A Simple, Logical System for Proving the Existence of God — Idealist Metaphysics

[AshvinP]

Can you elaborate on this, and maybe provide an example?

Grant,

Sorry to add another post before you respond, but I thought of another example of the sort you asked for. It is more recent for humanity and perhaps more familiar to the idealist community - Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Certainly consciousness (ideation) had to shift for depth psychology in general to become possible as a theoretical pursuit, but actually I want to use this example for the second leg of the metamorphosis, from theoretical, conceptual perception feeding back into a shift in consciousness. In our age of increasing spiritual freedom, this is especially important for people to grasp. The evolving Idea gives rise to theoretical perception-conception, and that in turn feeds back, at an ever-growing intensity, into how the Idea evolves (which is not to say it ultimately determines how the Idea evolves).

You may know Freud sought to explain all human experience in terms of psyho-sexual instincts deep within the subconscious. The latter was his reduction base. If a person developed a certain affinity for mystical spirituality as an adult, for ex., Freud was satisfied to attribute that to repressed or 'sublimated' sexual energy, most likely from childhood experiences, which has been transmuted into a spiritual outlook. That was his interpretation of the Oedipus myth, for ex. So his own conceptualization of sexual energy is spread over all psychic phenomena, past and present, including ancient spiritual mythology. Why? Because of intellectual pride and, related, because he never sought higher knowledge of the spiritual. He reached a primary physical drive of human activity and stopped there, and then sought to explain all world phenomena as its manifestation.

We will find similar approaches in much of modern philosophy across the board. Adler sought to reduce all psychic phenomena to a drive for "power", developing Nietzsche's will-to-power more precisely, which in turn was developed by Nietzsche in accordance with Schopenhauer's "blind Will" as the ontic prime, i.e. the reduction base for human ideation, including spiritual ideation. Between these three or four conceptual systems alone, we are dealing with a massive influence on Western thinking as it still exists today. These attempts all share the commonality of failing to concretely and livingly imagine something higher than the physical-intellectual. Instead of seeking to understand something like mythic poetry on its higher spiritual basis, it was reduced to manifestations of base physical drives.

“If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.”

There was not even the impulse to ask, "how did the base physical drives precipitate from much higher spiritual activities which we cannot conceptualize?", let alone seek the higher perspective from which this question can be answered. This is why the question of higher knowledge, and failure to seek it, is of utmost practical significance for our time. We live in the age of self-fulfilling 'prophecies' (intellectual theories). When Freud began theorizing, young children hardly harbored any psycho-sexual impulses, let alone repressed them so they formed the basis of all future adult endeavors. Today, because these early adopters failed to seek out anything higher than their own intellectual models, it's a safe bet the average 10 year old is filled with just as much psycho-sexual ideation as the average 30 year old. Now, they do actually permeate younger consciousness and transmute into all sorts of egoic endeavors in adult life. And, to add insult to injury, the academic looks at this and says, "see, Freud was right all along!"

Human consciousness, therefore, is being remade in the image of its lowest intellectual conceptions, and the most educated and 'enlightened' among us are especially happy to aid the effort. We can find Freudian psychoanalytic theory permeating many critical idealist perspectives as well. I am not saying these models need to be banished from existence, but redeemed in the Light of higher spiritual consciousness. Yet more models about "spiritual reality" won't do either, as it is only more of the same reduction of higher cognitions, i.e. moral ideations of spiritual man, into mineralized physical concepts. Once we become aware of how these things develop and manifest, however, we can easily discern the need for a radical shift in thinking with respect to these deepest topics of human existence. The time has come for us to abandon our conceptual frameworks as idols and utilize them as only symbols and tools for steering our spirit towards its higher nature from within.

"As long as you build up a scaffolding you remain in the thought customary to you in the physical world... this is related to the full reality not at all like the inner framework of a house to the complete building, but only like the outer scaffolding upon which the builders stand. This has to be taken down again when the building is completed. In the same way the scaffolding of thought has to be taken down again if one wishes to have the truth before one as it really is."
- Rudolf Steiner

[GrantHenderson]

Indeed, the question is whether we can draw parallels between “life and death” and our living experiences. This may seem like an oxymoron, but only because our concept of death is based on that which isn’t in living context. From our living, outer-observations of death, all we can directly deduce is that the natural body is no longer a function of the spirit. Our only experiences of a perceived disconnection with our own body (sense perceptions) is through altered forms of consciousness. We should draw upon these when considering the implications of death. Some of these induce a reduction of consciousness, some induce an elevation of consciousness, and others appear to do both (sleeping/dreaming).

But there is a big difference between altering our state of consciousness, inducing it in some way, and developing it through inner effort. To discern this difference, we must remember it's not only our outer observations which give our understanding of "death", or anything else, but our inner conceptual reasoning. If the latter remains the same, and the mode of observing changes, then why should we get any more living understanding of what death actually is, in its essence? This is why thinking is left in the blind spot - if simply altering the mode of perceiving gives us a higher understanding of what is under consideration, then things are much easier. We can ingest substances, or do a few meditations, and reach this understanding, and then stop, rinse, and repeat as often or not as often as we like. If our very mode of thinking must shift as we move from outer to inner, however, then it means developing, maintaining, and growing new thinking skills, which is ongoing effortful practice. Then our intellectual judgments of altered experience no longer suffice. We then need to approach it like developing and growing any new skill, such as playing an instrument. 

Who wants to do that for thinking itself? To withhold making judgments on all manner of fundamental topics of consideration, to refrain from playing the instrument which is the human soul, until the skills are developed? It feels much better, and safer, to continue making judgments but never reach firm conclusions - maybe after death we dissolve back into MAL bliss, maybe we continue on as alters and reincarnate after some indeterminate period, maybe we enter eternal paradise with God and angels, who really knows? This is the stance we question here as born of intellectual pride, fear of the unknown depths of soul, and therefore intentional incompleteness of reasoning (mostly subconscious). We must confront the natural fear of the spiritual within us - it feels very uncomfortable and dangerous to abandon the stable world of outer perceptions and intellectual judgments (natural), and turn to the world of spiritual experience (moral), which our own soul activity is always bound up with. Our darkest qualities may then be reflected back to us and/or we may lose our stable perceptual identity completely in the void.

So we need a good deal of inner courage to confront spiritual knowledge from within. The outer world of stable perceptions must darken to our will and our thinking, and we must enter entirely unknown, dynamic, and seemingly unstable territory within our soul to unveil the higher Light behind the abyss of darkness inside. In ancient times, these things took place in the Mystery centers - it was quite the physical and mental ordeal for the initiate to go through before ascending to perception-cognition of higher worlds. Something akin to physical death was actually necessary. Now, the 'mystery center' is the heart and soul of the individual. We are all potential initiates today and the physical ordeal is mostly absent, but the spiritual ordeal is still a frightening prospect, especially in modern culture where ordeals of all sorts are discouraged. Confronting our inner shadows feels just as frightening as physical death for many of us. People want to be protected and insulated from every little danger, outer and inner. Yet these people are not aware there is another option in which we grow spiritually strong, beautiful, and wise through confronting the darkness within our soul to transfigure and redeem it. 

https://rsarchive.org/Articles/GA036/En ... l_e04.html
"The habits of thinking that have come to be accepted in the modern study of nature [Naturerkenntnis] can yield no satisfying results for the study of the soul. What one would grasp with these habits of thinking must either be spread out in repose before the soul or, if the object of knowledge is in movement, the soul must feel itself extricated from this movement. For to participate in the movement of the object of knowledge means to lose oneself in it, to transform oneself, so to speak, into it.

How should the soul grasp itself, however, in an act of knowing in which it must lose itself? It can expect self-knowledge only in an activity in which, step by step, it comes into possession of itself.

This can only be an activity that is creative. Here, however, a cause for uncertainty arises at once for the knower. He believes he will lapse into personal arbitrariness.

It is precisely this arbitrariness that he gives up in the knowledge of nature. He excludes himself and lets nature hold sway. He seeks certainty in a realm which his individual soul being does not reach. In seeking self-knowledge he cannot conduct himself in this way. He must take himself along wherever he seeks to know. He therefore can find no nature on his path to self-knowledge. For where she would encounter him, there he is no longer to be found.

This, however, provides just the experience that is needed with regard to the spirit. One cannot expect other than to find the spirit when, through one's own activity, nature, as it were, melts away; that is, when one experiences oneself ever more strongly in proportion to one's feeling this melting away.

If one fills the soul with something that afterward proves to be like a dream in its illusory character, and one experiences the illusory in its true nature, then one becomes stronger in one's own experience of self. In confronting a dream, one's thinking corrects the belief one has in the dream's reality while dreaming. Concerning the activity of fantasy, this correction is not needed because one did not have this belief. Concerning the meditative soul activity, to which one devotes oneself for spirit-knowledge, one cannot be satisfied with mere thought correction. One must correct by experiencing. One must first create the illusory thinking with one's activity and then extinguish it by a different, equally strong, activity.

In this act of extinguishing, another activity awakens, the spirit-knowing activity. For if the extinguishing is real, then the force for it must come from an entirely different direction than from nature. With the experienced illusion one has dispersed what nature can give; what inwardly arises during the dispersion is no longer nature.

With this activity something is needed that does not come into consideration in the study of nature: inner courage." (Steiner, On the Life of the Soul)

The association you make between “death and responsibility” is interesting. It might first be important to note that taking on more responsibility than we can handle is just as irresponsible as taking on “too little responsibility”. Our moral obligation is to optimize circumstance in the greatest responsibility we can bear to maximize the probability of surplus for the degree of freedom we invest. If our degrees of freedom for choice are limited then we should accordingly limit that which we make ourselves responsible for. Furthermore, we can also take into consideration, not only our degrees of freedom for choice in each moment of action, but also across our entire life expectancy; how much energy is spent on us from the universe, and how much energy we expend to the universe throughout our lifespan. This puts into context our order within the complexity chain of consciousness. We can reasonably infer that our influence on the world is meant to be limited only to that which is expected of us throughout our lifespan, so our influence on the world is to some degree proportional to our capabilities with respect to the moral demands of the world. Thus, it is our moral responsibility to live and also to die. For a long time, I have considered that the greatest act we could perform to serve the universe would be to commit suicide on its behalf (only if beneficial — I dont believe that our limited capacities for living often, or ever require this level of responsibility).

This is similar to our lungs, and how they only produce a limited amount of oxygen on regular intervals. If our lungs instead constantly produced some overwhelmingly massive amount of oxygen, we would die of oxygen toxicity. But as things are, our lungs intake oxygen and it spreads throughout our bloodstream in useful quantities. There is; the moment of oxygen intake, oxygen transfer, and oxygen delivery — repeat. Our oxygen intake can’t exceed the limit of that which can be transferred to our bloodstream at once before we experience oxygen toxicity, etc. Meanwhile, our nervous system records whether our lungs provide enough oxygen to our bloodstream, and moderates the rate of oxygen intake accordingly.

The lung metaphor can be taken much deeper, but that might be a good spot to stop for an introduction. Though my larger proposal is that death has 2 stages (all part of 1 true stage). Ego dissolution and then unity with God. The first stage probably involves a life review and then an opportunity to wash away our sins with the helping hand of God. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if these processes were different for everyone, depending on their moral standing and primary modes of action (personality) within this life.

Related to what I responded above, I think most people today are hardly at risk of taking on "too much" responsibility, given how little is currently taken. As a precondition, we must know what we are actually capable of doing with our Spirit before assessing whether it is too much to take on. We simply won't have that knowledge until we delve into the depths of the soul and unveil it. This can be done, as Steiner indicates above. You are certainly correct that there is great balancing Wisdom at work in both the microcosmic human organism and the Macrocosm. But that Wisdom is still an ideal for us at this stage. We wouldn't even know where to begin balancing the physical, life, and soul processes if we were given creative responsibility for them. Is that a reason to say, "well I guess my current level of responsibility is fine because I don't know enough to do more, and would therefore screw it up"? In my view, it's a reason to seek more creative knowledge from within through the Spirit. It is how Wisdom beckons for us to come and join her in fashioning the Cosmos through our free agency.

"the higher, more integrated Idea must itself be present as a precondition to all theorizing, which then leads the Idea back to itself at a higher level. In that sense, it is the evolved Idea which makes possible more expansive perception which, in turn, makes possible the same Idea at a higher level of holistic integration."

Can you elaborate on this, and maybe provide an example?

So you propose that natural laws evolve in response to the evolving realizations of each individual? I’m not sure that the participatory universe works quite like that. Evidently, our evolving realizations can imply dualism, but this doesn’t give the universe laws which make it dualistic. There are laws intrinsic to our experience that connect all experiences, which cannot be altered by our perceiving/thinking activity that may make ideations indicating otherwise. If natural laws did evolve in response to our thinking/perceiving activity, and these were allowed by the moral/metaphysical laws, then they would also be implications of moral/metaphysical laws, and would thereby just be what is established by the moral/metaphysical laws. The question of whether they evolve over time, or whether they are “always there” is a philosophical speculation that is hardly even worth pondering about as far as I can tell. All natural laws are reflections of what is required for phenomenal experience, and are only induced by the experiential agent insofar as they are required for their phenomenal experiencing. I don’t believe that there is anything superfluous beyond that.

To be clear, my proposition isn’t that natural laws directly correspond to moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws, but that these moral/perceptual/metaphysical laws cast a shadow on the natural world. And if I am misinterpreting your position, please let me know

I would really point to every paradigmatic shift since the birth of philosophy-science 2,500-3,000 years ago as examples. First, the shift in consciousness had to occur, in perception-cognition, before mathematical and scientific theorizing became possible. Consider this passage from Jean Gebser: 

During the heyday of the Baroque era in the seventeenth century, an age which also attempted to get beyond the perspectival strictures of Renaissance space in the arts, there was a “downright frenzied forward thrust . . . in mathematics” of which Colerus speaks. The traditional and predominantly static geometry of measurement set down by Euclid is displaced, after a nearly two-thousand-year exclusive reign, by Descartes’ “analytic geometry” (1637), by Desargues’ “projective geometry” based on perception and illustration rather than on measurement (!) (1639), and by the “dynamic mathematics” (1638, 1687) of Galileo and Newton (see above p. 100). Projective geometry in particular engendered to a greater degree than the others the modern “non-Euclidian” geometries which brought into being the fourth dimension that Einstein introduced into physics in the form of “time.” These new mathematical concepts, moreover, were the foundation on which for the first time modern technology could be developed. Even bythemselves—and there are other parallel phenomena which are familiar to every mathematician—these facts are a clear indication of the “irruption of time” into mathematical thinking. They elicit a wealth of phenomena of which the foremost, the technologizing and four-dimensionalizing of our world, speak an unambiguous language.

Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin . Ohio University Press. Kindle Edition. 

So we are speaking of collective transformations here, but of course this manifests through individual human consciousness as well. We could say there is a 'top-down' precipitation of higher cognitions (moral laws) which are met by human individuals from the 'bottom-up' and manifested concretely in the world, and then we observe the manifestations abstractly, i.e. we ignore our own collective and individual participation in their manifestation, and call them "natural laws". In the modern age, the latter were then extrapolated indefinitely into the past and into the future as entities existing entirely independent of the human soul and its moral valence. I agree, there is little point speculating abstractly about this too much - the key is to actually undertake a reunion between the realm of moral laws, which reside within the soul, and the realm of natural laws which we perceive outside of us. The extent to which these two realms are kept separate from one another, inner (moral) from outer (natural), is entirely a function of each individual's cognitive development - it is not the same for everyone at any given time. We must abandon this modern abstract uniformitarianism in philosophy, science, art, and spirituality. That is what we are pointing to here. A path for each individual to actually undertake this reuniting of the 'opposites' which requires a sacrifice of abstraction - a death of the intellectual ego - to be born again from within as living thinking.

I think I understand your underlying argument better now, and I generally agree.

Since our experience is characterized by moral law, our immersion within the thinking/perceiving activities of inner experiences reveals the moral laws driving them, which in turn connects us closer to our soul driving inner-motivations and away from outer-observations, or external source motivations. Laws which we do not understand by their moral grounding through inner-experiences cast the shadow of a material makeup, which we recognize as and through sense-perceptions and outer-observations. We then analyze these outer-observations to derive natural laws, but most often fail to recognize they’re grounding within the moral laws of our inner-experiences. As such, what we observe of natural law is what is known to our soul but lost in our thinking.
However, I do think it’s important to emphasize that it isn’t the laws themselves which are “evolving” but the experienced characterizations of those laws from ideational to observational in nature.

Yes. I think you're right that it is better to understand life after death by analyzing the processes of our inner experiences rather than just observing the effects of different levels knowledge and experience.

Indeed, while the thoughts we produce are of the same source, they are passing thoughts still. I think the law which binds present thoughts with previous thoughts is that present thoughts must be compatible with previous thoughts in both ideational and spatial-temporal respects. This relates to the concept of death because it represents the end and beginning of new experience on a micro-level. We have no reason to claim that, what is comprehended of our evolving experience, isn’t the same kind of evolution that occurs on a macro-level of conscious activity.

I am going to have to end my conversation here unfortunately. Unfortunately my mental and spiritual health is declining recently, so I’m not as likely to give your thoughts the attention they deserve. I’ve recently fallen in love with a coworker/close friend who is soon getting married (again, it’s a problem). She is the most virtuous person I have ever met, who has known many lifetimes worth of suffering but manages to be wonderfully joyous and loving. It’s too difficult for me to have to see her every day from a distance. My thinking is cloudy because of it. I need to dedicate time and effort to re-develop my sense of self-purpose. Falling out of love is among the most difficult willing tasks because it goes entirely against our thinking/perceiving nature, but can be accomplished by directing our love inwardly onto personal values and goals.

I suppose I can actually relate this to your second comment quick — the fall of our spiritual awareness in substitute for pure intellectual pursuits. The woman I mentioned is not inclined in intellectual manners by any means, yet she lives life more rationally than the most intellectually inclined people I have met.

I want to thank you for how enlightening and open minded you have been. I have learned a great deal from this encounter. I expect that I will engage here again in the future.

[AshvinP]

I think I understand your underlying argument better now, and I generally agree.

Since our experience is characterized by moral law, our immersion within the thinking/perceiving activities of inner experiences reveals the moral laws driving them, which in turn connects us closer to our soul driving inner-motivations and away from outer-observations, or external source motivations. Laws which we do not understand by their moral grounding through inner-experiences cast the shadow of a material makeup, which we recognize as and through sense-perceptions and outer-observations. We then analyze these outer-observations to derive natural laws, but most often fail to recognize they’re grounding within the moral laws of our inner-experiences. As such, what we observe of natural law is what is known to our soul but lost in our thinking.
However, I do think it’s important to emphasize that it isn’t the laws themselves which are “evolving” but the experienced characterizations of those laws from ideational to observational in nature.

Yes. I think you're right that it is better to understand life after death by analyzing the processes of our inner experiences rather than just observing the effects of different levels knowledge and experience.

Indeed, while the thoughts we produce are of the same source, they are passing thoughts still. I think the law which binds present thoughts with previous thoughts is that present thoughts must be compatible with previous thoughts in both ideational and spatial-temporal respects. This relates to the concept of death because it represents the end and beginning of new experience on a micro-level. We have no reason to claim that, what is comprehended of our evolving experience, isn’t the same kind of evolution that occurs on a macro-level of conscious activity.

I am going to have to end my conversation here unfortunately. Unfortunately my mental and spiritual health is declining recently, so I’m not as likely to give your thoughts the attention they deserve. I’ve recently fallen in love with a coworker/close friend who is soon getting married (again, it’s a problem). She is the most virtuous person I have ever met, who has known many lifetimes worth of suffering but manages to be wonderfully joyous and loving. It’s too difficult for me to have to see her every day from a distance. My thinking is cloudy because of it. I need to dedicate time and effort to re-develop my sense of self-purpose. Falling out of love is among the most difficult willing tasks because it goes entirely against our thinking/perceiving nature, but can be accomplished by directing our love inwardly onto personal values and goals.

I suppose I can actually relate this to your second comment quick — the fall of our spiritual awareness in substitute for pure intellectual pursuits. The woman I mentioned is not inclined in intellectual manners by any means, yet she lives life more rationally than the most intellectually inclined people I have met.

I want to thank you for how enlightening and open minded you have been. I have learned a great deal from this encounter. I expect that I will engage here again in the future.

Grant,

I'm sorry to hear about your romantic troubles. Without going into details, I can relate in terms of my soon-to-be ex-wife. It isn't the same situation, but it's certainly a trying ordeal to go through. What makes it bearable, even an optimistic ray of sunshine, is this spiritual path that we are speaking of here. Not because of pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams, but because of its immanently reasonable and verifiable reality. I will offer some closing remarks and I hope you get to read them sometime soon, but I won't expect a response. I thank you for engaging in this discussion as well!

Ultimately, what science knows as the 'laws of nature' reflect our own evolving cognition. We can see this more clearly if we understand that all natural laws deal with spatial dynamics. They describe how perceptions transform in space from 'frame to frame'. Yet the essence of the spiritual Cosmos is not spatial. There are no spatial boundaries for our willing, feeling, or thinking activities. Our inner experiences don't have spatial dimensions. If that inner activity, at a transpersonal level, is what grounds the outer world of perceptions studied by science, then the laws of nature they derive must only be symbolic of inner dynamics and evolving along with our modes of cognition.

For example, quantum mechanics speaks about how particle properties decohere from states of 'superposition'. This dynamic is a reflection of the fact that our intellect fixes archetypal meaning which is durational into spatial dimension. Would this be a valid law of nature for a being whose cognition does not need to represent meaning with spatial dimension? These could be very lowly or highly evolved beings in relation to modern man. So even the most fundamental laws of physics are pointing us towards a reality which is of an evolving thought-nature, and which we are inextricably bound up with. Our intellect and its concepts, as well as outer perceptions mediated by those concepts, precipitate from this higher cognitive nature. The precipitated concepts cannot analyze what it precipitated from, any more than snowflakes on the ground could be figured in a way as to give understanding of the invisible atmospheric dynamics which gave rise to them. They simply aren't the right tools or the right vantage point for reaching that understanding.

What the intellect can give us is broad and fuzzy resolution on the archetypal dynamics involved, especially through analogical reasoning. We can construct a conceptual scaffolding to survey the cognitive evolutionary progression at work. For example, why there is so much differentiation within humanity. Why are there different cultures, so many nations, several different races, and two genders? Why do individuals roughly fall into a configuration of four different temperaments? Why are there specific philosophical and scientific positions that most people subscribe to consciously or unconsciously? With conceptual reasoning, we can discern an archetypal pattern to the emergence of these and other differentiations in nature and culture. We aren't analyzing the finished content of these categories (like philosophies), but the patterns of their emergence through history. Regardless of ontology, we discern that these all flow from past unities. The material says, at some point millions of years ago, there were no males and females, only asexual organisms. The mystic says there was only asexual Consciousness. The theist says there was only God and Adam before there was Eve, Abel, Cain, etc.

As long as you build up a scaffolding you remain in the thought customary to you in the physical world... this is related to the full reality not at all like the inner framework of a house to the complete building, but only like the outer scaffolding upon which the builders stand. This has to be taken down again when the building is completed. In the same way the scaffolding of thought has to be taken down again if one wishes to have the truth before one as it really is.

As long as the abstract conceptual scaffoling is kept up, speculating on a long forgotten past, it has absolutely no use in reintegrating our divisions into their higher Unities, and in fact becomes counter-productive the longer it stays up. It becomes a crutch and an excuse to avoid deeper understanding. Instead, we can seek to grow our intellect into higher spheres of consciousness where these unities are living realities. Jung spoke of the anima and animus in every individual, the feminine or masculine inner aspect of every male or female, respectively. By integrating this counter-aspect to the physical gender, we can return to a primal Unity before the division of genders. With higher cognition, we can actually grow into the domains of ideal activity where we perceive our own inner female or male aspect. And why shouldn't this be the case? After all, our cognition has evolved and is still evolving like everything else. We can discern this progression in great detail with our sound conceptual reasoning, free from prejudice. All evidence suggests it occurs much more rapidly than we are accustomed to think.

In fact, the differentiations have been embedded in outer nature to point us back towards our inner nature to be redeemed in higher consciousness. They are a dim reflection of all that still remains subconscious within us. We perceive different genders because our inner counter-genders have not been fully integrated. The cultural institution of marriage is also a symbol pointing us inwards. This is why I say the path of Spirit makes the separation from my wife much more bearable. It's not simply a vague religious feeling that things will be OK. We can only overcome the inevitable suffering and tragedies of physical existence if we have living knowledge of the spiritual. By overcome, I mean confront squarely, integrate in a healthy way, and actually view it as a blessing which gives us the opportunity to discover our higher unified Self from within. These things must become living realities. The Divine moral forces can be experienced inwardly as the wellspring of our entire existence in a precise and concrete way as we grow in living knowledge and wisdom.

Moral ideals are both the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega. They are the forces through which differentiated nature precipitated from the unified Spirit in the distant primordial ages and the forces which draw us upwards from nature back to the Spirit, back to Divine Love which satisfies all possible needs and longings. Logic and creative thinking is a moral force in this way. When we are careful to think through the force of logic and nothing else, we shield our reasoning from our own egoistic desires, impulses, preferences, antipathies, etc. We weave together a thought-organism which proceeds from thought to thought out of logical necessity. When we make this logical thinking active and creative, instead of simply passive and consumptive, as is the habit of the intellect, and we become conscious of how we make it creative, we wield the power to actually loosen the tight constraints of those ingrained prejudicial temperaments, traits, habits, patterns of feeling and thinking, and natural-cultural divisions of all sort.

We can think of every sense impression and concept as something we take from Nature, a debt we accrue to her. Through the ages, we have loaded ourselves up with debts and we continue to do so for our own conveniences and pleasures, including the abstract intellectual speculation which funds many institutions which keep the cycle going. Our perceiving and thinking is constantly consuming experiences which we feel to be entirely external and independent of our own inner activity. This debt places us under an oppressive burden - we are always anxious and stressed about our spiritual finance situation, depressed at how seemingly little existential meaning we have to show for all that material and mental spending.

What is the function of sense impressions and concepts? To satisfy various desires and longings through knowledge. By making our thinking consciously creative, we begin to pay these debts off by giving spiritual content back to Nature's appearances. We begin to satisfy our own longings, including the love we are always seeking from others, by the strength of active and heartfelt thinking towards the higher worlds who actually have the capacity to provide us the eternal Love we need. Far from being the overwhelming responsibility most people fear from approaching the Divine in living thinking, it is a redemption, a jubilee, from the oppressive spiritual debts which weigh us down.

"My yoke is easy and my burden is light."