Seflf-causality of the reality of consciousness.

[AshvinP]

I also disagree with Bernardo's official position that all evolution of consciousness only happens on the levels of biological structures (animals and humans) and stops and dissolves into the instinctive state of MAL after the physical death, even though he admitted at one of his Q&A that he is open to the hierarchical view but just not willing to openly admit it in the area of academic philosophy where he is currently active (and I understand his rationale for that).

That was BK in response to a question I asked. In the same question, when I brought up Newtonian theory of color, i.e. pure 'white light' existing independent of thinking agency in which the colors are embedded and drawn out by a prism, BK basically said this conclusion is the best science can do and, although Goethe had an intuitively more coherent theory which is also more practically relevant, it proved to be 'wrong', since its conclusions were beyond the orbit of systematic human perceptive-thinking inquiry. That is the same rationale for why he is 'open' to the supra-human hierarchical view but excludes such topics from the orbit of philosophy and science. So here we see the inevitable dualism which results when these things are held as only analytical models - one defaults to the materialistic outlook in science which refuses to see our thinking ego as embedded within the greater flow of the World Process through which all phenomena manifest, and therefore ignores/rejects its capacity to penetrate to the deeper layers of intuitive activity-meaning which are presupposed by all the concepts used in our analytical models. The 'advantage' of using the analytical models is that they will always lack enough living power to descend from our mental sphere into that of our feeling and will. We will remain 'open' to all manner of theoretical possibilities prior to death, but never committed enough to any one of them to inspire the intellectual ego, who, as you say, is only interested in its own survival now, into novel and expansive modes of thinking-being. The latter only comes through living knowledge, i.e. the vertical integration through Time while still in the body.

[Stranger]

Cleric, so, what's your opinion on the self-causality hypothesis? Do you think it is plausible within the framework of the Steinerian idealism?

[Federica]

1) So there's a hypothesis that MAL somehow inherits and builds up for itself a meta-faculty-at-large from the mini meta-consciousnesses of all the dissolved alters?

Correct. Notice that alters are not something separate from MAL, alters ARE MAL by nature, dissociation is just a way for MAL to evolve and acquire learning experiences from the first person perspectives of the alters. So, of course, MAL inherits the learning experiences of its own alters in order to evolve at the larger scale.

In relation to your paradigm and its application to BK’s - Of course, as you say, alters are MAL by nature, and their conscious experiences are and have always been within the only reality, MAL. However, it is not in the obvious course of things that, because the fragmented ego-consciousnesses dissolve in MAL, hence MAL acquires a recombined unitary faculty of meta-consciousness, through the mere dissolving of alters. It seems to me that you have to either demonstrate, or postulate such recombination faculty.
In your exposition, it appears as an implicit postulate, and my point is, it's a huge one. One that, alone, flies you a significant bit towards your desired self-causality end. Let’s say that, with it accepted, your paradigm then flawlessly flows until it reaches its self-causality aim. Well, you will have reached it at the cost of postulating away a kind of uber-panpsychism, a fraction of which is, for some academic philosophers, the content itself of their life-theses. In other words, you are merrily wiping all possible meaning off of their efforts in an ‘of course’. Not that I myself feel particularly contrite at such gesture, but because you are underscoring that such and such are the rules of science and philosophy, and you seem to have endeavored to play by those rules in the way you have exposed your paradigm here, then it may be worth noticing. Incidentally, one could also wonder - if it is so obvious, why does BK not make such hypothesis?
In any case, it seems to me that, in a way or another, you have to address the uber-recombination problem that your hypothesis entails.

2) "However at this point (do you mean point in time?) MAL abides beyond time" seems to be equivalent, in your hypothesis, to ‘MAL moving at will up or down the arrow of time’, that is to say, MAL remains very much caught within, not beyond, time. So in this scheme, time does not seem enabled to live up to the preponderant role that it is given, of both main culprit of MAL’s slip-at-large, and deus-ex-machina, or magic device that will /would /did allow the MAL-police to handcuff the stream of events and pin it back down on itself, so solving the mystery by wrapping it up.

Here the assumption is that MAL is both within and beyond the time of our apparent universe. I understand that this may be inconceivable for our human minds because most of us have no experience of the beyond-time state. As an analogy I can suggest a block-universe theory in modern physics or the philosophy of eternalism. Another similar view to consider is the view of the classical Chistian theology (e.g. Augustine of Hippo) that God abides beyond time of the created world but still acts within the dimension of time in the world, and that God is both immanent to the world and transcendental to it.

I still have to read your linked references - I don’t know these theories - however my point was that the promise of the assumption - MAL is both within and beyond time - does not seem to be fulfilled in your unfolding of the paradigm, which reads to me as: MAL is both within linear time, and within a loop of linear time, but never beyond time, through integration. In other words, your explanation of ‘beyond time’ sounds to me as a mere reshaping of the arrow of time, still within the framework of a sequential time unfolding. Instead of flowing linearly, you make it flow circularly, but it still flows sequentially in both cases. It is never a ‘beyond’, rather, it remains a ‘within’ in both cases, with a mere change of ‘function’ of the flow, not of ‘reference system’.

Unfortunately, I don't understand your second sentence.

One question that could enable a total reset of the problem: is the task of reflecting about the nature and cause of reality similar to the task of writing the plot of a detective novel, trying to find a clever solution to the mystery? If the answer is yes, well you should work at solving at least the two issues listed above. Also, you could consider to submit the scheme to Bernardo, during the upcoming Q&A. If the answer is no: I am glad to hear that - then there must be another way, that does not start by conjuring up a bit of theory, to fit another theory, that already has its issues, with the goal of countering some additional issues, but in the process, originating some more issues….

I'm just exploring here a "what if" possibility as a hypothesis without claiming that it is true and without expecting it to be free of any explanatory gaps. This is how science and philosophy work where people suggest hypotheses and theories and then scrutinize them to discover all their strong and weak points. Many don't survive in the process, but some do and contribute to our accumulated body of knowledge, but I'm not aware of a single scientific or philosophical theory that is totally free of any explanatory gaps and issues.

Herein defocusing from the details of your and BK’s paradigm, my attempt was to express the sense of alienation that arises when playing in full immersion by the rules you refer to. Tt may be true, "there is not a single scientific or philosophical theory that is totally free of any explanatory gaps and issues", but does that mean that we cannot question such an evolution of the idea of theory itself, and that we have to submit ourselves to the alienation that comes from operating in exclusive intellectual immersion in it? This alienation, or estrangement, or sense of unreality, inevitably materializes - it may surface or it may remain subconscious - when the task of exploring theoretical ‘what-ifs’ has come to very much liken the laying out of a cleverly organized ordering of concept-pieces, not as a means to the end of understanding reality, but as an end in itself, with no contact surface with the wholeness of our experienced existence, and as such, trapped in the closed circuits of a Lego-like mind-sandbox, in which these arrangements, as ends-in-themselves, become alienating, infernal loops. In other words, I was pleading for the freedom/duty to break free from the execution by those rules of such a restrictive and self-mortifying idea of theory.

[Cleric K]

Cleric, so, what's your opinion on the self-causality hypothesis? Do you think it is plausible within the framework of the Steinerian idealism?

Yes, it is indeed plausible. Although, it should be noted what the nature of ‘Steinerian idealism’ really is. From what you have written so far I believe it won’t be difficult for you to grasp this.

Our abstract intellectual cognition resembles manipulation of puzzle pieces within our imagination. This is the direction that metaphysics and philosophy have taken in the last few centuries. If we observe ourselves while doing this kind of philosophy, we’ll see that we have puzzle pieces for MAL, matter, energy or whatever and we try to build a thought edifice that is really a thought model of reality. In all this, the living spiritual activity which imagines and manipulates the puzzle pieces remains in the blind spot of consciousness, so to speak.

A new stage of the cognitive evolution of humanity begins when attention begins to shift away from the planar relations of thought puzzle pieces, towards the actual process of these pieces taking shape. You gave the example of the Ouroboros  – the snake biting its tail. When this symbol is presented to a person still operating strictly at the intellectual level of cognition he would take that symbol as a puzzle piece. He will try to imagine some self-referential process of reality in the way he pictures a microphone and speaker in a feedback loop. Yet the actual spiritual activity that animates the imagined process remains in the blind spot.

From the way you describe things, it is clear that for you the Ouroboros is not simply an abstract model for the supposed reality-in-itself but a symbol of living spiritual experience. There’s deep intuition within you that basically has the meaning “Whatever is in me that acts as thinking spiritual force, is of the same essential nature as the forces that seem to move the world phenomena. They seem to me as an external world only as far as I haven’t found the union with the first-person spiritual forces that are active in them.” So this is a different kind of thinking. In planar thinking we manipulate abstract symbols on the surface of our imagination and map them against perceptions. In the latter case, which we can call vertical or depth thinking, we deal with actual phenomenology, we investigate the thinking process as an actual process of reality. Clearly this presents an insurmountable challenge for the pure intellect which always feels as a top-tier observer of reality, thinking from its tower about the world down there. But if we are to observe the actual thinking process we feel as a dog (or snake) chasing its tail. The intellect wants to see itself in front of itself, and observe thinking as some signal produced from a mechanical device. But once again this picture doesn’t include the living activity that does the imagining. So the intellect can never observe as a finished perception its current thinking activity. It observes only shed snake skins that were thought an instant ago, while its current activity which focuses on the past shed skin, is the present living snake, which is fully intuitively conscious of itself but has not yet externalized itself.

Nevertheless, with the appropriate training it is possible to stabilize this process and begin to livingly navigate through it. Then everything we produce through our spiritual activity becomes a panoramic image of the forces that are active in the production of the image itself. So unlike planar thinking, it’s not so much the shape and color of the puzzle pieces and their horizontal relations but the investigation of the invisible gradient of our being through which the spiritual force is transduced until it reaches the state of mineralization (which we correlate with the nervous system and the sense organs). So at this stage of cognition it is not that in the images we see the true nature of reality. They are only reflections, ripples on the imaginative surface etched by our deeper intuitive activity. Such is the case with the Ouroboros. It’s clear that clairvoyant vision won’t find some literal Cosmic Snake biting its tail out there in spiritual space. These are imaginative symbols which make sense only when they are seen in the light of deeper intuition of our soul and spiritual nature. The greater orientation we gain in these intuitively known worlds, the more the whole perceptual panorama of our soul and sensory life becomes a living reflection of them.

We need to consider things in such light if we are to understand the direction of ‘Steinerian idealism’. We’ll be completely on the wrong track if we imagine that Steiner developed some complicated framework of planar thoughts that the intellectual ego manipulates on the surface of imagination and models the supposed reality-in-itself. Actually, where planar philosophy and metaphysics end, is where spiritual science begins. We can’t have a notion of spiritual science without understanding something of the higher forms of cognition from whence the concepts and images precipitate. And the first step across this threshold is to find the transition between planar and depth thinking. That’s why the Philosophy of Freedom (alternatively translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) is such an important work.

Steiner is not some ‘rights-holder’ over this domain of spiritual inquiry, any more than Pythagoras, Newton, Leibniz, Euler are ‘right-holders’ over the world of mathematical ideas. These things are difficult to understand only as long as we imagine that every soul is a completely self-enclosed sphere and ideas are simply local phenomena that we have learned to copy-paste in between ourselves through the medium of language and symbols. If we instead recognize that what we call subconsciousness is really a whole not yet elucidated world of soul and spirit, where the archetypal being of all humanity is to be found, then we clearly understand that the whole evolutionary journey of man from the dawn of cognition, has been to gradually grow into the spiritual world, such that both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ phenomena can be seen as reflections of the deeds of the Spirit living in all beings.

There have been many bright individuals who have been bringing the spirit in the world - both the pre-Christian mystics and the later Christian initiates who developed the science of the Christ being reaching down into the sensory spectrum through the ego activity of the individual “I”. Steiner’s work is one of the pieces of this Cosmic mosaic, yet a very important one. It so happens that there’s always a certain individuality that has to anchor certain spiritual impulse within the sensory world. For one thing was Aristotle, for another was Newton. If it wasn’t Steiner hopefully it would have been some other name. The important thing is to recognize the part of the veil that has been lifted through each impulse. In Steiner’s case the most important contribution is to lead the intellect towards its spiritual foundations. We know very well the crisis of cognition in our days. We have either the complete submerging in planar thought and endless abstract modeling of the supposed reality-in-itself, as is the case for the contemporary lifeless science and philosophy. Or we have the half-understood Eastern mysticism that declares the intellectual ego to be an illusion and one shuts himself into mystic sleep, expecting anything else eventually only after death. It becomes critically important in our age that we can find our intellect as the decohered manifestation of a higher form of spiritual activity, which leads us into a higher soul and archetypal spiritual world, where the driving forces of all Earthly happenings are to be found.

The point of all this is that although speaking of self-caused reality is plausible, we should not remain with only these thoughts. For some they will remain simply abstract planar puzzle pieces. Others will dimly feel that they symbolize something intuitively felt but will decide that this is the maximum achievable on Earth. So such theories only serve their purpose if they stimulate us to seek clear cognition along the depth axis of our being. Then we no longer speak of theories but we communicate in images the living reality of the shared spiritual world, in the same way we communicate in symbols mathematical ideas.

[Stranger]

Thanks Cleric, yes, I also share this view and that's why I said in my previous post " the melding of such philosophical paradigm with the spiritual practice and spiritual and intellectual development of our consciousness beyond the boundaries of the human level of the intellect", and by that I meant applying the acquired intellectual knowledge to internalized spiritual practice performed from the first-person perspective, and making the acquired ideas of knowledge to be the living first-person experiences. Instead of operating with ideas on the abstract level and projecting them onto the external world, we need to discover their actual experiential meanings by experiencing these intuitive meanings through our internal spiritual life. In this way such knowledge becomes not merely an abstract exercise in philosophy, but a life-guiding experiential Gnosis.

And from this perspective, I think the knowledge of the self-causation opens to us the new gnostic meanings applicable to our spiritual evolution, it tells us that we are the key participants in the evolution of consciousness as a whole and without our participation the very existence of the reality of consciousness would not be even possible. We do that mot merely for the benefit of our own personal development, but as a contribution to the evolution and the very existence of conscious reality as a whole. It gives the meaning and motivation to overcome the trials and sufferings of our human life and the sense of direction in our spiritual development.

[Federica]

I just want to note here that it's interesting to consider how, in our abstract thought-content, we are already 'outside Time', in the sense that we must negate-kill the force of Time in order to quantitatively experience it as the successive flow of minutes, hours, days, etc. It is our own 'outside Time' experience in abstract thinking which then gets projected onto the MAL/God/Absolute and results in, for all practical intents and purposes, a remote and 'transcendent' Consciousness which has little to do with our inner activity-experience. As crude as it sounds, the common understanding of God is only a corpse as is our own dialectical thought-form. Modern intellectual man re-creates God in his own image.

Yes, I understand that. As I have tried to further express in my last post here, my understanding is that in Stranger’s theory MAL is hypothesized to be both within linear time, and within a loop of linear time, hence always within sequential time, and never beyond time / inside Time. Therefore, time in that theory, seems to me as “quantitatively experienced as successive flow” all throughout.

We needed to get outside Time to win our inner freedom, as it is not possible to exert our individual will - to potentially make errors, lie, do evil, etc. - when our thought is within the true metamorphic force of Time. The sheer reality of that force makes impossible any will-independence. That is only possible within a quantitative realm of experience, i.e. Space as the polar opposite of Time. Yet our will-thought within Space is only the seed of freedom and cannot be nourished when we idolize our own quantitative creations, thereby forgetting their final cause or telos. We forget that we can only experience 'outside Time' because the true experiencer - the higher Self - is still within the force of Time. It is the forgetting which leads to the infernal loops, which are a symptom of the fact that we increasingly refuse to learn any lessons from our errors in the quantitative realm and are therefore destined to repeat them until we so learn.

By continually requiring perception in order to become manifest, immobility, as a fixed symbol of simultaneity, is imperceptible simultaneity stripped of itself: simultaneity continually broken off into moments by perception.

We are unaware of how to grasp these moments as moments, as points of the emergence of simultaneity, or eternity, whose form is simultaneousness. Such moments are annihilated in sensory perception. As part of the finite world, they are simultaneously possessed as small openings beyond the finite realm, and then lost. For this reason, they necessarily always involve an interval. The interval, abstractly overcome and abstractly filled, is time, but lost time—the continuance of its loss.

We can cognize this interval, which is never cognized, by grasping the inner movement that unites one thought to another. In fact, abstract thinking in need of a quantitative measure (or succession) loses time. Time exists separate and apart from quantity. Only the specter of time can be measured; time, itself, is immeasurable. Time is not the succession; it is what guides the succession.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (pp. 37-38). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

Regarding this further comment on Time, freedom, and forgetting - thank you, I do have the impression that the various insights are all adding to each other in some way. I can make sense of this one, but I’m struggling to find the fulcrum at the center of the various ideas / insights, wherefrom I could encompass them all. I have a specular problem in space, I can mentally go around various subareas of a landscape, but I often struggle to reconstruct a unitary map where I could mind-travel flawlessly through all the connected sub-areas. Similarly, I am lacking the helicopter view here. By the way, forgetting is in itself an act of slipping out of time, so it’s a slipping outside Time that causes slipping outside Time, hence the infernal loops of intellect…. I might very well be in one right now


Also, the quote is not clear to me, that stasis is a symbol of simultaneity. I would have imagined that multiplicity, not stasis, is the spatial symbol of simultaneity… Simultaneity means to me multiplicity seen from outside Time. Stasis means, along time-flow lack of movement in space, which is said to be the symbol of imperceptible simultaneity… I don't get it. I will have to be patient until I can work this out properly, I guess. I know what I'll go to next, not asking for more insights just yet, thanks again for these ones!

[AshvinP]

Now, how can we apply the option #3 to idealism? Here is the proposed scheme:

1. Let’s start from the Bernardo’s idealistic paradigm, from the original state of non-metacognitive MAL that, by its instinctive will, imagines/manifests the world as its own excitation and dissociates into alters in order to experience it. The question can be asked: where did this will to create came from? Why exactly this will to create the world in the direction of evolution of sentience and not any other kind of will (for example, a will to simply rest in the peace of its unexcited state)? In Bernardo’s version of idealism this question remains unanswered. We will return to this question later in #4.

2. Consequently, within the arrow of time from the perspective of the alters, the process of evolution of the world progresses and the alters evolve into sentient beings with progressively higher developed cognitive abilities until they become able to attain metacognition and realization of their own fundamental nature as consciousness.

3. At some point in the evolution the cognitive abilities of the alters become so powerful that they make the MAL itself also highly evolved and metacognitive when they merge with it at the end of their evolutionary paths. This soul’s evolution may involve ascending through multiple hierarchical levels of cognition. At the end of this evolutionary process the MAL reaches the state of omnipotence and omniscience beyond the limits of space and time that monotheistic religions refer to as “God”.

4. At this point the MAL knows that in order for itself and for such omniscient state to exist it had to go through the whole process of evolution from the instinctive to metacognitive state through the development of cognition of individual alters, so it was necessary to have the telos and will to evolve implanted in the original non-metacognitive state of the MAL. However, at this point MAL abides beyond time, which allows it to act at any moment of its own evolution and of the historical apparent axis of time of the apparent world. This makes it possible to for the MAL to retro-causally “implant” the telos and will to evolve (and may be even the very ability to have conscious experience) into its own original instinctive state whereby creating its own cause to evolve and exist.

I wonder if we could also propose to resolve the metaphysical issues as follows:

The primordial state consists of a quantum void in which what we now know inwardly as "will, feeling, thinking" was embedded. From this primordial state, a differentiation took place into the fundamental forces of physics - gravity, nuclear, electromagnetic. Again, what we now experience inwardly as "will, feeling, thought" was embedded in these forces, but in a way that we can hardly imagine. Any objection of a 'hard problem' here would succumb to the anthropomorphizing fallacy, since it assumes how we currently experience will, feeling, thought is also how it would have to be embedded with the physical forces at the highest levels of vertical integration, which any humble intellect must admit it cannot imagine. Through further differentiation, we eventually get the elements, chemicals, and material components which evolve themselves through the primordial survival instinct into sentient individual organisms, i.e. 'alters', who further evolve into meta-cognitive (reflective thinking) organisms who are awakened to their own reality in the World Process.  

Numbers #3 and #4 also follow from here in the same way. Sentient beings reflect on the nature of their awakening and say, whatever embedded this potential with us must also exist as "God(s)". They clothe these unimaginable forces in the imagery of the familiar sense-perceptible world. Super meta-cognitive MAL, an amalgamation of all the sentient alters who have converged through evolution, eventually decides to embed the WFT potential back into the physical forces which seed an entirely new Universe from a 'big bang'. Of course, the linear temporal language is being used because there is no other way to communicate this dynamic, but there is no reason to think Time is uniformly linear even under a physicalist paradigm and most secular science points away from such a conception of Time. We could say all the Universes are actually embedded within a 'multi-verse' in which they all exist simultaneously, yet our current 'alter' perspective must conceive it as linear history from past to future. Apart from the metaphysical 'hard problem' already mentioned and discarded, is there any flaw in the logic? Is this not a perfectly plausible hypothesis/model?

So then the question becomes, what have we actually resolved with either your model (which I understand is not only 'yours'), or the similar 'de-mystified' one above? To your credit, in response to Cleric, you observed that there must accompany with any such metaphysical exercise an experiential Gnosis as well. But isn't it possible, even likely, that the more one feels the metaphysical exercise is valuable and satisfactory, the less one is motivated to pursue any experiential Gnosis? I would say the last few centuries has made this likely possibility into a confirmed reality. At every stage of evolution, certain old inner habits-qualities must be sacrificed to make room for new ones. "Do not pour new wine into old wineskins or else both will be ruined". Whether this accords with our concept of what's 'fair' is an entirely separate issue and should not influence our objective evaluation of the holistic process. Certain habits of thinking need to be negated to result in a synthesis at a higher level, i.e. the thesis-antithesis-synthesis of Hegelian phenomenology. Here the thesis is abstract thinking (not only metaphysical, but across all dimensions of inquiry), the antithesis is more living thinking rooted in vertical contemplation of inner activity-experience, and the synthesis would be the Imagination (as Cleric described) which penetrates to deeper layers of the collective subconscious in which the answers to our metaphysical questions are discovered as living realities.

[Stranger]

But isn't it possible, even likely, that the more one feels the metaphysical exercise is valuable and satisfactory, the less one is motivated to pursue any experiential Gnosis? I would say the last few centuries has made this likely possibility into a confirmed reality.

Of course it is possible and we have been seeing it over the last centuries everywhere in science and philosophy, you are right. But if people managed to do it wrong, that does not mean we should abandon any metaphysical exercise at all, but rather we need to learn and demonstrate how to do it right with the coalescence of both discursive metaphysics and experiential gnosis.

Regarding you description of the process, that's also pretty much how I see it - God in its final omniscient state embedding the abilities to consciously experience, think, will and feel into its original non-metacognitive void state plus the telos as an instinctive impulse to manifest physical reality thereby making the evolution of consciousness possible.

[AshvinP]

By continually requiring perception in order to become manifest, immobility, as a fixed symbol of simultaneity, is imperceptible simultaneity stripped of itself: simultaneity continually broken off into moments by perception.

We are unaware of how to grasp these moments as moments, as points of the emergence of simultaneity, or eternity, whose form is simultaneousness. Such moments are annihilated in sensory perception. As part of the finite world, they are simultaneously possessed as small openings beyond the finite realm, and then lost. For this reason, they necessarily always involve an interval. The interval, abstractly overcome and abstractly filled, is time, but lost time—the continuance of its loss.

We can cognize this interval, which is never cognized, by grasping the inner movement that unites one thought to another. In fact, abstract thinking in need of a quantitative measure (or succession) loses time. Time exists separate and apart from quantity. Only the specter of time can be measured; time, itself, is immeasurable. Time is not the succession; it is what guides the succession.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (pp. 37-38). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

Also, the quote is not clear to me, that stasis is a symbol of simultaneity. I would have imagined that multiplicity, not stasis, is the spatial symbol of simultaneity… Simultaneity means to me multiplicity seen from outside Time. Stasis means, along time-flow lack of movement in space, which is said to be the symbol of imperceptible simultaneity… I don't get it. I will have to be patient until I can work this out properly, I guess. I know what I'll go to next, not asking for more insights just yet, thanks again for these ones!

Federica,

I think your characterization is accurate. When he says "immobility", to me that means the fixed spatial forms which appear as multiplicity. The 'movement' we perceive outwardly, through the succession of 'frames', is really the negation of the inner thought-movement which is actually taking place. All physical symbols are negations, or negative images, in that sense. And, in a similar way, at the cultural level, our metaphysical conceptual systems, tied to the physical nervous-sensory system, are only possible to the extent they negate the inner movement of living thinking within more subtle spheres of our organism, when we remain with normal waking consciousness. It is like the bi-stable perception which we can only perceive one way when we don't perceive it the other way, or what is reflected in the QM 'uncertainty principle' where the accuracy of measuring a particle's position only comes at the sacrifice of accurately measuring its momentum. So eventually we hit a limit at which the intellect can no longer work it out, because it is actively negating the very thing which needs to be worked out. The extent to which it ignores this limit and continues 'working it out' is also the extent to which it begins reaching inverted conclusions, which inevitably project/externalize inner flaws, deficiencies, attitudes, cognitive limits, etc. onto nature, culture, individuals, God, i.e. 'reality itself'. These things manifest so reliably through the deep layers of our normal waking subconscious that, if we ever feel that we are not doing it, then we most certainly are.

[AshvinP]

But isn't it possible, even likely, that the more one feels the metaphysical exercise is valuable and satisfactory, the less one is motivated to pursue any experiential Gnosis? I would say the last few centuries has made this likely possibility into a confirmed reality.

Of course it is possible and we have been seeing it over the last centuries everywhere in science and philosophy, you are right. But if people managed to do it wrong, that does not mean we should abandon any metaphysical exercise at all, but rather we need to learn and demonstrate how to do it right with the coalescence of both discursive metaphysics and experiential gnosis.

Regarding you description of the process, that's also pretty much how I see it - God in its final omniscient state embedding the abilities to consciously experience, think, will and feel into its original non-metacognitive void state plus the telos as an instinctive impulse to manifest physical reality thereby making the evolution of consciousness possible.

But notice in my description/model, "God" as any spiritual being(s) who we can relate to with our "I"-sense, with what you may refer to as Platonic ideation, don't exist. Isn't this a major difference than with your model and many traditional spiritual understandings? Yet the logic of both models are equally internally coherent, so what makes one more objectively valid than the other?

Also, your comment above about a "original non-metacognitive void state" suggests we are still thinking of it as a linear progression from instinctive consciousness to supra-intelligent, purposeful Deity. When you include "plus the telos", doesn't this basically negate the "instinctive impulse", since Being acting with teleological purpose is not acting instinctively?