Lou Gold wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:46 pm
Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 1:55 pm
With this talk and Q&A one is reminded of the brilliant mind of David Bohm. Not sure how it jibes with all the talk of 'thinking' that's currently going on in the forum, but I found it offered value, and well worth a listen. It also offers a fascinating mandala—a highway cloverleaf interchange as if seen from an OBE perspective—to meditate upon.
I always liked the intuitive feel of an "implicate order" although I assure you that I had no idea of how Bohm's brilliance revealed it. For me, it just "felt right" and during the early 1970s (heady anti-war protest days) I was invited to participate in a seminar with David at the University of Illinois. Curious, I attended, sat quietly for about half an hour, grew bored and got up to leave. 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.
Here's how it jibes with the Thinking talk according to me.
All of these 20th century thought-systems which point to an invisible structure which orders our phenomenal world, such as Jung's 'collective unconscious', 'objective psyche', etc., or Bohm's 'implicate order', or any number of other similar concepts in the integral thinkers of the last 100+ years, are pointing to the upper realm of meaning in Cleric's image above. It is the realm which has been 'fourier-transformed' or 'aliased' into what we now perceive as the phenomenal world of fragmented pictures. If we were to treat the image above as a cross-section fixed in our current time, which we generally shouldn't do, but will help for a limited purpose here, the 20th century conceptual systems themselves are residing in the middle, at the threshold of imaginative cognitions which are precipitating into the intellectual sense-world. We can say we are
always in the middle because, if we evolve into the imaginative domain of cognition and that becomes our new sense-world, there are still infinite more 'layers' of imperceptible meaning still above us.
Of course this is all just visual symbol for a non-spatial reality, so we don't need to get too caught up on "above" or "up" or "higher", except to the extent they indicate the underlying
meaning of what is being referred to - the meaning which resides in the
inverse fourier-transformed domain. We don't need to actually know too much about the details of Jung, Bohm, or anyone else to immediately recognize this dynamic in their conceptual systems, IF we are keeping concrete Thinking activity in our observation as much as possible. After all, isn't this what overarching scientific principles are supposed to do? To provide
holistic understanding of what seems like otherwise complex and convoluted sense-phenomena in all of their particular manifestations, so that we can explain their structured patterns of metamorphic behavior. For this to really land, we need to start thinking of conceptual systems as
ideal temporal phenomena like anything else we observe in the world.
Now think about how many people would look at the image above, read Cleric's essay, or, worse still, my 2 paragraphs above, and say "
this guy is a complete amatuer who somehow thinks he has decoded the thought of the most brilliant minds simply by referring back to 'Thinking' itself". That would be justified if the "Thinking" was serving as an abstract concept to which we are simply reducing all other concepts, but that is not how it is functioning here. Rather it's serving as the concrete bridge beween 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.