Spiritual "science"

[Federica]

But if you are really lucky, here comes a fundy Christian to you and tells you: Federica, this is actually not accurate. Out there, there is indeed some color consistency to what you are observing. I can tell you there’s a lake that’s always within the blue-gray tones, there’s grass that’s always light green, and even an ice-cream stand that is reliably pink. There is even a wood that lawfully appears within the dark green scale, always. You don’t have to believe me, just please follow the book in my hands. I’ll explain. You are actually wearing immersive glasses which conceal the lawful color patterns around you. But this book was written by the one who created the lawful color patterns and it tells us of a wonderful arrangement of colors. By learning the contents of this book you too come to know yourself that there’s actually no color chaos. Shall we read it together?”

Alright Anthony, if you can't see the difference, I will not insist - spiritual science does not need salespersons, you certainly don't need that either. And thanks for the feedback I will hopefully come up with better illustrations another time

For the record, I thought your sunglasses metaphor was excellent. My response was largely in jest although I did have a point to make. If one employs Bayesian reasoning, the prior probability of someone genuinely having access to special knowledge or a special key to knowledge must be low given the numerous contradictory claims of such in human history. Confirmatory evidence in favor of the claim is required to drive up that probability. The problem we have here (and with other such claims) is that that evidence is only available if you take the "plunge".

Anthony,

Just to start from your thought, in your Bayesian reasoning you are making an undue assumption of equal likelihood through time of that prior probability, as if the evolution of consciousness did not exist, as if through history the possibility to access spiritual wissenschaft had been fixed and given for the people of 100, 1000, or 2000 years ago alike. Does this make any sense? Is this an appropriate framework of analysis?


More generally, you don’t need to cast your checkered net of prior probability assessment reasoning, looking at the abstract event of ‘knowledge being accessed by some hypothetical, time-neutral human head’ wandering in some thrown up world-bubble picture. Isn’t this reasoning being sketched by You-Right-Now? Are you not the active author of these thoughts? Then take responsibility for them, you can’t call yourself out of the equation and, from the hiding place of your speculating vantage point, borrow Bayes' sunglasses and rock the catwalk with these, because you feel like. This whole idea is flowing through your own creative thinking agency, you have to acknowledge that!


At this pace, the standard of contemporary thinking habit will soon become DID thinking, where the thought is forming through our own agency, but with zero recognition of this fact, as if the whole creative process was happening in some external, abstract, duplicated place, head, or agency, that one can have fun furnishing and refurnishing like a Barbie house, with any sort of combination of hypothesis of our liking.


Anthony, If we unfold the Bayesian grid we will surely get Bayesian results. If we go for the Barbie house, we’ll get Barbie-like results. If we look through the sunglasses above, we’ll get chaotic colored dot series, and nothing else. But we don’t have to do any of these houses of cards, when we ourselves have under the scope of our willed initiative the instant possibility to take a direct no-matter-how-little step, free from any arbitrary set of hypotheses! And it’s not true that one has to take the plunge to get access to 'evidence'. Developing spiritual wissenschaft is a continuous (in mathematical sense) progression where every little step grants proportionate, directly experienced ‘evidence’. If you have the feeling that you have not experienced any evidence so far, it must be because you have not yet accepted to let go of the intellectual grid, and to put yourself at the center of your spiritual experience.

[AshvinP]

But if you are really lucky, here comes a fundy Christian to you and tells you: Federica, this is actually not accurate. Out there, there is indeed some color consistency to what you are observing. I can tell you there’s a lake that’s always within the blue-gray tones, there’s grass that’s always light green, and even an ice-cream stand that is reliably pink. There is even a wood that lawfully appears within the dark green scale, always. You don’t have to believe me, just please follow the book in my hands. I’ll explain. You are actually wearing immersive glasses which conceal the lawful color patterns around you. But this book was written by the one who created the lawful color patterns and it tells us of a wonderful arrangement of colors. By learning the contents of this book you too come to know yourself that there’s actually no color chaos. Shall we read it together?”

Alright Anthony, if you can't see the difference, I will not insist - spiritual science does not need salespersons, you certainly don't need that either. And thanks for the feedback I will hopefully come up with better illustrations another time

For the record, I thought your sunglasses metaphor was excellent. My response was largely in jest although I did have a point to make. If one employs Bayesian reasoning, the prior probability of someone genuinely having access to special knowledge or a special key to knowledge must be low given the numerous contradictory claims of such in human history. Confirmatory evidence in favor of the claim is required to drive up that probability. The problem we have here (and with other such claims) is that that evidence is only available if you take the "plunge".

Anthony,

I wonder what you make of my argument to Lorenzo before that the existence of subtle bodies, to take one primary ex., can be reasoned through by anyone with unprejudiced thinking? It is true that, without experiencing these living realities from their inner perspective, i.e. that which Thinks the human psycho-physical organization into existence, there remains room for skepticism and doubts. Just as, until one experiences the inner reality of their own thinking, which Federica pointed out is only a simple act of willed initiative away from us at any given time, they can be skeptical of its reality and chalk up thought-forms to all manner of externalized or illusory explanations, like mindless neurons or 'pure awareness' hallucinations. The reason why these abstract, externalized explanations still exist is because the intellect can remain skeptical of everything which it cannot experience from the inner perspective, which is every phenomena of the world.

It's not true, as Lorenzo suggested, that they remain complete speculations until that time. This is the case with absolutely everything investigated by the intellect. The intellect cannot determine the Sun will continue to rise with every passing day - just because it's happened many times before doesn't logically necessitate that it will happen again tomorrow. Does this make the anticipation of the Sun rising a complete speculation? Obviously not. The only reason to polarize to this extreme of declaring all matters of soul-spirit complete speculations until verified through higher cognition, is to avoid taking responsibility for one's thoughts which are challenging the reasoning, like Federica also pointed out. Instead one places the gradient of their own thinking in the blind spot and declares there are two switches - 1) on = 100% verification of all spiritual realities through knowledge of the inner perspectives, or 2) off = complete indefinite uncertainty of all spiritual realities.

But what about the logical reasoning in a passage such as the one below? Are you willing to offer a reasoned challenge to the below or do you agree that it greatly increases the support for the existence of more spiritual bodies which structure the human organism through every moment of its existence?

It has already been indicated that the description of the path on which man attains to a higher perception can be of value to him only after he has become acquainted in simple narrative form with the disclosures of supersensible research. For in regard to the supersensible realm it is possible to comprehend what has not yet been observed. Indeed, the right path toward perception is that which proceeds from comprehension.

Even though that hidden something, which in the physical body carries on the battle against disintegration, is only observable by higher perception, yet its effects are clearly evident to the reasoning power that limits itself to the manifest. These effects express themselves in the form or shape into which the mineral substances and forces of the physical body are fashioned during life. This form disappears by degrees and the physical body becomes a part of the rest of the mineral world when death has occurred. Supersensible perception, however, is able to observe, as an independent member of the human entity, what prevents the physical substances and forces during life from taking their own path, which leads to dissolution of the physical body. Let us call the independent member the ether or lifebody.
...
Having reached, in the presentation of the supersensible, the mention of this ether body or life body, the point has also been reached where such a concept will have to encounter the opposition of many present-day opinions. The evolution of the human spirit has led to the point where in our age the discussion of such a member of the human organism must be considered as something unscientific. The materialistic mode of thought has reached the point of seeing in the living body nothing but a combination of physical substances and forces, like those to be found in the so-called lifeless body, in the mineral.
...
If you have before you the mineral and its form, you will find that it remains the same; if it only depends upon itself. But this is not the case in a living being, in a plant, an animal, or a human being. As soon as a substance takes on so complicated a form that it can no longer be held together through its own forces, in other words, that it would decay if left to itself, there is something in this substance which prevents it from decaying, and in that case we have before us what we call a LIVING BEING.

Spiritual science therefore says: A living being would decay into the component parts of its substances if it were left to itself, if within it there did not exist something which prevents this decay. That which every moment prevents this living being from decaying, the preventing factor of such a decay, is what we call the etheric or the vital body. This is of an entirely different nature from the substances which constitute the physical body in every living being, and it has the capacity to produce the most complicated physical substances, to maintain them and to prevent their decay. What a living organism thus reveals in a purely external form, is what we call LIFE.

We all know that secular science has not cracked the problem of 'abiogenesis', i.e. the origin of life. What do you think are the chances that 'problem' is related to willful ignorance of the simple reasoning above?

[Cleric K]

Does SS predict that if two scientists, one a scientist who believes\sees an independent world picture that simply happens, and a second scientist who believes\sees the world in the cool way you do - if these two scientists measured the mass of an object, these two scientists would get different results? Or they would get same results but interpret them differently. I'm not sure how the POV of the scientist makes a difference in an observation. Can the difference between these two scientists be measured? Is there a test that establishes when an individul has achieved SS status, and their claims are to be trusted?

Yes, the results can differ. Not in the way one would immediately think, though. Imagine that one scientist says “What you do to measure that mass is highly dubious. You interfere with the experiment because you use your thought up intentions, you use your will to set up the experiment. I’ll believe in the objective truth of mass only if it presents itself to me as pure phenomenon, in no way tainted by my activity.”

Or would scientists agree on whether there’s a red spot on Jupiter? Not if one refuses to look through the telescope. You think this is far fetched? We need to only look at history:

My dear Kepler, […] What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.

Modern man smiles at these stories and thinks “How unbelievably dogmatic and close-minded these medieval philosophers must have been! This could have never happened to me!” But can’t it? It’s easy to speak from our position, looking back on events centuries ago. But what about our present situation?

If we really try to understand the past we’ll see that these philosophers didn’t refuse to look through the telescope because they thought to themselves “I’m a stubborn person and I want to dogmatically believe in my position.” No one does that! Instead, they felt to be completely in the right. Anywhere they looked, they saw support for their position – they saw it in the church and in their peer philosophers. Conversely, they sew Galileo as someone that tries to pull the wool before their eyes, trying to ‘gaslight’ them.

We, as people living in the 21st century, have the treasure of hindsight. It is a great tragedy if we don’t use it. People today, just like people of the past, simply can’t distinguish the extent to which their cognition and intuitive feel for what reality is, flows in the channel of culturally accepted common sense. These things should be clear even from the first pages of PoF. The goal is not to exchange one belief system for another but simply to investigate what is really given in the mystery of existence and what is added on top of that as metaphysical hypotheses (which in most cases are unverifiable by their very definition, just like it is the case with the belief in a world-in-itself). Unless we’re willing to unpeel the layers of unconsciously accumulated opinions, prejudices, preferences, sympathies, antipathies, beliefs, our thinking will always flow through channels entirely outside our consciousness.

Do you still think this is far fetched? Just recently we spoke about a simple experiment of consciously moving the focus of attention, with the goal to feel as tightly as possible how the movement reflects our intuitive intents. You refused to consider this experiment with the absurd excuse that once you close your eyes all existence ceases. I wonder what happens in the event of power grid blackout.

Our spiritual activity is a fact of our existence. In the context of dreaming we have mentioned many times how great contradictions and illogisms fail to make any impression on us. If they did, we would immediately become lucid. Similarly, our whole modern life presents us with contradictions over contradictions. The refusal to examine the reality of our spiritual activity is a kind of central contradiction. By closing our eyes for this contradiction, we make ourselves into dual beings – ironically, quite in line with Bernardo’s dissociative theory. One alter uses spiritual activity all the time, makes effort, thinks, seeks solutions. Then, when we switch to the philosopher alter, there’s a complete disconnect with the other. That alter, even though still using that same spiritual activity to produce the philosophical thoughts, declares himself to be a pure spectator and convinces himself that even philosophical thoughts simply appear by themselves. It would have been funny, if it wasn’t scary, how modern ‘non-dualism’ (both spiritual and materialistic) practically cements this dream-world contradiction. Lou might say that this contradiction is “a gift to hold dear, more than a mystery to resolve.”

And if all this wasn’t explicit enough, let’s state it in plain text – today, academics and even those on the forefront of idealism and the supposed revival of spirituality, act in a way no different than the medieval philosophers who simply stubbornly refused to look. In our modern case we refuse to recognize the ‘will imbued with intuitive intent’ as a legitimate part of the given. Instead, as soon as we think about it, the alter switch engages and we begin spinning the wildest theories that explain how thoughts appear as a result of the world process, while we take the position of the invisible spectator. Future human beings will look back on our age, just like we now look on medieval thinkers, and would label our present chapter of human evolution as the stage where thinking played hide-and-seek with itself.

'the existence of will imbued with intuitive intents' . . . do you mean does the world have intuitive intent? . . . I do not know. If it does, I'm not sure if science is even possible.

If you see the ‘world’ as the part of reality on the opaque side of existence, then I don’t mean that. The question is whether ‘will imbued with intuitive intent’ exists in your [inner] world – the only world you have ever known.

[lorenzop]

Re the telescope, the inclusion of new instruments and techniques into science is a part of the evolution science, and it's natural and even expected that there is doubt and controversy until this new instrument\technique is vetted.
Similarly, if someone wants to claim there is a 'desire body' or 'fun body' effecting observations - it's not enought to make the claim, or even to provide reason for the claim, the 'desire body' must be located, isolated and it's effects quantified.
Maybe there is a 'desire body', and maybe it's 'vector' is insufficient to influence landing an individual on the moon, but maybe it should be considered in observing the path of a quark, or finding a cure for cancer, or maybe not. At this point a 'desire body' is sheer speculation.
Science is a lot of work and collaboration.

[AshvinP]

Re the telescope, the inclusion of new instruments and techniques into science is a part of the evolution science, and it's natural and even expected that there is doubt and controversy until this new instrument\technique is vetted.
Similarly, if someone wants to claim there is a 'desire body' or 'fun body' effecting observations - it's not enought to make the claim, or even to provide reason for the claim, the 'desire body' must be located, isolated and it's effects quantified.
Maybe there is a 'desire body', and maybe it's 'vector' is insufficient to influence landing an individual on the moon, but maybe it should be considered in observing the path of a quark, or finding a cure for cancer, or maybe not. At this point a 'desire body' is sheer speculation.
Science is a lot of work and collaboration.

By this logic, your own inner life of thoughts, feelings, and desires is sheer speculation because it can't be isolated and quantified, and hasn't been vetted (by you). It's remarkable how years of introspective mystical practice leads to a worldview which out-materializes materialism. And it's precisely because it lacks the desire to do any work or collaboration towards understanding its own life of intuitive intents. As Cleric said, you won't even put in the effort to do the simple experiment of moving your attention - you say this will require a lifetime of delay before you can possibly pull it off. You close your eyes, existence ceases. When simple questions are asked about your own inner experience, you start talking about floating abstractions in the 'world', as if your inner life doesn't exist. These are not signs of a hard-working, collaborative scientific mentality. And let's also be clear, you are not the only person in existence. The existence of a rationally intelligible world is 'sheer speculation' to a 5 year old child who hasn't learned how to think, but this doesn't make it so. As Schop said, "every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the World", and that is on full display here.

[Federica]

It might be mentioned that in different languages, there are distinctions made between different kinds of knowledge, such as that between 'scientia' and 'sapientia' in Latin. 'Scientia' corresponds pretty well exactly to today's 'science', but 'sapientia' means 'wisdom' (and is also preserved in our species name, i.e. h. sapiens, although we don't often live up to it.)

In other cultures there are also such distinctions, for example in ancient Greek there is a distinction between techné, which loosely corresponds with artistic or technical skill, epistêmê which corresponds with precise knowledge, and phronesis, practical wisdom, denoting 'good judgement'. In Indian culture there are terms for discriminative wisdom such as Jñāna, Prajna, and Viveka, which have hardly any equivalent in the modern English lexicon (except perhaps 'gnosis' but it carries it's own historical connotations in the context of Western culture.)

In a culture where there is a wisdom tradition ( practically all pre-modern cultures) there was a shared understanding of what constitutes 'sapientia', the rules and standards of wisdom. In a secular, scientific culture, it's a hard distinction to draw as 'sapientia' has effectively been subjectivised - treated as solely a matter of individual judgement. Generally speaking, the lines tend to fall along the purported boundaries and relationships of 'science', 'religion' and 'philosophy' but those divisions themselves are the product of relatively recent history (the term 'scientist' and the distinction of science from natural philosophy only go back to the late 18th C).

Wayfarer,

Nice to have your punctual comments woven in the thread!
I would disagree, though, that “'scientia’ corresponds pretty well exactly to today's 'science'” if not for other reasons, because there is nothing in ancient Rome that exactly corresponds to today’s concept of science. Two thousand years of evolution of consciousness make for the gap. Scientia is solid, objective, external, data-based knowledge that can be taught and learned, but not in the way of modern science, that builds models of phenomena, as enclosed parallel spaces delimited by the working of sets of hypothesis, where we park simplified representations of reality to train our intellectual muscles on. This abstract replica approach earlier described by Ashvin and Cleric is what our mind flies to, most likely, when we hear the word science today, but that’s not Latin scientia.
There is another important word in Latin: cognitio . Unlike scientia, it describes introspective, personal, direct, intuitive knowledge (for instance, I know how to ride a bike) as opposed to external, data-based, transferable knowledge (for instance, I know how to build a house). Maybe we could say cognitio in today’s language is inner knowing, or even awareness.


In loosely similar interrelation, in ancient Greek, we have gnosis (similar to cognitio) and episteme (similar to scientia). My impression is that techne is not directly knowledge, it’s more like knowledge applied to a work of art, in a larger sense. In today's language, maybe I’d say craftsmanship, or expertise.


For me the usefulness of this language aside is mostly to try to imagine how ancient civilizations experienced knowledge and thinking. It helps extract ourselves from our modern flattened perception of our thinking function, that we experience as scratched on the I.
For example when we google for the meaning of gnosis in ancient Greek, and we find that it meant "revealed knowledge of the divine things", it doesn’t mean that it was a specialized religious term (as we are likely induced to imagine from our modern perspective). Instead, as described above, gnosis simply meant direct inner knowledge, or will imbued with intuitive intent, if you will. But because the nature of that activity at that time was so very different from today - as Cleric recently described - the Gods were necessarily involved. Today we shortcut that by concluding: “Oh ok, it meant knowledge about divine things." But if we are careful, we can discern: "It meant inner knowledge, which at that time was felt as one with the waves of the mysteriously ordered will of the Gods streaming in".

It is very difficult for modern man to grasp how thinking felt for the ancient Greek because today we feel as if we possess our thoughts. But for the Greek thinking still felt (as a slightly exaggerated analogy) as an unceasing stream of dreamy poetry. The soul could feel that it influences and steers that stream but it could by no means feel itself consciously responsible for the rhythmic rhymes that structure the stream (and the difficult thing to grasp is that the soul couldn't stand to the side and reason abstractly about this stream – anything that could be reasoned had to be experienced as intrinsically flowing on the waves of this mysteriously ordered stream, there was no 'secondary' stream that could think about the first). To speak to the ancient Greek that he can be spiritual active in the rhythmic structuring of thinking would be just as incomprehensible, as it would be if someone were to say to us, present people, that we can think the rhythms of our heartbeat. We can of course be open to such a future possibility but at the present time we don’t know how to even imagine that, we don’t know what inner ‘buttons and levers’ of our spiritual activity we should operate for that to happen, we don’t know such inner degrees of freedom.

[lorenzop]

By this logic, your own inner life of thoughts, feelings, and desires is sheer speculation because it can't be isolated and quantified, and hasn't been vetted (by you). It's remarkable how years of introspective mystical practice leads to a worldview which out-materializes materialism. And it's precisely because it lacks the desire to do any work or collaboration towards understanding its own life of intuitive intents. As Cleric said, you won't even put in the effort to do the simple experiment of moving your attention - you say this will require a lifetime of delay before you can possibly pull it off. You close your eyes, existence ceases. When simple questions are asked about your own inner experience, you start talking about floating abstractions in the 'world', as if your inner life doesn't exist. These are not signs of a hard-working, collaborative scientific mentality. And let's also be clear, you are not the only person in existence. The existence of a rationally intelligible world is 'sheer speculation' to a 5 year old child who hasn't learned how to think, but this doesn't make it so. As Schop said, "every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the World", and that is on full display here.

We are limiting our discussion to science . . . and what we can speak of scientifically.

[Federica]

Lorenzo, may I ask you, what makes you come back to these debates, and experience the same exchange pattern, over and over again?

[AshvinP]

By this logic, your own inner life of thoughts, feelings, and desires is sheer speculation because it can't be isolated and quantified, and hasn't been vetted (by you). It's remarkable how years of introspective mystical practice leads to a worldview which out-materializes materialism. And it's precisely because it lacks the desire to do any work or collaboration towards understanding its own life of intuitive intents. As Cleric said, you won't even put in the effort to do the simple experiment of moving your attention - you say this will require a lifetime of delay before you can possibly pull it off. You close your eyes, existence ceases. When simple questions are asked about your own inner experience, you start talking about floating abstractions in the 'world', as if your inner life doesn't exist. These are not signs of a hard-working, collaborative scientific mentality. And let's also be clear, you are not the only person in existence. The existence of a rationally intelligible world is 'sheer speculation' to a 5 year old child who hasn't learned how to think, but this doesn't make it so. As Schop said, "every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the World", and that is on full display here.

We are limiting our discussion to science . . . and what we can speak of scientifically.

Yes, and our inner life is the only thing we can speak of scientifically (with thinking). It is only through our inner activity that we know anything. The only question is whether we are thinking-speaking about it unconsciously, i.e. as some external floating abstraction, or thinking-speaking through it consciously, where it is tightly coupled to our first-person living perspective, which is the sole factor making the difference between secular or spiritual science. The secular scientist speaking of number, weights, and measures is speaking of nothing other than their own inner activity externalized in perceptual-quantitative form.

Of course, it is unlikely any of the above will mean anything to you right now, like the rest of the posts on this thread, because reorienting from the pole of abstraction requires an active will imbued intent to seek out the counter-pole of outer existence, or conversely a remembrance that one is actively intending to remain immersed in the outer abstraction, i.e. the inner-outer contradictions of the dreamscape, because it's easier, more comfortable, more pleasant, less demanding and sacrificial, requiring less inner strength and courage, which are all excuses anathema to the scientific spirit.

[Wayfarer]

I would disagree, though, that “'scientia’ corresponds pretty well exactly to today's 'science'” if not for other reasons, because there is nothing in ancient Rome that exactly corresponds to today’s concept of science.

Yes, point taken!