Wayfarer wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 10:37 pm
...
Wayfarer, I would like to add some illustrations to the topic, as I usually like to do. This is of help first and foremost to myself but in sharing that, I hope others can also gain more holistic intuition of these matters.
You say “
I am concentrating particularly on the question of how 'mind creates world'.” Let’s try to really feel what this implies. There’s certain intuition present in our soul which we try to put into words. Let’s try make an image of it:
So here we
symbolize our intuition of the mind as the one true Cosmic container of reality producing its mental images, within which it becomes entangled. Now let’s really try to gain consciousness not only of the intuition we distill in the above symbol but
also of the very distilling process. This can be itself presented as another image:
Now we try to grasp pictorially our own thinking process. We distill the concept of ‘mind’ from our intuitive background (larger puzzle piece), we distill the concept of the ‘world appearances’ (smaller piece) and in their logical fitting we feel cognitive satisfaction that we have a better grasp on reality. Needless to say, we can never see our thinking process from the side in this way. There’s no such vantage point because we’re
always merged with the first-person perspective of the big arrow that thinks the mental images. As soon as we think the above image, the big arrow becomes only a
symbol, while the
true ‘arrow’ is our own thinking activity. This seems as an endless recursion for the intellect but it stops to be such once we realize that thinking can be
experienced as an actual first-person creative force and not sought only in its own
representations.
Now what do other philosophers do? The physicalist does something like this:
He distills the concept of spacetime and fits it with the puzzle pieces of matter waves. It’s similar with all the different ways in which we can look at the world – these are the twelve world outlooks that Ashvin shared. In all cases we live in some dim intuition about what existence is and through thinking we bring into focus certain aspects of that vague background intuition, which we now grasp as packets of intuition or simply – concepts (much like the colors of a blurry image become cleanly differentiated as we adjust the lens of a movie projector).
Now according to your first post you feel the idealistic outlook to be superior because it avoids the unnecessary dualism. Looking at the above two pictures they are pretty much identical, except that the latter assumes the mind to be one side of the coin while reality-in-itself is the other. The former simply avoids that duality by postulating that all is mind, it’s a coin with one side – a Mobius strip.
Here, however, we should be crystally clear and honest with ourselves that just saying ‘mind creates the world’ doesn’t make it a
fact of experience. As far as the cognitive experience itself is concerned it is not that different from the thought “The Big Bang creates the world”. At this point we should already realize that the only way our philosophy could make a difference would be if we are to approach the
actual experience of the mind creating the world.
If we’re not deluding ourselves, we should be perfectly clear that the mind that we know creates
only thought-images. The moment we say that the mind creates the mineral (including the Cosmic bodies), plant, animal and human kingdoms, we no longer deal with
immediate facts of experience but we are only supporting abstract thought-images in our mind. Today philosophers and book writers do that so casually that no one pays attention that in the end, we’re still dealing with thought-images that we put together as a jigsaw puzzle in our mind. These images may
point to realities but we have to be transparently clear that in our mind we’re holding on to thought-images. Otherwise we simply succumb into
fantasy.
If I say that the mind I presently experience
creates the appearances of the planetary bodies, this is a fantasy. There’s nothing in my experience to support that claim. I only
assume that the perception of a planet is of the same nature as a thought-image, even though I can't produce it in the same way. It is quite clear – if I can’t experience as a reality how thought-images take form, how much less could I expect to know something about the supposed Cosmic Mind creating worlds? We’re on to something. If we are to find as a reality how the Cosmic Mind weaves images, then we better find where this happens within ourselves, don’t we? If we can’t find an instance of the image creating process within ourselves, then we have
no point of contact with the supposed Mind that creates worlds. The only thing we can do is to arrange a jigsaw model of that Mind.
All this is
circumvented by modern mysticism. It is said “who says that the Mind should feel consciously active in world creation? Creation issues when the Mind falls in the illusion of being a cause. This creates the first Karmic polarity. The Mind triggers a hysteresis-like process where it dances with its out-of-phase shadows. The more it tries to intervene in the process, the more Karma it creates and the more the world explodes into a fractal-like landscape of appearances. Only spiraling the hysteresis process into unity resolves the initial disbalance and folds back the mystery of existence into the original nothingness.”
This is all good but in reality all we fold in the mystical state is the
human intellect (and no one disputes that this is a necessary step). If this folding was
equivalent to the folding of the Cosmic Mind, then all existence would cease, the original Karmic disbalance would be resolved and all Creation would be undone. Yet we continue to follow the worldline of a bodily perspective with folded intellect. When this crucial distinction is neglected we’re led to believe that we are
already identical to the top container of reality. Here are images that I often use on this forum:
Here we imagine our vantage point of reality to be already at the Cosmic periphery. Then we meditate in such a way that we basically say “Just as my thoughts come and go, so the world’s appearances come and go as images in the mind.” Alright, but the very same thing can be said by any materialist. In fact they
do say that. Take someone like Sam Harris, for example. This position is so broad and vague that it simply states the obvious. Our inner life indeed consists of images coming and going. But what makes the mystic’s experience Cosmic in nature? If my mind can still move only thought-images then what makes me different from the materialist? Only the
belief we hold about the nature of the periphery. Both the mystic and the materialist agree that the periphery “
is basically unintelligible and meaningless”, except that one calls it Nature, the other calls it Mind.
We can spend decades and centuries more in debating on forums, basically confronting images like the above. In the end they only differ in the pictures of the puzzle pieces and the corresponding packets of intuition (concepts). This is also what Federica wrote about.
If we’re serious about approaching reality and not only thought-images that we fantasize to be true, we have no other option but enter the only place where mind in truth creates something – our thinking. Then our interests change. We no longer want to have a
conceptual image of how the mind creates the world but we leave the ground school and enter living field experience. Now our thinking process becomes the living creative process where intuition is distilled into thought-forms and thought-forms and other perceptions feedback in our intuition. Through this we begin to gain insight into something that simply doesn’t exist for us if our meditation consists only in observing images coming and going. We begin to intuit the
constraints within which our thinking and imaginative process unfolds.
We can think of our corporeal nature similarly to a hard diving suit. It has certain joints and hinges that constrain the expressions of our will. Our imagination can be mobile, we may picture ourselves to be athletic and agile but when we flow that imagination into our will, it turns out that the degrees of freedom of our bodily suit don’t live up to our expectations. This is easy to grasp. What is vastly more difficult to grasp is that our intellectual life is also part of that suit. The big difference, however, is that we don’t have the same
leeway that we have between our willing imagination and the perceived effects in the sensory spectrum. In others words, the fact that our willing imagination can wiggle and
differ from the perceived effects in the senses, makes us conscious of the constraints. Yet in our intellectual apparatus we’re fully merged with the constraints – the movement of our thoughts, the way they click together, our knowledge, are all constrained within the joints and hinges of the suit. To find a leeway we need to do something. Simply observing thought-images coming and going, indeed leads to the intuition that there’s a leeway between the thought-forms and the mind but this is as far as it gets. As soon as we attain to that stage we simply decide that we are now identical to the top container of reality, even though we’re still heavily constrained. We simply dismiss these constraints as
unessential and that they’ll simply evaporate as soon as we cross the threshold of death. So this is the same as the diver fully identifying with the suit and at some point dimly realizing that there’s miniscule leeway between his body and the constraints of the suit. Then the diver decides that he has resolved the mystery of existence. He is fully satisfied by the feeling that he’s not identical to the suit. He doesn’t feel any impetus to explore his inner degrees of freedom but simply spends time in the
feeling of being the body and
not the constraints. Then he continues to use the degrees of freedom of the suit to explain to others how they too are not identical to the suit and they can find freedom in the inexplicable feeling of the body.
This holds true in the highest degree about our thinking life, except that it is not at all that obvious. It is a great temptation to feel the miniscule leeway between our being and the intellectual mask, and then simply remain in that blissful feeling, believing that we have reached the edge of existence. Yet if we sense at least some reality in the suit metaphor, we should be clear that this leeway is only the
beginning of our fully conscious evolution.
The suit metaphor by itself suggests what the proper meditative method should be. We need to
differentiate our deeper intuitive activity from the intellectual joints, hinges and slots of the mask that continually format it. We need to find the intuition that there’s a being that is presently muted, with hands and feet tied. It only instinctively navigates through the dim intuitive context and recognizes itself only as far as it perceives the reflections of its activity within the intellectual slots of the suit. When we understand that, in our meditation we concentrate the thinking
force through which we support the intellectual forms. When this force gains strength, it can resist the templating action of the mask and begins to be loosened from the intellectual slots – we begin to know ourselves in
new degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity. We approach a form of higher Thinking, which imaginatively weaves in the opened leeway between our being and the intellectual slots. Within this unsuspected inner space, we not only perceive in symbolic reflections the constraints of the suit but we also find new degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity through which we can transform the elemental nature of that suit in ways that were in the most literal sense
unimaginable in our prior intellectual cognition. They were unimaginable because before that, our imagination could only flow through the rigid joints and hinges of the suit. Since we couldn’t step out and recognize the constraints, the limits of our imagination were felt to be the unquestionable limits of reality. We can never approach this higher form of spiritual activity unless we find our being within the willing of the thinking force. If we simply want to feel as a top container of reality and let go of thoughts, we simultaneously let go also of the spiritual force through which alone we can know ourselves as a creative being.
This picture, even though only a thought-image no different than the others above, can be produced as a faithful symbol of inner experience. Once we have a tiny step in that direction a whole
axis of evolution becomes comprehensible. This allows us to understand the constraints of reality in a completely new way. We understand that we live within a hierarchical gradient of spiritual beings (independent levels of mind if you will), which think the forms that act as constraints within which lesser beings evolve. As soon as a being evolves out of a certain level of constraints, it becomes consciously and creatively responsible for them. In the exact same way, when we gradually increase the leeway between our being and our inner suit where our sympathies, antipathies, preferences, inclinations, beliefs, ideologies are etched, we begin to fully consciously transform them in order to make them creative expressions of our increasing degrees of freedom and deeper intuition of the laws of the Cosmos. At our stage of evolution we begin to work on our character, our soul life, but we’re still very far from being consciously creative in the life processes of our body and its physical structure. Yet in the eons of evolution, such stages are bound to be reached. Then in truth we reach levels of being that are world-creative, which can think worlds in which other spiritual perspectives evolve.
This might be a little too much to swallow in a single gulp but I just wanted to illustrate that what is here being talked about, is concerned with an
actual path of inner experience. It is no longer mere interest in rearranging thought-images within the slots of our intellectual mask.
