The Central Topic

[Anthony66]

All of this certainly does require meditative effort!

If we speak in terms of "frames" and trace these back, is there a "first frame" or "alpha point" of frames? Again, here I'm exploring God-like concepts viewed from a SS perspective.

Anthony, please consider my previous post to Eugene. It contains the answers to your question. I know it's difficult matter so we can further clarify things. The main thing is to overcome the default and quite unexamined feeling that we're an absolute observer of reality ticking along an independent clock and being aware of this flow of time (which presupposed also some absolute memory). We should really wrestle to feel how we smuggle this assumption when we speak of the first frame. We naively assume that we can take our current temporal consciousness and observe the first frame. We can never understand the mystery of Time through such abstract conceptions. We need to enter the living experience at the shockwave of our becoming. We need to experience our thinking becoming as a kind of growing process which implodes more and more states of being.

Cleric, yes I'd already gone through your post to Eugene before I saw your response here. I feel like it is one of your most significant and I'll have to read it through a few times to really grok what you are saying about the absolute state. Of course your focus there was the "final" state. My question pertains to the "initial" state.

[Cleric K]

Cleric, yes I'd already gone through your post to Eugene before I saw your response here. I feel like it is one of your most significant and I'll have to read it through a few times to really grok what you are saying about the absolute state. Of course your focus there was the "final" state. My question pertains to the "initial" state.

I tried to hint at this by saying

If it helps, we can think of the absolute state not simply as the end of evolution but also as that which contains all possible beginnings. Beginnings and ends are simultaneous in the absolute state.

I'll try to approach it with another metaphor. Imagine movie strips where every frame represents the full spectrum experience of a state of being. Imagine you have movie strips which contain the infinitely many possible states of being - rock, plant, animal, human, alien, angelic, divine, in any conceivable evolutionary context. You take the scissors and cut the individual frames and stack them one over the other (let's imagine they are very thin so they don't build infinitely tall tower).

Now these movie frame are somewhat special. They are like holographic plates, they consist of phenomenal wave interferences. Similarly to tuning forks, the waves of one frame ring in partial resonance with the waves of other frames. This simply means that a given frame contains embedded within itself the patterns of others. The absolute frame is such that it rings in resonance with all other frames, that is, it has something in common with all frames. Other frames ring only with domains of self-similarly tuned frames.

Seen in this way, the experience of time evolution is the apparent continuous transition of frames such that every next frame rings in resonance with more and more other frames. This build up of resonance is the integration of memory, of our being experiencing more and more states as concentrically embedded in the present.

History tells us that the general consciousness always lags few centuries behind the pioneering beings which are on the forefront of discovery. Similarly, even though it's been more than a century since the ideas behind special and general relativity, we still live with Newtonian world conception. Relativity rests on the idea that we can't speak of a universal clock along which everything ticks. This still seems only as mathematical fancy for most scientists but higher cognition confirms it. Thus we should be very careful when we ask questions such as about the initial frame. Initial from the perspective of which world-line of integrating memory? As we approach the absolute state, all possible states of being are seen to exist as if side by side, similarly to timeless numbers. From such perspective, a given state may feel like being somewhere along a world-line of evolution, for a higher being a segment of that world-line is part of simultaneous now.

So we reach again the point of the previous post, where we realized that most of our metaphysical thinking secretly assumes a universal observer, ticking along a universal clock and having a sense of time thanks to mysterious universal memory. This makes us ask questions like "How did God's consciousness feel like when he decided to create the world?" Such a question presupposes many things, among which the idea of universal linear time to which God is subject too. We imagine that creation began N clock ticks ago and today God and all created beings have all lived through N ticks of time.

We can never make sense of reality with this kind of thinking. It would be more appropriate to start from the moment of our awakening as a conscious being which thinks about the great questions of existence. We find ourselves in a state of being which is in complicated relations with the infinity of other states of being. All these states still exist simultaneously, similarly to the block universe of GR. In the relative perspective of our state, we experience the constructive interference of particular states, while the vast majority of the rest interfere destructively and seemingly are not part of our reality.

Now the tempting question is to ask "How did the world reach this state?". The obvious thing seems to start extrapolating from our current state backwards to what we imagine as past and try to build intellectual picture of what these states might have been. That's how ideas as the Big Bang come about. But we also know that extrapolating in this way is not guaranteed to be correct - see flat Earth for example. Hopefully in the coming century more people will begin to think differently of what the past really is.

Through our Newtonian intuition, we feel like the more time passes, the more past events move away from us. But for the evolving world-line things look differently. It's like awakening in a certain state, let's represent it with the number 7. From the perspective of eternity this number exists simultaneously with all infinite numbers. Yet from our awakened perspective we feel in very complicated relations to the other numbers. As we explore these relations it seems we have passed through certain transformations and we have reached 7 by going through 1, 2, 3, etc. even though we have been unconscious at that time. Now if we imagine our future we may think that we'll continue towards states 8, 9, 10 and so on and as a result we'll be moving further away from 1. But the integration of memory actually makes it as if we expand as a circle around 7 and as we reach into 8, at the same time we gain also much more intimate experience of 6. Thus with the evolution of the world-line we don't simply move linearly in some direction but we integrate more and more of the palette of states into simultaneous now. In certain sense, the more we move towards the future, the more the mirror past becomes simultaneous. Towards the limit of the absolute state all possible states along any conceivable world-line of integration are seen as simultaneous.

Seen in this way, all world-lines (evolving perspectives of being) awaken from the darkness of unconsciousness (states which interfere destructively with other states) towards the state of universal resonance. I repeat that this is not some God created law of existence, it's simply the only way temporal development can ever be experienced in non-simultaneous manner. The logic is analogous to the anthropic principle. We can experience the eternal and simultaneous potential only through a progression of states that gradually integrate it into a whole. Of course the difficulty is that all those metaphors seem to already presuppose linear time as universal law, we're tempted to imagine this from the outside, as universal observer which sees how a given being's state moves through the potential. But such a perspective is nowhere to be found (except as imagination of the intellect). All perspectives are relative and experienced from within the states of being.

So the solution is to always think of concrete world-lines of being and not of some third-person perspective which tries to project everything on its own arrow of time. As said, Relativity should already have taught us to do that. Actually what we describe here doesn't demand anything new. Instead it requires letting go of persistent beliefs and embracing the given. Probably the most stubborn of them is the belief of universal time. Here's an example. We accept it as a certain fact that time continues to tick for everyone in the same way even at night when we're in unconscious sleep. But from the perspective of our world-line it seems as if our integration of memory continues in the morning. We would never know that we fell to sleep last night, neither that we had dreams, nor that we had spent time in dreamless sleep, unless we find ourselves in the morning state which embeds within itself all these previous states. We should train our intellect to feel complete tranquility at the prospect that it would be all the same if the universe didn't exist and somehow it came to be and we began experiencing our world-line integration immediately from our morning state. Our current state is completely defined by the constructive of destructive interference of other simultaneous states, just like the number 7 doesn't need to come into being by someone inventing it by starting counting from 1. Instead, from 7s perspective it seems that it is in certain specific relations with all other numbers. It's a great cognitive revolution when we begin to grasp the past not so much as something that has happened in time and is receding away from us but rather as integration of our current state which finds resonant relations with more and more timeless states of being.

Seen in this way, we'll reckon that there's no such perspective which stands near the absolute state and decides to create the world with the human being from there by starting to move in time together with the humans. In certain sense that perspective truly sees the potential world-lines of a possible world scenario but they are felt as simultaneous, as we see the numbers for example. On the other hand, from the perspective of the evolving world lines themselves, when they reach the state of development where they can understand things as the ones we're now discussing, it will look like a divine being has focused on a specific domain of the phase space of possible states and thus created our particular evolutionary scenario. For this reason it's still completely justified to speak from the perspective of our evolving world-line, of divine beings shaping our evolutionary domain. This may seem insane to suggest but when we experience in Intuition the resonance with the perspective of a divine being, it is as if this being looks and experiences through our point along the world line. That's why this being understands our evolutionary position. On the other hand, if we imagine the consciousness of that being at its own level it will seem as if, let's say, the human states of the the world-lines of a whole year time are simultaneous.

I know, these things are brain racking and they are simply painful if they remain in the abstract intellect but if we turn them into living experience, they lead to reality. And this is the big difference with the scientific theories which are bound to remain abstract. In GR we speak of block universe where we have a tensor energy field which at the same time determines the curvature of spacetime. These things are bound to remain as thoughts in the intellect. But what we speak of here are pointers to experiences. When we say 'energy tensor' we have intellectual construct which is supposed to map to some aspects of reality-in-itself on the opaque side of our subjective experience. But when we say here "state of being" this points us not away and on the opaque side of existence but directly to out most intimate experience. The words are only symbols, handles for those experiences. For this reason, all that we speak of here has the potential to be followed into living reality when taken with meditative effort. We shouldn't imagine that we can build some self-consistent intellectual TOE from the above. In this sense even the concept of 'state' is an idealization. We don't experience our flow of existence as made of discrete states but as more or less smooth metamorphosis. Concepts like 'state' and 'frame' are only like climber's hand holds. They are not reality itself but they give us grip on reality. It's inevitable that in the beginning they sound abstract and floating in the air but the more we get used to the topology of reality, the more these hand hold concepts will be felt to be only expressions, symbols for something which we live and breathe, which can never be captured in its fullness by few concepts.

[Anthony66]

I would really like to understand your argument here. I can only attempt to understand what you have subsequently written to me in your latest response once the content here is digested.

I tracked along OK until I reached this paragraph:

This could be imagined to be the Absolute state of being. It's such that all other infinitely many conceivable states are experienced as self-similar to it. Not only 'our' states but states of any conceivable being at any phase of development. Or in other words it's a state which feels that every conceivable state is present within it as memory. That absolute state would feel that there's something of it in every other state. Of course the geometric fractal is only a symbol. In practice we should imagine that all states of being are concentric, just like our memories of past states are concentric to our current "I"-state.

Did you really mean "infinitely many conceivable states"? I was expecting the absolute state to encompass all the states that were actually temporally realized. We had a progression of self-similar states which imposed a constraint on the sequence and then we have an absolute state which apparently has no constraints with its infinite conceivable states.

The next problem I had with the absolute state was the integration of the various conscious apertures into a common state. This requires some justification. How does the perspective associated with my ego become subsumed in the absolute state?

[Eugene I.]

This could be imagined to be the Absolute state of being. It's such that all other infinitely many conceivable states are experienced as self-similar to it. Not only 'our' states but states of any conceivable being at any phase of development. Or in other words it's a state which feels that every conceivable state is present within it as memory. That absolute state would feel that there's something of it in every other state. Of course the geometric fractal is only a symbol. In practice we should imagine that all states of being are concentric, just like our memories of past states are concentric to our current "I"-state.

This clearly shows that the SS version of idealism is Platonism. But it even extends from the original Platonism into the inclusion of the Absolute state of the infinity of all states. This idea of "the Idea of all ideas" (state of all states) is akin to the idea of the "set of all sets" in the modern set theory that mathematicians actually disallow because it is self-contradictory (it leads to the Russel's paradox: does the Absolute state of all states include itself?). SS claims that it follows reason and logic, yet it has no problem believing in logically contradictory statements.

Philosophically speaking, there is nothing wrong with Platonism. But my personal feel is that it makes life kind of pointless and strips it out of meaning and purpose. What is the point of wandering around a labyrinth of the ever-existing Absolute state of the infinite number of states? It's already there, "there is nothing new under the sun", there is nothing new to create and to invent. It makes any creativity pointless. It even excludes the Divine creativity because in such worldview God actually never created anything. Borgues eloquently described it in his famous The Library of Babel So, by claiming to resolve the meaning crisis of materialism the SS creates its own version of the meaning crisis.

[AshvinP]

This could be imagined to be the Absolute state of being. It's such that all other infinitely many conceivable states are experienced as self-similar to it. Not only 'our' states but states of any conceivable being at any phase of development. Or in other words it's a state which feels that every conceivable state is present within it as memory. That absolute state would feel that there's something of it in every other state. Of course the geometric fractal is only a symbol. In practice we should imagine that all states of being are concentric, just like our memories of past states are concentric to our current "I"-state.

This clearly shows that the SS version of idealism is Platonism. But it even extends from the original Platonism into the inclusion of the Absolute state of the infinity of all states. This idea of "the Idea of all ideas" (state of all states) is akin to the idea of the "set of all sets" in the modern set theory that mathematicians actually disallow because it is self-contradictory (it leads to the Russel's paradox: does the Absolute state of all states include itself?). SS claims that it follows reason and logic, yet it has no problem believing in logically contradictory statements.

Philosophically speaking, there is nothing wrong with Platonism. But my personal feel is that it makes life kind of pointless and strips it out of meaning and purpose. What is the point of wandering around a labyrinth of the ever-existing Absolute state of the infinite number of states? It's already there, "there is nothing new under the sun", there is nothing new to create and to invent. It makes any creativity pointless. It even excludes the Divine creativity because in such worldview God actually never created anything. Borgues eloquently described it in his famous The Library of Babel So, by claiming to resolve the meaning crisis of materialism the SS creates its own version of the meaning crisis.

Cleric may respond in more detail, but let's quickly note here that, just like GR theory superceded Newtonian ticking clock paradigm, Aristotelean logic has also been shown as insufficient to account for Reality in its depth. As Cleric mentioned, philosophers and academics in general have a habit of lagging behind, and people more generally have a habit of forgetting their own philosophical or scientific conclusions when moving from one domain to another. Normal intellectual logic cannot capture polar relations, which I think we all agree is the essence of all Consciousness. Eternity and Temporality is a polar relation, just like Idea-Perception, One-Many, Unity-Diversity, Absolute-Contingent, etc. If we try to reduce this relation to the rigid terms of such logic, it immediately becomes a duality instead of a polarity, and hence we get all of modern analytic philosophy.

This is why we should endeavor to actually experience the living gradient of Deep Consciousness, because intellect logic will never "prove" to us what is higher than itself. The new paradigm shift must be enacted through our own active and participatory thinking agency. The higher Logic - the unspoken Word - will be made manifest, will be spoken, through us.

in a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved matrix of space...

Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world... But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift.

Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all."

-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)

[Eugene I.]

PS: Also, the existence of the Absolute state of all states makes making choices meaningless, because for every "me making the right choice" there equally exist all the states of "me making all kinds of other choices" (in other words, all other versions of me making all other possible choices).

[Soul_of_Shu]

If Eugene wants to rehash some notion about the perils of SS, then I'll give it a while for the above comment, posted on May 14, to be reposted as a separate topic, before deleting it, along with any responding commentary, from this thread. So I'd advise waiting for that specific topic to be posted, before responding here.

[Cleric K]

Did you really mean "infinitely many conceivable states"? I was expecting the absolute state to encompass all the states that were actually temporally realized. We had a progression of self-similar states which imposed a constraint on the sequence and then we have an absolute state which apparently has no constraints with its infinite conceivable states.

I'm not sure I understand the source of your confusion. Can you elaborate?

The next problem I had with the absolute state was the integration of the various conscious apertures into a common state. This requires some justification. How does the perspective associated with my ego become subsumed in the absolute state?

Through continual death and resurrection. How did your child's ego become 'subsumed' in your current adult ego?

[lorenzop]

I'm trying to understand the dilema here . . .
For example, as I sit here and look out my window, over the course of a few minutes, there are a large number of impressions, configuration of birds, plants, joggers, visual and auditory, etc.
Is the question: Did each of these impressions already exist already in some Absolute State and I simply 'found them in a libray', or, were these impressions a fresh one-of-kind, a once in a lifetime of a universe combination of events?
If the above is the question, then what would be the consequence? What would I do differently one way or the other?
Doesn't each scenario miss the key element - the clarity of the impression . . . not only am I an earthworm, oriole or human being, but also am I drowsy, dull, angry, in love, etc.?
Seems like a red hering to me.

[Cleric K]

I'm trying to understand the dilema here . . .
For example, as I sit here and look out my window, over the course of a few minutes, there are a large number of impressions, configuration of birds, plants, joggers, visual and auditory, etc.
Is the question: Did each of these impressions already exist already in some Absolute State and I simply 'found them in a libray', or, were these impressions a fresh one-of-kind, a once in a lifetime of a universe combination of events?
If the above is the question, then what would be the consequence? What would I do differently one way or the other?
Doesn't each scenario miss the key element - the clarity of the impression . . . not only am I an earthworm, oriole or human being, but also am I drowsy, dull, angry, in love, etc.?
Seems like a red hering to me.

Lorenzo, if the question is asked in the same abstract manner in which we ask if there's free will or not (as seen from some perspective outside reality), then yes, this absolutely is a waste of time. It's just wooden philosophy for academics to make a living. But over and over again we try to lead these ideas to their real implications. Then comes Eugene and begins to mud the water for everyone with things that should have been settled long ago. He keeps returning with the Platonism argument, although it has been worked out at length (for example here). Then he says that if all potential exists as simultaneous infinity this makes existence meaningless because nothing new is ever created. This is also based on faulty logic and has been addressed, for example here. And so it is for everything else. Eugene certainly has the capacity to integrate all these ideas in their living reality, in fact I've always been on the opinion that he would be one of the first to succeed in that, yet for other reasons he has inner revulsion for these inner experiences. And that's fine. Everyone's karma is different, everyone has different dreams and fears but it's simply disrespectful to ignore all the efforts of Ashvin and me to elucidate these difficult topics from as many angles as possible and then simply write a list of the same old objections as if this is the first time these questions are being pondered.

In hindsight, we have many examples when we look at history and see how people of the past have held erroneous or simply incomplete views on things. We look back upon them and say "They thought about reality thus and thus." Yet we don't seem to learn from the past and today we still live with the conviction that our feeling for reality most certainly is quite complete. Maybe we miss few data points here and there but in general we know what the world is and what we are. The implicit feeling for linear time is one of these unquestioned world conceptions. We live entirely in Newtonian consciousness (no matter if we are materialists or spiritualists) and still imagine the world progressing from frame to frame in a completely linear sequence where each frame is the billiard ball which fully determines the dynamics of the next frame, the next billiard ball.

Let's consider your own example.

For example, as I sit here and look out my window, over the course of a few minutes, there are a large number of impressions, configuration of birds, plants, joggers, visual and auditory, etc.
Is the question: Did each of these impressions already exist already in some Absolute State and I simply 'found them in a libray', or, were these impressions a fresh one-of-kind, a once in a lifetime of a universe combination of events?

When things are put in this way it really doesn't matter how we answer that question, just as I explained to Eugene in the post with the Gödel numbering of songs. Rather, the question should be whether there's hidden temporal order of the unfolding stream of being or every moment is a billiard ball which determines the following (in other words, the future is fully determined by the past progression).

Most people here, especially those that take with some seriousness Eastern teachings, would also admit some belief in Karma (or simply destiny). Yet reasoning stops there. For example, if we ask Eugene, he'll probably admit that there's some mechanism of Karma, yet if we ask him what it is, he'll probably answer "I have no idea, I'll see on the other side". Really - people simply don't want to think things through. If there's some truth to things like karma and destiny then this necessarily means that there's some form of entanglement not only horizontally across space (in a slice of spacetime) but also vertically through time. In some sense there should be some structure to the temporal depth of reality, there should be some attractors that affect the unfoldment of our linear progression of states. This is obvious. We can't speak of destiny in a Newtonian universe. How could we explain, for example, meaningful encounter of two souls that has been ordained according to their karma? There's no basis for this in material or spiritual universe governed by absolute linear clock where every next state builds upon entirely on the accumulation of past states. Clearly, the world-lines of each soul must constrain the palette of their activity in such a way that it funnels towards a point where they cross.

Then if we admit the possibility that there might be temporal curvature, which attracts our destiny towards certain states, the next logical question would be to ask what is the relation of our consciousness towards this time-structure of reality (or more appropriately - could it be that our consciousness itself is an aperture of that structure). If we say that it's impossible to know anything about the temporal depth of reality, then we declare certain kind of dualism. We either declare this to be impossible in principle or only for the time being on Earth (the veil theory).

Please stop for a moment and consider what's at stake here. Everything that is being discussed here only tries to elucidate the ways through which consciousness evolves and how this evolution is really the growing into the temporal structure of reality. It's not about whether things are preexisting or created on the fly.

Consider the jogger on the road. To add to what you say "Doesn't each scenario miss the key element - the clarity of the impression . . . not only am I an earthworm, oriole or human being, but also am I drowsy, dull, angry, in love, etc.?" we can say: Do we miss something if we simply observe the unfoldment of events frame by frame? For example, if I watch a movie and enter meditative state and behold every frame for what it experientially is in the moment, in tranquil thoughtless mindfulness, do I miss something? Does the meaning of the hierarchical storyline add to the experience or diminishes it? Does a frame become less impressive if I behold it together with its temporal thickness of meaning? When you see the jogger, does the knowledge of the idea in her soul to run from A to B, take away from you experience or actually makes it denser, richer, more connected? If we as idealists consider thoughts and ideas to be legitimate part of reality, doesn't observing only the perceptions in a given moment miss something of the fuller picture of reality which would be there only if we also have the perception of meaning that lives in the jogger's soul about her intended path? When can we say that we have fuller and richer experience of reality - with or without the experience of the jogger's idea which is the attractor of the unfoldment of her temporal states?

So we see that we're dealing here with real and very significant questions. Evolving consciousness through the temporal depth of reality doesn't take away from creativity. This is as clever as saying that knowing that after summer there's winter, takes away from the joy of existence by spoiling the storyline. And I understand that there are indeed people who would find it more exciting to be taken by surprise by winter in flip-flops and bathing suits. Or that it is more exciting to build an airplane randomly rather than by investigating the laws of aerodynamics. These same people would say that it's boring to understand our soul life because that would reveal the consequence of our thoughts, feelings and actions. For them it is more exciting to face a war that no one saw coming because everyone was busy living 'for the frame'.

To keep the talk centered, may everyone state their view on the question of time. Does every moment simply build upon the previous? Or there's some structure/attractor/curvature that spans across time and there could be corresponding modes of consciousness that can resonate with it (which alone can explain something like destiny)? Then anyone can think for themselves if this makes any practical difference for our life here or not.