A Bohmian take on the current state of thinking

[findingblanks]

But since we are here:

"...but I am saying we should resist that temptation and understand all such manifestations as expressing much higher principles we have yet to concretely perceive."

That's an interesting comment. Where do you see this temptation manifesting in this conversation? Or were you making a more general point about resistance we should enact in general? Either way, I'm curious to hear good examples of this.

[AshvinP]

But since we are here:

"...but I am saying we should resist that temptation and understand all such manifestations as expressing much higher principles we have yet to concretely perceive."

That's an interesting comment. Where do you see this temptation manifesting in this conversation? Or were you making a more general point about resistance we should enact in general? Either way, I'm curious to hear good examples of this.

Well, as it turns out, I think what is happening on the other thread is a good example. I will only paste some of what I wrote here as well:

I am critiquing the modern age temptation to abstract and therefore reduce/fragment the world content into isolated phenomena, which are then reified by our intellect into 'things-themselves' with no overarching ideal Unity underlying them... There are only shared overarching Ideas which precipitate into mineralized thought-forms, are carved up, and then configured and re-configured into various forms. If we want to find genuine novelty, we will only find it in the holistic Ideas which are evolving and structure the phenomenal world, not the abstract thought-configurations which have been extracted from them.

This argument is the entire foundation of my Thinking approach. And Steiner, unsurprsingly, made this same argument more than once...

This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea.

- Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science (1883)

[Cleric K]

Soul, I'm 47% shocked you don't find these non-stop group unrequested seminars to be at least as disparaging as a short snide remark.

Why would you call what Ashvin wrote about, disparaging? It was precisely a lawful continuation of what Bohm speaks of.

Of course this is a rhetorical question because I know very well why you should see it that way. And I'm thankful that you finally came clean about it in the other thread where you conceded that all forms of thinking remain only abstract fragments for you. For this reason, you see any attempt to move from the abstract, to the concrete, to the real, as disparaging.

What's the point of speaking of implicit order of thinking if it forever remains a purely abstract combination of words in the mind? It's like we imagine thoughts as sand dunes. We realize that they're in constant metamorphosis. Some will say that this metamorphosis results from random collisions between the dunes, that they contain within themselves the laws which metamorphose them. Others will recognize that there's implicit order - invisible wind which is instrumental for their metamorphoses. Others still will recognize that the wind is not something 'out there' which might or might not exist but is the first-person experienced living spirit, through which the thought-dunes are shaped.

It's a nice metaphor, isn't it? One can say - 'rich'. It speaks exactly of what you say - how thinking (wind-spirit) creates structures yet doesn't notice itself. Meanwhile, the moment Ashvin steps in and tries to make the metaphor even richer, by bringing it closer to living, experiential reality, not by speaking of the wind-spirit implicit order as some abstract EM, quantum or whatever field but as the living reality in which our thinking flows, suddenly this becomes disparaging. This is the Central Topic all over again! Thinking in the cone loves to bask in rich metaphors such as 'implicit order' but at the moment thinking has to apply this metaphor to itself, it suddenly becomes disparaging, elitist, supremacist, unrequested seminarist and what not. All of this so glaringly obvious that it hurts the eyes. It doesn't hurt only when the eyes are blind. And they are not blind because one is condemned with such a fate (through skin color or whatever) but because there's deep antipathy towards even the possibility that the implicit order may refer to something completely real in which we live all the time. The mind-cone loves to speculate about what might be behind conscious phenomena - MAL, implicit order, quantum foam, etc. - through arranging puzzles of thought-fragments, but at the moment these fragments point to the fact that the apex of the cone flows within the reality to which these puzzle fragments point, the great rebellion begins.

Anyway. I'm really interested to hear your 'organic response' to the rich implicit order topic. I'm genuinely interested. I'm ready to be surprised what could be more organic, vibrant, living than approaching the actual reality of the implicit order within which our thinking flows. I'm interested to hear the rich abstract thoughts about this implicit order which are more exciting and organic than the living reality itself.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Soul, I'm 47% shocked you don't find these non-stop group unrequested seminars to be at least as disparaging as a short snide remark.

That said, I can't thank you enough for sharing that video and I hope to respond to it tomorrow if I get a chance. I absolutely LOVED how Bohm articulated the way that thought generates structures that it does not notice as its own products. So rich. Much thanks. I would love to be in a group where we could experience a more organic set of responses to your sharing than we get when a seminar immediately must be enacted. But them's the breaks.

FB ... I've no clue what you're on about with this comment. Disparaging toward who? Surely you are projecting your unaccountable feeling of being disparaged onto others. Prior to your first comment I found the exchange to be quite meaningful and engaging. The topic has 105 views in one day, which is good for this forum. Again, I can't take your remark seriously as anything other than another facile attempt at taunting and baiting, intended to stir up more antipathy and drama. Any more of the same, and I will be considering other options.

[AshvinP]

it suddenly becomes disparaging, elitist, supremacist, unrequested seminarist and what not.

Thanks Cleric, especially for the early morning laughs

[findingblanks]

Soul said,

"Surely you are projecting your unaccountable feeling of being disparaged onto others...."

No, I don't find it disparaging at all. I was trying to use the word in the way you've used it recently and I thought you would find it very rude to constantly side track conversations like the one your post opens up. It is always easy knowing how somebody conceptualizes a term and I was wrong in this case.

Anyway, I'm going to ignore the wonderful lectures that will take us into what we must understand from Anthroposohy and I'm going to focus on the brilliance of the video you posted.

[findingblanks]

Lou you said,

"On my way out David's wife approached me in a motherly way to ask if something was wrong? I just said, "for me the action is out on the streets." She nodded, softly smiled and gently patted my hand in a way that I perceived as a blessing, a blessing that I've never forgotten."

That's beautiful. Assuming your intuition was correct (and I'm absolutely sure you were connecting with a deep aspect of truth), it's easy to imagine that while his wife fully grasped the significance of working things out in explicit thought structures, she often experienced directly the downsides of when that becomes unbalanced with the 'life on the streets.' I imagine her smile, nod and soft contact with your body was quite a beautiful exchange of that understanding. Thanks for sharing.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I was trying to use the word in the way you've used it recently ...

The way I'm using it is the way Justin was using it when he conceded that his remark was "disparaging", and clearly directed toward Ashvin, who justifiably might have found it disparaging. I have no clue how you are using the term, as if the same context could apply here, where Ashvin has had a meaningful exchange with Lou, with no intention of being disparaging toward anyone.

All I see going on is your psychoanalytical tactic of making comments that are intended to bait and trigger a 'client' into reacting in an offended way, and then, when someone takes the bait, and reacts as expected, you use that as an excuse to go into psychoanalyst-mode, with your so-called shadow-dancing, offering to help them explore their issues, by questioning why they might feel that way, and what subliminal factors may be coming into play etc, etc, while adding little or nothing to any meaningful dialogos with respect to the original topic, as Ashvin and Lou were doing.

Anyway, I'm going to ignore the wonderful lectures that will take us into what we must understand from Anthroposohy and I'm going to focus on the brilliance of the video you posted.

Yes, please do, and save the tactics referred to above for PM mode, or your clinical practice, with those who've actually come to you for that reason.

[Lou Gold]

Reading this exchange, and given my nature, I'm reminded of a story from the same period of my life when I had my brief encounter with David Bohm. Back then, I had a friend who was a mathematician, a QM theorist type, who had left the the Math Dept to study cognition and perception in the Education Dept. He was interested in "magic moment" interactions when separateness seemed to vanish between people and a "wholeness" or "union" occurred. An example would be the moment when improvising jazz musicians moved into the special connection called a "jam." He made many videos recording these special moments. He would then present such a short video -- perhaps only 10 seconds long -- to a small seminar of perhaps 6-8 people. He would show the video and ask each person one-by-one to say what they saw happening. When the circle of different interpretations was complete, he would tell everyone to "throw away" their stated thoughts and then he'd play the video again and ask for new interpretations. This process would be repeated as long as a new interpretation could be offered. Eventually, everyone simply exhausted their inventiveness; no one would offer a novel interpretation; and this point there emerged 100% consensus about what was going on in the video. The separate competitive mind simply refused to offer a new thought and there was agreement about "reality".

Now I speculate: Might Ashvin/Steiner call this the moment when intellectual thoughts become Thought? Might a mindfulness meditator call this a quieting of the mind or cessation of mental chatter? Might others call it "no thinking" or "being in the zone"? And might the different interpretive names or representational models eventually meld into something called THE REAL?

OK, I'm not a philosopher but I'm interested in what you think.

[findingblanks]

Hi Ashvin,

Soul says I can't speak to you in the other thread.

When you say:

"Rather it's serving as the concrete bridge between what we perceive in the world, including ideal temporal phenomena, and the deeper layers of meaning we can potentially discern in that same world. We should try hard to remember this when we start lapsing back towards viewing this philosophy of Thinking as just another abstract thought-system among the plethora of such systems out there (which I also do, but fortunately less and less often the more I inhabit this approach as a living ecosystem of ideas). Remember the enormous practical difference it makes when we confront otherwise convoluted and complex ideal phenomena."

In your opinion has Bohm captured the essence of what Steiner is hoping the reader understands in The Philosophy of Freedom? Thanks.