Lou Gold wrote: ↑Tue Jul 26, 2022 3:02 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jul 26, 2022 2:09 am
Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Jul 25, 2022 8:42 pm
In my simplistic view, "Why do we reincarnate without memories?" is because dissociating from the whole to a part is a traumatic experience and memory loss is the natural result. Those who want to ask why an "intentional nature" would do this will continue to ask "Why?" and those who see an "instinctive nature" will focus on how to best deal with things as they are. I fully expect the debate between the two perspectives to continue. I'm not a philosopher but the thought that just came floating by said, "Perhaps this is the Hegelian notion of the dialectic driving development (DDD)." I dunno. Just a thought perhaps worth contemplating.
If my wholeness is rooted in my "instinctive nature", then my highest goal should be to return to that nature, or simply stop evolving so my current instincts remain in the driver's seat and gradually envelop my own intentional agency. In fact this is the subconscious goal of many people, as evidenced by their actions, habits, and attitudes more than their words. This is not what I call dealing with things as they are, because intentional human agency is the way things have become.
On the other hand, if my 'trauma' of incarnation is intimately bound up with my own intentional agency and that of other beings, my goal is become
more conscious of how and why I have been incarnating in this way. I am no longer looking to reduce my intentional agency back to instinctive nature, but to expand it even more to become more unified with the agency that was exercised prior to incarnation.
Don't take this as an attempt to debate philosophy, Lou, it's just a thought which came floating by
Could be as you say Ashvin. Could also be that the deepest goal of our instinctive but separated nature is to arrive at the wholeness of the love that reconnects. This too is an imaginative possibility. Should we reject the possibility that the God of many names is instinctually loving?
I think the word "instinct" has a pretty clear connotation in common usage, if not in explicit meaning, which is that of unthinking, non self-aware, almost mechanistic carrying out of various impulses. Normally we apply it to animals, infants and small children, and adults whose passions have overridden their rational and reflective judgments. In the law, something like this can actually serve as a defense to a crime, lowering the culpability from murder to voluntary or involuntary manslaughter, for example, which carries lesser penalties. The reasoning is because the person's rational faculties were
taken possession by the 'heat of passion', so society should cut them a break because they lacked conscious intent to the same degree as a person who coldly premeditates and calculates a murder scheme.
There is another less common usage, which means something more like "wise impulses which flash into consciousness in certain times of uncertain decision". This is more in keeping with how I view the nature of instincts, i.e. as the intelligent,
self-conscious spiritual impulses of beings in whose consciousness we are nested, emanating from the 'top-down'. Yet even these wise impulses, if we were to rely on them indefinitely, become an oppression against our freedom. Then we remain as spiritual infants who are growing into adult bodies but cannot deal with adult responsibilities, so instead we remain attached to all sorts of crude sensory pleasures. From the higher perspective, we are like viruses or parasites who evolve only through higher beings, not through the power of our own creative agency.
Or another analogy, it is like we are in a candlelight vigil, having our candles lit by the higher beings in front of us in the evolutionary progression but refusing to light the candles of those behind us.
As often said, this isn't an abstract theoretical speculation on how things are, but a scientific understanding which we all can discern with unprejudiced thinking. There are specific beings with specific candles at specific times in human evolution, lighting our own in specific ways. When we freely decide to take over creative responsibility for lighting our own candles and those behind us, we are transmuting subconscious instincts into conscious
intuitions. Then we are coming to truly know and commune with the Cosmic Intelligence from which our natural instincts arise, which is far from any mechanistic or unconscious or semi-conscious mental force. We attain ever-greater wholeness in full clarity of waking consciousness, because we are growing into the archetypal consciousness of our higher Self.