Federica wrote: ↑Tue May 24, 2022 1:14 pm 'When we consider our own ideational activity, we feel this as 'top-down' activity, instead of bottom-up, right? Our consciousness sets in motion a series of perceptual states of being from the top-down, including the sounds, which then feed back into our ideas, our intentions and actions.'This brings us to the question of individual free will, right? A difficult question for me at the moment. I am not satisfied with much of what I have heard about it. But this idea of hierarchy here, doesn't seem to be of much help either...
I don't want to pile on too much, since I know these are new ideas and a lot to take in. And you may be wondering how you got into this discussion and what it has to do with metaphysical idealism : ) So I'll try to keep my response brief. In general, we are answering the question, "what and how can we precisely know about the ideal structure of reality?" Just from looking at the questions you are asking Cleric and myself, it appears your Intuition in serving you well.
Hierarchy isn't a conceptual theory, but a given fact of experience. We must always be careful to distinguish these. There is hierarchy of the outer world - physical forces common to all, life forces common to living beings, soul forces common to animals and humans, and reflective thinking force unique to humans. There are mineral (physical forces), plant (life), animal (soul), and human (spirit) kingdoms, with the human embedding the others as well. There is planet Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy. Sea, land, sky, space. Individual, family, race, nation, species. Moments, minutes, hours, days, years, epochs.
Within us, we have cells, tissues, organs, systems. Of course we can really continue indefinitely with these going towards infinity at the microscopic and macroscopic scales. We are not speaking yet of what these are in essence, only the given fact they exist. The point being, everywhere we look there is hierarchical structure which needs to be accounted for by any sound ontology and/or science. We can hardly blame a materialist for hesitating to pursue an idealist ontology which has nothing to say about any of that structure except, "it's a dream of Consciousness, blind will of MAL seen across a dissociative boundary".
'Now if we are analogizing this to Consciousness at large, which exists in the same polar relation, ... Our ideas are like the perceptual states, the musical notes, of beings and their higher ideations, precipitating from the top-down.'If our ideas are the top-down precipitations of a conscious movement set in motion by higher conscious beings, how does this tie in with the ‘inner effort’ that should allow us to expand our consciousness from the bottom up?
This is the Beauty of polar structure where we find absolutely everywhere, spatially-temporally, microcosmically-macrocosmically, inwardly-outwardly, etc. There must always be a cooperative, living effort between the poles for evolution to continue. All that we experience now can be understood as complex nonlinear interactions which delaminated from the Cosmic Seed, the Primal Polarity, only it takes significant effort to discern where and how it is being expressed within that fragmented experience. The top-down ideations provide archetypal structure for the bottom-up details which unfold in increasing levels of freedom (ideally), while these details provide living feedback for the ideal structure to evolve. It helps to think of the entire ideal Cosmos as a unified living organism, a Macrocosmic expression of the human microcosmic organism.
Eventually through this process, the details become the Ideas and the Ideas become the details. These aren't separate units combining and decombining, but more like nested Russian dolls, or self-similar fractal structures metamorphosing through each other. It may help to think of a living Cell differentiating but never separating completely. Why does this differentiation occur? Ultimately it only makes sense as the expression of the highest sacrificial Love. But we can't confuse our dim concept of these things for what is experienced at the much higher levels of integrated Being. So we can't really speak of "rationale" because such a thing only exists for humans at an intellectual stage of evolution. Whatever the ideal, moral motive, we can rest assured it is highly Logical, because Logic (Logos) is itself the force by which the differentiation-integration polarity becomes manifest. It is what mediates between all poles of all polarities.
'Most importantly, there is no principle reason why our consciousness cannot expand to encompass those higher ideations with inner effort. 'If there is no in principle reason for not being able to expand our consciousness upwards, what are the de facto reasons why this is not happening?And are these higher beings, or conscious ideations, a plurality? In which case what is the rationale behind their differentiation?
That is the question at the basis of our critique of analytic idealism. It doesn't happen for one simple reason - most don't
know it
can happen. You asked Cleric what's the big deal with people abstractly speculating endlessly on forums like this one, and that's the biggest deal. If we are honest, we would never choose to remain with abstract theories of ineffable spiritual experiences if we knew, with genuine conviction, that there is another option - to actually experience the ineffable spiritual these theories are merely conceptual symbols for (which are very important so long as we remember they are, in fact,
symbols). And this option doesn't require money, super high IQ, or even too much time. But it does require openness, good will, high ideals, and inner effort. Knowing that this path is an option is already a huge opportunity, one that most people won't come across their entire lives. As for the specific practices, those can be provided (and Cleric has provided many on this forum), but laying the conceptual foundation for why this should even be pursued is equally if not more important.
'This is also related to your initial criticism of the flawed bodily boundary...'Yes, setting this boundary as one with the physical body seems arbitrary to me. But the segmentation of universal consciousness has to be explained somehow. What makes for the separation of ideations, both across and within levels of your hierarchy?
The polar structure of reality cannot be fully grasped by the rational intellect. We simply have to get used to that fact, after a while. We see this differentiating-integrating happening everywhere, but we can't capture it only with our intellectual concepts. This seems to be a major obstacle for people, after we have discussed it for several years on this forum. We should be honest with ourselves here - the intellectual ego does not like anything it cannot immediately encompass within its thought-bubbles. But we shouldn't let that natural antipathy discourage our efforts. By coming to know our antipathies, in a living instead of purely theoretical way, we have already made a huge step forward in overcoming them.
Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION.
- Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)
And this is most important - the Mind's
self-experiencing. When we ask questions about differentiation, separations, etc., often we are smuggling in a 3rd-person view. We are trying to view the whole thing as if we are neutrally observing it happen 'from the side'. My image of the cells above runs that same risk. This view from the side simply doesn't exist. What does exist, and what we are most intimately aware of, is the dynamic of our own first-person thinking perspective. It is here we can observe ourselves
participating in the differentiating-integrating process. It is a process which simply wouldn't happen if that thinking-perspective didn't exist. We are that process and normally we are flowing along with it instinctively because our thinking-experience is completely merged with it. It will take a great effort at deconditioning from the modern 'view from nowhere', by
differentiating our thinking-experience from the normal flow, if we are to begin understanding these things, but it certainly can be done. If all is Mind, and modern prejudices are only habits of mind, then there is no principle reason why they cannot be altered and, thereby, our experience of the entire World Content, and our own role in its Being and Becoming, can be altered as well. The great illusion of "dissociation" and "alter", as expressed in analytic idealism, is that those words only have meaning as relational qualities, based on the first-person cognitive activity of any given individual (or center of consciounsess) at any given time in any given relation with others. Do we suppose this, like everything else, isn't also highly differentiated between human individuals living today? It is, but we hardly like to admit that possibility in our age. What Schopenhauer rightly observed, yet himself succumbed to, is that "
every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world."