Eugene I. wrote: βWed Dec 15, 2021 4:38 pm
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..