Nature of memory and time - Split from "Why do we reincarnate without memories"

[AshvinP]

One thing that I do wonder about, Ashvin, is if, upon actually reading David Abram, one might see the emerging of a "redeemed" rather than a "regressive" animism -- redeemed, as in the light of a more evolved awareness that more authentically reconnects modern dissociated folks to their own bodies and the environments that have been so impacted unawaredly by human behavior? From my pov, a better connectedness to my embedded animal within alerts me to both positives (healthy) and negative (toxic) behaviors. In this sense of a "more redeemed more aware animism", there emerges more health and happiness for many involved (including other-than-humans). This is surely a practical and imaginative possibility, some of which I have directly experienced. As an aside, in my tradition this kind of process is called replanting and renewing the Doctrine of Jesus Christ and the Queen of the Forest. I'm sure there are many other ways as well to portray the evolutionary process, which includes non-corporeal beings who are surely also our relatives. VIVA! DIVERSITY and VIVA! CONNECTEDNESS

We're just talking about completely different things, Lou. I am saying the animal group-souls, of which the particular forms are members like our fingers are members of our organism, are embedded within the human individual. This is literal and can be discerned scientifically by unprejudiced thinking, once we abandon dogmatic materialistic thinking where everything is atomized units combining from the 'bottom-up' to form more complex and more conscious beings, limited to myopic timeframes and/or the flattened earthly plane. Transient physical health and happiness is not the issue here, but spiritual evolution and integration over the course of many incarnations of humans which culminate in the reincarnation of the Earth herself. On this reincarnated Earth, the animal group-souls will then be able to go through their "human" stage (in a more spiritualized form), with our help. All of this is assuming humanity does, in fact, choose to keep evolving forwards and upwards, through clear scientific consciousness of the soul and spirit, not slide backwards and downwards.

Abram's work, as it is portrayed by you and the links you have posted summarizing it, as well as his Wiki page and the mere titles, "the spell of the sensuous" and "becoming animal", make clear that he believes our human cognition would benefit itself from regressing to that of dreamy animal cognition. This is only natural in our times when a person has blotted out the possibility of higher spiritual worlds and beings which are responsible for both human and animal cognition. There is a clear sense that the atomism, materialism, and disconnect with Nature in the modern age cannot be sustained longer, but there is no view of the path upwards into higher consciousness, so naturally the path downwards seems more alluring and the best option. Contrast Abram's desire for humans to go back under "the spell of the sensuous" with Steiner's desire that we begin to develop sense-free thinking. The latter is rooted in a clear view of what is supersensible and stands above the kingdoms of Nature.

“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.”
― Rudolf Steiner

Your capsulation of the work of David Abram tells me that you have neither read nor understood him. However, it is not my mission to convince you argumentatively. You are surely capable of doing (or not doing) a personal inquiry and deep contemplation yourself.

If you can find me one single place where he refers to the supersensible origins of human consciousness and civilization, then I will take notice and reconsider. In the meantime, we can look at the following quote and see how he has no awareness of the evolution of human consciousness over the epochs which was guided by higher ideational powers, most especially in the Hebrew and Greek civilizations. And when that spiritual-future pole of reality is completely ignored, it's only natural his conclusions end up urging humans to go in the exactly wrong direction to navigate the ecological mess we are in. The most dangerous worldviews are those which contain maybe 75% or more truth and insight, but fail to notice the most critical percentage which truly makes sense of our collective situation. The 'more-than-human' world he speaks of is not simply the realm of sensuous Nature, but the realm of supersensible Spirit.

So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

[Lou Gold]

We're just talking about completely different things, Lou. I am saying the animal group-souls, of which the particular forms are members like our fingers are members of our organism, are embedded within the human individual. This is literal and can be discerned scientifically by unprejudiced thinking, once we abandon dogmatic materialistic thinking where everything is atomized units combining from the 'bottom-up' to form more complex and more conscious beings, limited to myopic timeframes and/or the flattened earthly plane. Transient physical health and happiness is not the issue here, but spiritual evolution and integration over the course of many incarnations of humans which culminate in the reincarnation of the Earth herself. On this reincarnated Earth, the animal group-souls will then be able to go through their "human" stage (in a more spiritualized form), with our help. All of this is assuming humanity does, in fact, choose to keep evolving forwards and upwards, through clear scientific consciousness of the soul and spirit, not slide backwards and downwards.

Abram's work, as it is portrayed by you and the links you have posted summarizing it, as well as his Wiki page and the mere titles, "the spell of the sensuous" and "becoming animal", make clear that he believes our human cognition would benefit itself from regressing to that of dreamy animal cognition. This is only natural in our times when a person has blotted out the possibility of higher spiritual worlds and beings which are responsible for both human and animal cognition. There is a clear sense that the atomism, materialism, and disconnect with Nature in the modern age cannot be sustained longer, but there is no view of the path upwards into higher consciousness, so naturally the path downwards seems more alluring and the best option. Contrast Abram's desire for humans to go back under "the spell of the sensuous" with Steiner's desire that we begin to develop sense-free thinking. The latter is rooted in a clear view of what is supersensible and stands above the kingdoms of Nature.

“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.”
― Rudolf Steiner

Your capsulation of the work of David Abram tells me that you have neither read nor understood him. However, it is not my mission to convince you argumentatively. You are surely capable of doing (or not doing) a personal inquiry and deep contemplation yourself.

If you can find me one single place where he refers to the supersensible origins of human consciousness and civilization, then I will take notice and reconsider. In the meantime, we can look at the following quote and see how he has no awareness of the evolution of human consciousness over the epochs which was guided by higher ideational powers, most especially in the Hebrew and Greek civilizations. And when that spiritual-future pole of reality is completely ignored, it's only natural his conclusions end up urging humans to go in the exactly wrong direction to navigate the ecological mess we are in. The most dangerous worldviews are those which contain maybe 75% or more truth and insight, but fail to notice the most critical percentage which truly makes sense of our collective situation. The 'more-than-human' world he speaks of is not simply the realm of sensuous Nature, but the realm of supersensible Spirit.

So the ancient Hebrews, on the one hand, and the ancient Greeks on the other, are variously taken to task for providing the mental context that would foster civilization’s mistreatment of nonhuman nature. Each of these two ancient cultures seems to have sown the seeds of our contemporary estrangement—one seeming to establish the spiritual or religious ascendancy of humankind over nature, the other effecting a more philosophical or rational dissociation of the human intellect from the organic world. Long before the historical amalgamation of Hebraic religion and Hellenistic philosophy in the Christian New Testament, these two bodies of belief already shared—or seem to have shared—a similar intellectual distance from the nonhuman environment. In every other respect these two traditions, each one originating out of its own specific antecedents, and in its own terrain and time, were vastly different. In every other respect, that is, but one: they were both, from the start, profoundly informed by writing. Indeed, they both made use of the strange and potent technology which we have come to call “the alphabet.” — WRITING, LIKE HUMAN LANGUAGE, IS ENGENDERED NOT ONLY within the human community but between the human community and the animate landscape, born of the interplay and contact between the human and the more-than-human world. The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. Archaeological evidence suggests that for more than a million years the subsistence of humankind has depended upon the acuity of such hunters, upon their ability to read the traces—a bit of scat here, a broken twig there—of these animal Others. These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors, moving instinctively from one track to the next, picking up the trail afresh whenever it leaves off, hunting the meaning, which would be the meeting with the Other
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

He is explaining the tremendous and deeply fundamental power of symbols. As I have shared previously, I once tested this by repeating, as I walked to the market, "Everything I see is a symbol of Consciousness" over and over in a mantra-like way. By the time I arrived at the market my whole sensual world had become extraordinary alive in a powerfully vibrant way and this was NOT done with the assistance of any psychedelic or sacrament. It truly cast a spell over the sensuous as a direct experience. I was in awe and grateful for this blessing or "spell of the sensuous." YES, we really are talking about different things.

[AshvinP]

He is explaining the tremendous and deeply fundamental power of symbols. As I have shared previously, I once tested this by repeating, as I walked to the market, "Everything I see is a symbol of Consciousness" over and over in a mantra-like way. By the time I arrived at the market my whole sensual world had become extraordinary alive in a powerfully vibrant way and this was NOT done with the assistance of any psychedelic or sacrament. It truly cast a spell over the sensuous as a direct experience. I was in awe and grateful for this blessing or "spell of the sensuous." YES, we really are talking about different things.

Maybe this is best as expressed as a difference in expectations. I expect much, much more of modern man with his scientific cognition and his access to higher worlds from which the Wisdom, Beauty, and Goodness of Nature precipitate. Everything you see isn't a symbol of 'consciousness', but of ideational beings with specific personalities and individualities, in whose Ideas we live and breathe. They are the ones who gave both human language and the language of Nature. To stop short of discovering these beings in full waking consciousness is a tragedy for modern man at his critical evolutionary stage.

But I don't know how else to convey this to you. You feel everything we write here has already been encapsulated by your mind-container. And every attempt to point to the existence of the mind-container and ideas existing beyond it is immediately condensed into the thought, "this young fellow is so arrogant to think he has something to teach me about the higher worlds... I've already been there and done that". Then all the specific arguments such as those about the evident relation between animals and humans are selectively ignored.

What we are pointing to here isn't super complex. My cat is in touch with the holistic currents of Nature as an infant child. She can't help but take joy in the sight, smell, and taste of canned tuna, to the point where she will kill herself eating it if I don't manage her portions. This is not inner Wisdom and we all know that intuitively from experience, and with basic reasoning, but somehow intellectual reflection comes up with clever animistic arguments to make us doubt it. If we want to find the Wisdom of Nature and her living biosystems and ecosystems, we need to find it within ourselves first and foremost. There is nothing currently sensible (or sensuous) about our inner ideational activity - it is entirely non-spatial, supersensible. Another obvious fact.

[Lou Gold]

He is explaining the tremendous and deeply fundamental power of symbols. As I have shared previously, I once tested this by repeating, as I walked to the market, "Everything I see is a symbol of Consciousness" over and over in a mantra-like way. By the time I arrived at the market my whole sensual world had become extraordinary alive in a powerfully vibrant way and this was NOT done with the assistance of any psychedelic or sacrament. It truly cast a spell over the sensuous as a direct experience. I was in awe and grateful for this blessing or "spell of the sensuous." YES, we really are talking about different things.

Maybe this is best as expressed as a difference in expectations. I expect much, much more of modern man with his scientific cognition and his access to higher worlds from which the Wisdom, Beauty, and Goodness of Nature precipitate. Everything you see isn't a symbol of 'consciousness', but of ideational beings with specific personalities and individualities, in whose Ideas we live and breathe. They are the ones who gave both human language and the language of Nature. To stop short of discovering these beings in full waking consciousness is a tragedy for modern man at his critical evolutionary stage.

But I don't know how else to convey this to you. You feel everything we write here has already been encapsulated by your mind-container. And every attempt to point to the existence of the mind-container and ideas existing beyond it is immediately condensed into the thought, "this young fellow is so arrogant to think he has something to teach me about the higher worlds... I've already been there and done that". Then all the specific arguments such as those about the evident relation between animals and humans are selectively ignored.

What we are pointing to here isn't super complex. My cat is in touch with the holistic currents of Nature as an infant child. She can't help but take joy in the sight, smell, and taste of canned tuna, to the point where she will kill herself eating it if I don't manage her portions. This is not inner Wisdom and we all know that intuitively from experience, and with basic reasoning, but somehow intellectual reflection comes up with clever animistic arguments to make us doubt it. If we want to find the Wisdom of Nature and her living biosystems and ecosystems, we need to find it within ourselves first and foremost. There is nothing currently sensible (or sensuous) about our inner ideational activity - it is entirely non-spatial, supersensible. Another obvious fact.

But I don't know how else to convey this to you. You feel everything we write here has already been encapsulated by your mind-container. And every attempt to point to the existence of the mind-container and ideas existing beyond it is immediately condensed into the thought, "this young fellow is so arrogant to think he has something to teach me about the higher worlds... I've already been there and done that". Then all the specific arguments such as those about the evident relation between animals and humans are selectively ignored.

Nope. Not all all the way I see you but perhaps you need to project this attitude on to me in order to see something of yourself? I dunno but the marvelous insight about the mote and log in whose eye surely comes to mind. For the record, I surely believe in the Beyond-the-Beyond and know that I've barely scratched the surface of it. Nothing in me denies that the play of larger forces are surely at work. And I celebrate whatever Spiritual Science and other disciplines contribute to the expanded awareness made possible to us. May we all be blessed by such extraordinary ordinary opportunities and experiences. Sobeit. Amen.

[Lou Gold]

PS: I really like your current avatar image, which somehow expresses for me both Blake's aphorism, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." and an instinctual urge to discover what's over the horizon. Did you create the image?

No, I got it from a post on Steiner's facebook group, presumably it was created by the poster and I can no longer locate it.

I think it's time for a change!

Great move Ashvin. The two interpretations I offered did not include the obvious one of the Light of Christ pouring down from on-high and spreading outward into a diversity of forms held together in a heartfelt container of love. Your new image selection was thus a perfect and affirming expression of this process. Congratulations!