Suggest a book or chapter on Consciousness-only Model

[harpreetkdev]

Hello All,

Growing up in India, we have a cultural belief about Consciousness-only model.

I am looking for suggestions on books / chapters by Bernardo Kastrup or any author that focuses on Consciousness idealism. I started reading "Materialism is Baloney" but the initial parts are focusing on refuting Materialism.

I have read Rupert Spiras book on Consciousness and I am a fan of it.

Pls suggest any books or chapters from books that doesn't focus on refuting Materialism BUT focuses more on Consciousness model

[Lou Gold]

Hello All,

Growing up in India, we have a cultural belief about Consciousness-only model.

I am looking for suggestions on books / chapters by Bernardo Kastrup or any author that focuses on Consciousness idealism. I started reading "Materialism is Baloney" but the initial parts are focusing on refuting Materialism.

I have read Rupert Spiras book on Consciousness and I am a fan of it.

Pls suggest any books or chapters from books that doesn't focus on refuting Materialism BUT focuses more on Consciousness model

Hello harpreetkdey,

I don't know that it would qualify strictly as "consciousness only" idealism and I've not yet read it but the blurbs and reviews suggest that Mark Vernon's, latest book on Dante's Divine Comedy may offer an East-West bridge that you may find interesting.

[Eugene I.]

Hello All,
Growing up in India, we have a cultural belief about Consciousness-only model.
Pls suggest any books or chapters from books that doesn't focus on refuting Materialism BUT focuses more on Consciousness model

[AshvinP]

Hello All,

Growing up in India, we have a cultural belief about Consciousness-only model.

I am looking for suggestions on books / chapters by Bernardo Kastrup or any author that focuses on Consciousness idealism. I started reading "Materialism is Baloney" but the initial parts are focusing on refuting Materialism.

I have read Rupert Spiras book on Consciousness and I am a fan of it.

Pls suggest any books or chapters from books that doesn't focus on refuting Materialism BUT focuses more on Consciousness model

May I suggest that it is time for humanity to abandon beliefs and seek knowledge? We have modeled all that can be modeled. Now we only speculate about our own models of reality - we model the models - while reality itself fades further and further into the background of our consciousness. Our thinking vision is fixed firmly on the past and our willpower to seed the future is nonexistent. Kastrup's latest article on "how you and me can be the same" is a case in point. In it, he posits the idealist equivalent of the "infinite multiverse" in order to maintain the atomized view of human consciousness via his ontological concept of "dissociation", which is simply dualism and pluralism in bad disguise.

It is time for humanity to stop speculating and theorizing about what we can know and do and start knowing and doing it. We can seek to actually experience the gradient of universal Consciousness we all share, rather than only talk about experiencing it in theory. In this connection, I suggest to you Steiner's Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. It is rooted in evolutionary idealism and monism. Not just in theory, but in practice. It builds on the foundations of the great German idealists, as well as the Eastern and Western mystics, but also goes well beyond what they could imagine for the potential of our One Mind.

What is common to these spirits is a strong feeling that in man's self-knowledge arises a sun which illuminates something beyond the incidental individual personality of the beholder. What Spinoza realized in the ethereal height of pure thought, that “the human soul has a sufficient knowledge of the eternal and infinite nature of God,” lived in them as immediate perception; and for them self-knowledge was the path by which this eternal and infinite nature was to be reached. It was clear to them that self-knowledge in its true form endows man with a new sense which opens to him a world that has the same relation to what can be attained without this sense as does the world of the physically sighted to that of the blind.

It would not be easy to find a better description of the importance of this new sense than that given by J. G. Fichte in his Berlin lectures in the year 1813. “Imagine a world of people born blind, who therefore know only those objects and their conditions which exist through the sense of touch. Go among them and speak to them of colors and of the other conditions which exist only for sight through the medium of light. Either you will speak to them of nothing, and it will be better if they say so, for in this way you will soon notice your mistake, and, if you cannot open their eyes, will put an end to this fruitless talk. — Or for some reason they will want to give a meaning to your teaching; in this case they will only be able to understand it through what they know from touch: they will want to feel the light, the colors, and the other conditions of visibility; they will think that they feel them, will, within the realm of touch, make up something that they call color and deceive themselves with it. Then they will misunderstand, turn things around, and misinterpret.”

This new sense leads to insights which do not exist for one who does not perceive in self-knowledge that which differentiates it from all other kinds of knowing. One to whom this sense has not opened itself thinks that self-knowledge arises in a way similar to knowledge through external senses, or through some other means acting from the outside.

He thinks, “Knowledge is knowledge.” However, in one case its object is something situated in the external world, in the other case it is in his own soul. He hears only words, at best abstract thoughts, in what, for those who look deeper, constitutes the basis of their inner life namely, in the dictum that in all other kinds of knowing the object is outside of ourselves, while in self-knowledge we stand inside the object; that every other object comes into contact with us as something completed and closed, while in our self we actively and creatively weave what we observe in ourselves. This may appear as an explanation consisting of mere words, perhaps as a triviality, but if properly understood, it can also appear as a higher light which illuminates all other knowledge in a new way. He to whom it appears under the first aspect is in the same situation as a blind man to whom one says, A brilliant object is there. He hears the words, but for him brilliance does not exist. One can unite in oneself the sum of the knowledge of a period; if one does not perceive the significance of self-knowledge then in the higher sense all knowledge is but blind.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA007/English/