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

[Lou Gold]

It is really not that complicated. If the Cosmos/MAL is really an inner spiritual experience in its essential nature, then self-propelled activity is a natural aspect of it. Then if we follow our own ideas, which say that alters are really apertures of Cosmic Consciousness, it's only logical that this activity of the Cosmos should be found in some form also in our individual human experience.

Is it really so difficult to comprehend that the activity which the higher strata of MAL use to Cosmically Think the Worlds and beings, is of the same essence as the thinking activity which manifests in a far more restricted way within our skulls?

Let me make it even more child-level approachable. The active aspect of the Living Cosmos (the Spirit), can be likened to the air that a deep diver receives through a long hose. This air is not mechanical mixture of gases - it's the very living meaningful Will of the Cosmos (it is Thought-like but it thinks not verbal words but the inner Cosmos). As it passes through several 'filters', 'valves', etc. it is stepped down to our human state where we experience it as the flow of our thinking spirit. This flow can never by grasped in the way we try to understand the flow of electricity in wires, for example. It can only be grasped if we make our own thinking the object of investigation. This is not abstract concept but the direct perception of the real and concrete flow - our own flow of thinking which we creatively shape.

This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand.

Cleric,

Perhaps your audience could better grok what you are saying if you could phrase as if you were speaking directly to a five-year old child. Doing that would offer a concrete example of the use of language for a child-level understanding and give meaning for your audience to your assertion, This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand. Can you do it as a first-person adult speaking directly to a second-person child?

[AshvinP]

It is really not that complicated. If the Cosmos/MAL is really an inner spiritual experience in its essential nature, then self-propelled activity is a natural aspect of it. Then if we follow our own ideas, which say that alters are really apertures of Cosmic Consciousness, it's only logical that this activity of the Cosmos should be found in some form also in our individual human experience.

Is it really so difficult to comprehend that the activity which the higher strata of MAL use to Cosmically Think the Worlds and beings, is of the same essence as the thinking activity which manifests in a far more restricted way within our skulls?

Let me make it even more child-level approachable. The active aspect of the Living Cosmos (the Spirit), can be likened to the air that a deep diver receives through a long hose. This air is not mechanical mixture of gases - it's the very living meaningful Will of the Cosmos (it is Thought-like but it thinks not verbal words but the inner Cosmos). As it passes through several 'filters', 'valves', etc. it is stepped down to our human state where we experience it as the flow of our thinking spirit. This flow can never by grasped in the way we try to understand the flow of electricity in wires, for example. It can only be grasped if we make our own thinking the object of investigation. This is not abstract concept but the direct perception of the real and concrete flow - our own flow of thinking which we creatively shape.

This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand.

Cleric,

Perhaps your audience could better grok what you are saying if you could phrase as if you were speaking directly to a five-year old child. Doing that would offer a concrete example of the use of language for a child-level understanding and give meaning for your audience to your assertion, This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand. Can you do it as a first-person adult speaking directly to a second-person child?

So, if this is the idealist metaphysics forum and people will understand only when we write to them like 5-year old children, if we go to the blog for small children who want to be philosophers when they grow up and write to them like adults, will they understand everything we are saying?
Bizzaro world...

[lorenzop]

Cleric provides the child-like easy to understand example of an air hose supplying to a diver in his post above. He is speaking of more than reason, predictably, participating and cause/effect in nature. He is adding a feeling or mood to every perception-actually he says the feeling proceeds the perception.
IOW, seeing is a feeling/meaning baked into reality.
The part I don’t understand is how he proves the above via an argument.
I think it’s possible to convert/appreciate everything as a mood, but first one has to decide between Christian, Hindu, Native American, etc belief system THEN be committed to that every minute of every day.
I think Cleric would say we are already ‘feeling’ but missing out of the really good stuff, which just happens to be Christian good stuff.

[AshvinP]

It is really not that complicated. If the Cosmos/MAL is really an inner spiritual experience in its essential nature, then self-propelled activity is a natural aspect of it. Then if we follow our own ideas, which say that alters are really apertures of Cosmic Consciousness, it's only logical that this activity of the Cosmos should be found in some form also in our individual human experience.

Is it really so difficult to comprehend that the activity which the higher strata of MAL use to Cosmically Think the Worlds and beings, is of the same essence as the thinking activity which manifests in a far more restricted way within our skulls?

Let me make it even more child-level approachable. The active aspect of the Living Cosmos (the Spirit), can be likened to the air that a deep diver receives through a long hose. This air is not mechanical mixture of gases - it's the very living meaningful Will of the Cosmos (it is Thought-like but it thinks not verbal words but the inner Cosmos). As it passes through several 'filters', 'valves', etc. it is stepped down to our human state where we experience it as the flow of our thinking spirit. This flow can never by grasped in the way we try to understand the flow of electricity in wires, for example. It can only be grasped if we make our own thinking the object of investigation. This is not abstract concept but the direct perception of the real and concrete flow - our own flow of thinking which we creatively shape.

This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand.

Cleric,

Perhaps your audience could better grok what you are saying if you could phrase as if you were speaking directly to a five-year old child. Doing that would offer a concrete example of the use of language for a child-level understanding and give meaning for your audience to your assertion, This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand. Can you do it as a first-person adult speaking directly to a second-person child?

So, if this is the idealist metaphysics forum and people will understand only when we write to them like 5-year old children, if we go to the blog for small children who want to be philosophers when they grow up and write to them like adults, will they understand everything we are saying?
Bizzaro world...

Despite my feeling this is both condescending to anyone reading it and unlikely to bring more clarity, here's my best attempt:

1. There is only One World (not one "dream world" existing 'next to' another "real world").
2. We are this One World - the World we see is our inner life projected as something other than us, i.e. the objects and processes we perceive around us.
3. Our current perspective we call our "I" is also another projected object/process in this same sense.
4. Our real, most essential "I" is the inner life of the entire outer form we call "the Universe" (not static, but always changing).
5. To re-member and re-cognize our real "I", we need to find the perceptible forms in the Universe which are undeniably connected to our current conscious activity and 'trace back' where they come from. (if we simply call ourselves the "real I" or experience mystical oneness and nothing further, we are still only identifying with the current projected "I" without realizing it).
6. These are our thought-forms and our own thinking which manifests them.
7. The process of observing and understanding our own thinking activity better, not as 'external' object to study, but as the activity we are engaged in right now when reading these words and forming concepts of their meaning, in the living transformations of that meaning, is also the process of rediscovering our essential Self.

[Lou Gold]

It is really not that complicated. If the Cosmos/MAL is really an inner spiritual experience in its essential nature, then self-propelled activity is a natural aspect of it. Then if we follow our own ideas, which say that alters are really apertures of Cosmic Consciousness, it's only logical that this activity of the Cosmos should be found in some form also in our individual human experience.

Is it really so difficult to comprehend that the activity which the higher strata of MAL use to Cosmically Think the Worlds and beings, is of the same essence as the thinking activity which manifests in a far more restricted way within our skulls?

Let me make it even more child-level approachable. The active aspect of the Living Cosmos (the Spirit), can be likened to the air that a deep diver receives through a long hose. This air is not mechanical mixture of gases - it's the very living meaningful Will of the Cosmos (it is Thought-like but it thinks not verbal words but the inner Cosmos). As it passes through several 'filters', 'valves', etc. it is stepped down to our human state where we experience it as the flow of our thinking spirit. This flow can never by grasped in the way we try to understand the flow of electricity in wires, for example. It can only be grasped if we make our own thinking the object of investigation. This is not abstract concept but the direct perception of the real and concrete flow - our own flow of thinking which we creatively shape.

This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand.

Cleric,

Perhaps your audience could better grok what you are saying if you could phrase as if you were speaking directly to a five-year old child. Doing that would offer a concrete example of the use of language for a child-level understanding and give meaning for your audience to your assertion, This is not difficult to understand. It's child-level-easy to understand. Can you do it as a first-person adult speaking directly to a second-person child?

So, if this is the idealist metaphysics forum and people will understand only when we write to them like 5-year old children, if we go to the blog for small children who want to be philosophers when they grow up and write to them like adults, will they understand everything we are saying?
Bizzaro world...

Standard argumentative twist from you Ashvin. It was Cleric's assertion that what he is saying is "child-level easy" to understand, NOT mine. Philosophers speak complicated, children speak simple and both are reflecting what they understand. To say it is child-level simple requires a demonstration.

[AshvinP]

So, if this is the idealist metaphysics forum and people will understand only when we write to them like 5-year old children, if we go to the blog for small children who want to be philosophers when they grow up and write to them like adults, will they understand everything we are saying?
Bizzaro world...

Standard argumentative twist from you Ashvin. It was Cleric assertion that what he is saying is "child-level easy" to understand, NOT mine. Philosophers speak complicated, children speak simple and both are reflecting what they understand. To say it is child-level simple requires a demonstration.

I thought it was obvious he didn't mean understandable to person with actual cognitive development of a 5-year old, but anyway... I gave it my best shot above.

[Lou Gold]

So, if this is the idealist metaphysics forum and people will understand only when we write to them like 5-year old children, if we go to the blog for small children who want to be philosophers when they grow up and write to them like adults, will they understand everything we are saying?
Bizzaro world...

Standard argumentative twist from you Ashvin. It was Cleric assertion that what he is saying is "child-level easy" to understand, NOT mine. Philosophers speak complicated, children speak simple and both are reflecting what they understand. To say it is child-level simple requires a demonstration.

I thought it was obvious he didn't mean understandable to person with actual cognitive development of a 5-year old, but anyway... I gave it my best shot above.

Actually factually, Ashvin, I'm reflecting from my own personal adventure years ago as a public storyteller about the complicated topic of forest ecology and conservation. My mentors advised me to make sure that what I was saying could be understood by a child and I chose language and a style to accomplish that. The result was far from perfect but it was presented more than 600 times to audiences ranging from children to hair stylists to scientists to Harvard Business School Club "suits" to Capitol Hill policy wonks and won many awards and recognitions. Speaking as if to children allowed me to get to the heart of things for a wide diversity of mindsets. You might find as interesting the "child-level" way I presented some basic forest ecology (starting at about 16:00).

[AshvinP]

Standard argumentative twist from you Ashvin. It was Cleric assertion that what he is saying is "child-level easy" to understand, NOT mine. Philosophers speak complicated, children speak simple and both are reflecting what they understand. To say it is child-level simple requires a demonstration.

I thought it was obvious he didn't mean understandable to person with actual cognitive development of a 5-year old, but anyway... I gave it my best shot above.

Actually factually, Ashvin, I'm reflecting from my own personal adventure years ago as a public storyteller about the complicated topic of forest ecology and conservation. My mentors advised me to make sure that what I was saying could be understood by a child and I chose language and a style to accomplish that. The result was far from perfect but it was presented more than 600 times to audiences ranging from children to hair stylists to scientists to Harvard Business School Club "suits" to Capitol Hill policy wonks and won many awards and recognitions. Speaking as if to children allowed me to get to the heart of things for a wide diversity of mindsets. You might find as interesting the "child-level" way I presented some basic forest ecology (starting at about 16:00).

This points to something we also keep trying to point out. To understand our arguments, you must at least to attempt to understand our perspective and ideal foundations. (not accept, but understand). You cannot simply project your own perspective, understandings, ideas, habits, etc. onto us and then declare us imcomprehensible from that perspective. Of course we are incomprehensible from that perspective. For ex., we say the 5-year old child has not even incarnated the Ego-"I" who reasons logically through appearances of the world, and we say this is supported by our shared experience and the solid science reasoned from that experience. So reflecting from your own personal adventure into your understanding of our position is destined to make the latter non-sensical. It may be helpful to consider Jung's insight here.

Primitive Man is unpsychological. Psychic happenings take place outside him in an objective way. Even the things he dreams about seem to him real; that is his only reason for paying attention to dreams... God now speaks in dreams to the British, and not to the medicine-man of the Elgonyi, he told me, because it is the British who have the power. Dream activity had emigrated. Occasionally the souls of the natives emigrate, and the medicine-man catches them in cages as if they were birds; or strange souls immigrate and cause diseases.

This projection of psychic happenings naturally gives rise to relations between men and men, or between men and animals or things, that to us are inconceivable. A white man shoots a crocodile. At once a crowd of people come running from the nearest village and excitedly demand compensation. They explain that the crocodile was a certain old woman in their village who had died at the moment when the shot was fired. The crocodile was obviously her bush-soul. Another man shot a leopard that was lying in wait for his cattle. Just then a woman died in a neighboring village. She and the leopard were one and the same.

Levy-Bruhl has coined the expression participation mystique for these curious relationships. It seems to me that the word "mystical" is not well chosen. Primitive man does not see anything mystical in these matters, but considers them perfectly natural. It is only we who find anything strange about them, and the reason is that we seem to know nothing about such psychic phenomenon. In reality, however, they occur to us too, but we give them more civilized forms of expression. In daily life it happens all the time that we presume that the psychic processes of other people are the same as ours. We suppose that what is pleasing or desirable to us is the same to others, and that what seems bad to us must also seem bad to them.
...
Equality before the law still represents a great human achievement; it has not yet been superseded. And we still attribute to "the other fellow" all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves. That is why we have to criticize and attack him. What happens in such a case, however, is that an inferior "soul" emigrates from one person to another. The world is still full of bêtes noirés and of scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves.
...
The simple truth is that primitive man is somewhat more given to projection than we because of the undifferentiated state of his mind and his consequent inability to criticize himself. Everything to him is perfectly objective, and his language reflects this in a radical way... we often represent a person as a goose, a cow, a hen, a snake, an ox, or an ass. As uncomplimentary epithets these images are familiar to us all. But when primitive man attributes a bush-soul to a person, the poison of the moral verdict is absent. Archaic man is too naturalistic for that; he is too much impressed by things as they are to pass judgment readily...

The theme of bush-soul, which seems so strange when we meet with it in primitive societies, has become with us, like so much else, a mere figure of speech. If we take our metaphors in a concrete way we return to a primitive point of view... since all unconscious psychic life is concrete and objective for archaic man, he supposed that a person describable as a leopard has the soul of a leopard. If the concretizing goes further, he assumes that such a soul lives in the bush in the form of a real leopard.

These identifications, brought about by the projection of psychic happenings, create a world in which man is contained not only physically, but psychically as well. To a certain extent he coalesces with it...

- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

[Lou Gold]

I thought it was obvious he didn't mean understandable to person with actual cognitive development of a 5-year old, but anyway... I gave it my best shot above.

Actually factually, Ashvin, I'm reflecting from my own personal adventure years ago as a public storyteller about the complicated topic of forest ecology and conservation. My mentors advised me to make sure that what I was saying could be understood by a child and I chose language and a style to accomplish that. The result was far from perfect but it was presented more than 600 times to audiences ranging from children to hair stylists to scientists to Harvard Business School Club "suits" to Capitol Hill policy wonks and won many awards and recognitions. Speaking as if to children allowed me to get to the heart of things for a wide diversity of mindsets. You might find as interesting the "child-level" way I presented some basic forest ecology (starting at about 16:00).

This points to something we also keep trying to point out. To understand our arguments, you must at least to attempt to understand our perspective and ideal foundations. (not accept, but understand). You cannot simply project your own perspective, understandings, ideas, habits, etc. onto us and then declare us imcomprehensible from that perspective. Of course we are incomprehensible from that perspective. For ex., we say the 5-year old child has not even incarnated the Ego-"I" who reasons logically through appearances of the world, and we say this is supported by our shared experience and the solid science reasoned from that experience. So reflecting from your own personal adventure into your understanding of our position is destined to make the latter non-sensical. It may be helpful to consider Jung's insight here.

I was not projecting Ashvin. I was reflecting in order to share a common dilemma of trying to communicate something complicated. You are saying something obvious, namely that if your audience makes the effort to embrace (understand, stand under) your symbolic universe they will arrive at the same conclusions as you do. OF COURSE! The conclusions are embedded in your symbolic universe. But your communication challenge is to speak with people outside of your symbolic universe. I was not projecting onto you and Cleric. I was offering the example of how I, as a storyteller, attempted to deal with this challenge in my realm of complicated concerns. It's trite but there's merit in Keep It Simple Stupid -- K.I.S.S.

[AshvinP]

Actually factually, Ashvin, I'm reflecting from my own personal adventure years ago as a public storyteller about the complicated topic of forest ecology and conservation. My mentors advised me to make sure that what I was saying could be understood by a child and I chose language and a style to accomplish that. The result was far from perfect but it was presented more than 600 times to audiences ranging from children to hair stylists to scientists to Harvard Business School Club "suits" to Capitol Hill policy wonks and won many awards and recognitions. Speaking as if to children allowed me to get to the heart of things for a wide diversity of mindsets. You might find as interesting the "child-level" way I presented some basic forest ecology (starting at about 16:00).

This points to something we also keep trying to point out. To understand our arguments, you must at least to attempt to understand our perspective and ideal foundations. (not accept, but understand). You cannot simply project your own perspective, understandings, ideas, habits, etc. onto us and then declare us imcomprehensible from that perspective. Of course we are incomprehensible from that perspective. For ex., we say the 5-year old child has not even incarnated the Ego-"I" who reasons logically through appearances of the world, and we say this is supported by our shared experience and the solid science reasoned from that experience. So reflecting from your own personal adventure into your understanding of our position is destined to make the latter non-sensical. It may be helpful to consider Jung's insight here.

I was not projecting Ashvin. I was reflecting in order to share a common dilemma of trying to communicate something complicated. You are saying something obvious, namely that if your audience makes the effort to embrace (understand, stand under) your symbolic universe they will arrive at the same conclusions as you do. OF COURSE! The conclusions are embedded in your symbolic universe, But your communication challenge is to speak with people outside of your symbolic universe. I was not projecting onto you and Cleric. I was offering the example of how I, as a storyteller, attempted to deal with this challenge in my realm of complicated concerns. It's trite but there's merit in Keep It Simple Stupid -- K.I.S.S.

No, Lou, understanding is not the same as accepting and concluding. I can work towards understanding many different 'symbolic universes' without concluding they are accurate or complete. The only reason I can make specified comparisons with philosophical and spiritual systems other than my own is because I do work towards that understanding. A fair evaluation of a conceptual worldview always presupposes understanding that worldview, but not accepting it.

As Cleric said, if there is no interest in fairly evaluating the outlook, because logically evaluating any outlook is itself seen as a mostly worthless pursuit, then that's all that needs to be said here. The claims of "incomprehensibility" don't need to be mentioned, because we have already established why that manifests - because there is no attempt to 'stand under' our symbolic universe when reading about it in our posts.