Cleric K wrote: ↑Wed Sep 07, 2022 7:38 am
Here's my take on the issue.
Imagine being on a forum where people primarily discuss physicalist theories of consciousness. Then if someone tries to point out that inner experience is the
actual given in the mystery of existence, soon there will be complains "This forum was about many things - neurons, microtubules, fields, dimensions, wind tunnels - there're endless possibilities which may explain how consciousness arises out of the physical. Now it's only about one thing - someone trying to point out that spiritual experience is more immediate and certain fact than the existence of a distinct inanimate physical world on the opaque side of subjectivity."
This has been pointed out several times. People here should be able to relate to this example. It's about certain maturation of consciousness. It's like rising to a hill and seeing from above that the labyrinth below has no exit, while others still down there say "You fool, there are so many more possible unexplored corridors, you're just lazy."
The matter is such that intellectual idealism has run its course more than a century ago. This is transparently clear for anyone who climbs the next hill and sees that the metaphysical systems are yet another intellectual labyrinth that never leads beyond itself. And this is not to say that all these systems of thought were wrong or unnecessary side tracks of evolution - quite the contrary - these are stages through which humanity's consciousness evolves. They cannot be skipped. But today we're already in a position to understand that they are
really stages, metamorphosing into one another, just like leaves of a plant unfold one by one.
At present, the intellect has driven itself into a corner. Or we may say it's pressing its back into the ceiling. I'm sorry to say that but it's more likely that something of
practical value will come out of a neuroscience lab than from the Essentia foundation. And this holds true for all philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality that tries to extract the essence of reality as some clever arrangement of thoughts.
This observation doesn't even require some especially deep insight. It's more or less what most people already feel anyway. The quick and dirty solution is for the intellect to simply
negate itself. Clearly, this doesn't really lead much further. It simply replaces the imagined vacuum of physical space with the spiritual vacuum of universal consciousness, where virtual potential emerges like manifested electron-positron pairs, only to quickly annihilate back into the Cosmic foam.
So this is the basic mood we find everywhere: yes - many will say - the thinking ego is a transient illusion, completely opaque to the potential from whence it emerges. It exists only within the manifested phenomena. It can know of deeper reality only as someone staring at a blackhole, capable of following phenomena only till the event horizon. When the intellect negates itself it remains in pure feeling which
the same that intellect chooses to call the spiritual vacuum/plenum.
So basically we have people coming here, overly enthusiastic about Bernardo's work, without really knowing that even though clothed in modern terminology,
the mode of cognition itself has already been thoroughly explored by the German Idealists of the 18th and 19th century. And this is not to criticize BK. It's actually valuable work because modern people (not speaking of amateur or professional philosophers) would have the greatest difficulty entering the mindset and language of the idealists of the past, so rising awareness to such a worldview through modern language is indispensable.
Yet soon after the initial euphory subsides, one begins to realize that not much has really changed - "OK, the world is mental in nature but now what?" And for most there are two basic paths to pursue. One is to continue exploring the intellectual labyrinth with the faith that maybe just behind that corner some ingenious arrangement of thought-pieces will be found which will solve everything. The other is based on the realization that nothing will ever be solved in this way so it's better to just annihilate the polarized intellectual phenomena back into their virtual state. Then there's also the mixture of two, where one accepts the marginal existence of the manifested intellect, yet some value is seen also in the arrangements of thoughts as long as they somehow convince the intellect that the highest wisdom consists into it negating itself and plunging into pure inexplicable experiencing. It's interesting to note that even BK's career so far exemplifies this archetypal pattern - starting overly enthusiastically, then gradually becoming disillusioned by the inability of the intellect to penetrate its depths (basically Schop's blind Will, which in modern terminology can be called the virtual/unmanifested potential of the One Universal Consciousness), thus analytical idealism has become simply another intellectual ladder which leads thinking to the point where it must negate itself in hope to annihilate into the inexplicable but true reality.
In this forum there is an attempt to simply indicate that this final frontier encountered by the intellect is only a
threshold leading to another stage of cognition. Endless attempts have been made to explain what the nature of this cognition is. In the context of this post we can picture that in yet another metaphor. The intellect accepts that its thoughts emerge from the virtual state metaphorically as electron-positron pairs, yet when raising the question of what the 'wavefunction' that guides this process is, on quickly declares it to belong to the realm of the dark instinctive nature of MAL. But through the proper meditative concentration on the very process of thoughts
willed into emergence from the virtual state, we gradually come to know that there's a non-intellectual (in the sense not thinking in sequences of thought-pieces) yet fully self-conscious cognitive activity which
guides this process of emergence. Through this concentration we awaken to a higher stratum of our being where our spiritual activity weaves in the sympathies, antipathies, and meaning, through which, if I can use the expression, we
steer the unfoldment of our states of being. Then we no longer think instinctively
about what reality is but begin to awaken
right into the forces that shape reality - starting from the forces that shape our own inner life. Gradually we come to realize that the virtual state is not at all inexplicable but consists of structured and fully conscious layers of spiritual activity, which seem to have their coherent personalities, as it were. We don't simply perceive these depths as some additional sensory perceptions, like some exotic color which we confront with our intellect, but by evolving our own thinking spiritual activity into becoming
self-similar to the higher order spiritual activities which weave the hierarchical (in the sense of musical or linguistic) structure of the dreamscape.
This is the critical threshold at which humanity finds itself today. So we basically either continue to endlessly explore the intellectual labyrinths, or we decide that annihilating the intellect is the highest achievement on Earth (anything else, if there's anything at all, to be expected only after death), or we realize that we've reached a point where we need to raise in consciousness and begin participating fully consciously along the gradient of manifestation. Not only at the level of final 'collapse of the wavefunction' but along the depth which shapes it through fully conscious spiritual activity.
Seen in this way, longing for the times when there were so many other things, is like grieving for all those kinds of distractions that were keeping the intellect happily engaged. The troublesome 'one thing' is not about reducing the richness of existence to one thing but only point at the
one direction which leads to even greater richness of existence. In fact, such richness and lucidity, in comparison to which our whole former Earthly life seems only as a dim dream.
As a final note I would like to point out that all said above hasn't and need not be related in any way to Steiner. No special terminology needed, only metaphors based on concepts that any relatively educated person of our age should be familiar with (like electron, positron, wavefunction, etc.) All that is needed is for one to be relatively conscious of the historical process in which we're placed. Questions such as the above should come completely naturally for anyone who can encompass the state of the world with their gaze. These are the pressing issues of our times, so to speak. And if after this one still wants to call such ideas Steineriaism or any other -ism, then it simply means they are still wandering the intellectual labyrinth and feel the need to put labels on every corridor. Such a person is not yet willing to go in a
perpendicular direction and investigate the
real forces that weave the very being who puts the labels and tries to classify the corridors, or even negates itself.
here's an example where I essentially lose my sh*t 