The Central Topic

[Eugene I.]

You seem to be suggesting that we can't derive mind from matter but it is entirely possible to derive matter from mind. I'd love to know how.

In idealism there is no matter whatsoever, so there is no need to "derive matter from mind", there is only "appearance of matter" in our sense perceptions of our conscious experience. So, all what we call "material world" is only our sense perceptions that are of the same nature of conscious phenomena, In other words, in idealism "matter" is only a way some conscious phenomena are organized in some specific patterns that "look like matter". So the explanatory task for idealism is only to explain how these patterns of sense-perceptional phenomena get produced and organized in patterns in the mind, and not to explain how matter is "derived" from mind.

We know from our experience that thinking can produce and organize conscious phenomena in patterns (ideas, imaginations and even sense perceptions in dreams), so there is no "magic" in a hypothesis that our sense perceptions can get similarly produced and organized in patterns (that look like "material objects") by certain thinking activity behind the "veils" of our individual minds. It is the same thinking/conscious activity that we all intimately know in our own conscious experience, we are not inventing here any new category of phenomena and not introducing any new metaphysical "nature" that is experientially unknown to us. So, what is left is only to figure out the technical details of how this organization process happens. Again, BK offers one hypothesis, SS offers another one. Of course you will not find any exhaustive explanatory models of such process in idealism (as if they exist in materialism....), you will only find rough plausible sketches for such explanation outlining possible explanatory paths (take the BK's DID analogy as an example). It's a work in progress in idealism, as opposed to the "dead end" in materialism due to the intractable "hard problem".

[Cleric K]

So it would seem to me that that Cleric should also explain why thinking (or Thinking) can have a hard aspect to it. Maybe it's all one in the end but why do we treat the hard thinking differently from the soft thinking.

Jim, the 'hardness', whether of the hammer or thinking, is a fact of experience. Please try to understand than in no way I'm trying to deny the facts or demean them. The pain of the sensory hammer vs. the imaginary is a fact. It is a fact that our conscious experience is related to what we perceive as body, nervous system, etc. Through thinking we can find correlations between these perceptions, just like we can find correlation between the sensory hammer and pain. In all of this we're firmly staying within the given. We're only elucidating the relations of perceptions through thinking. I have no problem to call the sensory hammer 'material'. I only withhold imagining that there's some fundamental aspect of reality, that is in principle opaque to any means to know if it really exists or not. There's simply nothing to be gained in this way (except the salaries of academic philosophers who make a living out of this).

There's a secret connection between our deep intuition that there's something real behind the sensory hammer. We realize that the sensory hammer can inflict on us a painful sensation which we can't produce by our own imaginary hammer. Thus we conclude: "There's something more than myself within the perception of the hammer. In my Thinking I can't produce pain. But through my Willing I enter withing something which produces severe pain."

This is something which I haven't seen mentioned so far in these hammer back and forths. An important distinction that we should make is that in the imagined hammer we're working entirely in the domain of Thought. When we lift the hammer with our arm we also activate our Will. The reader may take few seconds to feel the difference (similar to Jim's exercise). Try to imagine moving your hand as vividly as possible. Wave it around, spread your fingers, clench them in a fist. Now repeat the exercise but also activate the Will - make actual movements with the hand. Do this as many times as needed in order to get a good feel for the imagined and the actual willed movement.

So the difference between the two hammers is really the difference between how we transform our conscious state through Thinking alone and how we transform it through Thinking+Willing (things are more complicated than this. Even Thinking is Willed but let's keep it simple here. With Will here we refer exclusively to bodily will). With Will we always feel that we're diving into something much deeper and unknown than the surface where our awake Thinking lives. Most of the attacks on Idealism are based on the impression that Idealism claims that reality is made only of the Thinking layer. And there really are schools which present things in this way. I have personally criticized many times the superficial (flat) mysticism which presents reality as a thin dream picture. This results when there's no proper understanding of the mysterious Will.

These things are really not very well understood even among Idealists. If everything is of purely thought nature why can't we imagine the world in any way we like? This is a strange paradox for flat mysticism, which then goes on to invent convoluted mechanisms of dissociation, veiling and what not. There's no need to invent anything. We must simply investigate what is there in the given. If we observe objectively and without preconceived ideas we'll recognize three main forms of inner activity - Thinking, Feeling, Willing. Arranged in this way we go from thinking, where we're fully conscious, towards feeling, which becomes much more nebulous and slippery, and finally to willing, where everything sinks in deep mystery. Here one might wonder what's so mysterious about will. I've given this example many times: it's enough to imagine paralyzed limb in order to distinguish (like the exercise above) our willing intent from the actual perception of movement. We simply don't have control, neither we know what is happening between our conscious intent and the perception. It is as if our conscious intent sinks into mysterious depths and as a result we see movement. If our limb is paralyzed we send the same conscious intent, it sinks in the depths but nothing echoes back.

Note that all said above stays entirely within the given. We haven't assumed metaphysical explanations, we simply described the conscious phenomena as we experience them.

So we see that materialists are fully justified in their own right. We can say that the difference between materialists and idealists is that the former experiences much more clearly the mysterious willing element, while the latter are much more aware of the thinking element. Yet they both exist within the spectrum of the given and we can't derive one from the other.

So to clarify, when we live in the will we feel that we're going beyond ourselves. We feel that our will encounters something for which we can't account through thinking alone. We cannot account with thinking for the pain that we feel when we will the movement of the hand holding a hammer. Based on the givens we conclude "Through my will I interact with something which is beyond the perimeter of what I can grasp with thinking. If I could grasp that with my thinking I should have been capable to move the sensory hammer with my thought (not through the will) and inflict real pain on me just by thinking about it".

This mysterious depth within which we reach through our Will has always been known, even though by different names. One such name is God the Father. The man from before few centuries could have said "God the Father lives where my Will penetrates (which is the outer world). He is powerful, only he can inflict pain, which I with my thought can't produce." For modern science God the Father has transformed into matter (or whatever physical basis of reality). The mysterious nature of God the Father has crystallized into the mysterious nature of matter. The Will of God has become the laws of matter. Modern scientists says "When I dip into the unknown depths of reality with my Will, I feel pain. Only matter is powerful enough such that it can inflict pain which I with my thought can't produce."

Thus from another angle we reach once again the point where we see how useless it is to endlessly speculate what is the essence of the depths where our Will sinks, on the condition that we presuppose that we can never, even in principle, know directly anything about the depths where the Will descends. This is once again the Kantian divide and the island of Shajan: can we descend in cognitive way in the realm beneath the surface, in the kingdom of the Will, or we're forever destined to remain above the surface and only speculate about the essence of the depths by arranging models of volcanic rocks? And this connects us to the Central Topic (Dana, you should appreciate how I keep trying to return the jumpy threads back to the center ) which sketches the first steps for growing consciously into the depth layers.

[Soul_of_Shu]

And this connects us to the Central Topic (Dana, you should appreciate how I keep trying to return the jumpy threads back to the center )

Well, that is mainly why I'm letting it ride, as being the ever 'persistent' soul that you are, you are still making the valiant effort to overcome the cognitive disconnect, so who am I to suggest that you give up when it would have driven this soul to tears by now

[Eugene I.]

This is something which I haven't seen mentioned so far in these hammer back and forths. An important distinction that we should make is that in the imagined hammer we're working entirely in the domain of Thought. When we lift the hammer with our arm we also activate our Will. The reader may take few seconds to feel the difference (similar to Jim's exercise). Try to imagine moving your hand as vividly as possible. Wave it around, spread your fingers, clench them in a fist. Now repeat the exercise but also activate the Will - make actual movements with the hand. Do this as many times as needed in order to get a good feel for the imagined and the actual willed movement.

So the difference between the two hammers is really the difference between how we transform our conscious state through Thinking alone and how we transform it through Thinking+Willing (things are more complicated than this. Even Thinking is Willed but let's keep it simple here. With Will here we refer exclusively to bodily will).

Right, so more precisely, both imaginations and bodily movements arise by the acts of Will, but we can categorize them into the acts of "bodily will" and "thoughts-imaginations-producing will". Ther is also another type of phenomena that appear in our experience without any noticeable action of the will, such as the sense perceptions not related to our own body, or hallucinatory, drug-induced or dream-induced imaginations and perceptions.

So, any idealistic view is ought to explain how all these sensory phenomena beyond the control of our personal will appear to us in such consistently patterned manner. And they do not just appear organized in certain similar patterns, but amazingly follow certain mathematical equations (Schrodinger, GR etc) with an amazing precision, and idealism is ought to explain this phenomenon as well.

[Ben Iscatus]

Although Cleric's explanation adds value, I got the impression from Jim's exercise that the thinking (about the hammer and its action) involved willing too. The idea of will is there in prayer, I reckon (when heartfelt, it's more than a mere wish); also when offering distant healing.

[Cleric K]

So, the view of the evolutionary path that you are presenting is correct if taken together with a variety of other dimensions and paths of the development, but it would be incomplete and too reductionist/limited if it is claimed that all development is only reduced/limited to such path.

Let me try in yet another way

I think we agree that by blindly exercising their freedom, people may either move in the direction which leads towards the pole of Life or towards the pole of Death. The first pole leads to increase in freedom, more harmonious existence and ever higher forms of consciousness. The second pole leads towards diminishing consciousness, decreasing degrees of freedom, fear-based struggle for survival and so on.

What I'm speaking of is not one reduced/limited path of infinitely many but the half-plane that leads toward Life. Now you'll say that you also speak of that half-plane. Yet the trouble is that in our world all paths are mixed together and there's no clear label which says to which half-plane which path leads. And by path I don't speak at all about spiritual teachings. When I say 'path' I mean every single act of thinking, feeling and willing. In every instant we choose a path. So the problem is practical - from the full spectrum of the wave function how do we recognize which paths lead towards the half-plane of Life?

So what I'm saying is that in the completely general way you speak of these things it is impossible to know to which half-plane we're leaning with every single act of our spiritual activity. As long as things are kept in this completely general in nebulous form, we can never distinguish divine inspirations leading towards Life from mere subconscious sympathies and desires leading towards Death. And you know this very well. When things are kept at this level of abstract generality everyone will be able to justify their behavior. Everyone can claim that they are aligned with the Divine. Thus this kind of vague religiosity has not practical value except to make us feel good for what we think, feel and do. Lifting the layers of the veil is not about bypassing steps of evolution but precisely to understand the complicated self- and world-dynamics, such that we can understand what leads to one half-plane and what to the other.

[AshvinP]

This mysterious depth within which we reach through our Will has always been known, even though by different names. One such name is God the Father. The man from before few centuries could have said "God the Father lives where my Will penetrates (which is the outer world). He is powerful, only he can inflict pain, which I with my thought can't produce." For modern science God the Father has transformed into matter (or whatever physical basis of reality). The mysterious nature of God the Father has crystallized into the mysterious nature of matter. The Will of God has become the laws of matter. Modern scientists says "When I dip into the unknown depths of reality with my Will, I feel pain. Only matter is powerful enough such that it can inflict pain which I with my thought can't produce."

Thus from another angle we reach once again the point where we see how useless it is to endlessly speculate what is the essence of the depths where our Will sinks, on the condition that we presuppose that we can never, even in principle, know directly anything about the depths where the Will descends. This is once again the Kantian divide and the island of Shajan: can we descend in cognitive way in the realm beneath the surface, in the kingdom of the Will, or we're forever destined to remain above the surface and only speculate about the essence of the depths by arranging models of volcanic rocks? And this connects us to the Central Topic (Dana, you should appreciate how I keep trying to return the jumpy threads back to the center ) which sketches the first steps for growing consciously into the depth layers.

Beautiful...

I hope others appreciate how remarkable it is for nothing but careful observation of conscious phenomena, which you did a great job of summarizing in a few paragaphs, probably written in about 5-10 min., leading to questions and answers which the greatest modern philosophers never even thought to ask, let alone answer, their entire careers. That is not to say "Cleric is smarter than Kant or Schop", but that everyone can begin penetrating into the depths of Being by simply allowing their Thinking to flow through two-sided reasoning process of conscious perceptions and meaning. We then see how God the Father is increasingly veiled by our evolved cognition and crystallized into "trascendent Will of God", "blind mysterious Will", and "chaotic mindless matter" (now more like "emptiness of emptiness"; pure nothingness; void). TCT shows us how there is still a concrete remainder in our veiled experience - an overlap of veiled experience and that which is veiled - which we find in our own Thinking, and we can leverage that remainder to once again pierce the veils we placed over Being, but now in full clarity of consciousness.

[Cleric K]

Although Cleric's explanation adds value, I got the impression from Jim's exercise that the thinking (about the hammer and its action) involved willing too.

Yes, precisely. I just wanted to make that explicit, in order to make it clear that it's not just about some visual images which cause pain and others which don't (and calling the former matter) but to point attention to the fact that our spiritual activity differs in both cases.

The idea of will is there in prayer, I reckon (when heartfelt, it's more than a mere wish); also when offering distant healing.

That's great addition, Ben! Tremendously important. It is indeed that through prayer we can work within the depths even though our ordinary thought can't follow what's going on beneath the surface. From this perspective we can say that the faith that accompanies deep prayer is not merely a blind belief but the experiential feeling that we're really sending our heartfelt ideas into the real depths/heights of the Cosmic Being. And this is very characteristic experience. True prayer must feel as if we form a thought as a living dove and let it fly away towards the heights. When we lack faith we're practically constraining our spiritual activity on the surface. We don't allow ourselves to let go of the dove. Anyone can observe this distinction. The physicalist simply finds it foolish to allow himself to experience the thinking gesture of letting a thought fly away. Some may find that they do let the dove fly but they secretly inflate their imagination and don't allow the dove to leave its sphere - whatever happens with the dove they want to happen under their supervision in their own imagination. To let go of the dove in the proper sense we must feel that our thought leaves our immediate sphere into something far greater than and independent of us, which however is also of thought-nature (of quite different 'wavelengths' of course).

Right, so more precisely, both imaginations and bodily movements arise by the acts of Will, but we can categorize them into the acts of "bodily will" and "thoughts-imaginations-producing will". Ther is also another type of phenomena that appear in our experience without any noticeable action of the will, such as the sense perceptions not related to our own body, or hallucinatory, drug-induced or dream-induced imaginations and perceptions.

Yes, some time ago I used this image:


Similarly to the forces that physics studies, it can be said that in the primordial depths/heights of existence, there's really only one form of spiritual activity, which can be called Will but it is fully cognitive (meaningful) and the reflections of this Will are the (innerly experienced) Cosmos itself.

Will, Feeling,Thinking, Perception are the four Cosmic Folds, Iterations through which our particular evolutionary matrix is formed. They are reflected in the mineral, plant, animal, human kingdoms, the warmth, air, water, solid elements, the physical, etheric, astral bodies and the "I". These four iterations exist in relative freedom to each other and like complicated mirror system produce the infinitely complex fractal of Consciousness, of which currently we experience only a tiny aperture. Our thinking today is of the same essence as the primordial cognitive Will but has been transformed several times and now has assumed mineral-like form which is experienced against all other elements that are left behind and form our environment (both inner and sensory)

So with our true Will we live even at this moment in the primordial depths. It is as if we have left behind part of ourselves there but it is nevertheless present in and around us all the time and from 'outer' perspective constitutes the physical aspect of the Cosmos. We live in that part every night but from the standpoint of the intellect it looks as deep dreamless sleep. In the course of evolution the spirit will regain consciousness in the reverse order by uniting the delaminated forces. That's why development of higher cognition goes through the transfiguration of thinking - it is only from there that we can begin to gain consciousness of the deeper layers, by awakening to the more fundamental cognitive forced concealed within the mineralized thoughts.

[Eugene I.]

So, the view of the evolutionary path that you are presenting is correct if taken together with a variety of other dimensions and paths of the development, but it would be incomplete and too reductionist/limited if it is claimed that all development is only reduced/limited to such path.

Let me try in yet another way

I think we agree that by blindly exercising their freedom, people may either move in the direction which leads towards the pole of Life or towards the pole of Death. The first pole leads to increase in freedom, more harmonious existence and ever higher forms of consciousness. The second pole leads towards diminishing consciousness, decreasing degrees of freedom, fear-based struggle for survival and so on.

What I'm speaking of is not one reduced/limited path of infinitely many but the half-plane that leads toward Life. Now you'll say that you also speak of that half-plane. Yet the trouble is that in our world all paths are mixed together and there's no clear label which says to which half-plane which path leads. And by path I don't speak at all about spiritual teachings. When I say 'path' I mean every single act of thinking, feeling and willing. In every instant we choose a path. So the problem is practical - from the full spectrum of the wave function how do we recognize which paths lead towards the half-plane of Life?

So what I'm saying is that in the completely general way you speak of these things it is impossible to know to which half-plane we're leaning with every single act of our spiritual activity. As long as things are kept in this completely general in nebulous form, we can never distinguish divine inspirations leading towards Life from mere subconscious sympathies and desires leading towards Death. And you know this very well. When things are kept at this level of abstract generality everyone will be able to justify their behavior. Everyone can claim that they are aligned with the Divine. Thus this kind of vague religiosity has not practical value except to make us feel good for what we think, feel and do. Lifting the layers of the veil is not about bypassing steps of evolution but precisely to understand the complicated self- and world-dynamics, such that we can understand what leads to one half-plane and what to the other.

It is possible to know to which half-plane the actions belong. As I said, through our spiritual intuition we are able to know the Divine intentions, qualities and values. It is the same intuitive thinking that you are also talking about. So, if our actions align with the Divine intentions and qualities, then we are on the positive side of half-plane, and the other way around.

So far I was talking only about spiritual intuitive way of cognizing the Divine qualities. But SS seems to be claiming that the layers of the veil can be lifted and we can know all the world dynamics not just intuitively, but exactly in a scientific and verifiable way. It is indeed an ambitious claim, but it needs to be tested and verified in practice in order to be proven. If this claim would be true, then sure, you are right, we can "recognize which paths lead towards the half-plane of Life" in an objective and verifiable way. However, so far I have not seen any evidences that it is possible and the veil is indeed penetrable in an explicit way and not only intuitively. And I'm saying that based on my years of spiritual practices in different traditions. Steiner who spent decades in his occult practices failed to demonstrate this. He only got “blood pumping itself”, “willows healing arthritis”, “spiritual superiority of Arian/German race”, “planet Mercury related to element Mercury” and stuff like that. This is not spiritual science, this is kid's stuff.

So I think the veil is still here (even though it is entirely imaginary), it was put in place intentionally, and so far we are still left with only intuitive way of knowing the Divine qualities through the veil, and this is exactly the challenge of our human life and one of the reasons why we incarnate in such challenging environment. We have to deal with uncertainty, and that is not easy. It's like climbing Everest covered in clouds. Of course it would be easier to climb when there are no clouds and no uncertainty. As many NDE accounts suggest, there are many noncorporeal souls that never incarnate into humans, they prefer to live in certainty, and only the most courageous souls choose to incarnate into humans to live in uncertainty and accomplish what can never be accomplished in the noncorporeal environment of certainty. And that's us! But it's understandable that at times it gets so challenging and becomes so unbearable that many of us just give up. But no blames here, it's ok, it was still a nice try

[AshvinP]

So, the view of the evolutionary path that you are presenting is correct if taken together with a variety of other dimensions and paths of the development, but it would be incomplete and too reductionist/limited if it is claimed that all development is only reduced/limited to such path.

Let me try in yet another way

I think we agree that by blindly exercising their freedom, people may either move in the direction which leads towards the pole of Life or towards the pole of Death. The first pole leads to increase in freedom, more harmonious existence and ever higher forms of consciousness. The second pole leads towards diminishing consciousness, decreasing degrees of freedom, fear-based struggle for survival and so on.

What I'm speaking of is not one reduced/limited path of infinitely many but the half-plane that leads toward Life. Now you'll say that you also speak of that half-plane. Yet the trouble is that in our world all paths are mixed together and there's no clear label which says to which half-plane which path leads. And by path I don't speak at all about spiritual teachings. When I say 'path' I mean every single act of thinking, feeling and willing. In every instant we choose a path. So the problem is practical - from the full spectrum of the wave function how do we recognize which paths lead towards the half-plane of Life?

It is possible to know to which half-plane the actions belong. As I said, through our spiritual intuition we are able to know the Divine intentions, qualities and values. It is the same intuitive thinking that you are also talking about. So, if our actions align with the Divine intentions and qualities, then we are on the positive side of half-plane, and the other way around.

It simply isn't the same "intuition". The outer form of the word is the same, but the inner meaning is not at all the same. Cleric speaks of intuition (or simply "higher cognition" in general) as Bergson advocates below, while you are speaking of it as Schelling/Schop (and practically many others). This also goes to show the constant references to "Steiner" as a criticism of Cleric's arguments are just silly at this point. There are others who also perceived the deep inner logic of what Cleric is pointing to, and criticized the exact same things he is criticizing, i.e. the approach you are advocating, without any connection to Steiner or SS whatsoever.

I am trying to set a record for how many times the same quote can be relevantly used on a philosophy forum

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