Federica wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 11:52 pm
Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon May 30, 2022 9:27 pm
And for how long should humanity keep strictly separated the world of academic thought and the world of Truth? Who are we serving by keeping these 'good manners' by not disturbing the secular world through the implications of the given facts?
This is also why simply trying to prove materialism wrong in itself, can never lead too far. That's way the Intelligent Design movement (renamed Creationists) fails. They present valuable observations about the inadequacy of evolution through purely random mutations but at the same time don't provide anything as a substitute, besides "God created everything."
Similarly, simply showing the inconsistencies of materialism, leaves one in void. Then they become susceptible to the worst kinds of superstitions. In other words, the materialist superstition (which sclerotized the ancient gods of the elements into laws of nature) is simply exchanged for another superstition - such as "there's MAL or whatever behind the disassociative curtains of inner reality."
That's why it is so urgent today that we not only show the inconstancies but also show how they can resolved (besides simply picking a blind belief of choice). And this resolution is to happen here and now, not by fantasizing and expecting it only after death but by growing into the full spectrum of reality.
I think that BK is sincerely trying to do just that: bringing his truth out there, to the secular world. He has quit academia as well as a top job to lead a foundation devoted to spreading the word of idealism outside of the closed circles of academia. He is touching a much larger public than one would expect from a philosopher. And the shift away from materialism today in and outside academia is tangible, especially in the younger generations.
Also, BK is not simply trying to prove materialism wrong in itself. That's unfair. He has developed a cohesive vision, inquired and connected evidence from physics, psychology, medicine to it.
Now, that his system has pitfalls, yes, and that another system is what the world urgently needs right now, ok maybe. But what does this bitterness stand for?
Practically, what Cleric responded is all too real. In addition to this website, there is a discord server dedicated to BK's idealism. The comments there are 90% bashing of materialists, of the sort we might hear on a playground, as if the intellectual label "materialist" defines the very essence of someone's being and we can find all flaws of modern thinking within that label, and about 7% remarks about how we are all "one consciousness". The other 3%, if I am being generous, is devoted to matters of moral significance as they relate to the logical implications of
idea-lism, and mostly that is on side threads started by one other person and myself.
BK wrote a book called "Dreamed Up Reality". We often here about Maya in the nondual discussion. But it seems the possibility that
we are part of that dreamed up Maya, as atomized intellects perceiving and conceptualizing the world, is entirely ignored. It simply isn't taken the least bit seriously. For ex., BK just wrote an article speculating on
"How can you be me?". To preserve the atomistic dissociation theory, and the conviction that the rational intellect is the very apex of cognitive evolution, he speculates the analytic idealist equivalent of the infinite multiverse 'explanation'.
The latter is sometimes used by the atheist-physicalist to 'explain' how consciousness evolved in this universe and how it is so finely-tuned for life and sentience. BK uses it to 'explain' how we can exist in dissociated bubbles of consciousness yet all be the same Consciousness in essence. He posits that each dissociated perspective is constantly time-traveling to occupy the dissociated perspectives of other 'alters' it is interacting with, like a person playing chess against themselves. There is no discussion of more holistic Time-experience, as Cleric discussed in several recent posts, or about the integration of Memory through the ceaseless evolution of ideational activity.
Of course this article got glowing reviews on the server - the riddle of One Consciousness existing alongside 'dissociated alters' had been solved once and for all! The point here is to notice how all of this is done for only one reason - to simply avoid admitting that the rational intellect lives in Maya, its concepts are Maya, and its sense of atomization is Maya. It is done to preserve the theory of dissociated bubbles which, in turn, preserve the intellect at the apex of cognitive evolution, with no living ideas between it and the One Consciousness that it should seek out, pay attention to, and grow into. It is felt that the chess analogy works because Cosmic ideation within and between the human perspective and that of God/MAL is similar to that of two people making decisions while playing chess, i.e. rational intellect with only mineralized concepts to work with.
Ultimately it's not about criticizing BK, because BK is not reading any of this. He won't be reading Cleric's Nth metaphorical and imaginative illustration of Time-consciousness on the other thread, so there's not even a possibility of it being constructive for him. Why should that stop it from being constructive for the rest of us? This cliquish adherence to the public-facing academics is Maya. It is born of the physicalist perspective that what is bigger, weighs more, gets more views, has more followers, etc. is what wins the battles for human body, soul, and spirit. We feel that any truths we have won for ourselves can't possibly match up with those produced from the academic Goliath, no matter how sound our own logic and reasoning. So we must choose a 'side' and remain completely loyal to its doctrines.
But what if the individuals winning ideas through the strength of their own inner experience and reasoning is precisely the way in which failing philosophical-spiritual (or anti-spiritual) paradigms grow into new ones with minimal casualties of war in the process?
Kastrup wrote:More than in previous experiments, I find it extraordinarily difficult this time to recall the details of the experience. Like a regular dream that one forgets seconds after waking up, this time the experience began fading fast, even before I was back to more ordinary states of consciousness. Still, I remember that, at some point in the experiment, I was saying repeatedly in thought: “I am trying, but I cannot understand it... I am trying...” Something was being displayed in the screen of my mind; something extraordinarily profound and complex, but I could not make sense of it. It was very, very hard to grasp, whatever it was.
The gestalt of the experience was that of a “better informed” alter ego of mine trying to convey something to his space-time-bound doppelganger. I had a hard time making sense of “his” message. Yet, very slowly, the entire situation started becoming clearer. At some point, I felt as though my supposed alter ego were metaphorically opening the dome of inner theater above my head – like the moving dome of an astronomical observatory – revealing a profound and unprecedented truth operating busily and inconspicuously just behind what had previously been the boundary of my perceptual universe.
What I then “saw” was indescribable. How inadequate words are. This... “thing” that was revealed... froze me to the spot. It was a pattern. Whatever doubt I might have harbored about whether these experiences truly entailed knowledge input from outside my brain evaporated: there was absolutely no way this thing, this unfathomable miracle of a pattern, could have come out of my primate head.
We only need to take these words of BK, written soon after altered state of consciousness, more seriously. Our current state of conceptual activity is more Maya than we can imagine, but the fact that we can know this, as BK knew it above, is the greatest hope, for it means the gradient between our current state and higher ones is continuous and can be consciously grown into without limit. That is not to say without constraints, because it is actually the structured constraints which
make the growing possible. The poor in spirit are blessed because they are in a position of humility to realize the Maya of their situation and, by that very realization, begin to grow out of it in a living and productive, not merely theoretical and often vindictive, way.