Federica wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 8:00 pmFederica wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 5:45 pmI've posted this as a comment to Part V:Federica wrote: ↑Wed Apr 17, 2024 4:40 pm
I think there is a chance. Also the essays you shared walk the reader there. And some readers can feel that something crucial is missed in the jump from the initial phenomenological inquiry into pure awareness. And that the gap can't be patched by a hologram of mystical wisdom.
"May I submit the following note to your attention - keeping it brief, since the context is already provided by your discussion with Ashvin on Part X.
Speaking of contemporary idealism, you say: “while Kastrup’s, Velman’s, Taylor’s, and Shani’s idealistic approaches (...) take a step further in the right direction, they still lack a coherent evolutionary perspective and, most importantly, are too coarse-grained theoretical frameworks. By ‘coarse-grained’ I mean that idealism is a still too low-dimensional representation of a multidimensional reality.”
Here one could add that, even more crucially, the problem is that those idealisms are still… a *representation of reality*, that is, a model of reality from a third-person perspective, in which the role of thinking - in its real-time "thinking gestures" - is overlooked. However, as long as phenomenology is used as a partial approach, aiming at adding multidimensionality and evolutionary perspective to produce a new model - yet another model - in which the thinking who is arranging the thoughts jumps back into the blind spot and/or only *nominally* reintegrates itself, as subjective awareness (in fact, nothing other than yet another thought added to the rest of the model by a hidden hand) we are still not getting out of the bind. Am I misinterpreting your elaboration here?"
Here's the reply:
If you mean that my point is that more introspection on how the mind works, and from what it is conditioned, would be desirable, because otherwise we continuously overlook “the role of thinking in its activity,” then yes, that’s for sure. That’s also why I always invite people to complement the 3rd person with the 1st person approach. These also are two perspectives of the “multi-perspectival way of seeing.”
On the other hand, I’m well aware that what I write about “integral cosmologies,” may be seen as yet another extended model and representation of reality as well. Indeed, “cosmologies,” in itself, will never get us out of the circle of the mind to become able to realize how it works, and, thereby, see what stands beyond and behind it. Yet, I believe, the attempt (or should I call it “exercise”) to become aware that the world may be richer than previously believed, eventually looking at it with phenomenological approaches a la Goethe, or mindfulness, or meditative practices, etc., that could help us to get beyond.
Thanks, this is a very interesting dialogue for me, because it does seem like he is the most logical thinker through these issues and the most open to new possibilities for inner development that we have encountered so far. So I am still not sure where the resistance is in the realm of thinking, except that esoteric science may be seen as 'overthinking' the details of consciousness.
Here are the latest posts from Part X:
Marco: Sure thing. Far from any of my intentions to think illogically… (at least I hope I don’t…
) The mind has and will continue to play a decisive role in our evolution. Without developing the mind, we would fall back, and certainly could not harmonize it with higher principles. The mind principle exists precisely for that reason. It is a link between the material and subconscious realm with the supraconscious. In my view, the real reason that materialism, science and technology exist, isn’t so much because of their ability to provide us material wellbeing. Science, technology, the industrial revolution are, so to speak, a ‘trick’ of Nature to develop reason in this species we call homo sapiens (the “sapiens” is a joke… but I don’t digress.) It is the supraconscious Nature that says: “Hmmm…. How could I lure that being in developing its mind? Ok, let me make it become passionate about science, think about the world, the soul and the meaning of life, build tools and machines, and, eventually become also a blind materialist. This will develop its soul, and especially the mind.” That’s how evolution works. The real reasons that stand behind the events are occult to… well, our minds. But this transition is necessary.I like the idea of dissonance felt in the hardcore materialistic or atheistic arguments, I can relate to that with a very vivid experience. Very often they have extremely well-developed logical minds, yet they fail to get elementary facts about our inner cognitive domains, let alone spiritual insights. I think what is missing isn’t so much a mental ability but an inner contact. The materialist is someone who lacks this inner contact with something within (exception is when it is only a matter of education, in that case, the contact exists but is denied, for some time, but, usually, that doesn’t last for the whole lifetime.) Or, to put it into other words, if one doesn’t transition from an empiric third-person logic extending it to a first-person logic (therefrom the frequent accusations that one or the other side is ”illogical”) no mental argument will convince them.
Anyway, when I read you, I feel consonance. I suspect that we are becoming both to…. well, logical again. I don’t think it is important to agree and know in every detail the workings of our mind, logic, rational workings, subconscious, etc. The most important aspect is that we agree that reason alone is not enough, it is not the ultimate tool for knowledge, there are vaster and more powerful principles that await us along our evolutionary journey. And now do whatever we can to get there.
Response: That's a great way to put it! Indeed it seems the supraconscious 'lures' our inner development by presenting ever-new contexts in which we can exercise our soul-spiritual faculties and develop new ones. Of course, the problem arises when we forget this spiritual telos in the age of materialism, and instead consider our current faculties and what they can achieve within the decohered context as ends-in-themselves. That ignorance of the truthful flow of reality is the only thing that threatens further evolution.
I think you would agree that material science and practically all other modern philosophies and sciences fail to take the logic of their own findings seriously enough. If they did, then they would naturally be led by that logic to a remembrance of the spiritual telos, for ex. through research into the facts of natural and cultural evolution. You have pointed that out with respect to BK and analytic idealism in these essays as well. When we hear that "Nature is what MAL looks like from the outside", it is only natural to wonder about the first-person perspective(s) that animate the rhythmical orbits of the planets around the Sun, the progression of the years and seasons, the development of cultural epochs, and so forth. Shouldn't we be able to investigate (or introspect) these perspectives if they are essentially the same and entirely continuous with our own consciousness? Just as we intuitively experience the first-person agency that is responsible for the stream of our inner voice perceptions, can we also experience something of the agency responsible for the higher-order perceptual flow of Nature?
This is a natural path of investigation that BK and many others simply decline to pursue. For whatever rationalized reason, it is considered a waste of time and effort. So I think we have to be wary of falling into that same trap ourselves. For example, we know the stages of our evolutionary journey are overlapping, just like the physical, organic, emotional, and mental spaces are overlapping. In a sense, a single human organism is a *superposition* of all the different stages of evolution from the primordial 'past' to the present. What is most 'past' we know as the physical spectrum of mechanical interactions that run their course as a matter of necessity - they don't seem to budge in relation to our creative intents and activity. It is only within the mental space that we come into contact with the present, where the creative intents and the resulting perceptual flow (such as the inner voice stream when we intend to think about something) are entirely synchronized or 'in-phase'.
Following this same logic further, we can say the supra-rational spaces that signify our future development are also overlapping with the other spaces. That means the powerful and creative cognitive principles that await us along our evolutionary journey are already here - the Kingdom is at hand, so to speak. Something of their highest essence is already precipitating into our current cognitive consciousness and making our insights, such as we are sharing right now, possible. The skill is to learn how to more finely attune our current cognitive space, where reality is most 'in focus' for the average human, to those higher germinal principles. At the same time, it only stands to reason that this skill has already been developed to a high degree in others and perhaps that is the technique by which the supra-rational Cosmos lures us toward its higher potential. There is a gradient of Wisdom that flows through a chain of relative perspectives and into the average human population such that broader spheres of beings can participate in the co-creative work of evolution. In fact, we can understand all of human cultural development as a phenomenal manifestation of this gradient.
Is this something you have considered and what are your thoughts on that?
