Bernardo's journey

[Cleric K]

I've seen a little of this recent interview:



At this point Bernardo seems to have settled that MAL is conscious after all. See toward the end of this chapter about the great void 42:03.

But on the other hand, his conviction that the MAL state and the Earthly state are irreconcilably orthogonal until death seems to be strong. 1:03:30. He says "we can't understand it [what MAL is doing] and we don't need to." It's interesting - earlier (47:50) he speaks about being God, the point where we become the thing in itself "To know God from the first-person perspective is to be God". Yet then somehow human cognition is completely robbed of the possibility to find its concentric relations to God, although it inevitably is being thought by God. I wonder how that disconnect would be justified.

[AshvinP]

I've seen a little of this recent interview:



At this point Bernardo seems to have settled that MAL is conscious after all. See toward the end of this chapter about the great void 42:03.

But on the other hand, his conviction that the MAL state and the Earthly state are irreconcilably orthogonal until death seems to be strong. 1:03:30. He says "we can't understand it [what MAL is doing] and we don't need to." It's interesting - earlier (47:50) he speaks about being God, the point where we become the thing in itself "To know God from the first-person perspective is to be God". Yet then somehow human cognition is completely robbed of the possibility to find its concentric relations to God, although it inevitably is being thought by God. I wonder how that disconnect would be justified.

Cleric,

Thanks for sharing this video - it is good to update on Bernardo's journey at this time.

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?

I am interested to hear some more of what that means to you or anyone else who wants to weigh in. In that video section, he speaks of the 'void' being actually like a carrier wave, a 'fundamental tone', where there is 'pure knowing' but nothing else which can be differentiated in its cognitive texture, so to speak. In a certain way, this seems like a downgrade from instinctive consciousness, although perhaps he envisions the instinctive consciousness as another carrier wave nested within this more fundamental tone.

Then there is the disconnect you mention between the first-person human cognitive perspective and that of MAL/God which thinks the human perspective, and I also wonder about how it is rationalized.

[Cleric K]

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.

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.

[AshvinP]

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.

Ahh ok I prematurely stopped the video before that part - now I see! Thanks also for this illustrative elaboration.

Great quote from Goethe also, which seems to be an alternate rendering of what's in my footnote.

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.

Yes, I think it would be have been interesting if this thread was started before Wayfarer signed out, since he wanted to discuss Kastrup's ideas and apparently little else. I have a feeling that another excuse would have come to justify remaining in the comfortable split-brain mode. I guess it's too "esoteric" if one desires to heal one's Self!

[Federica]

I have watched a little, including the passage about the void. Based on that, it seems to me Bernardo’s position is stable. M@L is conscious, its spiritual activity or, in his words, its mentations, are represented by the laws of nature, but it’s not meta-conscious, it only has a spontaneous, instinctual “core subjectivity”. Rather, what seems different to me, compared to slightly older videos, is Bernardo's attitude. Maybe it’s just contextual to this one video, I don’t know, or maybe it's my arbitrary take, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to speculate further in this direction anyway, so I would simply notice, to echo the title of this thread, what I intuit as the expression of a non linear soul trajectory.