The world does not exist outside of perception, yet neither does it not exist.

[AshvinP]

One thing which I am sure you have experienced in meditation is the torrent of chaotic soul-life which emerges when we are trying to deepen concentration into a unitary thought-image. Our thoughts, passions, anxieties, concerns, etc. keep swirling around and it's like playing whack-a-mole, as soon as one mole is squashed by our concentrating efforts, another pops up to take it place. We may employ some technique and have success squashing the moles and then find we are now thinking about how we attained that success, thereby sucked right back into the torrents. Our lower nature will use even our successes to distract us from the high Ideal in that way.

Absolutely, I have experienced that. It’s like there is an inexhaustible default energy that keeps the thoughts swirling around, making us feel like we are being thought by those thoughts (or at least so it feels for me). Similar to the act of breathing, which is unconscious by default, but can be taken over by conscious intention, so thinking seems to fall in between the unconscious and conscious spectrums, except that, unlike breathing, in thinking the two regimes work one against the other. By default, there's a sort of gravity that presses thinking down into the soul-sensory loops. If we let it be, that’s where thoughts will be embarked. So we have to consciously lift it up to a regime switch. With breathing we got lucky that some higher ideation was doing the project management for us

Lately what I find helpful to remember is that these chaotic torrents I experience in meditation are always happening during normal sensory consciousness as well, only drowned out by the sensory-conceptual spectrum. Thereby we fall under the spell of the Maya that our inner soul-life is relatively ordered, that our forces of willing-feeling-thinking are relatively harmonious and working towards unified goals in life. But really we are being tossed and turned on the waves of many conflicting soul-currents just as we experience when trying to deepen concentration. So just the conscious experience of and attention to those inner torrents is already an act of differentiating our intuitive depth activity from the intellectual body suit which formats the expression of its flow into horizontal concepts and perceptions, as in Cleric's last metaphor.

Yes, I have indeed lured myself into believing that I had made progress, and that my complex was becoming more under control. I see the illusion constructed by the intellect, an additional wave of activity that only covers up the chains of the soul and sensory loops, which are still active, only doubled by one extra unit of heaviness, that our willed spiritual activity will have to disentangle. I will now try to listen to the two wavelengths, and see if they can be perceived as operating one over the other. Thank you!

Federica,

Yes there is a strong connection between breathing and thinking. Our physical breathing has actually become linked tightly with our lower sensuous-intellectual nature, which is why ancient breathing techniques could serve to only reinforce that lower conditioning rather than liberating our thinking from it. You may want to experiment gently holding the breath when your concentration is deepening in meditation, just to experience some more differentiation between the bodily nature and the soul-spirit nature. But perhaps this meditation topic is better left for another thread.

We should see how the very act of becoming more self-conscious of the soul and sensory loops is indeed making progress and gaining more control over the inner depth activity. It is finding more degrees of freedom through which your inutitive activity can express itself through the 'joints and hinges' of your intellectual body suit. Your efforts here have clearly paid off, as is evident from your posts. When we find that we can employ more concepts and metaphors, etc. to express our intuitive understanding, that is a great sign of more liberated and flexible thinking. And it is that deepened inner understanding which will provide living feedback, although not necessarily evident at first (if we remember 'time' does not flow in the same linear way for the spiritual), which gradually purifies the even deeper layers of feeling and willing activity.

[AshvinP]

PS: adding my two cents on the w-question: Ashvin, it could also be that one has first come across the name in its version with w and has simply remembered it in that version.

This is possible, but why wouldn't the person simply assume they are two different names, "Ashvin" and "Ashwin", like "Ashley" and "Ashleigh"? I feel there must be some other factor at work.

As you can see, with first Lorenzo and now Wayfarer writing it that way, I have become very curious!

[lorenzop]

The accepted view, the mainstream social-consensus philosophy, is realism: that the world exists irrespective of the presence of an observer.

I keep trying to escape this forum - but can't seem to 'check out', it's my Hotel California I suppose.
Re your definition of Realism - " the world exists irrespective of the presence of an observer." - I would argue that most flavors of Materialism and Idealism would fall under this definition of Realism, as would would most if not all sane and reasonable philosophies.
There is plenty of evidence for an independent reality - that is, a reality independent of our individual mind and perceptions.
Re Idealism, we can't conflate these two statements: 'reality is an activity of consciousness', and, 'reality is an activity of the mind'. The finite mind is a limited column\sphere and arises with\within reality.
Put another way, Idealism states Reality is what consciousness looks like to a finite mind.
What does Materialism claim? . . . not sure, I can't begin to type it it out without laughing.
So, re Idealism\Materialism\etc, these are models we hold provisionally as explanations for the appearance of reality.
I say provisionally because (maybe) all we can do is try them on, compare our experience with what these models claim or predict. If we prefer the consequences of one POV over the other, we can culture the mind . . .
but maybe it's simpler than we think.
When I inspect my experience, I don't really find a 'mind' to culture, I don't find any box or container of memories, i don't find any calculating device, or find any agency that chooses this or that. What I find are one thought, memory or perception at a time - I find thoughts and perceiving.
There is no thing one has to change or culture.

[Federica]

> What Ideal are you pursuing with your philosophical activities?

Kastrup refers to his current course as 'analytical idealism' and I think he uses the term 'analytic' to align his work within the general approach of 'analytical philosophy'. And that is the mainstream approach in Anglo-American academic philosophy. And he's making inroads there. Whereas if he went too far into the esoteric/occult, then the mainstream could easily write him off as 'an occultist'.

As I mentioned in my introductory post, I was a member on various philosophy forums for quite a few years, and I'm accustomed to trying to articulate my ideas within that framework, although I incorporate some perspectives from Buddhism. But I try to refrain from appeals to the esoteric or occult (hence Rudolf Steiner is not on my reading list although I've had some contacts with anthroposophy.)

I'm trying not to create too long a post, but as for my general orientation, I think you could call it 'the forgotten wisdom school' (a la Huston Smith). That is: ancient philosophy had a life-transforming wisdom and metaphysic, which over the millenia first became absorbed into religious dogma, then was abandoned by modern naturalism and has been forgotten. I had something of a Platonist epiphany (totally unexpected) which revealed the 'thread' I'm referring to that runs through philosophy up until Schopenhauer, after which it became extinguished in most Anglo-American philosophy. As Kastrup is re-introducing idealism, he's adapting some elements of this thread – hence his affinity with Schopenhauer.

Actually speaking of Schopenhauer, I can't resist from quoting this passage from him which I used many times on philosophy forums. which basically provides the answer to the question I asked:

All that is objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation, that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired (especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object, materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law, are in truth to be explained.

Wayfarer,

Again, thanks for your thoughtful reply. Starting from the end - the Schopenhauer quote - I would only ask one thing:
As such, the point made in the quote seems flawless, concluding to the analytic idealist’s position that our perception of the world is an idea, or a mental picture. But what do you make of the following critique, which remarks that Schopenhauer only deducts world as mental picture at the price of considering our physical organs through which that mental picture is said to be formed, as physical objects in the exact same way the materialist would? The perception of our eyes, not only the perception of the table, should consist of a mental picture according to Schopenhauer, correct? Still, eyes are used in the reasoning as the materialist’s eyes. So Schopenhauer only ‘refutes’ realism by assuming realism’s premises as the implicit, and necessary, starting point of his reasoning:

I thought that the table, just as I perceive it, had objective existence. But now I observe that it disappears together with my mental picture, that it is only a modification of my inner state of soul. Have I, then, any right at all to start from it in my arguments? Can I say of it that it acts on my soul? I must henceforth treat the table, of which formerly I believed that it acted on me and produced a mental picture of itself in me, as itself a mental picture. But from this it follows logically that my sense organs and the processes in them are also merely subjective. I have no right to speak of a real eye but only of my mental picture of the eye. Exactly the same is true of the nerve paths, and the brain process, and no less of the process in the soul itself, through which things are supposed to be built up out of the chaos of manifold sensations. If I run through the steps of my act of cognition once more, the latter reveals itself as a tissue of mental pictures which, as such, cannot act on one another. I cannot say that my mental picture of the object acts on my mental picture of the eye, and that from this interaction my mental picture of color results. Nor is it necessary that I should say this. For as soon as I see clearly that my sense organs and their activity, my nerve and soul processes, can also be known to me only through perception, the train of thought which I have outlined reveals itself in its full absurdity. It is quite true that I can have no percept without the corresponding sense organ. But just as little can I be aware of a sense organ without perception. From the percept of a table I can pass to the eye which sees it, or the nerves in the skin which touch it, but what takes place in these I can, in turn, learn only from perception. And then I soon notice that there is no trace of similarity between the process which takes place in the eye and the color which I perceive. I cannot eliminate my color percept by pointing to the process which takes place in the eye during this perception. No more can I rediscover the color in the nerve or brain processes. I only add new percepts, localized within the organism, to the first percept, which the realist localizes outside his organism. I merely pass from one percept to another.
Moreover there is a gap in the whole argument. I can follow the processes in my organism up to those in my brain, even though my assumptions become more and more hypothetical as I approach the central processes of the brain. The path of external observation ceases with the process in my brain, more particularly with the process which I should observe if I could deal with the brain using the instruments and methods of physics and chemistry. The path of inner observation begins with the sensation, and continues up to the building of things out of the material of sensation. At the point of transition from brain process to sensation, the path of observation is interrupted.
The way of thinking here described, known as critical idealism, in contrast to the standpoint of naïve consciousness known as naïve realism, makes the mistake of characterizing the one percept as mental picture while taking the other in the very same sense as does the naïve realism which it apparently refutes. It wants to prove that percepts have the character of mental pictures by naïvely accepting the percepts connected with one's own organism as objectively valid facts

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/Engli ... 4_c04.html



There are other questions I’d like to ask, but you are getting many, and I am interested in how you would answer the one here below, so I’ll end here.

So in a nutshell, to understand ‘mind creates the world’, we shouldn’t be simply trying to imagine that the mind creates the outer world because this outer world exists only as a concept in the mind. The thought about existence/non-existence itself must be undone. Only then we understand in truth what it means for the mind to create the world.

Would you say that this better addresses your initial post? Would you say that it presents a well understood account of your ideas or it has missed your essential point?

[Federica]

PS: adding my two cents on the w-question: Ashvin, it could also be that one has first come across the name in its version with w and has simply remembered it in that version.

This is possible, but why wouldn't the person simply assume they are two different names, "Ashvin" and "Ashwin", like "Ashley" and "Ashleigh"? I feel there must be some other factor at work.

As you can see, with first Lorenzo and now Wayfarer writing it that way, I have become very curious!

Ashvin,

I have an idea why, but I would let you decide for yourself. In the first few posts to me on this forum you were spelling my name 'Frederica'. Why didn't you simply assume Frederica and Federica are two different names?

[AshvinP]

PS: adding my two cents on the w-question: Ashvin, it could also be that one has first come across the name in its version with w and has simply remembered it in that version.

This is possible, but why wouldn't the person simply assume they are two different names, "Ashvin" and "Ashwin", like "Ashley" and "Ashleigh"? I feel there must be some other factor at work.

As you can see, with first Lorenzo and now Wayfarer writing it that way, I have become very curious!

Ashvin,

I have an idea why, but I would let you decide for yourself. In the first few posts to me on this forum you were spelling my name 'Frederica'. Why didn't you simply assume Frederica and Federica are two different names?

That's a good point! I guess what you are saying is a probable explanation, and would also include my prior guess that he had come across Indian people with the "w" pronounciation. I have actually come across a few different "Ashvin" with a v, but never one spelled "Ashwin". Perhaps the latter do exist. Right now, I would say Lorenzo and Wayfarer have known some "Ashvin" who pronounced his name with the "w" sound and, out of habit, spell it with that "w" when sounding out my name to type here. I pronounce my own name with a "v" for Americans and a "w" for Indians, so as to make it easier for both

[Federica]

This is possible, but why wouldn't the person simply assume they are two different names, "Ashvin" and "Ashwin", like "Ashley" and "Ashleigh"? I feel there must be some other factor at work.

As you can see, with first Lorenzo and now Wayfarer writing it that way, I have become very curious!

Ashvin,

I have an idea why, but I would let you decide for yourself. In the first few posts to me on this forum you were spelling my name 'Frederica'. Why didn't you simply assume Frederica and Federica are two different names?

That's a good point! I guess what you are saying is a probable explanation, and would also include my prior guess that he had come across Indian people with the "w" pronounciation. I have actually come across a few different "Ashvin" with a v, but never one spelled "Ashwin". Perhaps the latter do exist. Right now, I would say Lorenzo and Wayfarer have known some "Ashvin" who pronounced his name with the "w" sound and, out of habit, spell it with that "w" when sounding out my name to type here. I pronounce my own name with a "v" for Americans and a "w" for Indians, so as to make it easier for both

How agreeable
Not that I don't know what you mean, when I was living in France I used to pronounce my own name in a super ridiculous way, just to please the locals

[Federica]

I've just downloaded Kastrup's 'The Idea of the World' (as an audiobook) and will commence listening. I'm not disputing Kastrup's thesis of the world comprising 'excitations in consciousness', but I am wary about the reification of 'mind-at-large' as a kind of place-holder for 'spirit'.

Great, so you will soon be in a position to decide if the model as a whole makes complete sense to you. In the audio version you will do without some drawings of the human being, its dissociative boundary, and M@L, but they are similar to other ones found on Essentia.

[Wayfarer]

The thought about existence/non-existence itself must be undone.

Correct! Hence the thread title. So, yes, that does indeed address the initial post. And please understand, I'm not claiming to have reached any great plateau of enlightenment, this is just how I see the point of philosophical idealism as a consequence of study and meditation. There's a subtle matter at issue which is easily missed (not saying by you, but in general discourse). Seeing through it requires a kind of gestalt shift.

I would argue that most flavors of Materialism and Idealism would fall under this definition of Realism, as would would most if not all sane and reasonable philosophies.There is plenty of evidence for an independent reality - that is, a reality independent of our individual mind and perceptions. ...Re Idealism, we can't conflate these two statements: 'reality is an activity of consciousness', and, 'reality is an activity of the mind'. The finite mind is a limited column\sphere and arises with\within reality.

Of course there is a world completely independent of your or my egoic consciousness. That is not the point at issue. I've mentioned a recent book a few times in this thread, Charles Pinter's Mind and the Cosmic Order, I urge you to cast your eye at the abstracts for each chapter in the linked outline. Chapter One's abstract is as follows:

Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.

Also have a look at my essay on 'The Objective Stance'

So the pre-existent reality that you believe 'your mind' arises within is itself a conceptual construct. But that goes against the grain of your inborn worldview of liberal individualism which orients itself with respect to the sensory domain that it takes to be real. Not only is it hard to grasp, but you won't like it, as you will feel that it threatens your sense of self. I think that's the source of the angst you keep running up against.

what do you make of the following critique, which remarks that Schopenhauer only deducts world as mental picture at the price of considering our physical organs through which that mental picture is said to be formed, as physical objects in the exact same way the materialist would?

I'll call out this passage:

as soon as I see clearly that my sense organs and their activity, my nerve and soul processes, can also be known to me only through perception, the train of thought which I have outlined reveals itself in its full absurdity.

Grave misconception here in my view. Critical idealism is not representative realism: it's not as if 'the idea of the table' is an image that represents the table. That is John Locke. The second point is the idea of making the process of cognition itself an object of perception - which can't be done. 'The eye cannot see itself, the hand cannot grasp itself'. We can't view our cognitive processes 'from the outside', so to speak. (This point goes back to the Upaniṣads, see The Unknowability of Brahman and is central to Advaita Vedanta.) This inability to know the knower is central to my iteration of analytical idealism. It is a form of apophatic understanding - knowing that you can't know - which is a kind of meta-cognitive awareness. It seems to me the quoted passage doesn't come from that perspective.

I'm also dubious of this claim 'The path of inner observation begins with the sensation, and continues up to the building of things out of the material of sensation'. What of judgement and reason? Where do they fit? I suppose it's a proverbial can of worms, but I'm not inclined to want to pursue it.

[Wayfarer]

The salient passage from the Upaniṣad:

Nobody can know the ātman inasmuch as the ātman is the Knower of all things. So, no question regarding the ātman can be put, such as "What is the ātman?' 'Show it to me', etc. You cannot show the ātman because the Shower is the ātman; the Experiencer is the ātman; the Seer is the ātman; the Functioner in every respect through the senses or the mind or the intellect is the ātman. As the basic Residue of Reality in every individual is the ātman, how can we go behind It and say, 'This is the ātman?' Therefore, the question is impertinent and inadmissible. The reason is clear. It is the Self. It is not an object.

Everything other than the ātman is stupid; it is useless; it is good for nothing; it has no value; it is lifeless. Everything assumes a meaning because of the operation of this ātman... Minus that, nothing has any sense ". Then Uṣasta Cākrāyana, the questioner kept quiet. He understood the point and did not speak further.