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

[Cleric K]

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)

We can add also a third group - those who imagine that the car is just a floating dream image, that the highest wisdom consists in letting go of the wheel and compassionately experience the downride, while expecting to be teleported in a nirvanic state at the moment of the smash.

[AshvinP]

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)

We can add also a third group - those who imagine that the car is just a floating dream image, that the highest wisdom consists in letting go of the wheel and compassionately experience the downride, while expecting to be teleported in a nirvanic state at the moment of the smash.

Indeed. This 3rd group behaves mostly like the 2nd group whenever they want to accomplish some materialistic goals and speculate about the "essence" of the car"s systems before the nirvanic rapture.

And when asked to submit questions to their guru, this 3rd group offers:

"If metabolism is the sign of dissociation , are lab grown mini kidneys (organoids) dissociated alters?"

"Q: What is the empirical evidence for mind ?"

"Q: When my experience tells me to give it some of my money, what does that mean and what do I do ?"

"Question: What are your favorite Dutch things (foods, customs, words)?"

"Question: How are you man?"

[tjssailor]

To Cleric K and AshvinP. What will be experienced when dying?

[AshvinP]

To Cleric K and AshvinP. What will be experienced when dying?

Q: What will be experienced when dying?
A: The (1) etheric, (2) astral, and (3) Ego members of (4) human soul detach from (5) physical body, as the latter dissolves back into the (6) material (perceptual) context, the soul experiences (7) reverse review of life experiences within etheric body before this member also dissolves into (8) Earth atmosphere, the astral-Ego members continue on through (9) realm of purification until eventually the astral also dissolves, and the Ego prepares for its next incarnation as it (10) journeys through the higher spiritual realms.

The numbers here represent intellectual concepts which are strung together to answer your question and are hardly self-evident in their meaning, beyond some very flattened caricature. So, consider, what possible greater understanding do you get from these concepts (10 is arbitrary number for sake of simplicity, probably there are many more). Even if I expand on each concept with sub-concepts, it will only lead to more questions and more concepts that present the same issues as before. For one thing, the holistic context is missing. We can't really understand life between death and rebirth without first understanding our current life between birth and death. And we can't really understand our current life-death cycles between birth and rebirth without having the overarching context of spiritual evolution through many previous incarnations.

More importantly, though, we cannot attain deep, practically useful understanding through intellectual concepts alone. Practically all of Cleric's essays/posts, and many of mine, are pointing to this reality that our abstract intellectual thinking needs to be transfigured into a more heartfelt, deeply reasoning, and active faculty. Put another way, we need to seek out the meaningful context of our thinking which asks the question, "What will be experienced when dying?", and expects a conceptual answer will satisfy it's desire for genuine knowledge. That is why we need to observe-think about our own thinking. The meaningful context which explains why the question is asked with that expectation is also the context which can provide an answer to the question. These are the higher, currently invisible ideal forces through which our normal waking cognition is guided in the sense-world, including unexamined desires, feelings, assumptions, opinions, prejudices, etc.

Consider - I did not have to answer your question in this way. I could have simply made a bunch of deep-sounding conceptual associations with esoteric references and all kinds of similar things, hoping you would then patronize my blog, watch my youtube videos, buy my book, etc. With all the essays we have posted here, it would be quite easy to compile a philosophical-spiritual book which sells. We don't do that. The reason is because we actually want to reach shared understanding of the issues at play, and to stimulate each individual to realize their own Thinking can answer their own questions if they pursue it seriously, effortfully, and with humility and good will. Each individual who participates on this forum and has the capacity to reason through analytic idealism also has the capacity to lift their thinking to higher spheres of meaningful context. They will experience the greatest existential meaning when they have turned their thinking into an active force, like tentacles of an octopus which seek out and sense the meaningful context of its environment, thereby answering some of life's deepest questions for themselves.

[Cleric K]

As I was reading Ashvin's post, the following visualization came up:



The face represents our inner being which in our age is practically unknown (I'm not speaking of the conception we have about ourselves). Our inner spiritual core expresses itself in thoughts. These are represented on the image as fragments of our living fabric which are projected forwards and become perceptible to us - for example as our inner voice.

Think about it: in our age and culture, who tries to know their true being by investigating the thoughts themselves, understanding that they in themselves are testimonies of our deeper spiritual organization? If we don't see our body but we see skin flakes falling off, it would be logical to try and learn from them something about the unseen body from which they fall. Yet it never occurs to us to do something similar about our thoughts. Instead, the fragments of our being are taken as a flat horizontal layer of logical connections which are being mapped to perceptions. The dark screen in between the face and the fragments represents the fact that modern man lives in thoughts (the fragments) but the real spiritual being is completely in the dark, behind a veil, so to speak.

What Ashvin conveyed in his post is that it is very easy to give volumes of answers in the form of the red arrows - words and words and words, tied in the most complex esoteric relationships. But the goal here is to become aware in the most real sense, of the process of these fragments being formed from our living spiritual being. Not fantasized spiritual being, which would be just more fragments and red arrows in the plane but our living and immediate willful thinking projecting into the thought-fragments.

No matter what is said about the state after death in theoretical manner, it will remain in the plane with the red arrows. But we gain true insight into the state we enter after death, when right here and now, in our Earthly state, we begin to gain awareness of the way thoughts precipitate from our "I"-activity. This answers the question in a completely different way. Not by dogmatically embellishing the plane with more arrows but by livingly gaining consciousness of the depth axis perpendicular to the screen.

This has been stated many times but it should be repeated. Every such living answer can be compared to a gymnastic exercise. It's not enough to hear the words and see them as a new batch of arrows in the plane, just like it is not enough to hear the description of a gymnastic exercise, understand it abstractly and say "I get it". No, we only get it in the true sense when we set our body in motion.

Such is the question about death. This riddle can never be solved through more arrows in the plane. We need to set our spirit in motion and find our breathing orthogonal to the plane. Only this will be able to tell us something about the state after death in a completely real way. As any true monism/non-dualism would logically imply, we're 'dead' even in this moment. It's only this cognitive split between the spiritual world from whence our activity originates and the perceptual layer, which makes people believe that there are two completely separate worlds.

Even without aiming for it, the above can serve as an illustration for the duality of non-duality. Today the ideal for many is to recognize the unreality of the fragments but at the same time one simply remains at the surface of the veil (which they call 'pure consciousness'). Our spiritual activity that acts across the veil is never investigated because it is discarded as illusionary, together with the fragments.

[Anthony66]

It's all about the two big questions. What's your stance on this?

At this point, I intellectually would maintain an idealist depth model to be the best candidate of reality. But I honestly can't identify a lived experience of any structure "behind the veil", rather that stream of mentation that mysteriously appears on the stage of my consciousness. As Ashvin says above, there will always be a half-plane of reality beyond our perceptions, and I'm not fully convinced yet that we can develop the means to peer behind the veil.

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?

As I've said, as an evangelical Christian I was disappointed by prayer. In the end it was like mouthing words into the wind. What interest do the higher spiritual forces have with the affairs of men? How would I know?

[Cleric K]

As I've said, as an evangelical Christian I was disappointed by prayer. In the end it was like mouthing words into the wind. What interest do the higher spiritual forces have with the affairs of men? How would I know?

The question secretly implies quite atomic relationship between men and higher beings. It's like men are a clump of ego-atoms clustered around an Earthly sphere, while other beings are other atoms somewhere above the sensory spectrum and the question is why would they have any interest in men? Or why would we should have any interest in them? How do we know if they really exist or they're just the wind blowing?

A lot of what is being written here also goes into the wind so this time I won't answer directly (it has already been done many times). Instead, one should simply question this spatialized model of spiritual monads, where ego-atoms emerge directly from the background of 'pure awareness', already fully distinct (aka Flat MAL).

This is a question to everyone. Everyone more or less agrees about their dissociated bubble. Some even admit the possibility of other godly bubbles but they are envisioned to relate as particles - that is, one is 'here', the other is 'there' and they exchange forces of attraction and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy.

Alright. With this model, what is the space between the ego atoms? What is the air we breathe? What is the water? What is the Earth? The Sun, the planets? What are the animals? What are the cells and particles of our body?

And we all know the templated answer: "This is how consciousness (individual or MAL) looks from the outside". People distrust that there might be structure of the invisible world yet they readily believe that the body is how their personal consciousness looks like from the outside. They are not worried that they have no clue what in their consciousness corresponds to a rib, to a bladder, to a cell, to mitochondria, etc. Yet this idea is taken up with great enthusiasm. Why is it so? Because it is very convenient for the ego. The latter is still the unquestioned authority of the inner bubble. Above is only the featureless background of 'pure' consciousness. Everything else is below it, even though only 'on paper'. The ego has no clue what in its consciousness corresponds to a cell, yet it thinks "Whatever it is, it is part of me, someday I'll find it".

So the real problem is this rigid spatialization of consciousness. The ego wants to draw the boundary of its atom and feel opaque to any other compartment of MAL.

Just think how many hard problems all this produces. We pick a tomato right off the plant. We say "this is how the tomato being looks from the outside". Then we eat it. The particles gradually become part of our body. At what point the particles are transferred and cease to be what 'the tomato being looks like from the outside' and become 'what our human consciousness looks like from the outside'? Is this a gradual transfer? Is there a moment where the particles are partly ours, partly tomato's? Or it's a digital, quantum collapse like transfer?

See how many absurdities we bring upon our head. And why? Simply because we fanatically refuse to even consider as a possibility that the rigid compartmentation of the background MAL might be unwarranted assumption (the given surely doesn't tell us anything about such atomism).

We can never address the question of prayer in any meaningful way as long as one imagines that they are completely self-sufficient atom, swelled from the background, and that every particle, every cell, every organ of the body is projection of that atom. Then the atom says "I don't need anybody. I'm self-sufficient. Even though there's no evidence for it, I believe that every tiny detail of my body, is the shadow of my own atomic being. Relations with other atomic beings are optional, let alone praying to them."

So I'm leaving it with a question. Let everyone write something about what is it in between the atomic beings? If a salt ion within my bodily fluids is a projection of my alter's consciousness, then what happens with I perspire and tiny salt crystal falls on the ground? Does MAL take over it and it becomes 'how MAL looks from the outside'? Does this mean that the experience of MAL is full of holes? Is every human, tomato, animal consciousness experienced as a dark hole from the MALs perspective? When the mountain goat licks a salt crystal, does MAL feel how parts of its consciousness are taken away and disappear into the goat hole? But why stop at the animal and plant level? Why could not a salt ion itself be a tiny atomic consciousness? Is that also taken away from MAL? What remains for MAL at all? Only holes? What's the point of speaking of One Consciousness if all there is is only opaque bubbles floating in dark medium? What makes this different from materialism, besides the fact that for no clear reason in one case the background medium is called consciousness, while in the other it is called vacuum field?

Maybe Ashvin and I have spent too much time explaining how all these problems can be solved. Maybe it's time to hear everyone else's solutions to these problems. And let me just say that answers in the form "I don't know the solutions but the consciousness-atom view seems right to me, we just need more research" is in no way different than the materialist saying "I don't know how consciousness emerges from the brain but the view seems right to me, we just need more research." In both cases there's refusal to investigate the fundamental assumptions of the views, instead of taking seriously the givens.

[AshvinP]

See how many absurdities we bring upon our head. And why? Simply because we fanatically refuse to even consider as a possibility that the rigid compartmentation of the background MAL might be unwarranted assumption (the given surely doesn't tell us anything about such atomism).
...
Maybe Ashvin and I have spent too much time explaining how all these problems can be solved. Maybe it's time to hear everyone else's solutions to these problems. And let me just say that answers in the form "I don't know the solutions but the consciousness-atom view seems right to me, we just need more research" is in no way different than the materialist saying "I don't know how consciousness emerges from the brain but the view seems right to me, we just need more research." In both cases there's refusal to investigate the fundamental assumptions of the views, instead of taking seriously the givens.

I want to add, it is not only an unwarranted assumption at this point, but a positive rejection of latest science. I have posted this before several times, but people should also consider its implications before answering the questions Cleric posed. I am also eager to hear, for a change, other's ideas about the copious Flat MAL problems and potential solutions.

But consider the following thought experiment. Imagine an extraterrestrial humanoid life form whose mode of visual recognition was based on the enumeration of the material components that make up particular [manifestations] of general types, rather than on the identification of the general types that are instantiated by particular [manifestations]. Imagine, further, that this alien lands on Earth at a particular location and encounters two dogs: a living dog and a robotic dog. The alien scans the two dogs, catalogues their material constitution for future identification, and returns home. A few years later, the alien returns to Earth to the same location and faces the two dogs it encountered in its first trip. Despite being in the presence of the same two dogs, the alien’s cognitive apparatus is such that he is only able to identify the robotic dog and not the living one. From the alien’s perspective, the living dog of the first trip has faded out of existence, and an entirely different living dog has taken its place. What this admittedly fanciful thought experiment is meant to illustrate is that, if one focuses on matter rather than on form and allows for a sufficiently extended period of time, the stream-like nature of macroscopic organisms becomes perfectly evident. The fact that this does not happen to be easily perceptible to us does not make it any less true or important.

- Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Science (2018)

[AshvinP]

As Ashvin says above, there will always be a half-plane of reality beyond our perceptions, and I'm not fully convinced yet that we can develop the means to peer behind the veil.

To clarify, in addition to the implicit spatial idolatry and corresponding atomized view of spiritual beings, we should resist the urge to map our own consciousness at any given time onto all human perspectives of Deep MAL. The "half plane beyond" I refer to is simply another way of saying, "what is still unknown to me at any given stage of development". If I come to know the spiritual activity which is reflected by our Earthy kingdoms, or by our solar system, this is still major progress, even if there are other solar systems and galaxies still unknown. The fact that the latter always exist is simply a reminder to approach my current state of knowledge, at any given time, in mood of solemness, humility, and gratitude that there is still so much more awaiting my knowledge. And that is what we can call mood of "prayer". It should also encourage us to understand the Cosmic depth is, in fact, awaiting us on our co-redemptive mission; "the creation groans in anticipation". We are bringing quality of meaning into formative activity of the One World which would not be there without our efforts. Developing our higher thinking faculties makes this truly creative aspect of our inner activity more and more clear and certain.

[Anthony66]

As Ashvin says above, there will always be a half-plane of reality beyond our perceptions, and I'm not fully convinced yet that we can develop the means to peer behind the veil.

To clarify, in addition to the implicit spatial idolatry and corresponding atomized view of spiritual beings, we should resist the urge to map our own consciousness at any given time onto all human perspectives of Deep MAL. The "half plane beyond" I refer to is simply another way of saying, "what is still unknown to me at any given stage of development". If I come to know the spiritual activity which is reflected by our Earthy kingdoms, or by our solar system, this is still major progress, even if there are other solar systems and galaxies still unknown. The fact that the latter always exist is simply a reminder to approach my current state of knowledge, at any given time, in mood of solemness, humility, and gratitude that there is still so much more awaiting my knowledge. And that is what we can call mood of "prayer". It should also encourage us to understand the Cosmic depth is, in fact, awaiting us on our co-redemptive mission; "the creation groans in anticipation". We are bringing quality of meaning into formative activity of the One World which would not be there without our efforts. Developing our higher thinking faculties makes this truly creative aspect of our inner activity more and more clear and certain.

Where does the "awakening experience" fit in all of this? By this I mean the sometimes spontaneous experience certain people have of subject/object collapse, after which their view of reality is forever transformed. I know you and Cleric have touched on meditation practices which lead to a peaceful thought-free, blissful , "folded" state. But many of these awakening experiences are not precisely of this character and often occur in routine daily conscious states.