AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Dec 10, 2022 2:53 am
You say, "Bernardo seems to have settled that MAL is conscious after all". I presume you mean, something more conscious than the 'instinctive consciousness' we are used to?
Ashvin, I had in mind what he says here
45:33. So he recognizes that there must be spiritual activity behind everything in the Cosmos but then a bridge simply cannot be found. The thinking ego feels itself as part of MAL turned inside out and can’t conceive of any other way of finding the macrocosmic perspective, besides going through death. Hence the dualism of non-dualism.
We can present things thus:
These are two polar modes between which cognition switches. Like the camera analogy in the
other thread, we place our vantage point in one place and look towards another.
1/ First we place ourselves in the feeling of Cosmic unity, the core subjectivity. From that perspective we say “I am identical to God’s first-person perspective” thus we feel our ego identified with the Divine. From that perspective all reality must be seen as proceeding from some form of spiritual activity (as he admits in the above fragment of the interview).
2/ Second we place ourselves in the intellectual dust and feel our ego identified with it. Then looking towards unity, we feel utterly helpless. We’re clear that there’s simply no way that we can produce unity from our mental dust. The only solution seems to be death, where we expect that the intellectual dust will be forced to dissolve and we’ll become MAL again.
Indeed, death truly is the only solution. Except that we have to step into that condition methodologically, in full consciousness and without losing our body.
Even by just looking at the above images, the answer seems to be stinging our eyes. With all the talks about balance, non-duality and so on, the most glaringly obvious thing seems to be to find the
intersection of the two perspectives. How this is achievable in practice is commented in the
other thread. In short, we expect to find a place where the core subjectivity feels to be first-personally creative in the mental dust. In this way we have the best of both worlds – MAL’s Will recognizes itself (grows in intuition) in the reflections in the mental dust particles. This is simply the living experience of thinking.
On the logical level this is so eye-pokingly obvious. Yet people who are otherwise all-in for balance between everything, completely fail to internalize the above. Why is that? Because we fall victim to our own dissociative theory. Like the
bi-stable illusions, we constantly switch between the two modes. But as we spoke in the other thread, we’re not conscious of the switch, just like we don’t remember our falling to sleep. Thus, if we’re not vigilant, we become completely
insensitive to that switching and no longer recognize how we think from the positions of two completely conflicted personalities.
Faust I, Scene 2, lines 1112-1117 wrote:Two souls reside, alas, within my breast,
And each one from the other would be parted.
The one holds fast, in sturdy lust for love,
With clutching organs clinging to the world;
The other strongly rises from the gloom
To lofty fields of ancient heritage.
We believe that we’re a unitary being dissociated from MAL but it turns out that we’re not that different from a split-brain patient ourselves. We’re throwing the blame for our disease onto something external (and don’t we do that all the time?), failing to understand that it is
within us that the dissociation happens. We’re switching between two alters all the time, when one speaks, the other keeps silent. Luckily, these two alters are not entirely separated to the degree we have in split brain patients. Yet what happens when this split is pointed out? Various things. One is to simply justify that state with some clever logic. Another is to recognize the split but see it as “a gift to hold dear, more than a mystery to resolve”. Others simply sign out, as Wayfarer did.
Why this great opposition? The concrete obstacles are diverse but in the end it all boils down to the fact that this unity can be found only in
complete freedom. Thus we can only find it if we make the
effort to step towards it. As long as we switch between the two modes, cause and effect are always separated. We always wait for something to happen – death, first contact, second coming, lucky neural firing, etc. But this unity is the only thing that can only happen
if we ourselves become the cause. Only in this way the causative will of MAL can recognize itself in thinking. When we approach our thinking activity, when we find that tiny thought-image in which MAL finds its reflection, we reach a point for which we can no longer seek external cause. Any such attempt simply splits us again and we become lost in intellectual dust, being completely blind about the fact that MAL’s will flows in the thoughts.