Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[Federica]

I think transhumanism goes deeper than VR and the metaverse into the dead end of materialist reductionism, and into its illusion of mastery and knowledge, because what VR proposes as an external equipment for self-seclusion in a fully mastered parallel world of senses (or at least the ambition is that it would be fully mastered) is extended in transhumanism into a permanent, internal modification of the physical body. That the self-seclusive device is brought within the threshold of the skin, means that the longing to move into a fully mastered reality got bigger and stronger. The new ambition is to make this new fully mastered world coincide with the natural world, rather than it remaining a leisure or escape activity, with a headset to put on and play with. In a way, it’s similar to when Elon Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. Life as a whole should coincide with a new, fully artificial, secluded space, no matter how much waste we need to permanently leave unresolved behind us in order to achieve this (although I think transhumanist pursuits are somewhat worse, more alarming, than space colonization pursuits).


All this to say that I don’t think transhumanism expresses a natural wish of de-identification with our physical sheath. Rather the opposite. It expresses the most exasperated materialistic belief that the body is all we are, and that we should direct our efforts to the final pursuit of full knowledge and mastery of its workings. It’s based on the illusion that our thirst for truth will be appeased the more we enable ourselves to forge our physical world at will, starting from ourselves (our physical bodies). Everything else is an afterthought, is denied, reduced, deprived of any possible level-specific causality.


Is transhumanism pathological? It’s certainly detrimental to human spiritual development. In that sense only it can be said to be pathological. But it’s not a word I would choose. I would rather say, it’s a dead end, but I don’t think it helps loosen the etheric body in the same way VR can theoretically, and accidentally, be imagined to do it (if we are very generous) when we put on our headset. The transhumanist self-seclusion is forever (whatever transhumanists hope “forever” means). There is no back and forth in which we can entertain any hope to notice by contrast any differences in thinking gestures. Transhumanism is the last gasp, so to say, the full deployment of the reductionist obsession. It’s the end of the dead end (hopefully).

I also want to point that out what you wrote above about transhumanism could be used as a pretty tight-fitting description of healthy spiritual evolution, such as we are trying to manifest through Anthroposophy and similar communities. Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness which unites the seemingly 'parallel' worlds of spirit-soul-body, and eventually expands out into the spiritual Cosmos to 'colonize' (integrate) the evolutionary streams of different planets. We aim to become planetary spirits in that sense, and to shape the physical world through our ideation. We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life world in the even shorter term, to harmonize the ego-astral and physical-etheric complexes through their sleeping-waking rhythms. But what flips the aims completely on their head, from consciously allowing the physical to be made more spiritual to instinctively forcing the spiritual to be made more physical, is the lack of living consciousness of the underlying spiritual evolutionary impulses which 'incept' these desires, feelings, and thoughts within our soul-life.

I will start with this shorter one first. For the moment, I am overwhelmed at the idea of tackling the other post with the drone analogy, and the thousand things that would require to be pointed out. I realize nothing I could say would have any chance to have any effect. No matter how much on-point I would respond, you would probably ignore again 95% of it, and throw in whatever you have decided to communicate, as you say, without much edit, including a technical review of a drone - unbelievable, but it's there to watch - and using language like "higher tech". I feel you are not there, Ashvin.


Anyway, to your statement above, I would say this.
Is it a joke? How can you reasonably say that healthy spiritual evolution and mastering Ego-consciousness the way Steiner envisions it for humanity in a far away epoch in the future fits pretty tightly present-day transhumanist pursuit of self-seclusive/self-reductive mastery over the physical body?!

"Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness"
You call it a change of "language"? ...to be "more in terms of"??

"We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life"
These worlds do coincide, as they are ideated by higher intelligences, and what we most definitely aim to is to realize that, and our interactive part in that integration.
This has ZERO in common with the transhumanist ambition of making up a parallel physical-sensory-world, hoping to make it coincide by grafting it into our physical bodies - but really just looking away from all the disturbing, unresolved natural world - with the belief that the named two things, sensory world and physical body, are all reality and life are made of.

[AshvinP]

Alright, Federica, let's get back to the phenomenological basics. I will address your second to last post point by point. It is my mistake for straying too far into spiritual scientific analogies, since it probably requires a much more thorough study to be meaningful.

(...)
That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

Here we are, Ashvin, back to the main topic. I tried my best to gather the essence of my thoughts, from VR to transhumanism. I look forward to yours, and to the metaphor!

With the VR perspective within the sensory spectrum, we add yet another set of constraints on our spiritual activity (at this stage, we are quite literally putting on a headset and constraining our hands to the controllers). Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum, our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized. The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc., or the 'laws of nature', and more dependent on our heads and fingers. We must actively do something for the images to transform, unless we are simply watching videos. We can push a few buttons, turn our head, spin around, and view the 7 wonders of the world in full panoramic relief. I think we both agree that there is something of great significance taking place here, either for better or for worse (and usually for worse).

I would doubt we can say that different sets of sensorial configurations, or spectrums, can make our activity more or less spiritualized. Can we say that, because we will - or cause - a certain transformation from one frame to the next through the move of a finger, or a blink in one direction, rather than through stretching a leg, then our activity becomes more or less spiritualized, as a consequence of which body part is involved? I am not sure.
If I can borrow some vocabulary from Cleric’s last essay, which I imagine is fresh memory for all of us, we steer our configuration spaces all the time, our activity is equally spiritualized all the time. It hardly matters whether we are doing it within a natural configuration space, or a VR-supplemented one. As I put it before, "that the virtual world doesn't exist in the same way our natural world does, is irrelevant from an experiential perspective". Said in yet another way, the transformation of imagery in VR is not “less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” because it's just never dependent on those anyway.

No, and I never asserted the sensory-conceptual instruments themselves make our activity more spiritual. But they can be understood as reflections of more spiritualized activity. That is what the development of material technology has universally reflected over many centuries now, and what is developing through VR is no different. We must remember that spiritual evolution (the only kind of evolution there is) is happening for everyone, regardless of whether they are aware of it. But the longer they are unaware of it, the more pathological it becomes. It begins to manifest as fear, resentment, and infernal goals in relation to the progressive spiritual guidance.

You are abstracting to 3rd person metaphysics here when asserting the bold. When you go through life, is the transformation of the spatio-temporal imagery not dependent on the intents you manifest through your physical organism? If you sit in one place and stare straight at the wall without moving, does the wall-image transform by itself? When the subtler etheric body also becomes the conscious instrument of our Ego, then we have gained greater degrees of freedom in the transformation of perceptual imagery. I can expand more on this pont if necessary.

At most, I would imagine, when we will a certain transformation through a head movement rather than through our usual leg movement, there is a theoretical possibility that we can come to conceive the potential separateness of idea and physical movement. Maybe that’s what you mean, that we can hope to notice the primacy of our thinking gestures in that shift.
I have to say, I really really don’t believe this can happen in practice. Unless one already understood that, unless one already realized that outside VR, it’s not because we supplement the sensory spectrum with the 7 wonders of the world that we will come to realize that we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. That would be a miracle! I think we cannot reasonably expect that sensorial variations will illuminate our living thinking, and make us grasp the secret. As I put it before, only thinking can manipulate thinking. Conversely, for you who have already understood that clearly, there’s no value added to be found in the VR experience either.

Yes, of course, and I have never once asserted the VR experience by itself will lead us to find the proper relation of Idea to perception.

The question has always been, after we begin to understand that proper relation through our experience of first-person intuitive thinking activity and our study of spiritual science, do cultural phenomena such as VR tech offer any potential opportunities for supplementing our understanding? Your position has been that, while certainly other cultural phenomena and technologies offer that opportunity, for some reason VR falls outside the spectrum of pedagogical tools for our living spiritual activity.

So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.

You keep saying "as a regular practice", while I never made any argument for adopting it as a regular practice. To counter your position, I only need to provide one single example, present or future, in which the VR perspective could offer our living thinking pedagogical value through an experience not available through non-VR experience, even if the person uses it for 30 min and never picks up the headset again. That was the reason for the drone analogy. This by itself establishes the underlying principle of cultural evolution that I am arguing for. I don't need to establish it is good as a regular spiritual practice - I have never engaged in it as such, recommended it as such, or argued for it as such.

I think the etheric body has to be loosened in healthier, T-led ways rather than by trying to cut it apart with a forever dull VR-knife, which also puts unnecessary obstacles on the path. It’s as if we entrust a mediocre and unskilled surgeon - who not only was educated in past, obsolete (materialist) methods, but also has to operate with a forever dull knife - with the task of lifting our etheric body. So I can't help but disagree with a future-oriented look on VR. I rather see it as an expression of old, dying-off stuff of the past. As I see them, these are the last, or before-last, gasps of reductive materialism. Borrowing again from Cleric's vocabulary, I see VR, and transhumanism for that matter, as part of the reductionist dead ends in evolution.
To conclude before I move on to transhumanism, I will take the liberty to quote Cleric’s words of caution with regards to the possible spiritual import of Michael Levin’s model. Surprisingly or not, I think these words would also perfectly apply to VR:

It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.
This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires.

The above reveals that you are investing more causal power in the material technology than in the user's living spiritual activity. That is how you draw these generalized metaphysical conclusions which compare the VR tech itself to a mediocre and unskilled surgeon, rather than the person using it. We can't forget that VR tech, like all other tech, was not only developed through our intuitive spiritual activity, but is always used as the instrument of that activity. It is the skill, life, and power of that activity which is the determining factor, not the instrument. And, in certain cases, the additional resistance of the instrument can be used to strenghten the activity. Most surgeons can't successfuly perform brain surgery with a dull knife, but if there are one or two who can, that is a reflection of their immense surgical skills!

Think about this way - Cleric developed his living thinking the more effcient way, as we also recommend others do. Now after so and so years of spiritual training, he has decided to explore these intellectual scaffolds for supplemental spiritual value (and VR to some extent), for his own benefit and ours. Do you see how this fact by itself negates your entire position, assuming he and others are actually gaining that supplemental spiritual value from the exploration? Let's be clear - the intellectual scaffolds, the VR tech, etc. is not the stuff of the future. All of that particular content, as we know it now, dies away in the course of spiritual evolution. It is the universal spiritual forces which are developed through them that can potentially be the stuff of the future, depending on what level of morally redemptive spiritual activity we attain. The more we grow that activity, the more the World Phenomena become available as tools for our even further growth and for the opportunities to aid others on their path.

[AshvinP]

I think transhumanism goes deeper than VR and the metaverse into the dead end of materialist reductionism, and into its illusion of mastery and knowledge, because what VR proposes as an external equipment for self-seclusion in a fully mastered parallel world of senses (or at least the ambition is that it would be fully mastered) is extended in transhumanism into a permanent, internal modification of the physical body. That the self-seclusive device is brought within the threshold of the skin, means that the longing to move into a fully mastered reality got bigger and stronger. The new ambition is to make this new fully mastered world coincide with the natural world, rather than it remaining a leisure or escape activity, with a headset to put on and play with. In a way, it’s similar to when Elon Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. Life as a whole should coincide with a new, fully artificial, secluded space, no matter how much waste we need to permanently leave unresolved behind us in order to achieve this (although I think transhumanist pursuits are somewhat worse, more alarming, than space colonization pursuits).


All this to say that I don’t think transhumanism expresses a natural wish of de-identification with our physical sheath. Rather the opposite. It expresses the most exasperated materialistic belief that the body is all we are, and that we should direct our efforts to the final pursuit of full knowledge and mastery of its workings. It’s based on the illusion that our thirst for truth will be appeased the more we enable ourselves to forge our physical world at will, starting from ourselves (our physical bodies). Everything else is an afterthought, is denied, reduced, deprived of any possible level-specific causality.


Is transhumanism pathological? It’s certainly detrimental to human spiritual development. In that sense only it can be said to be pathological. But it’s not a word I would choose. I would rather say, it’s a dead end, but I don’t think it helps loosen the etheric body in the same way VR can theoretically, and accidentally, be imagined to do it (if we are very generous) when we put on our headset. The transhumanist self-seclusion is forever (whatever transhumanists hope “forever” means). There is no back and forth in which we can entertain any hope to notice by contrast any differences in thinking gestures. Transhumanism is the last gasp, so to say, the full deployment of the reductionist obsession. It’s the end of the dead end (hopefully).

I also want to point that out what you wrote above about transhumanism could be used as a pretty tight-fitting description of healthy spiritual evolution, such as we are trying to manifest through Anthroposophy and similar communities. Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness which unites the seemingly 'parallel' worlds of spirit-soul-body, and eventually expands out into the spiritual Cosmos to 'colonize' (integrate) the evolutionary streams of different planets. We aim to become planetary spirits in that sense, and to shape the physical world through our ideation. We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life world in the even shorter term, to harmonize the ego-astral and physical-etheric complexes through their sleeping-waking rhythms. But what flips the aims completely on their head, from consciously allowing the physical to be made more spiritual to instinctively forcing the spiritual to be made more physical, is the lack of living consciousness of the underlying spiritual evolutionary impulses which 'incept' these desires, feelings, and thoughts within our soul-life.

I will start with this shorter one first. For the moment, I am overwhelmed at the idea of tackling the other post with the drone analogy, and the thousand things that would require to be pointed out. I realize nothing I could say would have any chance to have any effect. No matter how much on-point I would respond, you would probably ignore again 95% of it, and throw in whatever you have decided to communicate, as you say, without much edit, including a technical review of a drone - unbelievable, but it's there to watch - and using language like "higher tech". I feel you are not there, Ashvin.


Anyway, to your statement above, I would say this.
Is it a joke? How can you reasonably say that healthy spiritual evolution and mastering Ego-consciousness the way Steiner envisions it for humanity in a far away epoch in the future fits pretty tightly present-day transhumanist pursuit of self-seclusive/self-reductive mastery over the physical body?!

"Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness"
You call it a change of "language"? ...to be "more in terms of"??

"We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life"
These worlds do coincide, as they are ideated by higher intelligences, and what we most definitely aim to is to realize that, and our interactive part in that integration.
This has ZERO in common with the transhumanist ambition of making up a parallel physical-sensory-world, hoping to make it coincide by grafting it into our physical bodies - but really just looking away from all the disturbing, unresolved natural world - with the belief that the named two things, sensory world and physical body, are all reality and life are made of.

Maybe if you read it from Steiner instead of me, you will see it's not at all a joke, so I will look for a relevant passage which hopefully doesn't require too much background study (as you probably know, most of his lectures require that). The one thing I would point out is that the higher intelligences ideating our spiritual evolution do not only work on the Anthroposphists or those pursuing the high ideals. The 'spirits of darkness' are also higher intelligences in which our human consciousness is nested and we can't understand current developments in human culture apart from their intentions. They are seeking the path of least resistance to their own spiritual evolution and the interference of these paths with progressive spiritual paths is what manifests as the pathological cultural forms of our evolution.

Just consider what Cleric wrote with regards to Levin, which you just highlighted - "The previous actually provides a perfect transition to the topic of transhumanism, insofar as Levin’s model can be seen as a precursor of an upcoming new sort of vertically integrating scientific bio-models that will open the way to advanced body modifications, biohacking, and other transhumanist pursuits."

So what makes the difference between Levin's models as, in the words of Cleric, "nothing but reaching the idea of the formative forces of the Cosmos yet entirely through intellectual reasoning about sensory facts", and the models as the precursor to more extreme transhumanist pursuits? It is a very strait gate and narrow way which makes the difference. Or I should say, it's deviating from that narrow way which leads the evolved spiritual knowledge of the Cosmic formative forces from genuine progressive insight into egoistic material pursuits.

[Federica]

Alright, Federica, let's get back to the phenomenological basics. I will address your second to last post point by point. It is my mistake for straying too far into spiritual scientific analogies, since it probably requires a much more thorough study to be meaningful.

(...)
That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

Here we are, Ashvin, back to the main topic. I tried my best to gather the essence of my thoughts, from VR to transhumanism. I look forward to yours, and to the metaphor!

With the VR perspective within the sensory spectrum, we add yet another set of constraints on our spiritual activity (at this stage, we are quite literally putting on a headset and constraining our hands to the controllers). Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum, our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized. The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc., or the 'laws of nature', and more dependent on our heads and fingers. We must actively do something for the images to transform, unless we are simply watching videos. We can push a few buttons, turn our head, spin around, and view the 7 wonders of the world in full panoramic relief. I think we both agree that there is something of great significance taking place here, either for better or for worse (and usually for worse).

I would doubt we can say that different sets of sensorial configurations, or spectrums, can make our activity more or less spiritualized. Can we say that, because we will - or cause - a certain transformation from one frame to the next through the move of a finger, or a blink in one direction, rather than through stretching a leg, then our activity becomes more or less spiritualized, as a consequence of which body part is involved? I am not sure.
If I can borrow some vocabulary from Cleric’s last essay, which I imagine is fresh memory for all of us, we steer our configuration spaces all the time, our activity is equally spiritualized all the time. It hardly matters whether we are doing it within a natural configuration space, or a VR-supplemented one. As I put it before, "that the virtual world doesn't exist in the same way our natural world does, is irrelevant from an experiential perspective". Said in yet another way, the transformation of imagery in VR is not “less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” because it's just never dependent on those anyway.

No, and I never asserted the sensory-conceptual instruments themselves make our activity more spiritual.
You did: “Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum, our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized”. I understand that was just inaccurate rendering through language. Or, shall we say, I don’t get your language.

But they can be understood as reflections (this is a subtitle you are only now adding) of more spiritualized activity.
Would you please explain what is meant by “more spiritualized activity” and how technology facilitates that?

That is what the development of material technology has universally reflected over many centuries now, and what is developing through VR is no different. We must remember that spiritual evolution (the only kind of evolution there is) is happening for everyone, regardless of whether they are aware of it. But the longer they are unaware of it, the more pathological it becomes. It begins to manifest as fear, resentment, and infernal goals in relation to the progressive spiritual guidance. Yes.

You are abstracting to 3rd person metaphysics here when asserting the bold.
One really gets the feeling that, because the sentence in bold annoys you, you whip the Third Person Metaphysics joker. That sentence in bold is simply to confront yours: “The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” I am saying, that transformation of imagery can’t be less (or more) dependent on arms and legs.

When you go through life, is the transformation of the spatio-temporal imagery not dependent on the intents you manifest through your physical organism?
Dependent on the intents yes, dependent on the idea, yes. But that’s not what you wrote! It's annoying that you now make it look like you need to go back to the phenomenological basics, which I’m supposedly still not getting, while what you are really doing is simply adding subtitles to your own overstretched language. I think your most recent use of language is the real issue here. A month or so ago, you started escalating how you stretch and bend principles, and the language in which you clothe them, to the point that you are now constantly flirting with dissonance and contradiction. In my opinion, you have gone beyond the level of elasticity language can tolerate. You have started ramping this up at the occasion of your exchanges with Wayfarer, and now you are doing it across virtually all your posts. This is the core of the problem.

If you sit in one place and stare straight at the wall without moving, does the wall-image transform by itself? When the subtler etheric body also becomes the conscious instrument of our Ego, then we have gained greater degrees of freedom in the transformation of perceptual imagery. I can expand more on this pont if necessary.

At most, I would imagine, when we will a certain transformation through a head movement rather than through our usual leg movement, there is a theoretical possibility that we can come to conceive the potential separateness of idea and physical movement. Maybe that’s what you mean, that we can hope to notice the primacy of our thinking gestures in that shift.
I have to say, I really really don’t believe this can happen in practice. Unless one already understood that, unless one already realized that outside VR, it’s not because we supplement the sensory spectrum with the 7 wonders of the world that we will come to realize that we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. That would be a miracle! I think we cannot reasonably expect that sensorial variations will illuminate our living thinking, and make us grasp the secret. As I put it before, only thinking can manipulate thinking. Conversely, for you who have already understood that clearly, there’s no value added to be found in the VR experience either.

Yes, of course, and I have never once asserted the VR experience by itself will lead us to find the proper relation of Idea to perception. If it can't, what is the teaching it can lead us to? If you call it pedagogical, it has to lead us somewhere.

The question has always been, after we begin to understand that proper relation through our experience of first-person intuitive thinking activity and our study of spiritual science, do cultural phenomena such as VR tech offer any potential opportunities for supplementing our understanding? Your position has been that, while certainly other cultural phenomena and technologies offer that opportunity - Absolutely not so. You will not find anything in my older posts not even suggesting that other technologies can offer opportunities to supplement our understanding - for some reason VR falls outside the spectrum of pedagogical tools for our living spiritual activity.

So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.

You keep saying "as a regular practice", while I never made any argument for adopting it as a regular practice.
Consistently with all my previous posts, when I say “as a regular practice” I simply mean “as opposed to VR as cultural phenomenon”.

To counter your position, I only need to provide one single example, present or future, in which the VR perspective could offer our living thinking pedagogical value through an experience not available through non-VR experience, even if the person uses it for 30 min and never picks up the headset again.
By trying to make VR valuable as a one-off experience, I think you are weakening your position further. You are renouncing any possibility that VR can train us to notice thinking gestures by contrast, and you bet on a sort of revelatory power of VR. VR as revelation… It’s not going to work… It cannot work!

That was the reason for the drone analogy. This by itself establishes the underlying principle of cultural evolution that I am arguing for. I don't need to establish it is good as a regular spiritual practice - I have never engaged in it as such, recommended it as such, or argued for it as such.

I think the etheric body has to be loosened in healthier, T-led ways rather than by trying to cut it apart with a forever dull VR-knife, which also puts unnecessary obstacles on the path. It’s as if we entrust a mediocre and unskilled surgeon - who not only was educated in past, obsolete (materialist) methods, but also has to operate with a forever dull knife - with the task of lifting our etheric body. So I can't help but disagree with a future-oriented look on VR. I rather see it as an expression of old, dying-off stuff of the past. As I see them, these are the last, or before-last, gasps of reductive materialism. Borrowing again from Cleric's vocabulary, I see VR, and transhumanism for that matter, as part of the reductionist dead ends in evolution.
To conclude before I move on to transhumanism, I will take the liberty to quote Cleric’s words of caution with regards to the possible spiritual import of Michael Levin’s model. Surprisingly or not, I think these words would also perfectly apply to VR:

It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.
This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires.

The above reveals that you are investing more causal power in the material technology than in the user's living spiritual activity. That is how you draw these generalized metaphysical conclusions which compare the VR tech itself to a mediocre and unskilled surgeon, rather than the person using it.
Ashvin, when you say that this tool is pedagogical, meaning a teacher, and that we can get a revelation through its use, you are the one who puts causal power in that technology. When I compare it to an unskilled surgeon, I am only just countering your entrustment in the tool's pedagogical value.

We can't forget that VR tech, like all other tech, was not only developed through our intuitive spiritual activity, but is always used as the instrument of that activity. It is the skill, life, and power of that activity which is the determining factor, not the instrument. And, in certain cases, the additional resistance of the instrument can be used to strenghten the activity. Scaffolds to increase resistance... You make it look like a spiritual gym. It looks like you like to gear up. I prefer to set my intention to confront spiritual activity directly.

Most surgeons can't successfuly perform brain surgery with a dull knife, but if there are one or two who can, that is a reflection of their immense surgical skills!
Or, it's a reflection of their being caught in the aftermaths of materialistic habits of the past!

Think about this way - Cleric developed his living thinking the more effcient way (not exactly - he said that he didn’t exactly develop it so very efficiently through the years), as we also recommend others do. Now after so and so years of spiritual training, he has decided to explore these intellectual scaffolds for supplemental spiritual value (and VR to some extent), for his own benefit and ours.
This is not the first time you intend to recruit Cleric’s view on VR to your support, but for me this is a stretch (based on what I can read on the forum, of course, though I believe more, not less, cautionary comments have been shared outside). Although Cleric has shared a general “since it’s here, let’s see what can be done” approach, and did say that VR “can help us realize that the concept of space is not that absolute after all” (and that’s about it, when it comes to his tribute to VR on this forum), his comments to your essay start with warnings about VR becoming “one of the greatest spiritual traps”, and with feeling “still little uneasy” about it, because VR is “such a thin ice”. So I for myself don't know whether or not he's gaining supplemental value from VR exploration.

Do you see how this fact by itself negates your entire position, assuming he and others are actually gaining that supplemental spiritual value from the exploration?
I don’t make such an assumption, because I don’t find on this forum any support for it, therefore I don’t see for the moment any “facts” involving Cleric that would negate my entire position.

Let's be clear - the intellectual scaffolds, the VR tech, etc. is not the stuff of the future.
That was already very clear to me. As I said, I consider VR a thing of the past, not of the future. If we feel the need to hold on to this or other scaffolds, rather than approaching thinking upfront, it’s because of the habits built up during centuries of materialist tradition still dragging us back towards the past.

All of that particular content, as we know it now, dies away in the course of spiritual evolution. It is the universal spiritual forces which are developed through them that can potentially be the stuff of the future, depending on what level of morally redemptive spiritual activity we attain. The more we grow that activity, the more the World Phenomena become available as tools for our even further growth and for the opportunities to aid others on their path.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I am going to ignore your blaming the lack of your substantive response to my points, on my adding in "subtitles" and other speculations about my "use of language". I am using plain English. In the parts you do respond to, you repeat many of the same phenomenological errors. I will point these out to you once again below.

No, and I never asserted the sensory-conceptual instruments themselves make our activity more spiritual.
You did: “Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum, our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized”. I understand that was just inaccurate rendering through language. Or, shall we say, I don’t get your language.

But they can be understood as reflections (this is a subtitle you are only now adding) of more spiritualized activity.
Would you please explain what is meant by “more spiritualized activity” and how technology facilitates that?

If you understand that it was an 'inaccurate rendering through language', then there's no need to treat it like I was making that assertion. At the very least, if it was unclear, you could have asked about it.

Spiritual evolution is not just something that occurs for individuals, but the collectives which those individuals comrpise. These collective developments manifest through the higher intelligence "I" beings and their activity. Everything that happens on the physical plane, in Nature and Culture, from epoch to epoch, can be traced as reflections of that ideational activity. I am only mentioning this more 'metaphysical' part because I know you already agree with it in theory, but I don't think you are taking it seriously enough. You seem to feel some technological phenomena are simply beyond the purview of this spiritual process.

Through that higher activity, human thinking consciousness attains greater thinking DoF and becomes more oriented towards spiritual principles. That is the basis of all modern philosophy and science, including materialism and its technologies, and the principles we have discerned through them ('principles' is another way of saying 'archetypal ideations'). We go from impressing language on stones, papyrus, paper with ink, to impressing it on airwaves and digital signals, from impressing data through cables and wires through Wi-Fi and 'bluetooth'. We can sense the concrete spiritualization being reflected in the medium of transmission (not caused by that medium). The same principle applies to all computer technology including VR.

We should also be clear that the mediums themselves are reflections of spiritual activity of a much higher order, responsible for creating the natural environment which our own spiritual activity can 'work against'. The forces of the mineral and plant kingdoms, the normal sensory spectrum, are all maintained through the activity of what SS calls 'elemental beings', which are the 'offspring' of much higher beings. In fact, these elemental beings evolved through another stream of evolution in which they lagged behind and therefore fell beneath the 'mineral' stage. So everything serves a critical purpose in the holistic spiritual economy and we wouldn't have the opportunity to develop our spiritual capacity if not for the elemental beings, to whom we should be grateful.

You are abstracting to 3rd person metaphysics here when asserting the bold.
One really gets the feeling that, because the sentence in bold annoys you, you whip the Third Person Metaphysics joker. That sentence in bold is simply to confront yours: “The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” I am saying, that transformation of imagery can’t be less (or more) dependent on arms and legs.

When you go through life, is the transformation of the spatio-temporal imagery not dependent on the intents you manifest through your physical organism?
Dependent on the intents yes, dependent on the idea, yes. But that’s not what you wrote!

It is also dependent on the instrument through which the intents-ideas can be expressed. If there was no such dependence, we would all be the equivalent of the Gods in terms of power to manifest/transform imagery. The only way I can begin to understand how you are failing to see this connection is that you are abstracting to 3rd person mystical idealist perspective, which says, 'I am the One Consciousness and all these physical constraints are simply Maya... they can't actually restrain my spiritual activity!'

The problem is not that you have lapsed into such a perspective in the course of this dicussion, which is perfectly natural, but that you feel yourself to be immune to such a lapsing because of previous insights and therefore are unaware that it has occurred. Then you get frustrated and defensive when I point it out.

Yes, of course, and I have never once asserted the VR experience by itself will lead us to find the proper relation of Idea to perception. If it can't, what is the teaching it can lead us to? If you call it pedagogical, it has to lead us somewhere.

Once we find the proper relation, our work is not done. In fact it's just the beginning of our work. We are never reaching a final destination at which we can kick our legs up and rest comfortable. And we would be foolish not to take all the help we can get from our natural and cultural environment in this never-ending work, as we will meet great resistance from our lower nature all along the way. If you feel the VR experience or the metaphors derived from it are not a help for you, that's fine, but that doesn't mean it can't possibly offer pedagogical value to any human being on the Earth, regardless of time and circumstance.

The question has always been, after we begin to understand that proper relation through our experience of first-person intuitive thinking activity and our study of spiritual science, do cultural phenomena such as VR tech offer any potential opportunities for supplementing our understanding? Your position has been that, while certainly other cultural phenomena and technologies offer that opportunity - Absolutely not so. You will not find anything in my older posts not even suggesting that other technologies can offer opportunities to supplement our understanding - for some reason VR falls outside the spectrum of pedagogical tools for our living spiritual activity.

Well then the discontinuity is even worse... but I have a feeling you may have misspoke here. Surely you think other cultural technologies, such as the computers we are using right now, offer opportunities to supplement our understanding? I guess I need to add, the computers as isolated units don't automatically supplement our understanding (of course no such isolated units actually exist), but our spiritual activity meeting its instrument in the computer tech which it developed.

So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.

To counter your position, I only need to provide one single example, present or future, in which the VR perspective could offer our living thinking pedagogical value through an experience not available through non-VR experience, even if the person uses it for 30 min and never picks up the headset again.
By trying to make VR valuable as a one-off experience, I think you are weakening your position further. You are renouncing any possibility that VR can train us to notice thinking gestures by contrast, and you bet on a sort of revelatory power of VR. VR as revelation… It’s not going to work… It cannot work!

That's not my position! As I keep pointing out. The time of 'external' revelations is far over. So that's not what I am arguing at all with respect to VR.

Follow the logic here carefully. You have set your position on VR up as such an extreme, generalized, blanket, universal dismissal of its value that the one-off pedagogical experience is enough to defeat it. Whether VR can be valuable as more than a one-off experience for some people is a completely separate issue. Most likely it can be, for some people.

The above reveals that you are investing more causal power in the material technology than in the user's living spiritual activity. That is how you draw these generalized metaphysical conclusions which compare the VR tech itself to a mediocre and unskilled surgeon, rather than the person using it.
Ashvin, when you say that this tool is pedagogical, meaning a teacher, and that we can get a revelation through its use, you are the one who puts causal power in that technology. When I compare it to an unskilled surgeon, I am only just countering your entrustment in the tool's pedagogical value.

You are projecting your abstract generalizing argument onto me, in addition to continuing to misattribute the "get a revelation from VR" argument to me. I never say "we" can get something from VR, that "we" should use VR as a spiritual practice, or anything similar. I am not making blanket metaphysical conclusions about the nature of VR and how it must always be good or evil in relation to growing our spiritual activity. The whole point of my posts on this topic is to point out the principled reasons we should avoid making such conclusions if we want to better understand our first-person relational perspective within a ceaseless spiritual evolutionary process. No natural or cultural phenomena we encounter is absolutely good or evil, a blessing or a curse, a means to salvation or something beyond redemption. It is critical in our epoch that humans come to understand this principle in a living way. When it is understood in a living way, it won't be constantly overriden by our personal antipathies and opinions.

Think about this way - Cleric developed his living thinking the more effcient way (not exactly - he said that he didn’t exactly develop it so very efficiently through the years), as we also recommend others do. Now after so and so years of spiritual training, he has decided to explore these intellectual scaffolds for supplemental spiritual value (and VR to some extent), for his own benefit and ours.
This is not the first time you intend to recruit Cleric’s view on VR to your support, but for me this is a stretch (based on what I can read on the forum, of course, though I believe more, not less, cautionary comments have been shared outside). Although Cleric has shared a general “since it’s here, let’s see what can be done” approach, and did say that VR “can help us realize that the concept of space is not that absolute after all” (and that’s about it, when it comes to his tribute to VR on this forum), his comments to your essay start with warnings about VR becoming “one of the greatest spiritual traps”, and with feeling “still little uneasy” about it, because VR is “such a thin ice”. So I for myself don't know whether or not he's gaining supplemental value from VR exploration.

Do you see how this fact by itself negates your entire position, assuming he and others are actually gaining that supplemental spiritual value from the exploration?
I don’t make such an assumption, because I don’t find on this forum any support for it, therefore I don’t see for the moment any “facts” involving Cleric that would negate my entire position.

And, as mentioned before, that fact of 'helping us realize the concept of space is not that absolute after all' (which is quite a huge realization), by itself, would defeat your extreme position, assuming it's valid.

But the point is, with respect to Levin's models - we have all gained enormous value from Cleric's decision to descend into the intellectual scaffolding, based on our comments from that thread. If that intellectual scaffolding didn't exist, there would be nothing for people like him, with their living thinking, to descend into. Yet, on the other hand, that intellectual scaffolding can and is being used by others, like perhaps Levin himself, for infernal (transhumanist) goals. So what makes the difference whether this intellectual scaffolding becomes a great spiritual blessing for us on the forum or a pre-curse to the infernal goals? And if you see what I am pointing to with that question, what is the reason why VR tech and VR experience is somehow in a completely different category than other material technologies with their sensory-intellectual scaffolding?

[Federica]

Federica,

I am going to ignore your blaming the lack of your substantive response to my points, on my adding in "subtitles" and other speculations about my "use of language". I am using plain English. In the parts you do respond to, you repeat many of the same phenomenological errors. I will point these out to you once again below.

No, and I never asserted the sensory-conceptual instruments themselves make our activity more spiritual.
You did: “Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum, our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized”. I understand that was just inaccurate rendering through language. Or, shall we say, I don’t get your language.

But they can be understood as reflections (this is a subtitle you are only now adding) of more spiritualized activity.
Would you please explain what is meant by “more spiritualized activity” and how technology facilitates that?

If you understand that it was an 'inaccurate rendering through language', then there's no need to treat it like I was making that assertion. At the very least, if it was unclear, you could have asked about it.

Spiritual evolution is not just something that occurs for individuals, but the collectives which those individuals comrpise. These collective developments manifest through the higher intelligence "I" beings and their activity. Everything that happens on the physical plane, in Nature and Culture, from epoch to epoch, can be traced as reflections of that ideational activity. I am only mentioning this more 'metaphysical' part because I know you already agree with it in theory, but I don't think you are taking it seriously enough. You seem to feel some technological phenomena are simply beyond the purview of this spiritual process.

Through that higher activity, human thinking consciousness attains greater thinking DoF and becomes more oriented towards spiritual principles. That is the basis of all modern philosophy and science, including materialism and its technologies, and the principles we have discerned through them ('principles' is another way of saying 'archetypal ideations'). We go from impressing language on stones, papyrus, paper with ink, to impressing it on airwaves and digital signals, from impressing data through cables and wires through Wi-Fi and 'bluetooth'. We can sense the concrete spiritualization being reflected in the medium of transmission (not caused by that medium). The same principle applies to all computer technology including VR.

We should also be clear that the mediums themselves are reflections of spiritual activity of a much higher order, responsible for creating the natural environment which our own spiritual activity can 'work against'. The forces of the mineral and plant kingdoms, the normal sensory spectrum, are all maintained through the activity of what SS calls 'elemental beings', which are the 'offspring' of much higher beings. In fact, these elemental beings evolved through another stream of evolution in which they lagged behind and therefore fell beneath the 'mineral' stage. So everything serves a critical purpose in the holistic spiritual economy and we wouldn't have the opportunity to develop our spiritual capacity if not for the elemental beings, to whom we should be grateful.

You are abstracting to 3rd person metaphysics here when asserting the bold.
One really gets the feeling that, because the sentence in bold annoys you, you whip the Third Person Metaphysics joker. That sentence in bold is simply to confront yours: “The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” I am saying, that transformation of imagery can’t be less (or more) dependent on arms and legs.

When you go through life, is the transformation of the spatio-temporal imagery not dependent on the intents you manifest through your physical organism?
Dependent on the intents yes, dependent on the idea, yes. But that’s not what you wrote!

It is also dependent on the instrument through which the intents-ideas can be expressed. If there was no such dependence, we would all be the equivalent of the Gods in terms of power to manifest/transform imagery. The only way I can begin to understand how you are failing to see this connection is that you are abstracting to 3rd person mystical idealist perspective, which says, 'I am the One Consciousness and all these physical constraints are simply Maya... they can't actually restrain my spiritual activity!'

The problem is not that you have lapsed into such a perspective in the course of this dicussion, which is perfectly natural, but that you feel yourself to be immune to such a lapsing because of previous insights and therefore are unaware that it has occurred. Then you get frustrated and defensive when I point it out.

Yes, of course, and I have never once asserted the VR experience by itself will lead us to find the proper relation of Idea to perception. If it can't, what is the teaching it can lead us to? If you call it pedagogical, it has to lead us somewhere.

Once we find the proper relation, our work is not done. In fact it's just the beginning of our work. We are never reaching a final destination at which we can kick our legs up and rest comfortable. And we would be foolish not to take all the help we can get from our natural and cultural environment in this never-ending work, as we will meet great resistance from our lower nature all along the way. If you feel the VR experience or the metaphors derived from it are not a help for you, that's fine, but that doesn't mean it can't possibly offer pedagogical value to any human being on the Earth, regardless of time and circumstance.

The question has always been, after we begin to understand that proper relation through our experience of first-person intuitive thinking activity and our study of spiritual science, do cultural phenomena such as VR tech offer any potential opportunities for supplementing our understanding? Your position has been that, while certainly other cultural phenomena and technologies offer that opportunity - Absolutely not so. You will not find anything in my older posts not even suggesting that other technologies can offer opportunities to supplement our understanding - for some reason VR falls outside the spectrum of pedagogical tools for our living spiritual activity.

Well then the discontinuity is even worse... but I have a feeling you may have misspoke here. Surely you think other cultural technologies, such as the computers we are using right now, offer opportunities to supplement our understanding? I guess I need to add, the computers as isolated units don't automatically supplement our understanding (of course no such isolated units actually exist), but our spiritual activity meeting its instrument in the computer tech which it developed.

So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.

To counter your position, I only need to provide one single example, present or future, in which the VR perspective could offer our living thinking pedagogical value through an experience not available through non-VR experience, even if the person uses it for 30 min and never picks up the headset again.
By trying to make VR valuable as a one-off experience, I think you are weakening your position further. You are renouncing any possibility that VR can train us to notice thinking gestures by contrast, and you bet on a sort of revelatory power of VR. VR as revelation… It’s not going to work… It cannot work!

That's not my position! As I keep pointing out. The time of 'external' revelations is far over. So that's not what I am arguing at all with respect to VR.

Follow the logic here carefully. You have set your position on VR up as such an extreme, generalized, blanket, universal dismissal of its value that the one-off pedagogical experience is enough to defeat it. Whether VR can be valuable as more than a one-off experience for some people is a completely separate issue. Most likely it can be, for some people.

The above reveals that you are investing more causal power in the material technology than in the user's living spiritual activity. That is how you draw these generalized metaphysical conclusions which compare the VR tech itself to a mediocre and unskilled surgeon, rather than the person using it.
Ashvin, when you say that this tool is pedagogical, meaning a teacher, and that we can get a revelation through its use, you are the one who puts causal power in that technology. When I compare it to an unskilled surgeon, I am only just countering your entrustment in the tool's pedagogical value.

You are projecting your abstract generalizing argument onto me, in addition to continuing to misattribute the "get a revelation from VR" argument to me. I never say "we" can get something from VR, that "we" should use VR as a spiritual practice, or anything similar. I am not making blanket metaphysical conclusions about the nature of VR and how it must always be good or evil in relation to growing our spiritual activity. The whole point of my posts on this topic is to point out the principled reasons we should avoid making such conclusions if we want to better understand our first-person relational perspective within a ceaseless spiritual evolutionary process. No natural or cultural phenomena we encounter is absolutely good or evil, a blessing or a curse, a means to salvation or something beyond redemption. It is critical in our epoch that humans come to understand this principle in a living way. When it is understood in a living way, it won't be constantly overriden by our personal antipathies and opinions.

Think about this way - Cleric developed his living thinking the more effcient way (not exactly - he said that he didn’t exactly develop it so very efficiently through the years), as we also recommend others do. Now after so and so years of spiritual training, he has decided to explore these intellectual scaffolds for supplemental spiritual value (and VR to some extent), for his own benefit and ours.
This is not the first time you intend to recruit Cleric’s view on VR to your support, but for me this is a stretch (based on what I can read on the forum, of course, though I believe more, not less, cautionary comments have been shared outside). Although Cleric has shared a general “since it’s here, let’s see what can be done” approach, and did say that VR “can help us realize that the concept of space is not that absolute after all” (and that’s about it, when it comes to his tribute to VR on this forum), his comments to your essay start with warnings about VR becoming “one of the greatest spiritual traps”, and with feeling “still little uneasy” about it, because VR is “such a thin ice”. So I for myself don't know whether or not he's gaining supplemental value from VR exploration.

Do you see how this fact by itself negates your entire position, assuming he and others are actually gaining that supplemental spiritual value from the exploration?
I don’t make such an assumption, because I don’t find on this forum any support for it, therefore I don’t see for the moment any “facts” involving Cleric that would negate my entire position.

And, as mentioned before, that fact of 'helping us realize the concept of space is not that absolute after all' (which is quite a huge realization), by itself, would defeat your extreme position, assuming it's valid.

But the point is, with respect to Levin's models - we have all gained enormous value from Cleric's decision to descend into the intellectual scaffolding, based on our comments from that thread. If that intellectual scaffolding didn't exist, there would be nothing for people like him, with their living thinking, to descend into. Yet, on the other hand, that intellectual scaffolding can and is being used by others, like perhaps Levin himself, for infernal (transhumanist) goals. So what makes the difference whether this intellectual scaffolding becomes a great spiritual blessing for us on the forum or a pre-curse to the infernal goals? And if you see what I am pointing to with that question, what is the reason why VR tech and VR experience is somehow in a completely different category than other material technologies with their sensory-intellectual scaffolding?

Ashvin,

I imagine that from your viewpoint it all must be quite boring and repetitive and in that sense I appreciate your reply. But I don’t get your first sentence:

I am going to ignore your blaming the lack of your substantive response to my points, on my adding in "subtitles" and other speculations about my "use of language". I am using plain English.

Maybe you breezed through it so fast that words fell back upside down after your passage?

If you understand that it was an 'inaccurate rendering through language', then there's no need to treat it like I was making that assertion. At the very least, if it was unclear, you could have asked about it.

You may call it a speculation and you may ignore it, but this was an example of how you are stretching language, and how unnecessary misunderstandings can follow (and do follow). That’s why I have called it, as you presented it, an assertion. With that said, I luckily have a minimum understanding of the given topic which allows me to see that it could be a question of language, more than meaning, so I mentioned that.
(I noted you don’t even grant me such minimum understanding, little surprisingly after your reprimand here if I may say, I'm coming to that).

Spiritual evolution is not just something that occurs for individuals, but the collectives which those individuals comprise. These collective developments manifest through the higher intelligence "I" beings and their activity. Everything that happens on the physical plane, in Nature and Culture, from epoch to epoch, can be traced as reflections of that ideational activity. I am only mentioning this more 'metaphysical' part because I know you already agree with it in theory, but I don't think you are taking it seriously enough. You seem to feel some technological phenomena are simply beyond the purview of this spiritual process.

I certainly don’t feel tech phenomena are beyond the purview of spiritual processes, and I have said multiple times that I recognize there are insights to glean, and meaning to grasp in VR as a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know why you are forgetting that now, but I want to add what I consider a key question: how do you fit the idea of dead ends of evolution in these collective developments and the ideational activity that shapes them?

Through that higher activity, human thinking consciousness attains greater thinking DoF and becomes more oriented towards spiritual principles. That is the basis of all modern philosophy and science, including materialism and its technologies, and the principles we have discerned through them ('principles' is another way of saying 'archetypal ideations'). We go from impressing language on stones, papyrus, paper with ink, to impressing it on airwaves and digital signals, from impressing data through cables and wires through Wi-Fi and 'bluetooth'. We can sense the concrete spiritualization being reflected in the medium of transmission (not caused by that medium). The same principle applies to all computer technology including VR.

Ok - Observing that already at the time of language impression on stones, man was impressing language on airwaves too (through speech) I tentatively interpret your idea of growing spiritualized activity as more conscious activity? Is this correct? Though maybe it’s not, because what’s the substantial difference between mastering stone sculpting and mastering airwaves? They present us with different constraints, but they’re all laws of nature, so why should the latter be more spiritualized/conscious? Certainly not because air feels more lofty than stone? All sensorial spectrum is mineral, there’s a slice of mineral in every kingdom, therefore digital signals, as a materialist technology, constitute a wider but equally mineral mastery of the laws of nature, compared to stone, and not necessarily more conscious. If so, I still don’t get in which sense you describe them as more spiritualized. I see them as equally spiritualized, because that is, and always has been, the nature of our activity, while the evolving element in evolution is the expansion of human thinking with respect to itself. Only thinking can manipulate itself and make or break human evolution. The feeling and willing spheres, as expressions of that activity, are more anecdotal. Or not anecdotal, but more free to happen or not happen in specific configurations, especially the sensory spectrum. So in which sense do you speak of such a linear spiritual crescendo, and growing of degrees of freedom linearly reflected in the sensory instruments?

[The transformation of imagery] is also dependent on the instrument through which the intents-ideas can be expressed. If there was no such dependence, we would all be the equivalent of the Gods in terms of power to manifest/transform imagery. The only way I can begin to understand how you are failing to see this connection is that you are abstracting to 3rd person mystical idealist perspective, which says, 'I am the One Consciousness and all these physical constraints are simply Maya... they can't actually restrain my spiritual activity!'

Here the argument seems to border on the absurd… Are you really saying you think I don’t realize that a leg and an arm present us with different constraints? I hope I won’t sound pretentious if I insist that I actually do.
And if there is a real risk that I can lapse in that type of mystical unconsciousness, I actually got lucky. First because - by chance - I haven’t try to fly away from my window to land on the supermarket place today, and second, such constraints were also one of the takeaways of Cleric’s new essay on Levin’s research - that we are at a mid-point level of integration, giving and receiving constraints from and to the above, as well as the the below levels - point that I even referred to when making exactly that remark! So, really, it would have been impossible to miss those constraints!
You stated that activity is more spiritualized when operated through fingers and head, and less spiritualized when operated through arms and legs, and that’s what I was questioning. Our activity is obviously constrained differently by a leg than by an eye, but it doesn’t depend on them to be more or less spiritualized. The CEO doesn’t depend on the middle management to be the CEO, but has to take into account the constraints coming from the management’s activity. The transformation of imagery does not depend less on legs in VR, or more on them in the natural world, it happens as fully spiritualized activity regardless, although when we make it express through legs, yes - it will make do with leg constraints.
Luckily (again!) I expressed the idea that our activity is equally spiritualized all the time, in 3 or 4 more alternative phrasings, the incriminated one being only one of them, so I still have hope that you will change your mind on this point, and grant me that basic level of living understanding.

The problem is not that you have lapsed into such a perspective in the course of this discussion, which is perfectly natural, but that you feel yourself to be immune to such a lapsing because of previous insights and therefore are unaware that it has occurred. Then you get frustrated and defensive when I point it out.

Ashvin, I don’t feel immune to any lapsing. I know intuitions don’t grant anything, and I constantly have the painful experience of losing the awareness of ideas, and oftentimes even their memory. I can say this is my number one preoccupation and struggle, and whether or not I will be able to improve this status. It’s true that I am far from neutral, feelingwise, but that part is clearly improving and is not as big of a concern as the lapsing. Still, lapsing is not what’s happened here, as I hope I’ve been able to show.

Well then the discontinuity is even worse... but I have a feeling you may have misspoke here. Surely you think other cultural technologies, such as the computers we are using right now, offer opportunities to supplement our understanding? I guess I need to add, the computers as isolated units don't automatically supplement our understanding (of course no such isolated units actually exist), but our spiritual activity meeting its instrument in the computer tech which it developed.

I haven’t misspoken. I confirm I don’t think the computer I am using right now supplements my “understanding”. It does eliminate sensory constraints in a powerful way, while it also adds some. I do reap the benefits of this technology without a clear understanding of how it works, in the same way I do with cars, home equipment, networks of various kinds, and all the technologies we commonly use, including books and older tech, down to the materials that clothe 99% of our sensory experiences, down to the stuff we nourish our bodies with, also. I would agree that, as technologies have historically eliminated, and continue to eliminate, enormous amounts of sensory constraints, they also necessarily add some, that are inherent to their nature. But the crucial element is in which proportions (I am saying this tentatively, it’s a new idea). These proportions could be the watershed between pre-materialist and post-materialist tech.

As we can observe, the more we move on, the more technology is created to add constraints, rather than to remove them. The more we dwell in the current evolutionary loop, the more the technology birthed in this space is one that supplements, not our understanding, but our sensory spectrum. The energy that should go to improving thinking mastery, goes to improving mastery of senses, and technology is increasingly bent to serve this purpose. In the past, it was used to clear the constraints of the physical plane, so as to enhance the possibilities to deepen religious, mystical, philosophical, and artistic endeavors. But now we are witnessing a reversal, where new technology is less and less focused on eliminating sensory constraints, and more focused on creating new ones.

So it’s a gradient. I don't set VR apart from anything. I don’t have an extreme position just for VR. To get back to the initial question, I think the internet, and the interface constituted by this computer, both eliminate and add conspicuous (and probably comparable) amounts of constraints, so they definitely change the sensory landscape and the way it feeds back into our activity, but do they “supplement my understanding?” What does that even mean… Again, if all activity is equally spiritualized, as it is, holistic understanding increases in the form of expansion of Thinking, independent (and I don’t mean there are no constraints!) of the specific sensory landscape our will and circumstances put under our nose. Thinking has to expand its conscious grip on whatever sensory landscape is experienced, and beyond. It’s a self-generated impulse, not one ignited by the senses. When such impulse is nourished from within, we develop our knowledge/understanding, so that whatever space of constraints can be integrated. When we have that impulse, we also press on the space of constraints with causal agency, to make it as conducive as possible to that same thinking expansion. Does the change to my space of constraints, as produced by my computer, supplement this process? Who knows how alternative configurations would have interacted and integrated? I don’t think it’s an important question, or even an inquirable one.
As you said, the computer unit cannot be extrapolated from my space of constraints which is being integrated by my thinking activity at any given moment. And so it is for your VR set, of course, at any given moment. But thoughts can evolve and stir the will to act. So a better way to put my position on VR would be this. Because VR is part of those dead-end technologies that have lapsed into and live in the post-materialist, intellectual, infernal loop, aiming to supplement sensory perceptions in order to serve the illusion of mastery and truth, what does it tell that some souls have it integrated in their set of constraints? And for those who have further been able to encompass it within the light of their conscious thinking activity, what does it tell about their life, soul, and unique ego perspective, individual and with effects on collective, that they are keeping it in their configuration?

That's not my position! As I keep pointing out. The time of 'external' revelations is far over. So that's not what I am arguing at all with respect to VR.
Follow the logic here carefully. You have set your position on VR up as such an extreme, generalized, blanket, universal dismissal of its value that the one-off pedagogical experience is enough to defeat it. Whether VR can be valuable as more than a one-off experience for some people is a completely separate issue. Most likely it can be, for some people.

Right, I have misunderstood your position here. I follow why you spoke of one-off value. Sorry.

You are projecting your abstract generalizing argument onto me, in addition to continuing to misattribute the "get a revelation from VR" argument to me. I never say "we" can get something from VR, that "we" should use VR as a spiritual practice, or anything similar. I am not making blanket metaphysical conclusions about the nature of VR and how it must always be good or evil in relation to growing our spiritual activity. The whole point of my posts on this topic is to point out the principled reasons we should avoid making such conclusions if we want to better understand our first-person relational perspective within a ceaseless spiritual evolutionary process. No natural or cultural phenomena we encounter is absolutely good or evil, a blessing or a curse, a means to salvation or something beyond redemption. It is critical in our epoch that humans come to understand this principle in a living way. When it is understood in a living way, it won't be constantly overridden by our personal antipathies and opinions.

I wonder, here again, about one question: if no cultural phenomenon is absolutely positive or negative, but it just happens, and it’s up to the individual to make it a pedagogical tool or not - beyond the moral questions this position raises - what is your understanding of a dead end of evolution then?

And, as mentioned before, that fact of 'helping us realize the concept of space is not that absolute after all' (which is quite a huge realization), by itself, would defeat your extreme position, assuming it's valid.

But the point is, with respect to Levin's models - we have all gained enormous value from Cleric's decision to descend into the intellectual scaffolding, based on our comments from that thread. If that intellectual scaffolding didn't exist, there would be nothing for people like him, with their living thinking, to descend into. Yet, on the other hand, that intellectual scaffolding can and is being used by others, like perhaps Levin himself, for infernal (transhumanist) goals. So what makes the difference whether this intellectual scaffolding becomes a great spiritual blessing for us on the forum or a pre-curse to the infernal goals? And if you see what I am pointing to with that question, what is the reason why VR tech and VR experience is somehow in a completely different category than other material technologies with their sensory-intellectual scaffolding?

I like this question! First, why do you see a principal problem in there being nothing to descend into for people with living thinking? Could they not, in principle, put their whole energy into ascension, for example in the detailed ways illustrated earlier in this thread?

What makes the difference whether the model becomes a blessing for us or a precurse to infernal goals - I would say: it’s not an either/or. Now that it’s become a blessing for us, it can still transform into infernal goals. Also, while Cleric was doing this, he was not doing something else, say, meditations that could have both elevated the collective evolution and become a blessing for us if verbalized on the forum. It’s impossible to know, and even a very strange question to ask/speculation to make.

What seems important to me, though, is that Cleric descended in Levin’s model in cohered manner. It's an exploration in thinking of an intellectual scaffolding. Ok, he watched the videos, and read the papers, which are sensory experiences, but that’s ancillary to what you call descending, I guess. The descent is, he thought in the model, he thought about it, verbalized it. So why call it a descent, after all? I would imagine that a descent should involve feeling, and above all, will/decohesion. Descent means ‘in the sensory spectrum’ doesn't it?
In a similar way, we can (try to) encompass VR as a cultural phenomenon (it’s not a descent) and understand its meaning in the grand ideational scheme - be it a dead-end meaning, or smoothed-in meaning, both... - but descending into its practice with feeling and will fits differently in the spiritual activity, compared to exploring an intellectual scaffolding. Not qualitatively different, because it’s all equally spiritualized activity all the time (please comment here if you mean that there is a crescendo of “spiritualization”, as I understand you do) but the degree of interactivity with the environmental levels, or the causal fabric of the activity, are different. This difference is not about being more or less conscious of reality/being (which I am unsure if it's the junction you would take at this point, but I may be wrong?) It’s not about how advanced thinking expansion is. This difference is something else. It’s about how much it overlaps across levels of causality. And I feel it has big significance, at least while we have an alive physical body, that we make our thinking expansion proceed or not in such a way that it will overlap and press across levels of causality, down to the sensory, and make us descend or not descend in those experiences.

***

I know I made it a long post, I certainly don’t expect a reaction on everything. If you could take one thing, would you please pick the question about dead ends? Thank you!

[AshvinP]

Federica,

My response will be lengthy as well and I tried to hit on most of the points you made.

Ashvin, I don’t feel immune to any lapsing. I know intuitions don’t grant anything, and I constantly have the painful experience of losing the awareness of ideas, and oftentimes even their memory. I can say this is my number one preoccupation and struggle, and whether or not I will be able to improve this status. It’s true that I am far from neutral, feelingwise, but that part is clearly improving and is not as big of a concern as the lapsing.

I do realize this and it makes me confident that our disagreements here won't really stray you from the most important work on the path. If anything, it makes me comfortable to be more direct and blunt with you on the points in contention. That said, I feel the lapsing (or whatever we want to call it) is still very much an issue.

I first want to point you towards my comment to Anthony on the other thread, which maybe you already read, especially the part about foundational principles. These are most important for us to grasp first, and then to evaluate any particular phenomenal manifestation within their context. Steiner's quote on the Lucifer, Human/Christ, Ahriman triad is especially important for us. With material technology like VR, we are mostly dealing with an Ahrimanic phenomena. If we declare it universally incapable of pedagogical value, irredeemable, or anything similar, we are essentially creating a duality excluding the Christ impulse which works through the extremes to balance them within the human soul.

Now you may well imagine that it is entirely in the interest of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers to conceal this secret of the triad. For the proper comprehension of this secret enables mankind to bring about the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers; that means, on the one hand, to use the Luciferic tendency toward freedom for the achievement of a wholesome cosmic aim, and on the other hand, to strive to achieve the same with the Ahrimanic element. The human being's normal spiritual condition consists in relating himself in the proper way to this trinity, this triune structure of the world.

Let's be clear - this doesn't mean every single person needs to delve into VR territory as part of their spiritual mission, or that some people should incorporate it as a daily practice. No one is making that argument. The argument is whether we can declare it or any other cultural phenomena universally beyond redemptive uses, which is effectively the position you have been arguing for. 

I certainly don’t feel tech phenomena are beyond the purview of spiritual processes, and I have said multiple times that I recognize there are insights to glean, and meaning to grasp in VR as a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know why you are forgetting that now, but I want to add what I consider a key question: how do you fit the idea of dead ends of evolution in these collective developments and the ideational activity that shapes them?

My mention of the elemental beings was intended to briefly address the question of the 'dead ends of evolution'. Basically, no such thing exists for a spiritual evolutionary understanding. All the forces which have ever been developed through the spiritual evolutionary process still exist and are embedded in our now-perspective, serving critical purposes, mostly below the threshold of waking consciousness. As a crude comparison, the 'elemental beings' were like the materialists of their time who, remained so adamantly opposed to the spiritual Cosmos for many ages, that they lagged too far behind the healthy spiritual evolution to seize the opportunity to incorporate the Spirit, to become fully human and eventually Gods, and became beings of Nature instead, serving as the sub-sensory support for higher life waves of minerals, plants, animals, humans. Maybe in your view, these are the humans who get so addicted to VR they end up living their whole lives (and even subsequent incarnations) in a virtual kingdom with no knowledge of the Spirit. Nevertheless, even this tragic outcome would serve a critical purpose for future life waves who need to carry out their 'work against nature' for spiritual growth. And eventually those life waves would be tasked with redeeming the VR rejects, like we are now tasked with redeeming the elemental beings. 

Ok - Observing that already at the time of language impression on stones, man was impressing language on airwaves too (through speech) I tentatively interpret your idea of growing spiritualized activity as more conscious activity? Is this correct? Though maybe it’s not, because what’s the substantial difference between mastering stone sculpting and mastering airwaves? They present us with different constraints, but they’re all laws of nature, so why should the latter be more spiritualized/conscious? Certainly not because air feels more lofty than stone? All sensorial spectrum is mineral, there’s a slice of mineral in every kingdom, therefore digital signals, as a materialist technology, constitute a wider but equally mineral mastery of the laws of nature, compared to stone, and not necessarily more conscious. If so, I still don’t get in which sense you describe them as more spiritualized. I see them as equally spiritualized, because that is, and always has been, the nature of our activity, while the evolving element in evolution is the expansion of human thinking with respect to itself. Only thinking can manipulate itself and make or break human evolution. The feeling and willing spheres, as expressions of that activity, are more anecdotal. Or not anecdotal, but more free to happen or not happen in specific configurations, especially the sensory spectrum. So in which sense do you speak of such a linear spiritual crescendo, and growing of degrees of freedom linearly reflected in the sensory instruments?

I am realizing that, in order to adequately address some of these questions, I would need to delve even further into spiritual scientific details. I don't quite have the skills to express the principles involved with technical metaphors and such. I'm not sure how fruitful it would be to just list out the relevant details, since it requires a lot of background study. Right now I am interested in hammering down the core principles of spiritual evolution. Yes, the transforming mediums of expression reflect the thinking activity becoming more and more conscious and, therefore, more and more capable of harmonizing understanding between various families, tribes, clans, communities, etc. so that there exists the potential for a truly human family, where individuals understand and love one another on a purely soul-to-soul level, independent of blood ties, national ties, and so forth. As we know from the PoF reasoning, in so far as we merely perceive, desire, or feel, we are personal beings, but when those activities are permeated by thinking, we transcend the personal. All cultural developments can really be seen as the evolution from the sentient soul to the intellectual and spiritual soul, as thinking increasingly awakens to its own reality. While these developments are most noticeable at the cultural and individual soul levels, they also penetrate down into the natural level.

In connection with the elements, I will also share the following diagram. It will no doubt seem very complex at first, but we are only using it to highlight a few principles. We can associate the planes between the 'arupa mental' plane and the physical plane with the sevenfold configuration spaces in Cleric's post on Levin. 





The basic principle is that everything we know as 'physical' now, i.e. the earth (solid), water (liquid), air (gas), was once more spiritual and has descended with our mode of consciousness into the physical as we know it. That was our spiritual involutionary phase at the scale of planetary incarnations, Earth rounds and globes. We have much more recently entered our evolutionary phase and, through human thinking renewed by the warmth-fire element of Cosmic Will, the physical elements can be again spiritualized. In that sense, everything we perceive physically is the outer manifestation of the spiritual. The physical, left to itself, is in process of decaying and dying. That is what made our self-consciousness possible - the destructive forces of our intellectual organism - and therefore we are also responsible for resurrecting the physical we have killed through our deeper spiritual activity. It is true that the current elements we experience with normal waking consciousness are all physical, yet they are also analogs for the higher spiritual (etheric) conditions. Earlier in the thread I made the following metaphor:

As our consciousness delaminates and becomes mired in the convolutions, the 'bureaucracy' of intuitive ideal relations becomes more densified from Fire to Earth. We meet more resistance tunneling through the Earth, or swimming through the water, then we do soaring through the air or expanding into the fire-warmth like a phoenix. It takes more effort to create accurate mirror reflections of our intuitive intents within the more densified stratum. All of that inner resistance manifests as our normally sluggish experience of space-time flow, and fixed objects, which constrain the degrees of freedom through which our intuitive intents can manifest themselves as percepts, concepts, images, etc. which accurately reflect those intents back to our "I"-center of consciousness.  We should understand all these nested layers of convolution as overlapping and interpenetrating, just as there is always Fire-warmth interpentrating the elements of Earth, Water, Air.

At each stage of delamination, intuitive intents (archetypal moral Ideas) create spheres of ideal space in which their fulfillment must unfold. We could say the Idea is arrested, so to speak, until its original intent can be redeemed, i.e. it can be made fit for integration into our pure intuitive becoming, through the expanding of degrees of freedom within a lower convolution, allowing for continuity of consciousness. Until then, a portion of our conscious experience is devoted to a more indirect transformation of the space-like mirrored images of our intuitive intents, until they once again resonate with the latter (like the circle smoothed out to resonate with the triangle). That creates a discontinuity of consciousness, demarcated by periods of 'darkness' without accessible memory (integrated intuition).  Those ideas/intents which set their ideal aim towards personal desires, passions, preferences, interests, etc. naturally create 'larger' spheres of ideal space, more complex bureaucracies, due to the intended atomization of ideal relations. Instead of creating a circle around the triangle, we create squares, pentagons, hexagons, etc. The very process of working through this indirect transformation with our actively willed thinking, which develops various virtues, also purifies and prepares the arrested Idea for its reintegration at higher (more conscious) stages of completion.

Within the fourth Earth convolution, we perceive-conceive fragmented stones, rocks, etc. and mineral bodies of plants, animals, and humans. As we move back with our consciousness into water (imagination) and air (inspiration) and warmth (intuition), in contrast, the ideal relations are more fluid, interconnected, formless. 

So these are analogies but, just like all analogies, they also point to real conditions which existed before in the manifest world and will exist again in the future. Humanity is now tasked with raising the physical condition of the Earth into a more etheric condition through higher consciousness, and we can see the very dim firstfruits of in recent technological developments, such as those mentioned before. Eventually it will return to a more astral condition, etc. 

The CEO doesn’t depend on the middle management to be the CEO, but has to take into account the constraints coming from the management’s activity. The transformation of imagery does not depend less on legs in VR, or more on them in the natural world, it happens as fully spiritualized activity regardless, although when we make it express through legs, yes - it will make do with leg constraints.
Luckily (again!) I expressed the idea that our activity is equally spiritualized all the time,  in 3 or 4 more alternative phrasings, the incriminated one being only one of them, so I still have hope that you will change your mind on this point, and grant me that basic level of living understanding.

I can't grant you that. This expression alone in bold gives us a clear signal that we have veered into a 3rd person perspective.

How can this be so? When the average person is in deep dreamless sleep, is his thinking activity equally spiritualized with when he is in full waking consciousness? What is the meaning of "spiritual evolution" if our activity is always equally spiritualized? Perhaps you mean something entirely different by "fully spiritualized" and "equally spiritualized" than what the words suggest, but I can't currently guess what that meaning might be. And the CEO does depend on the middle management, if we are using that as an analogy for the configuration space of human-scale thinking in relation to the soul, life, and physical spaces. 

Imagine this as clearly as possible. As a thinking being we’re steering in thinking intuitive space. When we think about matter and biology we project our thinking in that direction. Please note – in our intellectual life we don’t experience the full nature of the lower and higher spaces. They only act as constraints to our human-scale flow. Our consciousness spans through all spaces but we are clearly self-conscious only in the steering of thinking space. Other spaces mysteriously impress into our thinking space as various conscious phenomena.

Even though for clarity the spaces are depicted as something separate, we should imagine that they are all one within the others – every space is being bent by all others and it bends all others. So when we say that we’re self-conscious in thinking space this doesn’t mean that other spaces are separated from our consciousness through some membranes. It’s only that our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics.

To be clear, lapsing into this abstracted or dualistic thinking perspective, whether that's what has happened or not, doesn't mean we will completely forget how to live and survive in the world. Our will and our feeling and our subconscious thinking still remain much wiser and more integrated than our surface-level intellect which floats around in abstracted concepts. It simply means that, when confronting certain thinking inquiries, we will forget the foundational principles rooted in the first-person relational perspective for purposes of making our preferred arguments and reaching our preferred conclusions. 

As we can observe, the more we move on, the more technology is created to add constraints, rather than to remove them. The more we dwell in the current evolutionary loop, the more the technology birthed in this space is one that supplements, not our understanding, but our sensory spectrum. The energy that should go to improving thinking mastery, goes to improving mastery of senses, and technology is increasingly bent to serve this purpose. In the past, it was used to clear the constraints of the physical plane, so as to enhance the possibilities to deepen religious, mystical, philosophical, and artistic endeavors. But now we are witnessing a reversal, where new technology is less and less focused on eliminating sensory constraints, and more focused on creating new ones.

So it’s a gradient. I don't set VR apart from anything. I don’t have an extreme position just for VR. To get back to the initial question, I think the internet, and the interface constituted by this computer, both eliminate and add conspicuous (and probably comparable) amounts of constraints, so they definitely change the sensory landscape and the way it feeds back into our activity, but do they “supplement my understanding?” What does that even mean… Again, if all activity is equally spiritualized, as it is, holistic understanding increases in the form of expansion of Thinking, independent (and I don’t mean there are no constraints!) of the specific sensory landscape our will and circumstances put under our nose. Thinking has to expand its conscious grip on whatever sensory landscape is experienced, and beyond. It’s a self-generated impulse, not one ignited by the senses. When such impulse is nourished from within, we develop our knowledge/understanding, so that whatever space of constraints can be integrated. When we have that impulse, we also press on the space of constraints with causal agency, to make it as conducive as possible to that same thinking expansion. Does the change to my space of constraints, as produced by my computer, supplement this process? Who knows how alternative configurations would have interacted and integrated? I don’t think it’s an important question, or even an inquirable one.

The first paragraph sounds very much like you are forgetting that our thinking activity, with its increasing DoF, developed the technologies in question. You are treating the technology like something which came into existence entirely independent of that spiritual evolutionary process and then serves to dampen it for everyone, regardless of whether or how they use it as an instrument of living thinking. Or, alternatively, you are suggesting that the materialist age made our thinking lose DoF and we are now stuck in a descending loop. But this isn't accurate - the fact that most people are unaware of the increasing DoF when absorbed into sensory technology doesn't mean they aren't still amassing those DoF as a whole, and are not a few inner realizations away from releasing its potential energy. What we are able to do here on this forum, which would be unavailable without the computer technology, should be sufficient to put this issue to rest. But I will also quote a comment from Cleric as a reminder:


viewtopic.php?p=18034#p18034

Let's look at this in the context of the speech/writing split. Seen phenomenologically, in our stream of becoming we're continuously impressing our spiritual activity in the perceptual stream. With our spiritual activity we weave in intuitively grasped meaning. When we think, we express in perceptual verbal artforms the invisible meaning that we live in.

These two poles are not independent. Many times the metaphor of the riverbed has been given. Through our intuitively willed spiritual activity we impress the forms of the riverbed but at the same time this activity is being shaped by the riverbed. So we have a classical example of an unitary system which is only seen from two different angles. The best example is probably General Relativity where "Matter tells space how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move". In our case we can say something like "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve (how to fit the perceptions), and intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move." Of course this by no means should remain simply as an abstract conundrum for the intellect (basically perpetuating the bi-stable mode). Instead, it is perfectly possible for modern man to enter livingly into this flow of reality.

In ordinary consciousness we're tempted to anchor ourselves within something apparently stable. We can anchor ourselves either in the perceptual stream and see only the "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve" part (basically materialism or contemplative mysticism) or we anchor ourselves in the 'mind-stuff' and see only how the "intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move" (idealism which however fails to understand why this activity is constrained).
...
When we learn some form of art we develop our motor skills and make them fit to express artistic intuition. So it's the same basic principle at all levels. The perceptual world - the stone, clay, canvas, paints, keys, strings, our body and senses - curve and restrict our intuition. At the same time our intuition tells the art materials how to move and arrange. When we come to our soul life we have the same process. Through our activity we're shaping our character which in turns acts as the riverbed for future activity. So much like with Hegel, we have this dialectic evolution, through which the spirit impresses itself in the resisting perceptual spectrum and transforms it such that in turn it can express even greater degrees of freedom.

Your second paragraph, I will admit, sounds like it somewhat reintegrates the role of our thinking agency in the use of technology, in great tension with the first paragraph. How the phenomenal products of our thinking activity can work to supplement the perfection of that activity is certainly an important and inquirable question, if not THE most important question. What we are speaking of here is nothing other than the polar relationship of Idea to Perception, spiritual activity to riverbed forms. So your tendency to dismiss the critical role of the perception pole as unimportant again reminds me of the speech vs. writing discussion. You may say it is important, but the "equally spiritualized" comments, and all of your subsequent reasoning, practically dismisses it as irrelevant. I really hope you can see this occurring now. 

I like this question! First, why do you see a principal problem in there being nothing to descend into for people with living thinking? Could they not, in principle, put their whole energy into ascension, for example in the detailed ways illustrated earlier in this thread?

That is exactly the question - we can't understand spiritual evolution as a holistic process unless we discern the endless of string of sacrifices (descents) required at every stage, which make the ascents possible. It is again a polar relationship, perhaps we could say the polar relationship of Cosmic evolution, since it reflects the moral dimension. I hope it is clear from the above why the lapsing, i.e. the severing of the polarity into duality, is the thread running throughout all of your reasoning on this particular topic. Perhaps because you began with a great antipathy for materialistic thinking and technology. But it's critical to make every effort to keep the polar principle of descent-ascent incarnational rhythms in the background of our living thinking through all these topics.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

Thank you for your extensive reply! As an aside, I observe you often say things like this would require a much more thorough study, that would require getting the proper foundations first, as you probably know most of Steiner's lectures require a lot of background study, and so on.
Could you be more specific about this 'curriculum'? I am sure it includes Steiner's books, and I only read PoF and Knowledge of the higher worlds, but it seems like there's something else, more systematic. You previously made a list of your recommended books, though I would doubt one can do the background work to understand Steiner's lectures by setting off and embarking on the trajectories of those books?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Thank you for your extensive reply! As an aside, I observe you often say things like this would require a much more thorough study, that would require getting the proper foundations first, as you probably know most of Steiner's lectures require a lot of background study, and so on.
Could you be more specific about this 'curriculum'? I am sure it includes Steiner's books, and I only read PoF and Knowledge of the higher worlds, but it seems like there's something else, more systematic. You previously made a list of your recommended books, though I would doubt one can do the background work to understand Steiner's lectures by setting off and embarking on the trajectories of those books?

Federica,

I guess the main point on that is, we should always keep in mind that the phenomenal processes we encounter in the world and discuss here are the complex interaction of many polar oppositional forces working in from the higher worlds. That is why we say the inversion horizon, the proper relation of idea to perception, the more living thinking, even higher cognitive capacity, is just the very beginning of starting to know the world in its inner dynamics. Then a proper scientific investigation needs to be carried out and many such investigations were carried out by Steiner, resulting in his massive corpus of lectures. In that sense, we need to resist making premature conclusions about the nature of phenomena we encounter, even the most seemingly 'trivial' phenomena.

Let's say we buy a new car and it breaks down on the highway after 6 months. We don't know anything about cars and their internal mechanisms. We didn't get into any accidents or drive it too hard or see anything obviously wrong with it from the outside. So we say to ourselves, 'I just bought this car, it was supposed to be brand new, perfect condition, but it's actually a piece of junk!' Because we don't know anything about the internal dynamics, we were unaware that the gas we were putting in the car was the improper kind and that's why the car broke down. The car would have worked just fine if we had taken the time to penetrate its internal dynamics with living knowledge and supply it with the proper fuel.

That is why we need to patiently work our way through spiritual science with our living thinking, i.e. not just absorbing it as abstract dogma, but using the writings as conceptual grips to scale the intuitive wall of our inner spiritual being and its relation to the world, before reaching any firm conclusions about the essential nature or value of phenomenal processes. As we flesh out our intuitions and constellate a more holistic image, we may find that we we were thinking about some aspects of experience in a very shallow or misleading way, perhaps even completely upside down. There is no set curriculum for this. Personally, I just went to the lecture cycles where my intuition steered me, and I have returned to some of them a few different times as my own living thinking has evolved through spiritual practice and participation on this forum. I never cease to find deeper and deeper layers of meaning as it becomes more intimate to my own intuitive path. I look for lecture cycles rather than one-off lectures, but that is just my preference.

It's really difficult to recommend something specific. Practically all the cycles are exploring the most important spiritual scientific principles from varying angles and they will resonate with us depending on our specific life circumstances along the path. Steiner does a great job weaving in a holistic image of spiritual evolution no matter what the lecture topic happens to be - we start to realize one can't understand even something as 'simple' as nutrition or agriculture without a view for the whole Cosmic evolutionary process. I would recommend reading over Cleric's lengthy illustrative posts here a few more times and then just picking a lecture cycle based on intuition. Or you may want to take a look at https://anthroposophy.eu/Main_Page and work through some of their pages. For ex. this one - https://anthroposophy.eu/Man_-_the_human_being. They have a lot of helpful diagrams. Although this can quickly become an amassing of intellectual clutter if we don't go through patiently, with an eye towards foundational principles which run as threads through the details, rhythmically offering up the content back to the spiritual worlds in meditation, waiting for more higher-resolution insights to return.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

Thank you for your extensive reply! As an aside, I observe you often say things like this would require a much more thorough study, that would require getting the proper foundations first, as you probably know most of Steiner's lectures require a lot of background study, and so on.
Could you be more specific about this 'curriculum'? I am sure it includes Steiner's books, and I only read PoF and Knowledge of the higher worlds, but it seems like there's something else, more systematic. You previously made a list of your recommended books, though I would doubt one can do the background work to understand Steiner's lectures by setting off and embarking on the trajectories of those books?

Federica,

I guess the main point on that is, we should always keep in mind that the phenomenal processes we encounter in the world and discuss here are the complex interaction of many polar oppositional forces working in from the higher worlds. That is why we say the inversion horizon, the proper relation of idea to perception, the more living thinking, even higher cognitive capacity, is just the very beginning of starting to know the world in its inner dynamics. Then a proper scientific investigation needs to be carried out and many such investigations were carried out by Steiner, resulting in his massive corpus of lectures. In that sense, we need to resist making premature conclusions about the nature of phenomena we encounter, even the most seemingly 'trivial' phenomena.

Let's say we buy a new car and it breaks down on the highway after 6 months. We don't know anything about cars and their internal mechanisms. We didn't get into any accidents or drive it too hard or see anything obviously wrong with it from the outside. So we say to ourselves, 'I just bought this car, it was supposed to be brand new, perfect condition, but it's actually a piece of junk!' Because we don't know anything about the internal dynamics, we were unaware that the gas we were putting in the car was the improper kind and that's why the car broke down. The car would have worked just fine if we had taken the time to penetrate its internal dynamics with living knowledge and supply it with the proper fuel.

That is why we need to patiently work our way through spiritual science with our living thinking, i.e. not just absorbing it as abstract dogma, but using the writings as conceptual grips to scale the intuitive wall of our inner spiritual being and its relation to the world, before reaching any firm conclusions about the essential nature or value of phenomenal processes. As we flesh out our intuitions and constellate a more holistic image, we may find that we we were thinking about some aspects of experience in a very shallow or misleading way, perhaps even completely upside down. There is no set curriculum for this. Personally, I just went to the lecture cycles where my intuition steered me, and I have returned to some of them a few different times as my own living thinking has evolved through spiritual practice and participation on this forum. I never cease to find deeper and deeper layers of meaning as it becomes more intimate to my own intuitive path. I look for lecture cycles rather than one-off lectures, but that is just my preference.

It's really difficult to recommend something specific. Practically all the cycles are exploring the most important spiritual scientific principles from varying angles and they will resonate with us depending on our specific life circumstances along the path. Steiner does a great job weaving in a holistic image of spiritual evolution no matter what the lecture topic happens to be - we start to realize one can't understand even something as 'simple' as nutrition or agriculture without a view for the whole Cosmic evolutionary process. I would recommend reading over Cleric's lengthy illustrative posts here a few more times and then just picking a lecture cycle based on intuition. Or you may want to take a look at https://anthroposophy.eu/Main_Page and work through some of their pages. For ex. this one - https://anthroposophy.eu/Man_-_the_human_being. They have a lot of helpful diagrams. Although this can quickly become an amassing of intellectual clutter if we don't go through patiently, with an eye towards foundational principles which run as threads through the details, rhythmically offering up the content back to the spiritual worlds in meditation, waiting for more higher-resolution insights to return.

Thank you Ashvin. I see how my question can suggest I'm going in the exact opposite direction to the one I should take. I was just wondering if you were alluding to something specific with these references to required background studies the lack of which would make it difficult for me to grasp this or that. It turns out you weren't - perfect! Thanks for insights.