New topic split from 'concise criticism of analytic idealism' thread.

[Federica]

Hi Federica,

I was wondering if you noticed BK answered your question about bodily boundaries and what your thoughts were on his answer? As I'm sure you know by now, I have my own thoughts on it but it would be nice to hear yours first, whenever you have a chance.

Hi Ashvin,

Yes I have noticed Bernardo’s answer and I am unsurprisingly unsatisfied with it. I can certainly write down my thoughts about it, but let me warn you, and anyone else tempted to read here - this is going to be as boring and pedantic as it can be!


First, I would get out of the way the part of the question he hasn’t touched at all - NDEs and other similar phenomena. He could have neutralized that part by saying that the boundary is not perfect but porous. Ok let's drop it. Another detail, he mentioned that the body boundary can at a minimum be redefined as nervous system boundary, maybe to avoid remarks about skin, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I am taking note of that in what follows.


Now, I consider BK an intellectually honest person, however I have noticed that the body boundary as exposed in ‘The idea of the world’ and the way he has set up his argument in the video are somewhat different. Briefly, the statement under scrutiny originates from our ordinary habit of, in BK’s own published words, “delineating a subset of the physical world on functional or structural grounds and treating the subset as a separate entity in some sense. The question is whether such delineation is ontic or epistemic”. As we know, he then argues that such functional / structural delineation is ontic and non-arbitrary for living beings and epistemically convenient, conceptual and arbitrary for all other physical objects. My critique was that the delineation seems epistemic in both cases, and that picking up the boundary of the physical body as a way out of the decomposition problem of MAL seems arbitrary, not ontic.


In the video though, BK takes a different turn and says “...my argument that physical objects are only nominal is on the basis of function, while the argument for carving out our bodies is not based on function, it is based on experience”. I see this as a strategy to dismiss the question by detaching ‘function’ from his own argument as developed in the book, then throwing ‘function’ as a lasso of conflation around my critique in an attempt to restrain it within the supposed misunderstanding of function: “to carve out living beings as proper parts of the universe is ontic but it’s not done on a functional basis, and that’s the conflation that is in the question. She is lifting the basis of my argument for saying that physical objects are just nominal functions and she is bringing it to the argument about bodies being actual subsets of the universe. But my argument for that has nothing to do with functionality. And that’s the error”. This really seems an expedient to attract attention towards a supposed dichotomy function/experience (absent in the original model) only to conclude that my question is on the wrong side of the dichotomy. Moreover - and I can be wrong here, I am not used to the methods of philosophy - I would suspect that founding the argument on such a dichotomy would be logically wrong (big coincidence, BK doesn't do it in the book). Because if I want to demonstrate that, within a given set of elements, a property - for example quality of ontic delineation - only belongs to some subset of elements - such as for example living beings - in relation to other subsets which do not possess the property, I should run on all subsets a common test not two separate ones - such as for instance functional/structural carveout - and show how in that occurrence, different subsets display or do not display the property. So one should test the same criterion of functional/structural carving-out, not two different criteria, on all subsets, to demonstrate that only one subset passes the test. According to BK living bodies alone pass the test.


Again, in the book, and not in the video answer, BK respects this logic and concludes that the functionality of living beings is ontically separate, and not of epistemic convenience, insofar as it “does not merely help us structure the conceptual knowledge of the physical world”. This functionality consists in the living body/the nervous system being “intrinsically associated” with experience. “I cannot just decide that the chair I am sitting in is integral to the body in the way that I can decide that the handle is integral to the mug. (...) The criterion here is not merely functional/structural, but the range of mentation intrinsically associated with the body” where “there is no epistemic freedom to move boundaries at will".


That’s the diversion that’s been used to avoid the question. What’s the part of sincere conviction versus rhetorical habit I’m not sure. Another thing I noticed is that in the examples of 'experience' only sensory perceptions are mentioned, like the photons in Australia, the needles in the arm, and so on. Be it by coincidence or careful consideration, thinking is left out from the examples of conscious experiences BK provides. To be fair, I also see today that my question could have been expressed in more incisive terms, going directly to dualism of subject and object. At the time I wrote it, I was just carefully following BKs model, looking for weak links, ready to twist a knife in them. Not in a bad spirit - after all, I thought I had found a promising approach to understanding reality - but I wanted to be sure, so I was searching for breaches. It’s my intellectual standard way to understand ideas and check internal consistency. But even without knowing what I am realizing today about thinking, BK’s model seems, after careful consideration, fragile and I wonder if he will end up moving away from it in the future. I hope he will.


Because after all, as it is now, the implications of the model are that my brain, while it doesn’t generate my experience, is the extrinsic appearance of my mental processes on the screen of perception of another living observer, or subject. So on their screen of their perception, my brain is an airplane cockpit indicator, a representation of my experiential life. At the same time my brain/nervous system is also an ontologically separate, non-arbitrary physical system in the physical universe, by virtue of containing within its physical boundaries, or by virtue of “being intrinsically associated with”, my experience/my perceptions, while not containing those of my friend in Australia. So this same physical brain is “ontic” just for me, making me a legitimate, non-arbitrary separate subject of experience in the universe, while at the same time, for another observer, this brain is an extrinsic appearance, a nominal representation of foreign experience. When all living brains of the universe get ontic wild cards, while they also are extrinsic appearances, in a system where after all the one and only ontological primitive is supposed to be MAL, one can wonder how robust the model is in itself, even without opening the question of thinking...

[Lou Gold]

Lou,

"Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."

What you are speaking of is the wisdom and strength of men. These people in academia, as well as lawyers in my own field, are motivated, hard working, and high-achieving for all the outer worldly ways! They seek most of the same things anyone else seeks, whether they are materialist, idealist, or anything else - reputation, status, money, influence, power, adoration of others, etc. They are not at all actively motivated for inner sacrifice and transformation, for free service to what Beings live high above them and what they can scarcely even imagine now. And why should they be? If they will become these Beings simply by existing and working hard for worldly pleasures, then it's hardly worth the sacrifice for inner change. I tried to indicate this in the OMA quote about the spiritual alchemy. It is the 'inversion horizon' which Cleric has brought up often here and it's quite clear BK and his audience have not inverted from the geocentric to Heliocentric orientation yet.

Hehe, silly me for speculating on the processes of others. I know what you mean about academia. 49 years ago I abandoned it after teaching for 8 years at an excellent college and then a fine university and I've never regretted it. Indeed, each time I dropped or lost a containing identity it opened me to much broader horizons continuing to this day when I'm in the late stage of my corporeal end zone. Looking back on it all, I can report having known many fine generous service-oriented souls among whom only some claimed to be on a spiritual path. All were mostly just showing up and doing their work according to their best understanding. The true, good and beautiful take on and move through many forms. Viva! diversity.

Sure, Lou, there is no problem with hard working blue collar man. But the guy who becomes convinced through visionary experience and/or logical reasoning that there are higher hierarchies of spiritual Beings who permeate our experience and whom he can know through inner conscious development, which he has the time and capacity for, yet chooses instead to ignore them completely or endlessly speculate on their existence in academic circles... that's where the problems arise.

You seem to offer a sweeping bifurcation (blue collar vs academic) to which I must respond with nuance. It was an academic mathematician who introduced me to scriptures and sacred texts and an English professor who introduced me to Blake and the power and presence of the imaginal. My opening path toward interiority was located in the university where I found some amazing souls as well as one of the best Anglosphere library collections of translated sacred texts. As far as the problems go, I have found them everywhere. As you have suggested, representations of life and living systems can be messy. I prefer the term mysterious but for me the messiness or mysteriousness is not a foreboding "DO NOT ENTER" sign but rather an invitation to relate, embrace and participate in the glories of exploring, caring and sharing. As I reflect on it all, it does occur to me that my time in the academe was in the 60's and 70's when it was a rather boundary-breaking arena, which possibly is not what you experienced, perhaps as an institutionalized job training center. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy whose wanderings have been blessed more with openings than closings.

[lorenzop]

Regarding a theory of color - If we grant there are distinctions in reality, ie the difference between a doorway and a wall, it is simple step to also grant there are differences between colors. Now, how one body\mind generates and sees blue can be different than how another body\mind generates blue, but I see this as a trivial difference.
I believe what BK is saying is that if we cast away all differences (ie color) in reality, and all differences are generated by body\mind, then all phenomenon and everything we know comes into question.

[AshvinP]

Hehe, silly me for speculating on the processes of others. I know what you mean about academia. 49 years ago I abandoned it after teaching for 8 years at an excellent college and then a fine university and I've never regretted it. Indeed, each time I dropped or lost a containing identity it opened me to much broader horizons continuing to this day when I'm in the late stage of my corporeal end zone. Looking back on it all, I can report having known many fine generous service-oriented souls among whom only some claimed to be on a spiritual path. All were mostly just showing up and doing their work according to their best understanding. The true, good and beautiful take on and move through many forms. Viva! diversity.

Sure, Lou, there is no problem with hard working blue collar man. But the guy who becomes convinced through visionary experience and/or logical reasoning that there are higher hierarchies of spiritual Beings who permeate our experience and whom he can know through inner conscious development, which he has the time and capacity for, yet chooses instead to ignore them completely or endlessly speculate on their existence in academic circles... that's where the problems arise.

You seem to offer a sweeping bifurcation (blue collar vs academic) to which I must respond with nuance. It was an academic mathematician who introduced me to scriptures and sacred texts and an English professor who introduced me to Blake and the power and presence of the imaginal. My opening path toward interiority was located in the university where I found some amazing souls as well as one of the best Anglosphere library collections of translated sacred texts. As far as the problems go, I have found them everywhere. As you have suggested, representations of life and living systems can be messy. I prefer the term mysterious but for me the messiness or mysteriousness is not a foreboding "DO NOT ENTER" sign but rather an invitation to relate, embrace and participate in the glories of exploring, caring and sharing. As I reflect on it all, it does occur to me that my time in the academe was in the 60's and 70's when it was a rather boundary-breaking arena, which possibly is not what you experienced, perhaps as an institutionalized job training center. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy whose wanderings have been blessed more with openings than closings.

This is what I see as stopping on the seemingly high steps, letting them become a snare, setting our standards too low and becoming passive without realizing it. We generally start with the assumption that our inner life is already transparent to the rational intellect, or the life of feeling. This is simply the default state for modern humans and it is not easily overcome, even with spiritual training. We feel that we have all our soul qualities in front of us already, all the information we need to make informed and relatively free decisions on our spiritual journey. But we only feel this way because we rarely ever use inner effort to probe the depths of the soul - if we did this more often, then it would become perfectly clear how little we perceive of the forces underlying our normal experience and therefore how little control we have over what we are normally feeling, thinking and doing. 

First, we need to be clear about the role of Logic. If I come across a career scam artist who preys on the elderly and weak, but he holds open the door for me a couple times and says some kind words, pointing me to places I want to go, am I going to forget all about the scamming? Am I not going to look for the deeper motivations at work behind those seemingly benevolent actions he directs towards me? We can only do that deeper work if we put aside personal feelings and experiences, and go towards the transpersonal Logic underlying them. The experiences by themselves disclose almost nothing of the inner impulses and motivations and thoughts to us, so we must actively engage our reasoning. Yes, it's a sacrifice of time and effort, but no one ever promised our souls would be laid bare before us by simply existing and experiencing. 

Yet once we understand Thinking as a perceptual capacity, one that can no more create its own concepts than our eyes can create their own colors, the effort becomes easier, more fluid, and joyful. Then we begin to realize how Logic weaves together thought-organisms from within when all we do is pay attention to what's happening around and within us with genuine interest in their deeper significance. When we ignore the higher worlds, they ignore us right back, but when we pay attention to the higher worlds, they also pay attention to us in equal measure. They descend to meet our ascent. Otherwise we are like tiny ships adrift in a massive sea of souls with no beacon of light for the higher powers to see. If we light our beacon and lift our thoughts to the Heavens, the higher ideas begin to descend into us. Then we will be much less impressed with what passes for "active thinking" these days in academia or elsewhere.

We are constantly gifted coherent worldviews and conceptual insights about the higher worlds, by the higher worlds, so we can't take credit for them and neither can we be very satisfied with them. They are the bare minimum we attain to regarding the spiritual in a lifetime as modern imaginative beings. The same is even more true of visionary experiences which come apart from the Thinking path. And yet all we need to be is more open to the higher thinking influences and their inspirations to ascend much further than wherever we currently are. This takes a great deal of active soul searching, which is something we are conditioned by the outer world to avoid. We certainly cannot go around feeling the soul blockages are other people's problems and not our own if we are to make progress. When I say people are motivated for outward worldly reasons and not inner transformation, it's because I see it ever more clearly within myself. Many times we resist getting a clear view on the archetypal patterns of others because they may force us to admit them within ourselves.

Almost every day now, I discover new ways in which I have been secretly holding fast to worldly pleasures and pushing off inner transformation. Why does this suddenly begin dawning to me when it didn't before? There is no other way than actively observing oneself with clarity of thinking consciousness. For example, my logical reasoning can become one such indulgence for me if I treat it as a means of personal expression, a reflection on me personally. Maybe I keep wondering how well my arguments were constructed, how they were viewed by others, how they were received, what I could have changed to make it reflect on myself more favorably. It's not the act of reasoning which is to blame, but my own inner orientation towards it. It's when I forsake its transpersonal essence for what is only personal to me. These subtle yet critical distinctions will go completely missed if we are not constantly vigilant - it's a very fine line to walk if we are to avoid veering off into extremes. If we prefer to smear out the depths of our soul life, or anyone else's, then we are not avoiding the forces which violently thrash us around on their waves, but only undergoing them unconsciously. We are blissfully ignorant of them, yet they are still pushing, pulling, and tearing us asunder beneath the surface. This path is simply about going through consciously, and therefore more quickly, what everyone will go through unconsciously

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of Truth, like BK, should decide whether they feel the deepest knowable Cosmic secrets are already in front of them, within the content of their visible mind containers, or whether it's more likely they, like everyone else alive, have soul blockages obstructing their inner vision. Whether they already have all the perceptions necessary to make a relatively informed and free decision about what to seek after, or whether they are falling backwards into various gravity wells under the illusion of freedom. There is no virtue in leaving the Cosmic mysteries exactly where they are, as they were gifted to us, but in admitting we are not yet virtuous and it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life. It matters little what physical gender, nationality, race, age, IQ, etc we happen to adorn this lifetime. If we have some time and inclination to read and write on a forum such as this one, we surely can have the same for this inner spiritual work.

This is an area where people find it particularly difficult to distinguish between maya — illusion — and reality. The motives we ourselves or others tend to ascribe to our actions are not the true ones. It is painful to have to realize this, but — I have spoken of this on several occasions — they are not our true motives. Nor are the outward positions people hold in social life their true positions. People are usually completely different inside from the way they present themselves in the social sphere and also from the way they see themselves. People believe so strongly that their actions are based on a particular motive. Some think their motives are entirely selfless, when in reality they are nothing but the most brutal egotism. People are not aware of this because they have such illusions concerning themselves and their social connections. This is another area where we can only discover the truth if we look more deeply into the whole scheme of things.

People today, especially if they want to be good people, wanting nothing for themselves but only to be selfless and desire the good of others, will of course seek to develop certain virtues. These, too, are iron necessities. Now, of course, there is nothing to be said against a desire for virtue, but the problem is that people are not merely desiring to be virtuous. It is quite a good thing to want to be virtuous, but these people want more. If one looks to the unconscious depths of the human soul one finds that in the present time people are not really much concerned to develop the actual virtues. It is much more important to them to be able to feel themselves to be virtuous, to give themselves up entirely to a state of mind where they can say: ‘I am truly selfless, look at all the things I do to improve myself! I am perfect, I am kind, I am someone who does not believe in authority.’ They will then, of course, eagerly follow all kinds of authorities. To feel really good in the consciousness of having one particular virtue or another is endlessly more important to people today than actually having that virtue. They want to feel they have the virtue rather than practise it.

As a result, certain secrets connected with the virtues remain hidden to them. They are secrets which people instinctively feel they do not want to know, especially if they are modern idealists who like to feel good in the way I have described. All kinds of ideals are represented by societies today. Programmes are made, and a society states its principles, which are to achieve one thing or another. The things people want to achieve in this way may indeed be very nice, but to find something nice in an abstract way is not enough. People must learn to think in terms of reality.

... It is right, and good, to be more and more perfect, or at least aim to be so, but when people are actually seeking to be perfect in a particular direction, this search for perfection will after a time change into what in reality is imperfection. A change occurs through which the desire for perfection becomes a weakness. Benevolence will after a time become prejudicial behaviour. And however good the right may be that you want to bring to realization — it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world. You work towards something that is good, and the way of the world will turn it into something bad. We therefore must seek ever new ways, look for new forms over and over again. This is what really matters.

[AshvinP]

Hi Federica,

I was wondering if you noticed BK answered your question about bodily boundaries and what your thoughts were on his answer? As I'm sure you know by now, I have my own thoughts on it but it would be nice to hear yours first, whenever you have a chance.

Hi Ashvin,

Yes I have noticed Bernardo’s answer and I am unsurprisingly unsatisfied with it. I can certainly write down my thoughts about it, but let me warn you, and anyone else tempted to read here - this is going to be as boring and pedantic as it can be!


First, I would get out of the way the part of the question he hasn’t touched at all - NDEs and other similar phenomena. He could have neutralized that part by saying that the boundary is not perfect but porous. Ok let's drop it. Another detail, he mentioned that the body boundary can at a minimum be redefined as nervous system boundary, maybe to avoid remarks about skin, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I am taking note of that in what follows.


Now, I consider BK an intellectually honest person, however I have noticed that the body boundary as exposed in ‘The idea of the world’ and the way he has set up his argument in the video are somewhat different. Briefly, the statement under scrutiny originates from our ordinary habit of, in BK’s own published words, “delineating a subset of the physical world on functional or structural grounds and treating the subset as a separate entity in some sense. The question is whether such delineation is ontic or epistemic”. As we know, he then argues that such functional / structural delineation is ontic and non-arbitrary for living beings and epistemically convenient, conceptual and arbitrary for all other physical objects. My critique was that the delineation seems epistemic in both cases, and that picking up the boundary of the physical body as a way out of the decomposition problem of MAL seems arbitrary, not ontic.

Thanks, Federica. I really appreciate your expression of the plethora of logical problems in the answer. Generally, I think your reasoning is spot on. I may add more later, but for now just a few brief comments.

In the video though, BK takes a different turn and says “...my argument that physical objects are only nominal is on the basis of function, while the argument for carving out our bodies is not based on function, it is based on experience”. I see this as a strategy to dismiss the question by detaching ‘function’ from his own argument as developed in the book, then throwing ‘function’ as a lasso of conflation around my critique in an attempt to restrain it within the supposed misunderstanding of function: “to carve out living beings as proper parts of the universe is ontic but it’s not done on a functional basis, and that’s the conflation that is in the question. She is lifting the basis of my argument for saying that physical objects are just nominal functions and she is bringing it to the argument about bodies being actual subsets of the universe. But my argument for that has nothing to do with functionality. And that’s the error”. This really seems an expedient to attract attention towards a supposed dichotomy function/experience (absent in the original model) only to conclude that my question is on the wrong side of the dichotomy. Moreover - and I can be wrong here, I am not used to the methods of philosophy - I would suspect that founding the argument on such a dichotomy would be logically wrong (big coincidence, BK doesn't do it in the book). Because if I want to demonstrate that, within a given set of elements, a property - for example quality of ontic delineation - only belongs to some subset of elements - such as for example living beings - in relation to other subsets which do not possess the property, I should run on all subsets a common test not two separate ones - such as for instance functional/structural carveout - and show how in that occurrence, different subsets display or do not display the property. So one should test the same criterion of functional/structural carving-out, not two different criteria, on all subsets, to demonstrate that only one subset passes the test. According to BK living bodies alone pass the test.

Exactly. The presupposed duality is quite explicit here. Another way to think of the logical error is this - what if, as is always the case, future science discovers aspects of the living organism which don't confine themselves to the 'boundaries' we perceive now? Then the entire ontology and everything built around it crumbles. The fact that BK's argument completely rules out this possibility, even if it was the most unlikeliest of possibilities (which it isn't), means there must be a logic error in the argument. There is simply no way around that. (this is related to the default 'mind-container' perspective we have).

Also, it's immediately apparent that what is outside in the 'functional world' is always passing into and out of our living organism, forming and being formed by it. Nutrition, digestion, excretion, respiration, nerve-sense (perceptions stimulate inner meaningful experience which stimulate perceptions, such as gestures and so forth), etc. What happens to our physical organism when we die (or when we shed all our cells) if it's not returned to the 'functional world' and reused in the process of forming living organisms and the 'experiential world'? It is beyond arbitrary delineations to imply otherwise.

Again, in the book, and not in the video answer, BK respects this logic and concludes that the functionality of living beings is ontically separate, and not of epistemic convenience, insofar as it “does not merely help us structure the conceptual knowledge of the physical world”. This functionality consists in the living body/the nervous system being “intrinsically associated” with experience. “I cannot just decide that the chair I am sitting in is integral to the body in the way that I can decide that the handle is integral to the mug. (...) The criterion here is not merely functional/structural, but the range of mentation intrinsically associated with the body” where “there is no epistemic freedom to move boundaries at will".

But if the handle can be considered integral to the mug, and the mug integral to human imbibing of liquids in culturally appropriate way, and culturally appropriate imbibing to culture at large, and culture at large to systematic thinking, and thinking to conscious reflective experience, then can't such experience be considered integral to the 'functional world' of handles? Indeed, one must sever the link between awareness/perception/experience and thinking for this to ever sound like a plausible argument, and so that's exactly what all modern abstract ontologies do.

That’s the diversion that’s been used to avoid the question. What’s the part of sincere conviction versus rhetorical habit I’m not sure. Another thing I noticed is that in the examples of 'experience' only sensory perceptions are mentioned, like the photons in Australia, the needles in the arm, and so on. Be it by coincidence or careful consideration, thinking is left out from the examples of conscious experiences BK provides. To be fair, I also see today that my question could have been expressed in more incisive terms, going directly to dualism of subject and object. At the time I wrote it, I was just carefully following BKs model, looking for weak links, ready to twist a knife in them. Not in a bad spirit - after all, I thought I had found a promising approach to understanding reality - but I wanted to be sure, so I was searching for breaches. It’s my intellectual standard way to understand ideas and check internal consistency. But even without knowing what I am realizing today about thinking, BK’s model seems, after careful consideration, fragile and I wonder if he will end up moving away from it in the future. I hope he will.

Here's to hoping!

[Lou Gold]

Sure, Lou, there is no problem with hard working blue collar man. But the guy who becomes convinced through visionary experience and/or logical reasoning that there are higher hierarchies of spiritual Beings who permeate our experience and whom he can know through inner conscious development, which he has the time and capacity for, yet chooses instead to ignore them completely or endlessly speculate on their existence in academic circles... that's where the problems arise.

You seem to offer a sweeping bifurcation (blue collar vs academic) to which I must respond with nuance. It was an academic mathematician who introduced me to scriptures and sacred texts and an English professor who introduced me to Blake and the power and presence of the imaginal. My opening path toward interiority was located in the university where I found some amazing souls as well as one of the best Anglosphere library collections of translated sacred texts. As far as the problems go, I have found them everywhere. As you have suggested, representations of life and living systems can be messy. I prefer the term mysterious but for me the messiness or mysteriousness is not a foreboding "DO NOT ENTER" sign but rather an invitation to relate, embrace and participate in the glories of exploring, caring and sharing. As I reflect on it all, it does occur to me that my time in the academe was in the 60's and 70's when it was a rather boundary-breaking arena, which possibly is not what you experienced, perhaps as an institutionalized job training center. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy whose wanderings have been blessed more with openings than closings.

This is what I see as stopping on the seemingly high steps, letting them become a snare, setting our standards too low and becoming passive without realizing it. We generally start with the assumption that our inner life is already transparent to the rational intellect, or the life of feeling. This is simply the default state for modern humans and it is not easily overcome, even with spiritual training. We feel that we have all our soul qualities in front of us already, all the information we need to make informed and relatively free decisions on our spiritual journey. But we only feel this way because we rarely ever use inner effort to probe the depths of the soul - if we did this more often, then it would become perfectly clear how little we perceive of the forces underlying our normal experience and therefore how little control we have over what we are normally feeling, thinking and doing. 

First, we need to be clear about the role of Logic. If I come across a career scam artist who preys on the elderly and weak, but he holds open the door for me a couple times and says some kind words, pointing me to places I want to go, am I going to forget all about the scamming? Am I not going to look for the deeper motivations at work behind those seemingly benevolent actions he directs towards me? We can only do that deeper work if we put aside personal feelings and experiences, and go towards the transpersonal Logic underlying them. The experiences by themselves disclose almost nothing of the inner impulses and motivations and thoughts to us, so we must actively engage our reasoning. Yes, it's a sacrifice of time and effort, but no one ever promised our souls would be laid bare before us by simply existing and experiencing. 

Yet once we understand Thinking as a perceptual capacity, one that can no more create its own concepts than our eyes can create their own colors, the effort becomes easier, more fluid, and joyful. Then we begin to realize how Logic weaves together thought-organisms from within when all we do is pay attention to what's happening around and within us with genuine interest in their deeper significance. When we ignore the higher worlds, they ignore us right back, but when we pay attention to the higher worlds, they also pay attention to us in equal measure. They descend to meet our ascent. Otherwise we are like tiny ships adrift in a massive sea of souls with no beacon of light for the higher powers to see. If we light our beacon and lift our thoughts to the Heavens, the higher ideas begin to descend into us. Then we will be much less impressed with what passes for "active thinking" these days in academia or elsewhere.

We are constantly gifted coherent worldviews and conceptual insights about the higher worlds, by the higher worlds, so we can't take credit for them and neither can we be very satisfied with them. They are the bare minimum we attain to regarding the spiritual in a lifetime as modern imaginative beings. The same is even more true of visionary experiences which come apart from the Thinking path. And yet all we need to be is more open to the higher thinking influences and their inspirations to ascend much further than wherever we currently are. This takes a great deal of active soul searching, which is something we are conditioned by the outer world to avoid. We certainly cannot go around feeling the soul blockages are other people's problems and not our own if we are to make progress. When I say people are motivated for outward worldly reasons and not inner transformation, it's because I see it ever more clearly within myself. Many times we resist getting a clear view on the archetypal patterns of others because they may force us to admit them within ourselves.

Almost every day now, I discover new ways in which I have been secretly holding fast to worldly pleasures and pushing off inner transformation. Why does this suddenly begin dawning to me when it didn't before? There is no other way than actively observing oneself with clarity of thinking consciousness. For example, my logical reasoning can become one such indulgence for me if I treat it as a means of personal expression, a reflection on me personally. Maybe I keep wondering how well my arguments were constructed, how they were viewed by others, how they were received, what I could have changed to make it reflect on myself more favorably. It's not the act of reasoning which is to blame, but my own inner orientation towards it. It's when I forsake its transpersonal essence for what is only personal to me. These subtle yet critical distinctions will go completely missed if we are not constantly vigilant - it's a very fine line to walk if we are to avoid veering off into extremes. If we prefer to smear out the depths of our soul life, or anyone else's, then we are not avoiding the forces which violently thrash us around on their waves, but only undergoing them unconsciously. We are blissfully ignorant of them, yet they are still pushing, pulling, and tearing us asunder beneath the surface. This path is simply about going through consciously, and therefore more quickly, what everyone will go through unconsciously

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of Truth, like BK, should decide whether they feel the deepest knowable Cosmic secrets are already in front of them, within the content of their visible mind containers, or whether it's more likely they, like everyone else alive, have soul blockages obstructing their inner vision. Whether they already have all the perceptions necessary to make a relatively informed and free decision about what to seek after, or whether they are falling backwards into various gravity wells under the illusion of freedom. There is no virtue in leaving the Cosmic mysteries exactly where they are, as they were gifted to us, but in admitting we are not yet virtuous and it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life. It matters little what physical gender, nationality, race, age, IQ, etc we happen to adorn this lifetime. If we have some time and inclination to read and write on a forum such as this one, we surely can have the same for this inner spiritual work.

This is an area where people find it particularly difficult to distinguish between maya — illusion — and reality. The motives we ourselves or others tend to ascribe to our actions are not the true ones. It is painful to have to realize this, but — I have spoken of this on several occasions — they are not our true motives. Nor are the outward positions people hold in social life their true positions. People are usually completely different inside from the way they present themselves in the social sphere and also from the way they see themselves. People believe so strongly that their actions are based on a particular motive. Some think their motives are entirely selfless, when in reality they are nothing but the most brutal egotism. People are not aware of this because they have such illusions concerning themselves and their social connections. This is another area where we can only discover the truth if we look more deeply into the whole scheme of things.

People today, especially if they want to be good people, wanting nothing for themselves but only to be selfless and desire the good of others, will of course seek to develop certain virtues. These, too, are iron necessities. Now, of course, there is nothing to be said against a desire for virtue, but the problem is that people are not merely desiring to be virtuous. It is quite a good thing to want to be virtuous, but these people want more. If one looks to the unconscious depths of the human soul one finds that in the present time people are not really much concerned to develop the actual virtues. It is much more important to them to be able to feel themselves to be virtuous, to give themselves up entirely to a state of mind where they can say: ‘I am truly selfless, look at all the things I do to improve myself! I am perfect, I am kind, I am someone who does not believe in authority.’ They will then, of course, eagerly follow all kinds of authorities. To feel really good in the consciousness of having one particular virtue or another is endlessly more important to people today than actually having that virtue. They want to feel they have the virtue rather than practise it.

As a result, certain secrets connected with the virtues remain hidden to them. They are secrets which people instinctively feel they do not want to know, especially if they are modern idealists who like to feel good in the way I have described. All kinds of ideals are represented by societies today. Programmes are made, and a society states its principles, which are to achieve one thing or another. The things people want to achieve in this way may indeed be very nice, but to find something nice in an abstract way is not enough. People must learn to think in terms of reality.

... It is right, and good, to be more and more perfect, or at least aim to be so, but when people are actually seeking to be perfect in a particular direction, this search for perfection will after a time change into what in reality is imperfection. A change occurs through which the desire for perfection becomes a weakness. Benevolence will after a time become prejudicial behaviour. And however good the right may be that you want to bring to realization — it will turn into a wrong in the course of time. The reality is that there are no absolutes in this world. You work towards something that is good, and the way of the world will turn it into something bad. We therefore must seek ever new ways, look for new forms over and over again. This is what really matters.

Lou said, You seem to offer a sweeping bifurcation (blue collar vs academic) to which I must respond with nuance. It was an academic mathematician who introduced me to scriptures and sacred texts and an English professor who introduced me to Blake and the power and presence of the imaginal. My opening path toward interiority was located in the university where I found some amazing souls as well as one of the best Anglosphere library collections of translated sacred texts. As far as the problems go, I have found them everywhere. As you have suggested, representations of life and living systems can be messy. I prefer the term mysterious but for me the messiness or mysteriousness is not a foreboding "DO NOT ENTER" sign but rather an invitation to relate, embrace and participate in the glories of exploring, caring and sharing. As I reflect on it all, it does occur to me that my time in the academe was in the 60's and 70's when it was a rather boundary-breaking arena, which possibly is not what you experienced, perhaps as an institutionalized job training center. Maybe I'm just a lucky guy whose wanderings have been blessed more with openings than closings.

Ashvin said, This is what I see as stopping on the seemingly high steps, letting them become a snare, setting our standards too low and becoming passive without realizing it.

So who do you see as doing this? Who stopped on what steps following an introduction to higher realms? Please be specific.

I don't disagree with your spiritual process. If it is progressing as you say, I would consider it as good spiritual work.

I like Steiner's description of how good intentions go bad. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna advises Arjuna to not claim the fruits of his own labor but to offer them to Him. The "fruits" of course refer as well to a self-image of having personally achieved something.

I liked his last paragraph. The quest must be for a new horizon rather than a resting spot. I like to say, "There are no absolutes, including this one."

[AshvinP]

So who do you see as doing this? Who stopped on what steps following an introduction to higher realms? Please be specific.

I don't disagree with your spiritual process. If it is progressing as you say, I would consider it as good spiritual work.

I like Steiner's description of how good intentions go bad. In the Bhagavad Gita Krishna advises Arjuna to not claim the fruits of his own labor but to offer them to Him. The "fruits" of course refer as well to a self-image of having personally achieved something.

I liked his last paragraph. The quest must be for a new horizon rather than a resting spot. I like to say, "There are no absolutes, including this one."

Practically everyone. It's our default mode of being in this stage of evolution. Whenever we get spiritual insight, we cling to it for the sense of power, wholeness, satisfaction, bliss, etc. it gives us, but rarely do we conceive of sacrificing that experience for spiritual insights on even higher planes. It could be something as simple as gazing at beautiful sunsets, like making spiritual arguments on this forum as I mentioned, or even contemplating spiritual imagery in meditations. All these things can feel so good for us that it never occurs there is something still deeper within, more supersensible, which is yet to be perceived-known, and will only be so with active sacrificial effort. As mentioned on other threads about the moral-natural dynamic, sacrifice and resurrection on higher planes is really at the foundation of all evolutionary processes. It's not a one time thing but an ascending gradient which delivers us into our 'future'. None of this is to say we should avoid these spiritual experiences, not at all. That's simply a weakness of will. Instead we should be grateful we are given so many opportunities by the higher worlds to prove and sharpen our metal by enduring and overcoming temptations to remain where we are.

This isn't unrelated to what Federica commented on BK's answer to her question. Making epistemic distinctions into ontological boundaries is the core way modern intellectuals have avoided the often messy and uncomfortable business, in terms of confronting our soul depths, of following the contours of experience and reason on their winding path upwards. If we feel ourselves to be fundamentally dissociated from the higher worlds, and can seemingly support that with logical philosophical argument (which only works because the thinking-perception polar link is severed), then we have given ourselves perfect excuse to avoid paying too much attention to them, and avoid admitting to ourselves they are also paying attentiom to what we do inwardly.

Great example from the Gita - "by their fruits (offered up to God) shall you know them".

[Lou Gold]

Great example from the Gita - "by their fruits (offered up to God) shall you know them".

Yup. The path of devotion is my way.

About the limits of intellectual thought, I very much like the comment of the Nobel laueate biologist George Wald:

What one really needs is not Nobel laureates but love. How do you think one gets to be a Nobel laureate? Wanting love, that’s how. Wanting it so bad one works all the time and ends up a Nobel laureate. It’s a consolation prize. What matters is love.

Or, in the words of the great Franciscan prayer, "It is by giving that we receive."

Just don't get too attached to a self-identity. It's a snare.

[Lou Gold]

Whenever we get spiritual insight, we cling to it for the sense of power, wholeness, satisfaction, bliss, etc. it gives us, but rarely do we conceive of sacrificing that experience for spiritual insights on even higher planes. It could be something as simple as gazing at beautiful sunsets, like making spiritual arguments on this forum as I mentioned, or even contemplating spiritual imagery in meditations. All these things can feel so good for us that it never occurs there is something still deeper within, more supersensible, which is yet to be perceived-known, and will only be so with active sacrificial effort.

I agree that there is something still deeper within, more supersensible, which is yet to be perceived-known. I like to call it The Great Mysteriousness. Sacrifice (making sacred) is the way to embrace and learn from it.

[Federica]

So much of the warning contained in this dialogue I can recognize as relevant to me directly. The things I like to think about myself, the real motives behind usual behaviors, and for example the same (but worse) mental habits Ashvin has described about reasoning. In particular, it's by indulging in one of these that weeks ago I wrote something really insensitive here. I apologize to you, Lou, for those words...