in orthogonal inner universes and I will never understand what is it like to be you, neither you'll understand what is it to be me. Thus if we're lucky we'll just exist side by side as members of incompatible spiritual species or we'll enter into conflict which is in principle unresolvable because there's no common ground between us."
For anyone who has at least some feeling for what it means to be human in the true sense of the word, the above doesn't stand to the facts. Actually it is the most human characteristic of our "I" that we can always enlarge our horizon. It goes against the millennia-long quest for comprehending the riddle of existence. Look at all the sciences, the arts, religions - all activity of the human spirit. The latter doesn't know limits, it keeps breaking wall after wall. Imagine a scientist saying: "I see stones, I see metals but there's nothing in common between them. I'll stop my scientific investigations right now because there's nothing, even in principle, that can bring connection between them." Luckily, scientists didn't stop there and, even though in a limited and materialistic way, they found that both stones and metals speak the same 'atomic language' on a deeper level.
Yet people today try to do exactly the opposite when it comes to spiritual reality. They say "different human groups exist in fundamentally orthogonal soul-languages. I'll never ever be able to understand within my soul, the thoughts, feelings and actions of those members of the other group."
When formulated like that it doesn't sound quite like something which the human spirit would say, does it? Actually, the above should be felt as insulting. It's like saying "you'll can never find common ground between rocks and metals". As a matter of fact, a scientist may feel motivated to find that common ground just for the sake of refusing to be limited in such an arbitrary way.
If we look at things in this way, we'll soon see that objections like the above are actually nothing but excuses which try to support certain personal, tribal, national, racial, religious, etc. feelings. It is not that we have any solid evidence that different soul groups live in orthogonal and incompatible to each other inner spaces. It's simply that we resist the widening of the soul radius, which can only be achieved through Love.
These are things at the base of all those talks about fundamentally incompatible interest soul groups. It goes against all logic of monism/non-duality to propose such a thing. Instead, we can always expect that there's a greater level of understanding consciousness from which the apparently conflicting groups, still speak the same primordial language in their innermost Spirit.
This is the positive (and not retrograde) aspect of monotheism. It's not in the least about singling out a deity and making the whole world worship it. It's about whether we can find the Being in us which has such Love that it can live in full comprehension of the thoughts, feelings and actions of the beings that we encounter within our ever expanding horizon of experience. The question is not whether there's a monotheistic God or not but whether we can approach within ourselves the primordial creative grounds, which speak the same 'language' no matter the nation, species, planet, galaxy. The scientist assumes that there's something common between our planet and another in a galaxy far, far away - it's assumed they share the same physical laws. The molecular composition of a planet might be different but the more we go towards the foundations, the more unified it becomes (it's assumed that the electron here is the same as the electron there). The physical structure is like hierarchical diversification from common physical ground (unified quantum fields, particles, atoms, molecules, macromolecules, cells, organs, etc.). Similarly, we can conceive that this is the perceptual symbol-image of the spiritual hierarchy of the universal spirit exploring different states of being, yet all overarched through the same universal ground state.