The Central Topic

[Soul_of_Shu]

Anyway, in the spirit of thanks prevailing herein recently, I'm still thankful to the doubters for the constant reminder of what the Perennial is up against in this current transitory, foundering paradigm that is hanging on for dear life. And speaking of hanging on, I do still wonder what keeps the doubters hanging in here, as surely there is some allure, some inkling of meaningful insight appearing as if veiled by some diaphanous word-forms, oh-so-near, yet just out of reach beyond abstraction, if only one could parse that undertow of meaning tugging at one's wandering soul ... I trust that too will eventually prevail.

[Eugene I.]

The problem is: there is a bunch of these fish hanging around. Which one do we bite? Or none? And if we do want to bite, how do we know which one is true and which is fake? And even if one decides to stay away from biting any fish how do they know they are actually not biting any?

[Soul_of_Shu]

The problem is: there is a bunch of these fish hanging around. Which one do we bite? Or none? And if we do want to bite, how do we know which one is true and which is fake? And even if one decides to stay away from biting any fish how do they know they are actually not biting any?

Ah well, as per my previous post, be thankful for the fish, and the simulacrum fishing lures that teach us about what is not a fish

[Steve Petermann]

The problem is: there is a bunch of these fish hanging around. Which one do we bite? Or none? And if we do want to bite, how do we know which one is true and which is fake? And even if one decides to stay away from biting any fish how do they know they are actually not biting any?

Here's my take on this. I think dissatisfaction plays a key role. Our own personal worldview has an existential impact (what we care about deeply). At some points, there may be a relative satisfaction with a particular worldview but often that is short-lived. Our lives are not static. Events happen. The world around us changes or we experience something that challenges that worldview. That satisfaction gets truncated to some extent. This can result in a nagging sense that something is wrong with our worldview picture or landscape. This should be obvious as we reflect on our personal evolution from childhood to adulthood to the waning years of life. Each of these stages produces its own particular dissatisfactions. Since dissatisfactions are motivational, the question is, what to do about it?

One option is repression. If a dissatisfaction is uncomfortable, why not just repress it? This is most likely unconscious but does it really work? I think from psychology we know that it may or may not work. But even if it does seem to work at some level, often it comes back to bite us in some other way.

Another option is to honestly confront what is bothering us and try to work through it — try to discover a worldview that to some extent reduces the dissatisfaction. This is that way of courage in spite of the pain. The hope may be to just diminish the pain, or it may be a sense that there is something profoundly meaningful to be had in this process. If this is the option chosen then the question is, how to proceed?

Here I think it is important to recognize diversity. We each have our own particular personality type and history. These all shape how we try to resolve dissatisfactions. For some, there is a strong structural inclination where things like propositions, empirical findings, coherence, logic, consistency, etc. are paramount. For others, not so much. For them, it may be a more intuitive sense, as Polanyi said "we can know more than we can say". So be it. As life travelers, it's not "one size fits all". Each of us will have our own criteria (structured, unstructured, or a mixture) that we apply to the situation. What we "bite" and how we go about it is a personal free choice.

Now, a key question is "why the dissatisfaction" in the first place? As a theistic divine idealist, I think it is because deep down humans and other creatures have an innate sense that the dissatisfaction results from a dissonance with their own transcendent divine depth. That depth says our orientation towards life and how we live is not in tune with the best way — the way that promotes instantiating the good, meaningful, and beautiful in each moment. Also, there may be a sense that it's not just our dissatisfaction at stake but a communal stake as well. After all, no one lives in isolation.

Here's another thing I think is important to consider. Augustine said, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You". I would modify this to say that there is never a complete rest. This comes back to dissatisfaction. Would we really be satisfied with complete rest? Of course not. We thrive on challenges. It creates a vitality we cherish. As evolution has shown, there is a constant drive towards "the more". Each step in spiritual evolution offers new challenges (new dissatisfactions) that drive towards being more fruitful for the good and more profound. The Divine is infinite with possibilities for diversity and creativity. Each situation offers the prospect of greater heights, not some endpoint but something new where meaning, beauty, and the good can take shape in remarkable ways.

[AshvinP]

Here I think it is important to recognize diversity. We each have our own particular personality type and history. These all shape how we try to resolve dissatisfactions. For some, there is a strong structural inclination where things like propositions, empirical findings, coherence, logic, consistency, etc. are paramount. For others, not so much. For them, it may be a more intuitive sense, as Polanyi said "we can know more than we can say". So be it. As life travelers, it's not "one size fits all". Each of us will have our own criteria (structured, unstructured, or a mixture) that we apply to the situation. What we "bite" and how we go about it is a personal free choice.

Steve,

We don't have "our own" personality type. The fact that there are personality types - extroversion-introversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, etc. - which can capture so many particular manifestations of the types, shows how the psyche is objectively structured and can be investigated. Jung said, "people don't have ideas, ideas have people". The same could be said of personality types, which are essentially ideal constellations of transpersonal qualities.

Now, a key question is "why the dissatisfaction" in the first place? As a theistic divine idealist, I think it is because deep down humans and other creatures have an innate sense that the dissatisfaction results from a dissonance with their own transcendent divine depth. That depth says our orientation towards life and how we live is not in tune with the best way — the way that promotes instantiating the good, meaningful, and beautiful in each moment. Also, there may be a sense that it's not just our dissatisfaction at stake but a communal stake as well. After all, no one lives in isolation.

Here's another thing I think is important to consider. Augustine said, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You". I would modify this to say that there is never a complete rest. This comes back to dissatisfaction. Would we really be satisfied with complete rest? Of course not. We thrive on challenges. It creates a vitality we cherish. As evolution has shown, there is a constant drive towards "the more". Each step in spiritual evolution offers new challenges (new dissatisfactions) that drive towards being more fruitful for the good and more profound. The Divine is infinite with possibilities for diversity and creativity. Each situation offers the prospect of greater heights, not some endpoint but something new where meaning, beauty, and the good can take shape in remarkable ways.

My question is, if someone comes to you and expresses how alienated, isolated, fragmented, etc. they feel from being 'cut-off' from and out of tune with the "transcendent divine depth", what is your concrete advice for them to reestablish this spiritual connection? Would you just say, "the Divine is infinite with possibilities for diversity and creativity", and expect that to be a satisfying remedy to this profound spiritual alienation of the person who is genuinely seeking Divine rest? When we keep these things so vague, imprecise, and abstract, they become practically worthless. And, as Cleric has explained several times here and elsewhere, what you are calling "rest" is just your anthropomorphic projection onto Divine perfection. It is you assuming we approach the "rest" as atomized ego and, when we reach it, all the fun stuff stops. That is not the same sort of "rest" we find in various parts of scipture or the early Church fathers, and certainly not what we find in esoteric Western spiritual tradition and its understanding of theosis.

[Steve Petermann]

My question is, if someone comes to you and expresses how alienated, isolated, fragmented, etc. they feel from being 'cut-off' from and out of tune with the "transcendent divine depth", what is your concrete advice for them to reestablish this spiritual connection? Would you just say, "the Divine is infinite with possibilities for diversity and creativity", and expect that to be a satisfying remedy to this profound spiritual alienation of the person who is genuinely seeking Divine rest? When we keep these things so vague, imprecise, and abstract, they become practically worthless.

As I said, there is no "one size fits all". If someone asked me for advice I wouldn't have a strict definitive answer for them. Paul Tillich said, "Anything can be transparent to the divine". Where I had some similarities with them, I could share ways I try to tap into that transcendent divine depth but they probably already know the avenues where they have experienced that depth. In a dialog, there might be some specifics but in general, the advice might be just "seek and ye shall find", or "be open to it" or "face life's challenges head-on" or "dialog with others about your journey". Depending on who they are it might be through art, music, literature, athletics, philosophy, theology, religion, science, dance, relationships, nature, meditation, prayer, communal activities, solitude, and on and on. The opportunities are endless.

[AshvinP]

My question is, if someone comes to you and expresses how alienated, isolated, fragmented, etc. they feel from being 'cut-off' from and out of tune with the "transcendent divine depth", what is your concrete advice for them to reestablish this spiritual connection? Would you just say, "the Divine is infinite with possibilities for diversity and creativity", and expect that to be a satisfying remedy to this profound spiritual alienation of the person who is genuinely seeking Divine rest? When we keep these things so vague, imprecise, and abstract, they become practically worthless.

As I said, there is no "one size fits all". If someone asked me for advice I wouldn't have a strict definitive answer for them. Paul Tillich said, "Anything can be transparent to the divine". Where I had some similarities with them, I could share ways I try to tap into that transcendent divine depth but they probably already know the avenues where they have experienced that depth. In a dialog, there might be some specifics but in general, the advice might be just "seek and ye shall find", or "be open to it" or "face life's challenges head-on" or "dialog with others about your journey". Depending on who they are it might be through art, music, literature, athletics, philosophy, theology, religion, science, dance, relationships, nature, meditation, prayer, communal activities, solitude, and on and on. The opportunities are endless.

That's the impression I got from your post and it is the common approach of the modern age. In my law practice, that is also 'common wisdom' - no generalized legal advice can be given to people because they all have their unique personal situation. That is why it is assumed machines cannot simply replace people in these sorts of fields. Of course, there is truth in that. But it is the most surface-level layer of truth. That is because, during the normal course of our daily thinking and counseling, we are not also consciously observing and thinking through the higher-order patterns of meaning which are constellated between the particular manifestations. For the most part, that is thought to be irrelevant to the practice of law (or priesthood), because we move from one case to another and we feel like we are starting afresh with each new individual. BUT, subconsciously, assuming our practice improves over time, we are actually absorbing these deeper transpersonal layers of meaning and they are informing how we confront each new particular manifestation. We are integrating our knowledge. Our thinking is moving vertically instead of only horizontally. But we reach a max capacity as long as this vertical movement is not deepened by making it conscious - by consciously observing our own thinking. This is what TCT is pointing to.

That is why I mentioned the thing about personality types. We need to be really honest with ourselves here. It is default thinking to feel, "each person has their own personality type and history". We do not normally feel, "each personality type has its own group of people". But that is what the guy who basically discovered the idea of "personality types" (Jung) concluded. You see, these concepts we bandy about can become practically anything we want them to be if we are not also carefully reasoning through their deeper meanings. You want the concept of "personality type" to be a justification for "there is no objectively valid approach for most people", so that is exactly what it becomes. Again, this is not personal to you but common to nearly all people in our time, including myself if I am not paying attention to my own thinking process when it confronts the percepts and concepts of the world. We need to confront these tendencies within ourselves honestly and by way of Thinking. Our thinking flows within many 'guides' and 'constraints', as Cleric has illustrated several times on this thread alone. I am observing that the people who aren't following his logic are the same people who approach them with a preconceived outlook on spirituality. That is especially true if the outlook has been formed after much time and effort, which clearly you have put into writing your blog articles.

We are not telling you or anyone else to abandon everything you know or have written, or to start over from scratch in terms of all that you have learned. That is the beautfy of a truly consistent idealism monism - all reasoned worldviews find their place and utility in our spiritual evolutionary growth. But that is only IF we come to perceive them as vastly incomplete moments of an organic Unity. These conceptual systems are all symbols pointing to something much higher than themselves. And we need to remember the purpose of a symbol is not to point back at itself via an 'impenetrable veil'. When we erect that veil, we automatically convert all the rich symbols into mere pictures; we have condemned them to be mere isolated idols. These idols prevent us from reaching any shared understanding with others in the world. It keeps "art, music, literature, athletics, philosophy, theology, religion, science, dance, relationships, nature, meditation, prayer, communal activities, solitude, and on and on" fragmented from each other, even though we can penetrate to their deeper and shared layer of meaning without mystically obscuring their content. All of our fears of "rest" (static homogenization) in this regard are our own limitations which arise from the artificial hard veil we first subconsciously constructed and refuse to tear down.

[Cleric K]

Hey no, you are talking about a different "veil" - the veil of dualistic thinking. I never questioned that, in fact always supported, and breaking through that veil has been the focus of all nondual practices and traditions. Steinerians actually disregard this kind of nondualistic perception and talk about breaking through a different veil - the veil that conceals from us the "guts" of the hierarchies and structures of noncorporeal realms. In their understanding it's only by breaking into the noncorporeal realms where we can find the unity and dispel duality. It's important not to confuse these, they have little to do with each other. You can exist in noncorporeal form still confused and perceiving the world dualistically, and you can live in human form veiled from the noncorporeal realms and yet perceiving the world non-dualistically.

I'm posting here in order not to clutter Mike's thread.

It is actually one and the same veil, Eugene. The difference is that mysticism stops at what you rightly call nondual perception. It was also my whole point in my response to Mark, where I stressed on the fact that the self-remembrance, experiencing, etc. necessarily need to be in fully receptive state. The veil consists in the inability to have fully conscious cognitive activity in the non-dual state.

I explained the divine misery very clearly yet you still turned everything upside down. But thanks to your remark above I now see that you simply imagine some completely different veil. I don't know why you turn my position into an escapist despising the Earth. Just as you say, I see and love everything that we're able to experience here. One of my most favorite experiences is to gaze at the starry heavens and think "It was worth it to become a speck of dust in order to be able to appreciate in this way the infinite vastness of the Living Cosmos."

What I said was that we must realize the things that we put as painful obstacles for ourselves. You appreciate all the good things on Earth but would you like to keep also the wars, the web of lies of which the present political and corporate world is built, disease and so on? The veil is not to open portal to other dimensions. I don't know, maybe you are imagining it in a such way and that's why you can't grasp what is being talked about. The veil is not a separation membrane between the Earthly matrix and some other floor of existence. Piercing the veil doesn't lead us away from Earth. It only adds meaning to it. We are still in a body, we're having perceptions but everything is imbued with deeper and deeper meaning. It's like everything becomes a meaningful script, where previously were only hieroglyphs. This is not simply intellectual meaning cluttering consciousness but the actual spiritual dynamics which are responsible for phenomena. The first layers of this script that we uncover are the forces within which our thinking flows. These are not some abstract elements on the other side of the veil, which simply 'explain' things, as transistors explain the flashing pixels on the screen. If you imagine things in this way - no, it's not like that. We're not talking about two worlds - Earth and another world where the gory hardware is. There's only one world. When we begin to understand the flow of thinking which we're actively willing, it becomes richer, denser, more meaningful because we become conscious of more and more things. We understand how we have been locked in certain patterns of thought. This is necessary, not in order to escape Earth but in order to become more free and stop serving the forces within which humans blindly flow, and which drive them into conflict and destruction.

The veil is a veil in the same sense as mathematical knowledge is veiled from the non-mathematician. If the veil is lifted one doesn't escape the world but the world content becomes richer, more meaningful. This is the goal also of self-knowledge. It's not about learning irrelevant details about our spiritual transistors but to gain living consciousness of the way we can unfold our spiritual conduct.

Let me put it this:

The veil doesn't lead us in some separate world but unveils the meaningful thickness of the world here and now

This is a gradual process of continual enrichment. Without this process we can't unfold our full potential on Earth. Trying to prevent this process is like learning guitar but avoiding to learn most of the chords because we're worried that if we understand more, playing will become uninteresting. It's actually the opposite. The more we understand, the more interesting and fascinating everything becomes. What is more interesting - a book that we can read or a book that we can't read? It is true that being unable to read is a unique experience in itself but there's no need to seek that experience ourselves - we'll have to pass through it whether we want it or not. We don't need to seek evil as if we're worried that life will become boring without it. This rests on false assumption that we can simply think away evil and thus it is up to us to keep it in place. We can't. In fact, when we start actively pursuing the Good, all evil will stand up to resists us. It is exactly there that we need all the wisdom and love that we can gather. So we don't need to support evil in place. If we start moving towards the Good, evil will rain over us even if we don't want it.

If people today learn more about the way their soul life is guided by invisible forces, the Earth will become even more interesting place, not more boring. Today 90% of man's energies are spent for completely banal things. Yes, that's interesting experience in itself but there's no need to perpetuate it. We can experience the unique but yet meaningless experience of going to work every day at a job we don't even like and finally dying. OK, we got that, it was interesting in a way but why do we need to keep doing the same thing eternally? We've gained more than enough experiences with war, lies, hypocrisy and so on. Does anyone really feel he hasn't got enough of those and wants more? It is here where we must have an ideal, a direction. Unveiling the hidden forces which lead humanity by the noses won't ruin the fun. Instead, it will lead to even greater degrees of freedom. The Earth will become even more rich in meaning and more interesting. We'll discover activities in expanded modes of consciousness which today we simply can't conceive. But we must be awake. As long as we believe that God wants the wars and lies, we're being led by the noses by exactly the beings which feed on pain and conflict. It's their voice which whispers "Relax, it's all good. War is natural, it's what you came to experience. There's nothing to be fixed." God wants us to understand more and more about reality so that we can employ our freedom in the best way possible.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'm posting here in order not to clutter Mike's thread.

Thanks Cleric, for moving the discussion here. I was actually hoping you would elaborate on my point about the 'veil', until I had to address Mike's request, and I appreciate the edifying response, that is as usual far more percipient than any elaboration I could articulate.

[Eugene I.]

It is actually one and the same veil, Eugene. The difference is that mysticism stops at what you rightly call nondual perception. It was also my whole point in my response to Mark, where I stressed on the fact that the self-remembrance, experiencing, etc. necessarily need to be in fully receptive state. The veil consists in the inability to have fully conscious cognitive activity in the non-dual state.

That's not quite true. In the advanced stages of non-dual practices (Dzogchen in Buddhism or Sahaja Samadhi in Advaita) the non-dual state is active state with fully meta-conscious cognitive activity, including willing and thinking. But in the initial stages of practice the emphasis is on the passive state of just observation of the arising phenomena. The practice is gradually staged to allow to master it step by step. What you are referring to is only the initial passive stages. But even at the initial stages the conscious cognition of thinking activity is encouraged. For example, the Vipassana meditation involves the insight into the originations of thoughts and activity of thinking and willing, basically of everything that is going on in consciousness, in order to achieve the insight into their inter-connectedness and dependent origination and the activity of consciousness causing them to arise. That's a 2500 yrs old practice.

Anyway, there is a variety of veils, that's why it gets confusing. Yes, there are veils that you are describing in the realms of meanings that we could know but remain ignorant to, and I fully agree that when we humans develop our cognition we expand into these realms of meanings previously unknown to us. However, in the human form there are still certain limits to such expansion set by the veils that veil certain realms of reality from us, specifically the noncorporeal realms. I already suggested why there were put in place for a reason and we in general can not and are not supposed to break them, even though there are exceptions to that (there are indeed some reports of clairvoyance, plus all those NDE accounts etc). Again, one of the reasons for that is that in order to be able to focus and develop in certain dimensions, we need to limit ourselves in some other dimensions, it is a "microscope" effect. We humans are here in the "microscope" limited-focused mode where we can accomplish things that are not possible to accomplish without such focus in the noncorporeal forms. We need to master how to use such "microscope" mode to get the best of it instead of trying to break it. But by all means we can and we should expand our cognition into dimensions that are available to us in our human form, and that includes all the realms of meanings accessible to us.