Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 30, 2022 6:10 am
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.