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Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 1:16 pm
by Eugene I.
Cleric K wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 10:16 am This is at the core of the issue - the individual soul life is seen as atomic element confronting a Natural/Heavenly world.
Cleric, I think you still grossly misunderstand what I'm saying. I can give a simple analogy: an orchestra where there is a musical score - the global constraints, structures and attractors, there is a conductor - a higher-order being that keeps the global flow going and makes sure every performer is in sync with the music, yet the actual music is performed by all individual players, and their creative contribution is crucial - it is exactly their individual creativity and individual sense of music that creates the actual performance and experience of music. Surely, musicians are not prefect, they screw up here and there, some of them play their own music disregarding and confronting the orchestra, but by keeping practicing and learning how to perform in consort they get better and better, improve their musicality and make the whole performance better over time. It's a co-creation of discarnate and incarnate worlds, co-creation of all beings on all levels of hierarchy. May be even a better analogy is jazz band performance where all musicians follow the common harmonic sequence but each is allowed to improvise and contribute to composing the actual music.

Or going to Mozart analogy, we can assume that he heard some inspirational harmonies from higher spheres, but it was his genius and his sense of music that realized those harmonies and enriched them with his own musical inventions and live feelings. So, again, he was not just a zombie channeler of the all-finished music that he heard from higher spheres, but it was an act of co-creation.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 1:31 pm
by Cleric K
Eugene I. wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 1:16 pm Cleric, I think you still grossly misunderstand what I'm saying. I can give a simple analogy: an orchestra where there is a musical score - the global constraints, structures and attractors, there is a conductor - a higher-order being that keeps the global flow going and makes sure every performer is in sync with the music, yet the actual music is performed by all individual players, and their creative contribution is crucial - it is exactly their individual creativity and individual sense of music that creates the actual performance and experience of music. Surely, musicians are not prefect, they screw up here and there, some of them play their own music disregarding and confronting the orchestra, but by keeping practicing and learning how to perform in consort they get better and better, improve their musicality and make the whole performance better over time. It's a co-creation of discarnate and incarnate worlds, co-creation of all beings on all levels of hierarchy. May be even a better analogy is jazz band performance where all musicians follow the common harmonic sequence but each is allowed to improvise and contribute to composing the actual music.

Or going to Mozart analogy, we can assume that he heard some inspirational harmonies from higher spheres, but it was his genius and his sense of music that realized those harmonies and enriched them with his own musical inventions and live feelings. So, again, he was not just a zombie channeler of the all-finished music that he heard from higher spheres, but it was an act of co-creation.
That's all fine! The question is how do you envision your relations with the conducting beings. Imagine that they all disappear in a snap. We put aside the fact that very soon there will be cacophony all over. Let's focus on the almost instantaneous moment after their disappearance. Do you imagine this will have any impact on the way your consciousness works, on the way you experience your thoughts, feelings, will? On the structure of Nature and the way you perceive her?

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 1:38 pm
by Soul_of_Shu
Eugene I. wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 1:16 pm ... I can give a simple analogy: an orchestra where there is a musical score - the global constraints, structures and attractors, there is a conductor - a higher-order being that keeps the global flow going and makes sure every performer is in sync with the music, yet the actual music is performed by all individual players, and their creative contribution is crucial - it is exactly their individual creativity and individual sense of music that creates the actual performance and experience of music. Surely, musicians are not prefect, they screw up here and there, some of them play their own music disregarding and confronting the orchestra, but by keeping practicing and learning how to perform in consort they get better and better, improve their musicality and make the whole performance better over time. It's a co-creation of discarnate and incarnate worlds, co-creation of all beings on all levels of hierarchy. May be even a better analogy is jazz band performance where all musicians follow the common harmonic sequence but each is allowed to improvise and contribute to composing the actual music.

Or going to Mozart analogy, we can assume that he heard some inspirational harmonies from higher spheres, but it was his genius and his sense of music that realized those harmonies and enriched them with his own musical inventions and live feelings. So, again, he was not just a zombie channeler of the all-finished music that he heard from higher spheres, but it was an act of co-creation.
I can resonate with much of this. Just to be clear, while I feel that two poets could encounter the same Poetry, so to speak, their unique talents, vocabularies, sensibilities, muses, etc, would result in two novel takes on that Poetry, and thus two distinctive poems.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 1:52 pm
by AshvinP
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 7:28 am
AshvinP wrote: Mon May 16, 2022 10:53 pm Does this make sense? Not whether you agree with the existence or description of IC above, but does it make sense what I mean when I refer to it? 
I'm not sure what you mean above. So I'm curious how it relates to, for example, the writing of the best poetry. In this case, it certainly doesn't happen when it is the 'mini-me' thinking it through—that being actually a hindrance producing only the poorest sort—but rather it is more a serendipitous encounter with a greater order Imaginative Thinking that is the purview of one's Psyche at large, with Its human expression, pen in hand, being the vehicle and vocabulary through which the Poetry is chanelled/translated into wordform, such that others might share in it. This too is one's understanding of how Mozart encountered the music-of-the-spheres Symphonies that awaited the rare talent, facility and dexterity required to play them in corporeal form; and likewise Einstein's encounter with the paradigm-shifting Equations. So 'who' actually Thinks these up, and whence do they come, or why? I can only concur that once in that state of Mind one is quite incapable, let's say, of the reasoned pondering of a bank statement, or writing a grocery list. As for deliberately developing that capacity to transcend workaday thinking, so as to access its Divine counterpart at will, I can't claim any mastery or special understanding.

And the bold is really at the heart of TCT - why should we expect to know what it means? Let's take poetry - when you write it, send it to me, and I read it, do I then know what it means to have been the one inspired to write such poetic ideas? Have I attained your inner conscious perspective during the course of Willing, Feeling, and Thinking it? The words I read from your poetry are concepts for me - they are symbols which dimly point me towards some higher existential meaning, the very beginning of a long journey to the Source of that meaning. I cannot expect that simply reading them will give me the Imaginative or Inspired perspective from which they were written. Yet I can only truly understand something of this nature once I have consciously experienced it from within its own inner perspective.

Cleric's last post is really honing in on the perspectival shift needed to make peace with this reality of our lower perspective, and thereby find the inner strength to ascend to something higher. I shouldn't have even tried to describe Imaginative cognition, because that just reinforces the presumption that our game of conceptual descriptions is promoting understanding. What we should seek understanding of is how utterly dependent our concepts, feelings, desires, etc. are on what we are seeking to understand - as Cleric says, how the whole inner landscape becomes something radically different in its absence. But we shouldn't accept this as an intellectual theory from someone else - we should ask ourselves if we really sense its truth from within. Whether we sense the reality as much as we sense how our life experience would change if we woke up with amnesia tomorrow.

He asks:
That's why I keep returning to the question: what is the neutral natural order? If we conceive that beings are only attractors that constrain each other, then if we imagine them away, what is it that we're left with? We're still left with some constraints, right? We're still constrained in space, time, the form of our body, our desires, ideas. What are these?
...
The question is how do you envision your relations with the conducting beings. Imagine that they all disappear in a snap. We put aside the fact that very soon there will be cacophony all over. Let's focus on the almost instantaneous moment after their disappearance. Do you imagine this will have any impact on the way your consciousness works, on the way you experience your thoughts, feelings, will? On the structure of Nature and the way you perceive her?

I think everyone interested in this topic should ask these to themselves and perhaps try to share their answer here, or at least share their process of thinking through the questions and trying to answer them.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 2:05 pm
by Soul_of_Shu
AshvinP wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 1:52 pm I think everyone interested in this topic should ask these to themselves and perhaps try to share their answer here, or at least share their process of thinking through the questions and trying to answer them.
The mini-me will give it some thought, but I'm not promising much ;)

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 2:15 pm
by Eugene I.
So basically what you guys are saying is this: all you are saying is you lower-cognition conceptualizing of your individual ego-minds, you actually have no idea and no direct experience of what higher-cognition is, so all your arguments are irrelevant to what Cleric is saying. Well ok, but this makes the whole discussion pointless.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 3:03 pm
by Cleric K
Soul_of_Shu wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 1:38 pm I can resonate with much of this. Just to be clear, while I feel that two poets could encounter the same Poetry, so to speak, their unique talents, vocabularies, sensibilities, muses, etc, would result in two novel takes on that Poetry, and thus two distinctive poems.
This is really at the core of the matter. People rebel against higher knowledge because they imagine that they can do everything by themselves. They say "I don't need some god to dictate to me how to write my symphony". This is the great misunderstanding - that the divine beings do the same things as we do, except, since they are so benevolent, they only try to be suggestive and not assert themselves too much. It's only natural that most people see that as someone breathing down your neck. They think "Just leave me alone, I understand that you know more than me but I want to bang my head on my own for a while. What's the point if I simply do everything right by repeating your thoughts and intents like a puppet?"

This is how people generally feel about the divine and the reason they can't see it otherwise is that they can't even imagine that these beings might be doing something else. This is the great difficulty. That in order to understand what the higher beings are doing we need to develop new degrees of freedom of our own consciousness. As Einstein allegedly said: you can't understand that which you can not imagine. The living Cosmos is too efficient for two beings to be doing the same thing. What the muses do is very different from what Mozart does. Neither the muses can or need to create sensory music, neither a human being can engineer the higher order curvatures of the spiritual world. What Mozart does is to translate into sensory musical language something which lives on another level. Exactly as you say, this translation is not one-to-one. There's no single or right way to do that translation, just like a n-gon can only approximate a circle, no matter how finely it breaks it down.

We should get that clear. What we do with our human thinking, feeling and willing lives at a level of resolution of the Cosmic spectrum which higher beings do not need to control directly. They say "We're doing our job, you're doing yours. Even though we see and understand what you are doing, it will be too tedious if we had to do it for you. We've gone through that stage long ago. Now we are doing work which you can't even conceive of unless you put special effort in it".

And this special effort is the real problem. Since people consider themselves finished beings observing reality from the high point of pure awareness, they insist that the degrees of freedom of their imagination cover everything there is about the way the Cosmos works. For this reason they imagine that even if they exist, higher beings have the same human-like goals and interests and they simply breathe down our necks, fighting for control, trying to tell us what to think, feel and do (as a matter of fact there indeed are abnormal beings who fight for exactly this kind of control but this will take us too far to tackle).

We can approach what the higher beings are doing only if we turn attention to everything that we take for granted. Yes, the higher worlds are not doing the things that we can do anyway - they do the things that we don't even know exist, let alone can do ourselves. All these things are flattened in our consciousness, we live in them, they weave our environment, our body, soul and spiritual architecture, yet we seal that tight and take it as some absolute and atomic feature of the wildcard 'consciousness'. We take that for granted and don't conceive that in some other being's perspective it might be the result of creative effort. Instead we imagine that just because we don't recognize anything within the flattened depth, it must be the same for every being. Then we imagine that higher beings' life also consists in drinking beer and we tell them "Don't tell me how to drink my beer, you big wuss." What we take for granted is that there's a world, that there's malt in the world, that we have a mouth to take in and an organ to pee out the beer. All this we take as some unquestionable matter of course. We imagine that even if all the higher worlds and beings were to disappear, we would still be left on the porch drinking delightedly. Little that we conceive of is that there might no longer be a mouth, malt, porch, planet, gravity, space, time, thoughts and feelings of delight, unless there were higher order intelligences which support these archetypal structures with their spiritual activity, and within which we experience the drinking of the amber liquid.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 3:35 pm
by AshvinP
Eugene I. wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 2:15 pm So basically what you guys are saying is this: all you are saying is you lower-cognition conceptualizing of your individual ego-minds, you actually have no idea and no direct experience of what higher-cognition is, so all your arguments are irrelevant to what Cleric is saying. Well ok, but this makes the whole discussion pointless.
No, it's only that you refuse to be open to an understanding of 'higher cognition' which is not your own. This was made clear when you said #1 and #2 could be equivalent. If you want to make an argument against the existence or importance of 'higher cognition', you must first understand what is meant by it. How could it be otherwise? If, alternatively, you have zero interest in understanding what is meant by it, then why are you on this TCT thread which is clearly oriented towards promoting that understanding? We've been over this too many times before and you always refuse to answer questions once it becomes clear where the inner logic is leading you, away from your personal preferences. Maybe it's time to take a page from BK's book and simply avoid engaging altogether.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 3:44 pm
by lorenzop
I'm not sure of any need for a conductor (who might disappear at any moment), or, that every thought, sensation is a remembrence of some Absolute State.
Why not the simplest explanation - that reality, earthworms and humans have instincts \ tendencies \ predispositions.
If I pluck a guitar string I get a musical note, not a rhinoceros.
The creation of crystals is a perfect example of a predisposition of nature. The resultant crystal does not have to be a remembrence of an Absolute State.

Re: The Central Topic

Posted: Tue May 17, 2022 4:06 pm
by Eugene I.
AshvinP wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 3:35 pm If you want to make an argument against the existence or importance of 'higher cognition', you must first understand what is meant by it. How could it be otherwise?
How can I understand what is meant by it if I have no direct experience of it? It's like asking a blind person to understand what it meant by "red color".