Our human language, in terms of semantics, grammar and the common conceptual content, is inherently dualistic, Ashvin was exactly right about that. Any sentence unavoidably has a linguistic subject-object structure. So, no matter what you say, you can always be formally accused of dualism. So, how do we convey any nondualistic meanings or ideas using such dualistic language? Should we develop a different language (or at least different grammatic structures based on common English)? I don't think that project will succeed, and even if we would be able to do that within a group of nondualistically-thinking people, nobody will understand us outside of our group. So, what is the solution? I think a reasonable solution is to try to convey nondualistic meanings using the common language, but the readers/listeners should try to decode the messages to see the actually implied meanings through the distortion of the dualistic language.Federica wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 2:20 pm Eugene,
Scaligero is not writing about the known challenge you are referring to.
If I did not 'know' you, I would conclude from what you have written here that you hold a materialistic worldview.
In fact, I do argue that what is implied in your opinion above is a case when the dualistic baseline approach, thrown out of the door, gets back in through the window (do you have this saying in English?)
It's always ready to trick us, as soon as we are not carefully looking...
Seflf-causality of the reality of consciousness.
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
"You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop" Rumi
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
Stranger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 3:57 pm
Our human language, in terms of semantics, grammar and the common conceptual content, is inherently dualistic, Ashvin was exactly right about that. Any sentence unavoidably has a linguistic subject-object structure. So, no matter what you say, you can always be formally accused of dualism. So, how do we convey any nondualistic meanings or ideas using such dualistic language? Should we develop a different language (or at least different grammatic structures based on common English)? I don't think that project will succeed, and even if we would be able to do that within a group of nondualistically-thinking people, nobody will understand us outside of our group. So, what is the solution? I think a reasonable solution is to try to convey nondualistic meanings using the common language, but the readers/listeners should try to decode the messages to see the actually implied meanings through the distortion of the dualistic language.
Eugene,
It exists indeed a non-dualistic language. If you haven’t yet read Knowledge of the higher worlds, you will find it described there (nothing I would attempt to do directly). Besides, semantics and conceptual content in a human language are roughly the same thing, it seems to me, isn’t it? Anyway, I agree, we should try to convey non-dualistic meaning using our dualistic language. What I’m saying is, your statement above, beyond being inevitably dualistic in language, as you have explained, is dualistic in meaning, too.
Your meaning is: there is the body, the physical constitution, the genes on one side, living as simulacrum in the bubble-like utopia of sameness that appeases our fear of exclusion, and our subsequent blind wish of abstract perfect alignment, and then there is education, social environment, etc. on the other side, leaning towards a more or less discursive thinking in the West versus in the East, which fully explains the known challenge for Westerners practicing Eastern techniques. As if it was possible to make up such an abstract divider, throw it across reality, and let it run for us the following syllogism: if "person A" gets educated today in the West, and later on, we take that same "person A" and we put it in, say, Japan, then we can surely expect that said "person A" will face a well-known challenge there, where they will have a hard time practicing Eastern techniques. Does it not sound like abstract, frame to frame, timeless, madeup approach to reality?
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Seflf-causality of the reality of consciousness.
I think we should be more clear about where the trouble with language comes from. The subject and object distinction is not at the core of the issue. This is apparent when we try to express in words our inner state. For example, if we have fever we can say "I have high temperature" or "I feel very hot". These words are symbols for inner experience. If we have to avoid the subject we'll have to use some awkward wording like "Feeling of hotness is being felt in universal awareness." This of course simply blinds us for the very thinking force uttering these words. We pretend that the words appear out of nowhere, stating some universal facts. In the process we do everything in our power to avoid feeling spiritually responsible for the words. Thus the ego hides in the background, playing peekaboo. The ego imagines that by blinding itself for its first-person spiritual force, all reality becomes a third-person picture (practically the Yin-Yang picture Federica posted above).
The problem with language is rather that the thinking that thinks in that language has become locked in the intellectual plane. Then all thinking looks like browsing through a dictionary - every word references other words, which at some point reference the first. Thus we have circular relations in the plane. No wonder that mystically inclined people are so eager to abolish this vicious circularity. However we can break the cycle in another way - namely, when we begin to gain consciousness of the process perpendicular to the plane - the crystallization of our intuitive volume (which spans far beyond our momentary inner aperture - both spatially and temporally) into thought forms. We also have the opposite process - the kindling of intuition by perceptual content.
When this vertical process is unconscious, one is left only with thought phenomena on the plane. Then the whole world becomes for us an interaction of planar thought puzzle pieces. Most of today's intellectual activity in science, philosophy, economics, politics, social relations, is simply a game of putting thought-pieces together on the plane, like some game of chess, where each thought represents something from the perceived world and we try to move it according to some rules.
Imagine someone who doesn't know the sense of warmth. What will such a person grasp when he hears "My temperature is high"? He'll probably imagine some temperature-object placed on a high shelf. He'll reply "your imagination is high!"
We instinctively use vertical thinking all the time when we express our inner state. Our verbal expressions of joy, pain, sensations, are 'occult' matter for those who don't know them. It is only because in our society we deal with more or less common inner perceptions, that their verbal expressions don't strike us as 'occult'.
We don't have to abolish the subject-object distinction but simply assume the phenomenological stance. Then everything we express in language is like a report: "From my current perspective I see this phenomenon at such degrees azimuth, such degrees elevation". The one receiving the words shouldn't simply see them as puzzle-pieces on the plane that he tries to click together in themselves. Instead, they should set their inner being in motion and seek the 'hyperspace' coordinates from which the description makes sense.
So our language has quite a lot of potential. Trying to eradicate the subject and object from language doesn't at all lift our cognition off the plane. Quite the contrary - it evens vanishes the last traces of verticality. The ego rejoices in its hideaway, subconsciously pulling the strings on the thought puzzle pieces, while pretending that they belong to the impersonal third-person reality where 'all is one'.
So instead of inventing Newspeak, we can begin by simply paying genuine interest in what other human beings think and say. Not by taking their words as dead puzzle pieces and see if they click with the geometry of our own plane but by trying to feel their life situation, their emotional and ideal perspective. Then we naturally lose any interest to prove ourselves right and others wrong. Our true interest now is to investigate the constellation of soul forces that makes a person express spiritually as they do and in the process we find the same forces also in us, and see how they operate in our perspective. In this way, even people who speak to us 'dualistically' (that is, expressing planar arrangements of puzzle-pieces), for us present a depth experience - depth which even the one speaking is not aware of.
The problem with language is rather that the thinking that thinks in that language has become locked in the intellectual plane. Then all thinking looks like browsing through a dictionary - every word references other words, which at some point reference the first. Thus we have circular relations in the plane. No wonder that mystically inclined people are so eager to abolish this vicious circularity. However we can break the cycle in another way - namely, when we begin to gain consciousness of the process perpendicular to the plane - the crystallization of our intuitive volume (which spans far beyond our momentary inner aperture - both spatially and temporally) into thought forms. We also have the opposite process - the kindling of intuition by perceptual content.
When this vertical process is unconscious, one is left only with thought phenomena on the plane. Then the whole world becomes for us an interaction of planar thought puzzle pieces. Most of today's intellectual activity in science, philosophy, economics, politics, social relations, is simply a game of putting thought-pieces together on the plane, like some game of chess, where each thought represents something from the perceived world and we try to move it according to some rules.
Imagine someone who doesn't know the sense of warmth. What will such a person grasp when he hears "My temperature is high"? He'll probably imagine some temperature-object placed on a high shelf. He'll reply "your imagination is high!"
We instinctively use vertical thinking all the time when we express our inner state. Our verbal expressions of joy, pain, sensations, are 'occult' matter for those who don't know them. It is only because in our society we deal with more or less common inner perceptions, that their verbal expressions don't strike us as 'occult'.
We don't have to abolish the subject-object distinction but simply assume the phenomenological stance. Then everything we express in language is like a report: "From my current perspective I see this phenomenon at such degrees azimuth, such degrees elevation". The one receiving the words shouldn't simply see them as puzzle-pieces on the plane that he tries to click together in themselves. Instead, they should set their inner being in motion and seek the 'hyperspace' coordinates from which the description makes sense.
So our language has quite a lot of potential. Trying to eradicate the subject and object from language doesn't at all lift our cognition off the plane. Quite the contrary - it evens vanishes the last traces of verticality. The ego rejoices in its hideaway, subconsciously pulling the strings on the thought puzzle pieces, while pretending that they belong to the impersonal third-person reality where 'all is one'.
So instead of inventing Newspeak, we can begin by simply paying genuine interest in what other human beings think and say. Not by taking their words as dead puzzle pieces and see if they click with the geometry of our own plane but by trying to feel their life situation, their emotional and ideal perspective. Then we naturally lose any interest to prove ourselves right and others wrong. Our true interest now is to investigate the constellation of soul forces that makes a person express spiritually as they do and in the process we find the same forces also in us, and see how they operate in our perspective. In this way, even people who speak to us 'dualistically' (that is, expressing planar arrangements of puzzle-pieces), for us present a depth experience - depth which even the one speaking is not aware of.
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
Federica wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 5:11 pmStranger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 3:57 pm
Our human language, in terms of semantics, grammar and the common conceptual content, is inherently dualistic, Ashvin was exactly right about that. Any sentence unavoidably has a linguistic subject-object structure. So, no matter what you say, you can always be formally accused of dualism. So, how do we convey any nondualistic meanings or ideas using such dualistic language? Should we develop a different language (or at least different grammatic structures based on common English)? I don't think that project will succeed, and even if we would be able to do that within a group of nondualistically-thinking people, nobody will understand us outside of our group. So, what is the solution? I think a reasonable solution is to try to convey nondualistic meanings using the common language, but the readers/listeners should try to decode the messages to see the actually implied meanings through the distortion of the dualistic language.
Eugene,
It exists indeed a non-dualistic language. If you haven’t yet read Knowledge of the higher worlds, you will find it described there (nothing I would attempt to do directly). Besides, semantics and conceptual content in a human language are roughly the same thing, it seems to me, isn’t it? Anyway, I agree, we should try to convey non-dualistic meaning using our dualistic language. What I’m saying is, your statement above, beyond being inevitably dualistic in language, as you have explained, is dualistic in meaning, too.
Your meaning is: there is the body, the physical constitution, the genes on one side, living as simulacrum in the bubble-like utopia of sameness that appeases our fear of exclusion, and our subsequent blind wish of abstract perfect alignment, and then there is education, social environment, etc. on the other side, leaning towards a more or less discursive thinking in the West versus in the East, which fully explains the known challenge for Westerners practicing Eastern techniques. As if it was possible to make up such an abstract divider, throw it across reality, and let it run for us the following syllogism: if "person A" gets educated today in the West, and later on, we take that same "person A" and we put it in, say, Japan, then we can surely expect that said "person A" will face a well-known challenge there, where they will have a hard time practicing Eastern techniques. Does it not sound like abstract, frame to frame, timeless, madeup approach to reality?
There is a real conundrum here for the modern intellect. As Federica says, the implicit dualism is always lurking in the subconscious waiting to reassert itself. The only safeguard is to begin the work of spiraling together our thinking with our will, i.e. to develop living thinking. Our thinking should be imbued with active will and our will should be irradiated (purified) by high-ideal thinking and devotional feeling. Seen in this way, the study of spiritual science is a fantastic method since we cannot help but make our will more active in thinking when reaching up to unfamiliar, lofty spiritual ideas, while also purifying our will by contemplating the Wisdom and Love of the higher worlds as they livingly manifest in our natural, cultural, and individual human experience. Imaginative meditation will then more directly contribute to the spiraling work and provide the necessary higher impulses for even deeper SS study which goes beyond the normal conceptual realm.
The alternative is that all these concepts, including "living thinking", "imagination", "spiritual evolution", "evolution of consciousness", etc., remain as conceptual placeholders in an abstract schema. Then, when we go to investigate aspects of spiritual evolution, we inevitably default to the material reductionist framework because the abstract placeholders provide nothing of living value, whereas secular science still has some life. The realm of natural phenomena (will) is held discontinuous from that of cultural phenomena (thinking) out of convenience. The problem is not that we are consciously holding them separate from one another out of preference or belief, but that we cannot even imagine an alternative. It simply does not register that what we call 'genes', 'body', etc. (nature) are expressions of the same Spirit which weaves through cultural phenomena (nurture) and there is a constant and lawful interplay between them. Indeed, from an abstract schematic perspective, it is quite absurd to connect these two together in any scientific way.
Eugene, I hope it's clear that Federica and I are not just arbitrarily picking on you or trying to start arguments. As indicated in the posts she shared, this is a deeply rooted habit of thinking, rooted in our psycho-physical constitution, that has effectively prevented most understanding of the living thinking path on this forum. If it were just a matter of Western education (which of course reinforces the habit), then it wouldn't be so difficult to overcome it. But it's a habit of desire-thinking which is rooted in the depths of our subconscious Being. There is only a 'pinhole of cognition', a strait and narrow way, through which the semblance of our abstract thinking (past) can meet the reality of our living will (future) in the present, and that is the path which PoF and Western esoteric science seeks to illuminate within us.
"Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an 'I'"
Re: Seflf-causality of the reality of consciousness.
exactly!Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 5:50 pm So instead of inventing Newspeak, we can begin by simply paying genuine interest in what other human beings think and say. Not by taking their words as dead puzzle pieces and see if they click with the geometry of our own plane but by trying to feel their life situation, their emotional and ideal perspective. Then we naturally lose any interest to prove ourselves right and others wrong. Our true interest now is to investigate the constellation of soul forces that makes a person express spiritually as they do and in the process we find the same forces also in us, and see how they operate in our perspective. In this way, even people who speak to us 'dualistically' (that is, expressing planar arrangements of puzzle-pieces), for us present a depth experience - depth which even the one speaking is not aware of.
"You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop" Rumi
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 6:13 pm Eugene, I hope it's clear that Federica and I are not just arbitrarily picking on you or trying to start arguments. As indicated in the posts she shared, this is a deeply rooted habit of thinking, rooted in our psycho-physical constitution, that has effectively prevented most understanding of the living thinking path on this forum. If it were just a matter of Western education (which of course reinforces the habit), then it wouldn't be so difficult to overcome it. But it's a habit of desire-thinking which is rooted in the depths of our subconscious Being. There is only a 'pinhole of cognition', a strait and narrow way, through which the semblance of our abstract thinking (past) can meet the reality of our living will (future) in the present, and that is the path which PoF and Western esoteric science seeks to illuminate within us.
Yes, by the way, Eugene, the only reason I noticed that is because I have spent months here banging my head against very similar walls and struggling to understand what was going on. I'm maybe not going to prepare a sample of 'funny' quotes to demonstrate that, but I could - there's plenty of material
And I have a clear feeling I'm very far from being done 
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
That's ok, Federica, no worries. Just to clarify, by "head" and "heart" I meant not the "physical" organs (or more precisely, organs that are perceived like physical), but the organs of our psyche (obviously, the "physical" heart would have nothing to do with the will).Federica wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:29 pm Yes, by the way, Eugene, the only reason I noticed that is because I have spent months here banging my head against very similar walls and struggling to understand what was going on. I'm maybe not going to prepare a sample of 'funny' quotes to demonstrate that, but I could - there's plenty of material
"You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop" Rumi
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
Stranger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:46 pmThat's ok, Federica, no worries. Just to clarify, by "head" and "heart" I meant not the "physical" organs (or more precisely, organs that are perceived like physical), but the organs of our psyche (obviously, the "physical" heart would have nothing to do with the will).Federica wrote: ↑Mon Nov 07, 2022 9:29 pm Yes, by the way, Eugene, the only reason I noticed that is because I have spent months here banging my head against very similar walls and struggling to understand what was going on. I'm maybe not going to prepare a sample of 'funny' quotes to demonstrate that, but I could - there's plenty of material
I don't know how it could take less than at least a few iterations to get a provisional sense of what is meant by dualistic in this context... My spontaneous comment here has to be that physical organs do have a lot to do with the human faculties of for example willing... But I doubt I would be good at finding the right words to go about it at this point...
Last edited by Federica on Mon Nov 07, 2022 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
They ae certainly interconnected but not identical
"You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop" Rumi
Re: Self-causality of the reality of consciousness.
Right. It's so tempting to categorize and order our thoughts, that we tend to hold as images of reality. I suspect this has to slowly and progressively appear to our attention... or at least so it is being in my case. Not a sudden revelation, unfortunately
In this epoch we have to be fighters for the spirit: man must realise what his powers can give way to, unless they are kept constantly under control for the conquest of the spiritual world. In this fifth epoch, man is entitled to his freedom to the highest degree! He has to go through that.