AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 4:33 pm
(...)
Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 4:55 pm
(...)
Ashvin, Cleric,
Thank you for offering these two renditions of the problem with my comment quoted here:
Federica wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 3:04 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 12:59 pm
Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize (...) but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?
Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful
for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could perceptual experience
teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?
Before I respond, I want to say, I hope you don’t feel obliged to wrap all your explanations in “
if we” and “
when we” paper. I see why it’s useful in essays and general discussions, but in this context it starts to sound almost dystopian, with all these “
we” that mean “
you”. Please feel free to say “
you”, when it reflects your meaning. I would not take it badly.
Ashvin, unsurprisingly, I knew you wouldn’t like the word ‘detour’, though I didn’t expect it would help me achieve in this discussion not less than the complete trinity of wrongthinking - dualistic, mystic reductionist, and even materialist reductionist. However, I think, before throwing at me the dualistic anathema, it would have been good to make some more effort trying to put my perspective in context, instead of squaring my words by the criteria of SS’s discontinuity-free principles and tenets. Incidentally said, my understanding is, discontinuity, in certain sense, is inevitable, just because Will
is discontinuity, every choice of action we make
is by nature a discontinuity. We break off the space of possibilities and we pick one possible materialization only, on moral grounds (once, and if, we become free from all the other stuff standing in the way, of course).
Please note, my comment is not an absolute statement I want inscribed on my epitaph. It’s a
reaction to your position about this idea of
descent, and that, in principle terms, descending in material experiences of
any kind, is
always better than not descending. I still see major moral questions in this approach, and in it’s corollary that no phenomena/behaviors/actions are morally characterized in and by themselves, only our intentions when descending in them are. “
The moral threshold resides within the individual agency and his intentions-ideals, not within the phenomena themselves”.
So I am sure I am missing a lot in my understanding of the moral aspects of SS. Even the following is not well understood: “
our spiritual consciousness is only possible because other streams of development have lagged behind” when put side by side with the (opposite?) statement that by developing our living thinking, we help elevate the consciousness of our family, community, nation, etc. (roughly said). I have no difficulty recognizing that I need to fill in the blanks there. But I reject the dualistic label:
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 4:33 pm
There is no such thing as a spiritual perspective which directly knows itself apart from the manifestations of its structured potential.
I never stated or suggested that “such a thing” exists! You have a tendency to hyperbolize and generalize selected parts of my comments!
Does the double nature of man, by which unitary reality is split in two in the act of cognition, introduce a duality? If you say it does, then I will gladly say OK to your dualistic label. I understand livingly that perception and spirit are two sides of one reality! It’s a polarity that spirals together, not one that falls apart in dualism. That we reincarnate over and over again for a reason has not escaped me either.
“
Once our living perspective becomes aware of its own thinking participation in this process of manifesting the outer physiognomy, the latter becomes its greatest asset. It provides living feedback”
Exactly!
To the spiritually conscious, it provides feedback, rather than
new intuitions. To this function of feedback I am adding additional layers in my comments to Cleric that follow here. I hope you will find them further clarifying of how I see things.
***
“
It's misleading if we imagine that we can gain access to the archetypal worlds and from there derive spiritually everything in the sensory spectrum.”
I never said that we can do it. I am
not losing sight of mutual causality, at any level of reality, or the vibrating membrane, or the bistable figure, or the countless other metaphors you have used!
“
We should remember that there's a spectrum of reality and no part is fully reducible to the others. It is true that the archetypal beings have a much more encompassing effects (non-local) but it's not the case that from their perspective everything that happens on more local scales is fully determined.”
It’s once again the idea of interconnected causality. I understand this! It’s also illustrated in the form of multiple levels of “higher order spaces” in your Levin’s post.
Cleric, I would like to ask you: now that you have attained a certain level of spiritual development (I have The knowledge of the higher worlds in mind, as encompassing idea of the various phases of such a trajectory, in terms of both outer and inner stages of transformation) and found your bearings in the spiritual world, is perceptual reality
teaching you anything
new? I’m not asking if it gives you confirmations, but if it's still the
source of
new intuitions?
“
With all this in mind, everything that we have as our modern civilization should stand before us as a riddle - how will all this be transformed? (...) Personally, I have no idea how these transformations will be possible.”
Please correct me if I’m wrong (which I’m saying without the least irony). If the perceptual world you are interacting with could be a driver of
new, original intuitions for you, if it could give you ‘better’ understanding of reality than the one you have developed/discovered/created through the referenced tools and methods, you
would have some ideas of how these transformations could unfold, wouldn’t you? You would look at “
how hopeless everything looks”, you would assess the phenomena and say “I am learning fresh intuitions, from being immersed in these perceptions, from how they are evolving, and I understand that we are moving in such and such redemptive (or not) direction. I looked into phenomena, I descended into them, and I got new insights about the future as follows”.
Conversely, every time you come to us with a new illustration grounded in the perceptual sphere, be it Levin’s or one of the many others that have preceded it, every time you write a post that starts 'this has been said so many times, but let me give you yet another angle' you are not yourself
surprised by what you have found out in the new rendition, correct? You intimately knew the principles already, and simply found a new material outplay, or example, that
confirms your encompassing knowledge of reality, to hopefully help us get inspired and have a brain wave, correct?
Notice, this is all I stated in my comment.
I am very far from advocating to turn away from the raw material, discard all technology, and that there’s nothing to be done in the perceptual world. If I may quote what I wrote in this thread three days ago:
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 15, 2023 10:59 pm
thinking of the Levin’s model and its mutually impinging levels of causality, that we progressively infuse with awareness, it could maybe be said that a synonym for
infusing reality with awareness/becoming more conscious of it, is identifying the
telos in the higher orders. When that principal direction is found in the spiritual world, the system can become unitary, the fast vibrating membrane can be understood as unitary, and that “
Wise orientation towards the surrounding world” can be consequently found.
This telos I was recalling is exactly what I gather from your concluding words:
Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 4:55 pm
More and more of our perceptual world has to be grasped from the proper
spiritual perspective. We need to learn to read the world with our spiritual eyes. For this reason, we have to be able to
find the place of every Earthly phenomenon within the spectrum of reality. We need to understand how the phenomena work, what ideas are invested in them, what desires and so on. This is the
raw material that we will work with. Higher spiritual ideas will have to meet this raw material and give it more musical forms. If we seek the spiritual by turning our sight away from the raw material, by saying that there's nothing to learn there, we enter spiritual vacuum. The spiritual has to flow into the raw material and make it pliable and docile.
The telos, the spiritual perspective, is the idiom, and the world is the book in which we find it expressed, spelled out. We look at the pages, and we attempt to read and grasp every sentence in the terms of the idiom. At the same time, the spelled out story we are reading gives us feedback, and confirmation that the language is alive, follows certain rules, certain expressions, and flows on certain waves. The story gives thickness to the idiom. Although as beginners we can practice and learn a lot about the language by reading the book, once the language is holistically internalized, the story won’t
teach us the language. It will
play out the language, it will give us
feedback and angles on the language, but
it will not open new chapters in our knowledge of the language. The latter, on the contrary, enables us to recognize how every sentence, paragraph, and page belongs in the narrative flow. It enables us to find and understand the place of every piece of the story.
Also, it’s near to impossible to deduct, based on the page we are reading now, what the next page in the book will tell ("
I have no idea"). The past and current pages
by themselves can’t help us guess what the next will tell. In this sense the spelled out story can’t teach us the future, it
can’t teach us new insights. But if we have knowledge of the language, we can all impress it on the next pages and somehow make them add up in the book.
I’m not sure this metaphor is the best one, or how far it can be pushed. I still hope it can at least provide an approximation of how I understand the interplay of the sensory and spiritual planes at this moment.