The Central Topic

[Soul_of_Shu]

Thus bringing this to a close ...



(triple-strength prayer)

Not so fast!

Clearly I still have a lot to learn about effective praying

Anyway, given that some no-comment lurkers apparently find some entertainment value, and hopefully some spiritual value, from following some soul-beings trying to overcome 'self'-induced cognitive disconnect, who am I to preclude it?

[Cleric K]

However, it is only one of the global processes and developmental dimensions in Consciousness and not everything that is going on can be reduced to it. This is the "spiritual science" part of the wholistic life and activity of Consciousness, but not all life is reducible to science and gaining knowledge, there is also esthetical/artistic, creative, agapic (Love-manifesting), there is exploration and actualization of the infinite variety of conscious forms and so on. So, again, it's not a question of "this-or-that" but a question of allowing and embracing of all venues of spiritual development and expansion of Consciousness, both on global and individual levels, including the spiritual science but not limited to it.

Eugene, you're simply projecting a way too narrow intellectual aura on Thinking.

You'll have to agree that all esthetical/artistic, creative, agapic aspects of spiritual activity are in themselves inseparably intertwined with knowledge. Not necessarily intellectual. Even if we don't know how to speak, doing clay modelling with our hands is still a skill. We project our imagination through our hands, we learn from our mistakes, we perfect our fine motor movements - even if we don't have the conceptual knowledge to describe the process as we do now. It is the same with all aspects. Each of them confronts the resistance of the sensory realm. All our spiritual activity practically tries to project our imaginative thinking over perceptions. Even thought we're used to call thinking only the cold analytical arranging of words, when we shape the clay we're doing another form of thinking - we're imagining forms which have certain meaning for us and we try to project them through our hands. There's no need for any of this to be verbal or abstract. Please, try to expand your notion of what Thinking is. When you're experimenting with musical ideas with your guitar, your spiritual activity lives in melody, harmony, rhythm. Your imagination surfs these landscapes and thanks to the motor skills you've developed, you're able to project this musical imagination through your fingers. What is speech? It's the same principle thing. We're living in meaning with our spiritual activity and we project this meaning as sound through the larynx. It might not be words, we may be singing with vowels only, experimenting with our imagination, curving our voice, rising and lowering the pitch, applying vibrato modulations. If we picture how imagination becomes more and more differentiated we can project these into different sounds - words. Each word is an artistic art-form symbolizing meaning. Now consider that you don't project your sound imagination all the way to the larynx. Then you're entirely in your imagination. You can do here all those things - play the guitar, sculpt the clay, sing, speak, move - but without going all the way in the domain of will. Now try to encompass all these activities at the same time. What's common? One thing - they all emanate from the singularity we call "I". Whether you play the guitar, whether you're singing, modelling, speaking, thinking - it all proceeds from the same singularity. It's one unified spiritual activity which takes many forms.

Every form is a science in itself. You need knowledge to play the guitar, you need knowledge how to speak (we learn that as babies). All these forms of activity operate through various constraints. You can't play the guitar in any way you want - there are purely physical constraints. You can't speak any sound you want - the vocal tract places constraints. So all our forms of spiritual activity encounter some resistance and we gradually learn to perfect our activity such that we can realize our imagination even in the face of the constraints.

But there are also constraints of different character. Why do you play the guitar and not drums? Why did you become an engineer and not a doctor. Why did you switch to Buddhism from Christianity? There are so many possibilities, why exactly these choices? Clearly our spiritual activity operates not only within physical constraints (the domain of Will) but also within feeling constraints (sympathies and antipathies), ideal constraints (our understanding of things). So for example you've felt engineering to be more sympathetic than medicine. You can't tell why exactly. But somehow the wave function of your spiritual activity felt more pleasant towards the engineering spectrum rather than medicine. And similarly for every other thing. The whole idea of the Central Topic is to turn attention precisely to these invisible constraints within which our spiritual activity operates. At the level of the intellect we can't really tell why we felt our profession to be more sympathetic. But we certainly can begin to gain insight about much more immediate things within our thinking.

Don't look at thinking as some sterile sector of the total spiritual activity. Think about it as the one unified spiritual activity which continually casts artistic imagination into perceptions. When our imagination moves through intricately differentiated meaning we cast thoughts - artistic symbols of conceptual meaning. This is what you continually try to narrow Thinking into. But it's not at all necessary that once we recognize these intricate differentiations of meaning, we have to abstract them away and enclose ourselves in them (the phantom layer). I agree that this is where science and philosophy of today have become lost but that's their own fault. The fine resolution of meaning that we probe through concepts can help us experience the infinitely intricate ideal shades in everything we do with our spiritual activity. When you play guitar you can enjoy the melody. But the experience reaches a whole new level if we're able to experience also our mood, our breathing, the tapping of the foot, the way our head gently rocks in rhythm, the movements of the fingers, which immediately connect with the feeling of marvel and awe about the structure of the human body and how it makes possible these intricate movements to precipitate from our musical imagination. This is really enrichment, densifying or meaning that we experience. This is not reducing. The whole experience doesn't become more abstract but more profound. The more we have probed the ideal landscape, the more everything becomes more meaningfully interconnected. This interconnectedness is music in itself. It's a whole world of overtones that penetrate with meaning the world or perceptions. The musical relation between these intricate differentiations of meaning we call in the most general sense - logic. Mathematics for example, is artistic flow which perceives the strict relations between these differentiations. But I repeat that it is not in the least the goal to strip away this fine conceptual network and enclose ourselves in it. This is what modern science and philosophy do. They lock themselves in that network and try to correlate the scientific art-forms to other perceptions. The conceptual layer is integral part of the invisible ideal topology. It is as integral as the nervous system is to the whole body. It's only a different level of detail of the whole, different fractal level.

So Thinking shouldn't be seen in the narrow abstract sense. Everything that we do with out spiritual activity is a form of Thinking - the continual precipitation of artistic meaning into perceptions. It's obvious that this artistic stream operates under constraints - not only physical. Today we may not be in the mood for playing, someone at the forum might have said something, the political situation may be bad, we may feel confused and so on. There's a vast array of forces which modulate our artistic metamorphic stream as if externally but we can begin to find these constraints also very close to the tip of our artistic wave front. It's simply that we must gradually translate our outer skills more and more towards that wave front. When we play guitar we recognize our errors and try to correct them. We recognize the constraints - the length of our fingers, the shape of the guitar, etc. - and find creative solutions how to perfect our ability to transduce musical imagination into finger movements. Well, the tip of our thinking is the wave front of our artistic stream. This is the most immediate, the most intimate form that our artistic spiritual activity takes. Everything else can be seen as spiritual activity which descends further through feeling into the will and meets additional constraints on the way. Martin was able to imagine the moonwalk with exquisite artistry. If that imagination was to continue towards the will it's not certain that he would be able to perform the same moves.

At the wave front of our spiritual activity we're continually transducing meaningful imagination into thought-perceptions. The words of our inner voice are the movements of our fingers, the concepts that we think are the chords. All of these operate also within constraints but no longer of sense-perceptible nature. The Central Topic speaks of the need to invert our scientific inquiry in order to grasp not how our imagination encounters outer physical constraints but how the wave front of our artistic thinking flow operates within invisible constraints, how our artistic freedom is shaped by them. We can never perfect our playing skills if we don't observe how our musical imagination clashes with the physical constraints. These clashes are the living feedback which tells us what we need to correct. If we're blind for them we continue to play air guitar and imagine that we're making beautiful music, but the sound comes otherwise. Similarly we can never perfect the flow of our artistic spiritual stream unless we begin to observe how it is constrained 'from the other side' by ideas, prejudices, opinions, feelings, sympathies, antipathies, desires, beliefs, fears. All of these are the form of our guitar, the tension of the strings (are they tuned?), the agility of our fingers. This gives another take of the much despised idea of perfection. When playing guitar we don't say "Oh no, I'm getting too good. I better worsen my skills because music will lose all flavor, it will stagnate in perfection." Instead, perfection means that our musical imagination can freely transduce all the way to the sensory realm. Seen in this way, perfection not only doesn't stagnate our artistic flow but really opens the way for ever more brave levels of musical imagination, which we couldn't even imagine previously. It's the same with spiritual development, except that we don't play only guitar but life as a whole. Our artistic flow of thinking, feeling and willing continually embeds into the perception and memory of the world, beautiful harmonies or hideous noises. We can only perfect this artistry if we realize that we're a singularity which transduces artistic meaning into perceptions. We can move towards this perfection only if we find the common center of all forms of spiritual activity, begin to recognize the constraints and then start transforming them, all according to our high ideal..

[Eugene I.]

Similarly we can never perfect the flow of our artistic spiritual stream unless we begin to observe how it is constrained 'from the other side' by ideas, prejudices, opinions, feelings, sympathies, antipathies, desires, beliefs, fears. All of these are the form of our guitar, the tension of the strings (are they tuned?), the agility of our fingers. This gives another take of the much despised idea of perfection. When playing guitar we don't say "Oh no, I'm getting too good. I better worsen my skills because music will lose all flavor, it will stagnate in perfection." Instead, perfection means that our musical imagination can freely transduce all the way to the sensory realm. Seen in this way, perfection not only doesn't stagnate our artistic flow but really opens the way for ever more brave levels of musical imagination, which we couldn't even imagine previously. It's the same with spiritual development, except that we don't play only guitar but life as a whole. Our artistic flow of thinking, feeling and willing continually embeds into the perception and memory of the world, beautiful harmonies or hideous noises. We can only perfect this artistry if we realize that we're a singularity which transduces artistic meaning into perceptions. We can move towards this perfection only if we find the common center of all forms of spiritual activity, begin to recognize the constraints and then start transforming them, all according to our high ideal..

Good insights, Cleric. Right, Thiniing needs to be taken in the larger context. But to the above I would say: yes and no. IMO it is a combination of the strive for perfection and constraints that catalyzes the creativity, in music and in life in general. And that is why constrained forms (like human form with all its constraints, limited knowledge and the "veil") are so catalyzing for creativity. For example, medieval music was written when very few instruments were available and they were very primitive, very little knowledge about musical theory and musicology was developed. But the very special beauty of the medieval music has never been achieved again at later periods when all that extensive knowledge and musical means became available. Similarly, traditional Japanese art is very constrained in its technical means, forms and themes, but its beauty is unmatched. Of course more knowledge and more technical means and less constraints always open new possibilities, but often something magical and catalyzing is lost. So, paradoxically, often performing under constraints and limits catalyzes the creativity and spiritual development, and going back from complex to simple, from unlimited to constrained opens unique possibilities for spiritual development unachievable in less limited ways of existence. This is one of the reasons why the spiritual beings incarnate into the human form which is so constrained in knowledge and means. It may seem counter-intuitive and counter-productive - why reduce your consciousness into a humanoid-level existing under the "veil" and limit your access to the larger-scale knowledge? Well, this is the reason - to become like a medieval Japanese artist and be creative under severe constraints and with scarce means. If anyone would tell a skilled Japanese artist: "if you would have way more knowledge about how your fingers move and how colors are construed and all the knowledge you would ever need for your art, and if you would use all the color palette instead of just a few colors that you use, you would be able to create pieces of art of a much-higher esthetic value", he would obviously answer: "not at all".

Similarly, it is easy to love something or someone perfect, but the real spiritual development in the dimension of love happens when we are challenged to love something or someone far from perfect. So yes, we love beauty and loving always goes with Thinking, but that does not mean that more knowledge and more perfection of what we love is needed to develop more love.

So, paradoxically, the spiritual development is a non-linear and non-single-dimensional path. More perfection, completness, complexity, knowledge and less limits do not always help with development and at times going back to less of those open some unique developmental paths and opportunities. The fractal of Cosnciousness is fundamentally non-linear, non-deterministic and unpredictable, and that's the beauty of it.

[AshvinP]

But there are also constraints of different character. .

Cleric,

Could we perhaps also say here that the individuality of "Ashvin" is a constraint for the spiritual activity of more expansively-embodied agency of the Cosmos, as it can only come to expression through me at my own level of intellectual cognitive development? There is also the much less imprisoning constraint of "Cleric" for this agency (or another agency), but a constraint nonetheless. Perhaps there is also the constraint of the "Meta-Kastrup forum". There are the constraints of families, nations, and cultures for even more expansive agencies. Here I mean "expansive" in an essentially temporal, rather than spatial, sense. All of these constraints of higher order spiritual agencies should inspire us to become less constraining for them, as they also imbue us with the power to make our own spiritual activity less constrained, i.e. more liberated. The fact that I am not able to project my spiritual activity into beautiful medieval music right now should be motivation for me to overcome this limitation which does not belong to the higher agencies or to Reality itself, but is only my own limitation.

And perhaps we also see here how our own spiritual activity can begin to perceive what is higher than itself by the following the inner threads of logic weaving through the Cosmos (or I am just flat out incorrect ). But we should be careful, because I may begin to rest my intellectual thoughts on these ideas which, while they may be formally correct, are quite disconnected from my immanent thinking experience. They have become more and more abstracted from the sphere of my own spiritual activity at this stage. Perhaps I have moved more from Anthropo-Sophia ("Wisdom of Man") to Theo-Sophia ("Wisdom of God") without the corresponding cognitive development to make such a move. I should not expect to go from playing an electronic keyboard to constructing a medieval-style symphony with instruments in one bound. Which is not to say there is anything wrong in thinking about these things, but only in conflating my thoughts about them for their essential reality.

Note to others: I am genuinely asking this question and do not really know the answers, so please don't take any of the above as spiritual claims I am asserting as truth. I have confidence in the Logos principle which worked through my reasoning activity, inspired by Cleric's post, because otherwise I would not even post the question, but I also know that much more spiritual growth is needed to more precisely and concretely discern the living answers to such a question. This is really my strategy for building up trust in my own spiritual activity, by discovering the inner logic of otherwise external claims I have come across, and hopefully expanding my own Thinking degrees of freedom in the process.

Brilliantly and beautifully articulated post, as usual!

[Ben Iscatus]

Martin was able to imagine the moonwalk with exquisite artistry. If that imagination was to continue towards the will it's not certain that he would be able to perform the same moves.

Beautifully expressed as your post was, it nevertheless shows that you channel your vision through a strictly hierarchical conceptual framework. Within that framework, you have Imagination leading down through Feeling into Will. But why limit yourself to such constraints, why believe in them? When freed from limiting beliefs, we can look for the porosity in our dissociative boundary, exploring psychokinesis, telepathic communication, remote viewing and so on. I'd say Will acts within the Imagination, not merely to activate bodily movement.

[Eugene I.]

PS: Here is another analogy: in science we use telescopes and microscopes in order to acquire unique perspectives into certain structures of micro or macro objects. But tele/micro-scopes work by trading the sharpness of focus with the scope of perspective - the more sharp and detailed vision we get, the more limited the scope of the view needs to be. Similarly, in certain areas of knowledge, such as esthetic, agapic, emotional and other existential dimensions, in order to learn more we need to temporarily limit the scope and perspective of our experience. We can still argue that we still enhance the overall knowledge of Thinking by doing that, and this would be correct, but such enhancement is achieved by temporarily limiting the scope of knowledge in order to be able to focus and experience the universe from some limited but unique perspectives of tele/microscopic beam. In the same way Consciousness puts temporary and imaginary "veils" between multiple subjective perspectives (souls) and immerse them into temporary "veiled" modes of existence in order to acquire the tele/micro-scopic perspectives in order to expand the overall scope of experience and knowledge. Later on the veils will be removed and the acquired knowledge and experience will be integrated in the all-encompassing Knowledge. So: "A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather. A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.", a time to live under veils and a time to remove the veils.

[AshvinP]

Martin was able to imagine the moonwalk with exquisite artistry. If that imagination was to continue towards the will it's not certain that he would be able to perform the same moves.

Beautifully expressed as your post was, it nevertheless shows that you channel your vision through a strictly hierarchical conceptual framework. Within that framework, you have Imagination leading down through Feeling into Will. But why limit yourself to such constraints, why believe in them? When freed from limiting beliefs, we can look for the porosity in our dissociative boundary, exploring psychokinesis, telepathic communication, remote viewing and so on. I'd say Will acts within the Imagination, not merely to activate bodily movement.

Are you saying we can bypass constraints of spiritual activity and compose a beautiful symphony by saying, "I don't believe in this silly anti symphony-composing constraint!"? Can you provide examples of when you have done that and it worked? Come on, Ben...

[Cleric K]

PS: Here is another analogy: in science we use telescopes and microscopes in order to acquire unique perspectives into certain structures of micro or macro objects. But tele/micro-scopes work by trading the sharpness of focus with the scope of perspective - the more sharp and detailed vision we get, the more limited the scope of the view needs to be. Similarly, in certain areas of knowledge, such as esthetic, agapic, emotional and other existential dimensions, in order to learn more we need to temporarily limit the scope and perspective of our experience. We can still argue that we still enhance the overall knowledge of Thinking by doing that, and this would be correct, but such enhancement is achieved by temporarily limiting the scope of knowledge in order to be able to focus and experience the universe from some limited but unique perspectives of tele/microscopic beam. In the same way Consciousness puts temporary and imaginary "veils" between multiple subjective perspectives (souls) and immerse them into temporary "veiled" modes of existence in order to acquire the tele/micro-scopic perspectives in order to expand the overall scope of experience and knowledge. Later on the veils will be removed and the acquired knowledge and experience will be integrated in the all-encompassing Knowledge. So: "A time to scatter stones, and a time to gather. A time to embrace, and a time to be far from embraces.", a time to live under veils and a time to remove the veils.

Eugene, I did write few pages long response but in the end I decided not to post it. I've written few things about the conscious situation after death but I don't think it will be of any help.

I understand your examples, your telescope analogies. Yet they are all meant to justify an idea which, as we know, is in principle unverifiable. It's like pure speculation about the shape of the craters on the far side of the Moon (before the era of space flight).

Anyway. My point is that we live in pathological times when it is believed that it is more probable to 'know the truth' by simply picking a random new age belief from the bucket and ignore the whole spectrum of facts which contradict it, rather than investigate the facts in depth. And how can we investigate the facts when the belief maintains that any approach to the facts will ruin the whole play? Yes, one day people will marvel about the way they created a box, entered in it, wrote on the inside "There's no way out, except through death. And no peeking." and began fantasizing about the exterior of the box in any way that pleases them. When in ordinary life someone tells us "Close your eyes, give me your wallet, your watch, your keys, count to 100 and when you open your eyes you'll see me in front of you", we would call the police right away. But when someone tells us "Close your eyes, believe me everything I say, including that you can't question what I say because you'll ruin the show" then we gladly embrace it. Where's the logic?

Since the above doesn't bother you, which in itself should be the absolute deal breaker for anyone with serious interest in reality, then I guess all other 'lesser' contradictions will be completely negligible for you.

One thing which simply doesn't make sense is the whole talk about evolution, gaining experience, gaining knowledge, etc. These things are simply patched over the veil philosophy but can't really find their place there. You say that souls incarnate in limited conditions in order to learn and evolve. But evolve in what direction? What's the point? Where does this all development lead? Furthermore the very voluntary veil in itself makes any idea about learning quite senseless. One can speak about unique kinds of experiences but to gain knowledge? Knowledge about what? In the veil philosophy this knowledge is really nothing more but the ability to say "Yes, I was there, I experienced it". But none of this really leads to actual evolution of consciousness. Accumulation of candies from the candy shop - yes - but not something which rises us on a new level of existence. When we return to the other side we're quite the same, only with a little more stories to tell. In other words it is imagined that in the disincarnate state we possess all school grades under our belt but we say "I'll now put all grades from second upwards behind a veil and accumulate some unique candies that are only interesting if I have no more than first grade understandings.

And I can give many more questions that can never find logical answers within the veil philosophy. This is the same situation materialism finds itself into but raised on a higher level. Materialism struggles to fit the contradictions but doesn't address the fundamental premises which produce the contradictions in the first place. It's the same with any religiosity which postulates and justifies the veil (a temporary Kantian divide). All the hard problems are ignored or it's expected that they'll be solved at some future time but it never occurs to them to check their dogma.

[Eugene I.]

My point is that we live in pathological times when it is believed that it is more probable to 'know the truth' by simply picking a random new age belief from the bucket and ignore the whole spectrum of facts which contradict it, rather than investigate the facts in depth.

It's actually the other way around. There are no facts supporting Steiner's views other than Steiner's own claims of his clairvoyant knowledge (and perhaps a few of his followers sharing the same beliefs) which is highly unreliable IMO. On the other hand, there is a huge amount of NDE accounts, regression therapy and reincarnation studies all of them confirming the reason and purpose for the existence of the veil and for souls incarnations into humans. My views are based on these accounts, for me they are facts and require in-depth investigation. You claim that all those accounts are unreliable because they are all distortions based on personal interpretations, and the Steiner's view is the only one based on true facts. So, we have one account of Steiner's occult clairvoyance (and perhaps a few of his followers sharing the same beliefs) vs many thousands of all those NDE, regression therapy and reincarnation studies accounts most of them quite consistent about their reports on what they learned about the incarnation and "veil" and the overall path of the souls spiritual development.

To me the "veil" view makes perfect sense and I don't see any "hard problems" there. On the other hand, I do see explanatory gaps and problems with the Steinerian view. If the "veil" is such a problem and all is needed to solve all humanity's problems is to dissolve the veil, then why does it still exist and was put in place, why the higher-order beings could not just help us and remove it if all the structures controlling the world that we perceive is under their control? And why the souls even choose to incarnate into humans knowing that their existence will be restricted and veiled? It makes no sense to me.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

Could we perhaps also say here that the individuality of "Ashvin" is a constraint for the spiritual activity of more expansively-embodied agency of the Cosmos, as it can only come to expression through me at my own level of intellectual cognitive development? There is also the much less imprisoning constraint of "Cleric" for this agency (or another agency), but a constraint nonetheless. Perhaps there is also the constraint of the "Meta-Kastrup forum". There are the constraints of families, nations, and cultures for even more expansive agencies. Here I mean "expansive" in an essentially temporal, rather than spatial, sense. All of these constraints of higher order spiritual agencies should inspire us to become less constraining for them, as they also imbue us with the power to make our own spiritual activity less constrained, i.e. more liberated. The fact that I am not able to project my spiritual activity into beautiful medieval music right now should be motivation for me to overcome this limitation which does not belong to the higher agencies or to Reality itself, but is only my own limitation.

And perhaps we also see here how our own spiritual activity can begin to perceive what is higher than itself by the following the inner threads of logic weaving through the Cosmos (or I am just flat out incorrect ). But we should be careful, because I may begin to rest my intellectual thoughts on these ideas which, while they may be formally correct, are quite disconnected from my immanent thinking experience. They have become more and more abstracted from the sphere of my own spiritual activity at this stage. Perhaps I have moved more from Anthropo-Sophia ("Wisdom of Man") to Theo-Sophia ("Wisdom of God") without the corresponding cognitive development to make such a move. I should not expect to go from playing an electronic keyboard to constructing a medieval-style symphony with instruments in one bound. Which is not to say there is anything wrong in thinking about these things, but only in conflating my thoughts about them for their essential reality.

Yes, everything is pretty much on the mark. But as you say, trying to grasp things in completely intellectual way can become quite brain wracking. The question of 'beings' is especially challenging because we can hardly avoid our sensory habits to think of beings as spatially localized loci of spiritual activity. Several people can look at the same sensory object and in certain sense their gazes overlap. Similarly our thoughts, feelings, perceptions are like an elemental spiritual world which is being gazed at by many different beings, just like we're one of the gazing perspectives. We see only that which belongs to the vicinity of our body but other beings see everything that belongs to the conscious phenomena characteristic for certain nation, for example. Probably the greatest hindrance to these things is the idea of private property (much connected with your recent quote from Leviticus). Our inner world is shared property because there's one world. It's just that people today imagine that world to be on the opaque side of their bubble. The world content is a collective painting. Even a single thought of ours is not entirely ours. It's true that we feel fully responsible for the paintbrush stroke but we're not responsible for the brush, the paint, the canvas. We're simply doing our part of the painting. The great painters of the past used to place the main strokes but allowed the apprentices to fill some of the details. We're not consciously responsible for our body, its life, our sympathies and antipathies. These are the constraint within which we paint our part. What are we painting? Someone recently mentioned Asimov's Last Question. It is of course clothed into completely mechanical and quite distorted concepts but there's still twilight of deep Intuition in it. We're painting the answer to the question what the world is. It's not a question that we can answer with the intellect. It's not an answer that after millions of years will come out as 42*. It's an answer by demonstration. We reach the answer when we can create the world out of ourselves. This is what evolution will answer. And in the process of demonstrating the answer we create the seed points for countless other paths that will awaken from the dark sleep, stumble upon that question and set out on their own journey that will reach the answer in unique ways.