reality as unintelligible chaos, Dr. Hoffman's dashboard, etc.

[Cleric K]

I would agree with this, although the language 'spiritual organization is not attuned to the world contents' is a bit fuzzy to me.
I would state it more like William Blake does: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” Or, this quote from Cezanne "“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”
Or as the wisdom of the East might suggest, "Knowing of the world is structured in consciousness'.
The above is what we experience each day, if we're drowsy, angry, grief stricken, or asleep, dreaming . . . these states effect our perception.
But yes I find your answer more useful than the 'dashboard'.

There is very concrete reason to speak of spiritual organization. We can get quite clear picture of this by investigating the nature of physical development. It has been supposed for a long time but today it is known with certainty, that people born blind and undergoing sight restoring operation later in life, have to learn seeing from the ground up. It's not in the least that they immediately see and say "Aha, so that's how the tables and chairs that I've been only touching so far look like". This article may be of interest:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-o ... ndness-see

So the experimental results simply confirm what has been logical all along - most of our cognitive capabilities (especially those which make us human in comparison to animal) are not developed automatically. It is well known that if language is not acquired in the first years of life it can only be acquired with great difficulty, if at all, later. In the first years of life the nervous system is especially plastic and is being organized in direct response to stimuli and thinking. When a blind person undergoes operation they are flooded with color stimuli but initially this is only an unintelligible chaos. Gradually they may learn to orient themselves through the perceptions but as the experiments show, even then the seeing abilities rarely reach the full potential of what is possible when sight is developed in the normal way.

This gives us a good analogy to distinguish between simply cleansing the doors of perception (corresponding to the surgery) and actually organizing our inner being. There are many ways into which our ordinary consciousness may open up towards the finer spectrums and experience imagery. This is possible also with psychedelics. Yet the greatest mistake of our age is to believe that this represents some objective perception of the deeper layers of existence. In reality, the mystical and psychedelic experiences present us a flood of phenomena, similarly to the color sensations a formerly blind person receives after operation. And here's the great difference: opening the doors of perceptions and experiencing a flood of phenomena doesn't in the least equate to seeing, in the very same sense that the flood of color that the blind man experiences is not yet seeing. To see means to be able to make sense of the perceptions. Everything should integrate into a musical whole.

Please take a good note that sight doesn't develop in itself. We can't develop sight if we grow in a dark cave. That's why I spoke of development as a kind of attunement. Our physical and spiritual processes gradually attune themselves to the environment and in this process both physical and soul layers of our being are organized. This is not dissimilar to what Jim speaks about: that our intellectual being builds itself as a kind of cognitive mirror of the environment. Except that Jim stops there, refusing to investigate the possibility that there might be no hard boundary between our inner life and environment. Otherwise the process of attunement can continue much further than attunement of an intellectual model to the contents of sensory perceptions (I tried to hint at that with this post which he didn't want to address).

Goethe has expressed this beautifully: "Were the eye not of the Sun, How could we behold the light?". Something of great significance is hidden in these words, which encode the essence of the evolutionary process.

So with this said, we once again arrive at the spiritual drama of our decisive times. Today people are still very tempted to consider themselves complete beings (pure consciousness) of which only the doors of perceptions are slightly dimmed. This leads to extension of Maya into the supersensible which is even more dangerous than the sensory Maya. As soon as the person achieves some kind of extraordinary experience, they consider they have seen the carrot afresh and their work is done. The only thing left is to wait compassionately for death and anything else is to be expected only beyond the threshold. What is repelled with great force is the fully logical possibility that the carrot is only the color that the blind man sees for the first time and the revolution consists in the patient and tedious work of developing the actual intelligible seeing. This higher consciousness reveals in new ways how sensory perceptions are weaved together, how the streams of destiny shape the dreamscape, how archetypal beings intend the evolutionary Cosmic rhythms (epochs) within which humanity unfolds its potential as a plant unfolds leaf after leaf. Yet this potential is not something that appears to us readymade after we rub our eyes after sleep. The centers in the brain, the lotus flowers in the soul body - all these have to be developed gradually if the sea of phenomena is to be seen as a Cosmic symphony. For this to happen our whole spectrum of being should be gradually shaped, organized, developed, attuned. Our aperture of Cosmic being should become self-similar to Cosmic being at large, just like the eye has to become self-similar to light it we're to behold the Light the floods the Cosmos.

I hope this analogy with the blind man acquiring sight makes it clear why there's difference between simply cleansing the doors - which in the analogy corresponds to the surgical procedure - and the organization - which corresponds to the development of brain centers which one has to begin perfecting much like starting from a baby stage. The greatest obstacle for seeing this aright is the desire to consider ourselves complete beings, self-sufficient in our thoughtless state where everything is consider to be just what it is, with no further questions asked, instead of realizing that our fully conscious evolutionary journey hasn't even begun yet.

[Jim Cross]

You should actually read Hoffman on this. It's extremely likely we would build a camera to generate images we would recognize. Otherwise, nobody would be interested in the photographs. In other words, photographic images are nonveridical in the same way that our vision is nonveridical.

At least, that is Hoffman's view.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.37 ... 90-8#Sec14

It may be that I don't understand how Hoffman is using the 'dashboard' . . . for example a group of individuals viewing the moon; one thinks the moon is very far away, another thinks the moon is close, another thinks it's a piece of floating cheese, and another sees (the moon) yet names it and sees it as a goddess.
If the 'dashboard' is the moon being being far away, being close, being cheese, being a godess, etc. then I misunderstood Hoffman's dashboard.
But I don't think this is the case - Hoffman uses the analogy of an icon on the computer screen (trash can), and sliding a file to it. In this analogy reality is 1/0's and the dashboard is the icon. Hoffman appears to be open to even (almost) 0 truthfulness in perception - and certainly open to 0 truthfulness in measurement\interpretation.
Needless to say, the brain, neurons and their firing, are also of the dashboard/visualization tool.
The brain, moon - all physical objects, colors etc. exist when we render (reconstruct) them - and don't exist when we don't render them.
BTW, I NOT thinking I got Hoffman on something he missed - but rather there must be something I'm missing.
Re "It's extremely likely we would build a camera to generate images we would recognize" - yes our cameras capture the same spectrum of light as our eyes (not UV) . . .
I see a train approaching at 200mph, I video the oncoming train, on playback the video camera captures largely what I see and hear:
1) there is a train approaching, with charcacteristics largely like what I observe.
2) the oncoming object is a reality quite different than what I see, and yet somehow the camera renders the train as I do.
3) the camera captures reality, whatever that may be; and yet when I watch the 2D image on playback I somehow render the image the same way as I rendered the oncoming reality.

Of the 3 options above, #1 is the only believable.

I think "dashboard" is more BK than Hoffman. Hoffman uses more the term "desktop".

However, neither one can be credited with it. I have seen the same analogy used in a book from the 1990's, The User Illusion. It is based on the early days of computer design and graphical user interfaces. The idea is that the computer is complicated so there needs to be an interface to simplify it if ordinary people are going to be able to use it. A single icon and simple actions taken with it by the user can lead casually to a whole series of complicated actions in the computer itself, for example loading a program or erasing a file.

This isn't substantially different from my use of the term model in other discussions.