Anthony,Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 02, 2022 2:28 pmCleric,Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Dec 08, 2021 10:20 pm Almost all my posts here have always been focused on one single topic. Those who are able to grasp these things will see that I've been talking about the same thing from many different angles. I don't do that because I pretend to be the first to know of such things but because I realize the urgency of the times and how time slips through our fingers while we serve centuries old mental habits. Let me make one more attempt to point attention to that central theme.
I've been reading carefully some of the dialog associated with this thread and a few more pieces have come together for me. I certainly grok TCT, I might even be able to use my own words and concepts to articulate it.
My "question of the day" pertains to the truths that can be extracted from the perceptions in front of the veil, without development of the depth thinking. I think we agree that our science is very successful and taking our fragments of perception and establishing horizontal relationships and laws that appear to govern these. But what about discerning spiritual truths or evaluating the various religious claims, for example the propositions, "Jesus died for our sins", "Jesus rose bodily from the dead" or "there is an un-caused first mover"?
This is the domain of the religious apologist and they operate in the domain of the horizontal. The inferences they make are convincing to some and belief results in changes to willful actions. But being devoid of the vertical element, are such arguments of little weight for the esoterist? How do you engage with such claims?
If I may offer a brief comparison - consider the 'proposition', "Beethoven's symphonies are the most beautiful musical compositions conceived by man so far". Now we are in the realm of aesthetic meaning, but it's clear that this claim cannot be investigated by horizontal intellectual thinking. "Jesus died for our sins" is in the realm of moral meaning, which is even further removed from intellectual thinking. They are so far removed that the propositions are practically meaningless. So I would answer yes, without the vertical element they have no practical relevance for our spiritual inquiries through deepened thinking.
We can also start to perceive with our reason why aesthetic and moral meaning are also woven into all that we normally consider amenable to horizontal thinking, like basic scientific observations. The 'laws' of secular science are completely stripped of this meaning, and without reintroducing that meaning through our own vertical thinking, we really know nothing about what deeper sources of phenomenal existence they are pointing to. We are then only studying our own abstractions and their mechanical movements within the 'perceptual interface', like studying movement of quantitative shapes of images on a mirror to try and understand the agentic source of inner experience which gives rise to the mirror images.
Genuine science is based on first-person observation, without added abstract assumptions, and we only observe meaning, of no different kind than the meaning we observe in art, books, movies, or anything in human culture that speaks to us of great aesthetic and moral purpose. Anyone can test this out by looking around the room, inhabiting their own 1st-person perspective, and noticing how they are only conscious of some meaning of all that is perceived. The perceptual structures by themselves are vague, their precise quantitative measurements are not known, and for all things there are no delimiting boundaries after a bit of reflection. For ex. where does the light by which you perceive all the things begin and end?
All perceptions are embedded within a context of other perceptions in this same way - we cannot even imagine them as isolated. We cannot imagine the color 'blue' without a context for its appearance. This context is what we call "meaning" and it is the only thing science studies because it is only meaning that can be perceived. This is only forgotten when we fantasize a 3rd-person perspective which doesn't exist, a 'view from nowhere', and then imagine there are isolated perceptions which can be matched up with one another in propositional form. All such propositions are practically meaningless because they imply a perspective which doesn't exist in reality.
It helps to remember the meaning of "theory" in scientific theory. When we perceive meaning in the aims and purposes of human culture, including religion, we are also theorizing like we are in science. All such theorizing, if aimed to perceive something of essence behind the propositional forms (as opposed to aimed merely at applied technological purposes in some limited domain of experience), or to apply science towards technological aims with Wisdom, which necessarily entails moral meaning, must eventually employ vertical thinking to redeem those rigid forms into more poetic flows. It is then about consciously perceiving more and more meaningful activity underlying the forms, building confidence that a form like "Jesus died for our sins" points our vision towards higher order conscious activity of deep significance, rather than trying to prove some rigid propositional form is "true" at any given time (which is impossible).
https://theoriapress.substack.com/p/the ... cebook&s=r
Max Leyf wrote:Theoria (from the Greek θεωρία, thea “a view, a sight” + horan “to see”) is the term I have settled on to designate the energy and experience of vision. The discovery of a conceptual, intelligible, or noetic essence that is already present in everything perceptual is an entry point into theoria. It’s connection to the familiar English word “theory” will be apparent and for this reason, I present a brief inquiry into the term below.
A theory is not only intended to explain what can be readily observed. Instead, the function of theory is more elementary than this. To wit, a theory is intended to disclose specific phenomena, patterns, and relations that may otherwise escape notice. Put another way, the function of a theory is to reveal the logic and lawfulness in what would appear mere happenstance to the untutored eye. Indeed, therefore, it is only in light of the proper theory that anything can be perceived, to begin with, and subsequently explained. Hence, it should be clear that a theory must be more than an explanation of what can be readily observed since the theory was also present as a necessary condition for observation as such. Since the meaning of the term “theory” has contracted over the years (especially since the Scientific Revolution), it will be necessary to recover an older, broader understanding of the term.