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Marco: Right. Mind is in its nature an active faculty, but it works best when receiving the suggestion from above. And one should not confuse silence with passivity. The activity of consciousness is best in the silence of the mind (with “mind” I mean the analytic, rational and intellectual cognition, in contrast to the supraconscious trans-rational “mentality”.) I don’t mean mind as synonymous with all cognition. Because, again, there could be a suprarational cognition that has nothing to do with logic, reason, rational discourse, etc. You might be familiar with the three gunas of the Indian philosophy: rajas (restlessness), sattwa (equanimity, equilibrium), and tamas (inertia.) Sattwa is not tamas. A receptive mind is not inert, it is sattwic. Meaning that it can eventually do its job actively, but only because of a higher non-mental intimation. Mystics compare the mind with the reflecting surface of a lake shining the moon’s rays. One can discern the moon only if the rippling of the lake does not distort its image. This doesn’t mean that the mind hasn’t a function anymore. At our stage of evolution it remains absolutely indispensable, when we have to reflect in the practice, organizing, speaking or writing (the example of the artistic practice you do is a good example) it remains necessary. There is also a physical mind in the body that is also quite ignorant, stubborn, repetitive, yet essential because, when it doesn’t go its way, it can be a phenomenal tool of technical precision and both remain central in learning skills for, say, playing a musical instrument, acquiring technical skills, etc. But the mind and the physical mind are mostly ignorant receiving ends, not the original creative powers. They best work when they are receptive to what goes beyond them and become active only in the practical realization of what the inner inspiration suggests. I believe that most great scientists that made great discoveries and who worked with their “imaginative activity” had the best ideas when the imaginative power transcended the mind. The same can be said of the notorious ‘flow state’. The question is whether it is a flow from the mind or despite the mind? While the “feeling” (the revelatory one, not the fear-based) may have yet another source in the soul (that’s why I have this fixation with “soul-factors”…
) Don’t we often say that our mind suggests something but the heart does otherwise? What is that? A subconscious intellectual activity or an inner feeling (cognition) that goes beyond the rational? And, yes, let’s not cram the entire world into our intellect, but it is not my experience that the source of the “ideal processes“ come from the “intervening intellect”. Their flows is much more intense without the intellect intervening.
Anyway, we don’t have to agree. That’s my different perception of the thing… And, I like your idea of the dance between receptivity and activity. Reminds me of the Vedic organization of the faculties of consciousness. They also were talking about mind, seeing, hearing, feeling, speaking etc. as receptive, active, subjective, objective, etc., from a perspective that nowadays we would label as ‘phenomenological’. I would not be surprised if all this was well known in ancient times and we are only reinventing the wheel.
Response: Right, the mind, in the sense you are using it, is not the original creative power and yet is indispensable at our stage of evolution, as you point out. The source of ideal processes is not the intervening intellect, but rather the latter is the former's *outer physiognomy*, like a person's countenance is the outer physiognomy of their inner states of being. In no way can we work solely with the properties of the countenance, measuring and relating them in various ways, to recover an understanding of the inner states that shape them. At best, the countenance can only act as a symbol that allows for a 'portal of resonance' between our soul life and the soul life of another being, provided we are deeply interested in the latter and make some effort to understand it. It is the same with our intellectual concepts in relation to the deeper, supra-rational processes. The former can act only as symbols that help us intuitively orient to the deeper processes that gave birth to and shape them.
We know there are varied sorts of lawfulness within our thinking experience. The lawfulness that we intuit from the transformation of billiard balls in motion is not exactly the same as that which we intuit from the growth, decay, and rebirth of plant matter. Likewise, the latter is not the same as that which we intuit from the transformations of our soul life, the rhythms of sympathies, emotions, impulses, etc. that we share in common with animals. And none of those are the same as our intuition for the transformations of our thought-life which we generally describe as "logic". This is the whole phenomenological reason why the physical, vital, astral, and mental principles have been distinguished, because people over the ages have intuited their varied transformation signatures (the intuition of the mental transformation arrived relatively more recently). None of these principles are reducible to the others, yet we know they overlap in various ways and influence one another.
There is also an interesting *asymmetry* in the principles. We can imagine experiencing the mental principle in the absence of the others (even if this does not actually happen in the flow of life), but we can't imagine the lower principles in the absence of the mental principle. The very act of 'imagining' implicates the mental principle and its lawfulness. This points us to the fact that there is something fundamental about the logical lawfulness of thinking, even if we don't have a clear idea of what that something is. For example, if we add two numbers together, like 84 and 167, we can sense that we are doing something, making certain 'thinking gestures' to move around the mathematical puzzle pieces in various ways, bumping them into each other and eventually fitting them together. People may carry this operation out in slightly different ways, but we all make the thinking gestures. What we are inwardly *doing* to make those gestures nevertheless remains mysterious. Normally we are preoccupied with the results of the operation and don't try to observe the gestures we are making.
So we don't know the lawfulness of the lower principles directly but only through the prism of the mental principle, and even with the latter there is some mystery as to how exactly our mathematical thoughts, for ex., transform through mental space. Yet within the mental space, we at least have some lucid sense of being *creatively involved* in the gestures that are responsible for the transformation. We can't say the same for any of the other spaces. Healthy reasoning shows that just because we can follow the transformations of mineral-mechanical elements, organic beings, and soul beings with our thoughts, and notice their distinctions, that doesn't mean we actually understand why those transformations occur at any deep level. We certainly don't feel creatively involved in the deeper physical, organic, and psychic processes. Hence we still have the 'problem of abiogenesis' and the 'hard problem of consciousness'. These are only problems for reductionist thinking and it's quite possible that expanding the mind into the superconscious will also shed light on the deeper nature of the soul, organic, and mineral lawfulness.
What we experience as 'logic' at the intellectual level must have some relation to the supra-rational creative faculty, and the latter must also be related to the lower subconscious principles (perhaps as an image to a reflection), if we are not to stray into dualism. For example, when we encounter certain hardcore materialistic or atheistic arguments about how everything in our living experience, including our consciousness itself, must be driven by mindless and mechanical interactions, most of us have probably felt a certain amount of pain. When beholding the cognitive dissonance required for such arguments, it strikes a chord with not only our rational mind but somewhere deeper in our being. Probably not as much pain as we feel when we accidentally burn ourselves, but still the very experience of the argument falls somewhere on the gradient of pain. It's not necessarily the content of the argument that causes the pain, but the underlying dissonance that the content reflects. We can intuitively sense that the person's deeper soul factors are grinding against each other in very unpleasant ways for them to express their thoughts in such a blatantly contradictory fashion.
In that sense, 'logic' can be understood as our ability to perceive consonances and dissonances between deeper psychic and ideal processes, even if we don't have any clear idea of what the latter are. By thinking logically, we dimly probe the supra-rational spaces and extract fragments from them, fitting those fragments together in ways that strike resonant chords and create consonance. When we think illogically, it is as if we are out of tune and out of sync with the deeper relations, leading to a potentially painful cacophony of tones. This is why I would say the logical mind is indispensable at our current stage, not only because it helps us with the tasks you mentioned, but also because it helps develop the *forces* that are needed to penetrate the supra-rational spaces with lucid cognition of the ideal consonances and dissonances that are characteristic across the whole spectrum of reality. These forces are also characteristic of the original creative power. It's only that in the higher spaces of consciousness, we don't only work with fragmented extracts of the ideal processes that can be related with one another through discursive logic, but with a much more holistic spectrum of those processes. The latter is what also projects into our normal thinking experience as the lawfulness of the psychic, organic, and physical domains.
) Don’t we often say that our mind suggests something but the heart does otherwise? What is that? A subconscious intellectual activity or an inner feeling (cognition) that goes beyond the rational? And, yes, let’s not cram the entire world into our intellect, but it is not my experience that the source of the “ideal processes“ come from the “intervening intellect”. Their flows is much more intense without the intellect intervening.
In parallel, there is