Is it just me who is going through a lot of existential angst about idealism?

[Cleric K]

Ashvin,

Who or what are you advocating to prayer to? What form does this prayer take - petition, praise, thanksgiving?

I must admit that given my evangelical church background, the thought of prayer leaves me cold. A substantial part of my deconversion surrounded my increasing conviction that prayer was pointless. Little children who my church prayed for incessantly died of cancer. A needy man who was surrounded by prayer boiled alive in his bath. My pastor died young from cancer. God never seemed to turn up in times of need.

Anthony, I'll add something before Ashvin does.

I can very well understand your evangelic dissatisfaction. I would feel the same at your place. But I won't go into that now.

The prayer we talk about is first and foremost a specific soul mood. I'll try to illustrate this.

It's been mentioned many times here that at any given time we experience only the tiniest tip of our being. At any time we experience a handful of thoughts that are in constant metamorphosis. Try to feel how infinitely small these thoughts at the focal point of our consciousness, are in comparison to everything that we know, that we can remember, that we feel, that we wish for and so on. Think how infinitely little of our whole life experiences are expressed in the few words at the center of our thinking at any time.

People live with the conviction that they are in control of the totality. To be sure, materialists are more objective here than most naive spiritual/religious people. The former at least imagine that the vast majority of the psyche is hidden away in the neural details. The latter imagine that they are already complete atomic beings. Some even imagine that they have outgrown the need for a brain!

So the first step is to make the effort and simply recognize how little we really experience of the hidden depths of the soul at a given time. The easiest way to appreciate this is by imagining how powerless we're when for example we can't remember something, when we can't solve a problem, when we can't get that song out of our head, when we dwell on emotions that logically we don't want to and so on.

This same thing was at the core of the Central Topic. Make an experiment. At some point of the day stop and notice what you're thinking about. Then see how you came to think about it? Did you choose it consciously our of a wide palette of possibilities or you were simply flowing within the invisible streams of soul life and the thoughts were only commentaries of wherever these streams took you? If it's the latter, then were these streams the result of fully conscious activity? These are simple but tremendously valuable observations.

Imagine that you're on an exam and you can't solve the problem. You know that you have studied, you know that you have the skills, the knowledge, yet you just can't find the answer. Once again the streams of deeper life have brought you into a hole where you simply can't see clearly. If you are in full control of the entire totality of the soul, you would just exercise that control, get out of the hole and find the solution.

And here's the crucial point. What should be the relation between our conscious thinking self and the deeper streams that lead us here and there? Please, think about this with all the needed seriousness. If we call these deeper streams "my soul" or "my subconscious", what do we imply? In the materialistic conception this implies completely mechanical processes happening in the brain and our conscious ego emerges on top of them. In other posts we spoke about the analogy with the archipelago, where our conscious self is the experiences of the islands (thoughts) protruding above the ocean surface. For today's man it's somewhat difficult to deny completely that there's something beneath the surface (the subconscious) but this is imagined as completely mechanical process of biological computation. Idealists don't go further than that. Especially when they embrace Schop's idea that what's beneath the surface is the dark abyss of the instinctive and unconscious will. Calling the abyss 'pure consciousness' doesn't lead anywhere either because it is still completely orthogonal to conscious thought and fully inexplicable. It just calls Schop's unconscious will - conscious. Yet it still has all the characteristics of completely instinctive and inexplicable will.

All of this makes the human ego to feel as a top authority. It doesn't deny that the abyss is beyond its conscious control but at the same time it feels itself to be higher than it.

Now I'll say something which will sound as the greatest blasphemy to the ego living in the above mood. Imagine that there are forces working in the subconscious which are fully coherent and in fact emanate from certain "I"-ness. Now the real question is how should we relate to that deeper "I"-ness?

I know that this is one of the most antipathetic topics for modern man who has come to extreme comfort of feeling as the absolute ceiling of consciousness. It's not that he denies there could be other more advances beings but they are placed outside. As far as the personal consciousness is concerned, the ego feels as the absolute apex. The idea that the forces within which our daily thoughts stream have coherent center, is disturbing to say the least.

And this is where the mood of prayer comes in. In secular Western culture, people live completely in one half-plane of reality. Their gaze is pointed entirely downwards, so to speak. Those who pray in the evangelic sense still feel as the ceiling of their atomic soul. They send their prayers out into space where they imagine some God will hear them. This is not the sense of prayer that is here used.

The mood of prayer here is about including the other half-plane of reality in our life. This means to have fully conscious relation to that which weaves below (or higher - it's relative) the surface of consciousness.

I'll leave it here. Everyone can decide for themselves where they are on this fence. Please note that we're not talking about some belief. This is completely practical matter. It's like seeking understanding of the best way to grow food or build a house. Similarly we need completely real and useful knowledge of how to relate with the forces which are beyond our conscious control at the tip of our waking self.

To make it even more explicit, all this relates to the question of the higher self. Do we think of it as some instinctive automaton? As the spiritual computation going on below the surface of consciousness? Or we're willing to seek the concentric relations of our "I"-ness with the higher "I"-ness within which our waking consciousness streams?

[lorenzop]

Rupert Spira keeps things simple and within daily experience: https://youtu.be/HNCKMOLediw
A brief 2 minute starting point

[AshvinP]

I can lend support to what Cleric says about prayer. It's remarkable what sincere and selfless prayer can accomplish within us, that we cannot accomplish for ourselves with thinking alone. It is not something which can be proved intellectually, but rather aligns with the principle, "seek first the Kingdom of God in righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." It is an efficacious reality we can justify to ourselves only by living within it for some time, in devotion and good faith.

Ashvin,

Who or what are you advocating to prayer to? What form does this prayer take - petition, praise, thanksgiving?

I must admit that given my evangelical church background, the thought of prayer leaves me cold. A substantial part of my deconversion surrounded my increasing conviction that prayer was pointless. Little children who my church prayed for incessantly died of cancer. A needy man who was surrounded by prayer boiled alive in his bath. My pastor died young from cancer. God never seemed to turn up in times of need.

Anthony,

I think Cleric covered all the main points. As he showed in very straightforward terms, there are only so many logical options for the vast realm of experience which is currently a black hole for the conscious intellect (assuming we agree the subconscious exists).

1) Mindless matter/energy that cannot even be experienced or imagined (since imagining requires mediation of mind; option requires dualism),

2) purely instinctive consciousness/will (similarly cannot be experienced or imagined; requires dualism),

3) intelligent, self-aware archetypal forces with the privilege of their own "I"-ness. (the latter is practically all we experience when awake and our most trusted intuition)

For the simple and rather self-evident reasons Cleric outlined, #3 is most logical but also most threatening to the rational ego, who wants to hoard the "I"-ness all to itself. Prayer, at first, could be nothing more than simply allowing for the possibility of #3, not only as intellectual theory, but as a living experiential reality which actually makes a difference in our perception and understanding of the world around us and within us. We can take the logical necessity of #3 and imbue it with devotional, loving feeling and gratitude, assuming we are in fact grateful that we have the endless opportunity to enter into greater communion with these forces through our own Thinking. The latter can truly give us access to concrete experience of what our ancestors experienced instinctively before. Here again, we meet the logical necessity of consciousness-cognition evolving through the epochs and right through into our present day.

I want to also share a passage from Steiner which many here may find surprising, since it is often mentioned how he is stooge for pro-Western Christianity or cult leader. Consider the following, which is probably just as critical of the modern evangelical approach as you are, and judge for yourself.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA197/En ... 07a01.html

As the time approached in the history of humankind that was to bring the Mystery of Golgotha, an advanced culture of soul and spirit had evolved in Asia. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had already reached its culmination and was in the early stages of decline. Do not let us deceive ourselves: European ideas do not make it easy to grasp the great culture which had grown out of the soul and spirit of the Asian peoples. When people who are thoroughly European in their way of thinking, people for whom the physical body is the instrument of thinking, want to get Europeans to appreciate Asian ideas, as Deussen 4 has done, for example, the outcome in no way represents the contents of Asian civilization of soul and spirit, for everything alive in it has been translated into European thought. It has even happened that interpretations of certain spiritual streams in India caused a sensation in Europe — those published by von Garbe 5 for instance [Ashvin: and Schopenhauer at earlier time], yet it was nothing more than European materialism producing a garbled translation of Asian soul and spirit culture. Publications of this kind contain a trace of the real spirit of ancient Asia. It is necessary to point this out very firmly because, as I have said before, belief in authority has reached an extreme degree and people really have nothing in them that permits them to acknowledge the validity of something, except the fact that it has been written by university professors
...
It is important to distinguish between the Mystery of Golgotha as a historical event that happened in the Near East at the beginning of Christian era and the notions people have of this Mystery of Golgotha. At the time when the event occurred, Europe did not have the capacity to grasp it fully, for it was an event that could only be grasped in soul and spirit. European civilization, however, had spread by using physical matter as its instrument. The event which occurred at the beginning of our Christian era could not be directly grasped in a civilization based on physical and material things. Asian civilization on the other hand had an intellectual life based on soul and spirit and out of this was able to find concepts with which to grasp the event of Golgotha. The event that happened in Palestine was thus poured into the conceptual world of the Orient.
...
From the middle of the 15th century onwards the influence of the bony European body has been such that in the end that old tradition only survived in empty outer phrases among religious communities. For many centuries the tradition had been so much alive that little regard was paid to the Gospels and people took their cue from life itself. As the European body came to die off people felt impelled to say: Let us cast off the old tradition; we want to put our faith only in the Word, the Word as it is written. People believe they have the Word when in fact they only have a poor translation of it. It gradually came about — though no one is willing to admit it — that really all one had was the outer shell of the Word of old that once held within it the tidings of the Mystery of Golgotha in the garb of oriental wisdom, a wisdom of soul and spirit.

This oriental wisdom is little understood by the people who generally interpret or translate the Gospels; they understand little, if any of it. The point is that it is necessary to see the Mystery of Golgotha in a new light.
- Polarities in Evolution (1920)

[Cleric K]

Rupert Spira keeps things simple and within daily experience: https://youtu.be/HNCKMOLediw
A brief 2 minute starting point

Thanks Lorenzo. RS actually does a very good job to approach the mood of prayer in this way.

The question is, are we going to stop there? Are we going to rest satisfied as soon as we find the warm spiritual cushion, when we feel gently carried by the inexplicable infinity? Are we going to declare that we have reached the ultimate maximum of what human life is about?

All we need is to continue following Spira's own words to their conclusions. The prayer that he cited from his youth is actually very powerful. But if we are really to let God express through our thoughts, seeing, hearing, heart, why should that remain at the level of mystical union with something inexplicable? What are we really doing in this way? Are we claiming that God is dimly conscious instinctive will and we simply pray to it to possess us (and as a result we ourselves become extensions of the instinctive spiritual process)?

If we follow the logic of RS's words they will lead us to the natural conclusion that we, as human beings, should become the eyes, ears, brain and heart of the Divine Being of the Cosmos. A Being that its Cosmic scale creates worlds through its spiritual activity (its Word) while at its human scale creates thoughts, feels and acts. Instead of seeking how our small thoughts are fragmented precipitations of the Cosmic Word, we only seek to be filled with inexplicable bliss, with nebulous Cosmicality. And this is once again 2) from Ashvin's post above. We pray to God to fill us but we don't allow Him to awaken in us. Instead, we put Him to sleep in us. We reduce his Divinity to mystical dreamy feeling that fills our soul. The ego doesn't give up its bastion, it ensures that there's no "I"-ness in its sphere, other than its own.

This is the point of bifurcation, Lorenzo. And you can easily see where you stand if you try. Just think about it: do you envision that the Divine is actually a living conscious Be-ing, that the worlds are created akin to Cosmic Thoughts in that Divine Consciousness? The answer to this question is related to the other question - what is our human relation to that Divine Consciousness? So we once again reached the two big questions from my earlier post. If you can come to clarity with yourself about what is your stance to these questions, you'll also quickly understand why you understand or fail to understand what Ashvin and me are talking about.

And thanks again for Spira's words. They also serve as valuable example that sometimes it's not about what is said (which might be very true and beautiful) but about what is omitted.

[Anthony66]

Thanks for your responses.

You paint a suggestive relationship with this "other half-plane of reality" or "higher consciousness", but what does that look like?

Our "other half-plane of reality", hallowed by thy name??
In the name of "other half-plane of reality", I command thee to grant me a new Lamborghini??

Should one be praying to anyone/anything apart from the main man, the transcendent being above all beings??

[tjssailor]

Thanks for your responses.

You paint a suggestive relationship with this "other half-plane of reality" or "higher consciousness", but what does that look like?

Our "other half-plane of reality", hallowed by thy name??
In the name of "other half-plane of reality", I command thee to grant me a new Lamborghini??

Should one be praying to anyone/anything apart from the main man, the transcendent being above all beings??

You are the transcendent being....

[AshvinP]

Thanks for your responses.

You paint a suggestive relationship with this "other half-plane of reality" or "higher consciousness", but what does that look like?

Our "other half-plane of reality", hallowed by thy name??
In the name of "other half-plane of reality", I command thee to grant me a new Lamborghini??

Should one be praying to anyone/anything apart from the main man, the transcendent being above all beings??

Anthony,

I will mention one thing here. A main reason why prayer is important is because we are admitting, in humility, that we simply don't know about the other 'half-plane of reality' which is always behind-above our current "I"-perspective. We can form general concepts for an intellectual framework of the higher hierarchies and the Trinity/Godhead or higher Self, whatever one ends up calling it, but we can't claim to actually know anything we have not directly experienced. For the latter, we need to expand/grow our consciousness into the higher worlds. No matter how much we grow, there will always be a 'half-plane of reality' still above us. What remains above is the invisible meaningful context, only perceptible in partial reflections, which still shapes our fate, while what is below is what has become perceptible and transparent and, therefore, we can manipulate to some extent in freedom. So that is why we pray for discernment, guidance, knowledge, etc., out of humility and gratitude, so we may come to know God's will for us through our own Thinking efforts, growing into the meaningful context above and bringing back higher knowledge for the benefit of the Cosmic Whole.

We need to also remember, we are localized perspectives, fractal images, of a unified Cosmic Organism. We are not praying to some being who is essentially different from us, standing apart and observing us or arbitrarily dictating our life, but that All-Being who experiences the eternal integration of all perspectives. Consider this from the Deep MAL essay:

Deep M@L allows us to solve the very significant mystery of time. Once we understand the hierarchically interacting idea-beings we come to view time as something completely different. Every idea-being is something holistic that encompasses relations with other idea-beings. An analogy with a symphony can be useful. Closest to the Center we have the archetypal idea of the symphony which exists as something whole, that can be encompassed from a certain M@L perspective as all existing in the 'now'. Yet this holistic idea can be seen also to spread out as a process with a beginning and an end, or exposition, development and recapitulation. This idea-being can be thought of as containing only the most general idea-potential for any conceivable symphony. It acts as a kernel in relation to which more specific ideas can be experienced. In certain sense, more differentiated idea-beings (perspectives) can explore how they can creatively unfold their activity within the context of higher archetypal ideas. When these ideas are differentiated further they become more and more specific, just as a musical idea becomes more and more specific as it goes through musical phrases, bars, notes, sound vibrations. Metaphorically speaking, it can be said that our human condition corresponds to a thus formed composition, experienced in what seems as linear time. But in reality it's all a matter of complicated non-linear interaction of idea-beings within Deep M@L. We explore this non-linear depth through thinking and the higher forms of cognition. It must be kept in mind that in this analogy the symphony should be taken as something living, in the sense that all parts evolve together, and they all contribute creatively. The archetypal form of the symphony doesn't dictate its details but only the general structure. Other idea-perspectives develop the details independently. Furthermore, man is not an isolated 'sound' in this hierarchy but his perspective spans all the way to the Center - there's no principal isolation. The 'man-sound' is not something isolated but, so to speak, represents a holographic perspective of the whole idea-structure - from the most archetypal, to the most detailed. Yet this perspective finds itself in relations to other differentiated holographic ideas. The difference for man lies in how well integrated his perspective is and whether he can identify himself only with the fragmentary 'sounds' or can gain consciousness also of the deeper archetypal ideas.
The illustration of Deep M@L above should be thought of as containing more and more holistic ideas as we move towards the Center, reaching an ideal unity of all-that-can-ever-be as an eternal 'now'. The Center should not be thought of as some special 'entity' but as the One Idea that unities harmoniously all ideas. It's not a question whether such an idea exists - if we can think about it - it exists. The question is how this idea relates to us and all other idea-beings.

[Cleric K]

Thanks for your responses.

You paint a suggestive relationship with this "other half-plane of reality" or "higher consciousness", but what does that look like?

Our "other half-plane of reality", hallowed by thy name??
In the name of "other half-plane of reality", I command thee to grant me a new Lamborghini??

Should one be praying to anyone/anything apart from the main man, the transcendent being above all beings??

Anthony, before it is possible to make any constructive steps in this direction, we should really address the core. Otherwise we're treating the symptoms and never reach the root causes.

It's all about the two big questions. What's your stance on this? All the talks about prayer will only be lost in the periphery if you exclude as a possibility that there are World Thoughts at the foundation of reality. I tried to explain this. When we hear 'MAL', the first image that we naturally have is of inner experience but of Cosmic proportions. Yet the more we try to follow the logic of our own concepts the more we turn away from them. We can see this very clearly with BK, who started somewhat enthusiastically but gradually had to reduce everything to instinctive inexplicable something, completely opaque to our "I"-consciousness. And I understand and sympathize. It must have been a real struggle. As long as MAL is presented as instinctive conscious energy, following inexplicable laws, the intellect maintains its overseer perspective. This perspective is fully compatible with today's scientism, except one exchanges matter/energy with the abyss of instinctive consciousness. If one had to pursue the idea of MAL further, one inevitably reaches the point where they are forced by the inner logic to conceive of higher strata of ideating be-ings, within which our inner world is embedded. This is a step BK can't take. It would cross the line of scientific decency. As soon as one begins to speak of higher order intelligence, one is no longer a scientist but a mad occultist. This is the half-plane blindness. It's the cultural conditioning that only what is graspable in lifeless concepts and can be reduced to the idea of matter/energy/instinctive being, is reliable.

Imagine children playing with toys and listening to adults speaking about politics, science, etc. - things that the children do not understand. Some of them say "Maybe these words that we hear have meaning. Maybe that meaning even has something to do with the way the world works". Other children say "nonsense, these are childish beliefs. Only that which can be expressed in the arrangements of our toys has meaning."

So these are the half-planes. The first group of children beholds the half-plane of their manifested world - the toys - but they are also open for the other half-plane - ideas which are still outside their consciousness but nevertheless have causative roles in the world processes. The second group focuses only on the first half-plane and considers it unscientific to speak of higher order, let alone order that is shaped by living ideation of beings.

So this is the root point. I have little hope that these root questions will ever be confronted in this forum. Experience shows that the centrifugal forces immediately send thinking into the periphery. I can break the questions into even more palpable sub-questions but I'm not sure if anyone cares to ponder them.

For example, one can meditate on:
* What is it that I feel so appalling about prayer? Is it that I'm afraid that I might be addressing spiritual forces which might not exist at all? Or maybe these forces exist but they have completely different character, that has not a trace of inner experience. Just as civilized man considers it foolish to think of a hurricane as anything more than complicated configuration of air and water masses, driven by pressure gradients, so it might be that the hurricanes in MAL are of such spiritual-mechanical nature. I'll be a fool if I pretend that such hurricanes may have what I call 'understanding'.
* Maybe there really are higher order spiritual beings, maybe my consciousness is transparent to them, maybe they can perceive my moods, desires, goals, just like I perceive the colors of a flower. This might be so, I don't deny it, but I don't see why I should have any relation with those beings. What counts is to focus on the pure awareness in me, which is above any other being.

There other things that we can meditate on too. But do we at all want to find the answers?

[Hedge90]

Our "other half-plane of reality", hallowed by thy name??
In the name of "other half-plane of reality", I command thee to grant me a new Lamborghini??

I admit this gave me a good chuckle

[AshvinP]

Imagine children playing with toys and listening to adults speaking about politics, science, etc. - things that the children do not understand. Some of them say "Maybe these words that we hear have meaning. Maybe that meaning even has something to do with the way the world works". Other children say "nonsense, these are childish beliefs. Only that which can be expressed in the arrangements of our toys has meaning."

So these are the half-planes. The first group of children beholds the half-plane of their manifested world - the toys - but they are also open for the other half-plane - ideas which are still outside their consciousness but nevertheless have causative roles in the world processes. The second group focuses only on the first half-plane and considers it unscientific to speak of higher order, let alone order that is shaped by living ideation of beings.

As a complementary metaphor to what Cleric writes here, consider this from Barfield. Do our questions, and our conviction that there are no first-person experiential answers to such questions, betray a secret desire to sit around and wait for the smash? We are accelerating closer by the day.

Once upon a time there was a very large motor-car called the Universe. Although there was nobody who wasn't on board, nobody knew how it worked or how to work it, and in course of time two very different problems occupied the attention of two different groups of passengers. The first group became interested in invisibles like internal combustion; but the second group said the thing to do was to push and pull levers and find out by trial and error what happened. The words 'internal combustion', they said, were obviously meaningless, because nobody ever pushed or pulled either of these things. For a time both groups agreed that knowledge of how it worked and knowledge of how to work it were closely connected with one another, but in the end the second group began to maintain that the first kind of knowledge was an illusion based on a misunderstanding of language. Pushing, pulling and seeing what happens, they said, are not a means to knowledge; they are knowledge. It was an odd sort of car, because, after the second group had with conspicuous and gratifying success tried pushing and pulling all the big levers, they began on some of the smaller ones, and the car was so constructed that nearly all of these, whatever other effect they had, acted as accelerators. Meanwhile the first group held their breath and began to think that their kind of knowledge might perhaps come in useful after the smash.

- Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (1953)