Stranger wrote: ↑Tue Jan 24, 2023 12:04 am
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Eugene, I would like to extract a summary of where I believe our understandings can intersect. I’m putting aside the question about what factors will make us reincarnate or not.
First, I think we agree that our starting point is our present human condition. I believe in the last few years it has been shown that the classical metaphysical approach where we begin with intellectual axioms about reality and try to derive everything from there, has run its course long ago. We can’t make a step further unless we become awake to the fact that the thinking that traverses the metaphysical conceptual space is itself part of reality and not something standing outside and detachedly reasoning about it.
So we can try to distill essential phenomenological principles from our living experience. In the light of the previous paragraph it should be already clear but let’s state it explicitly – this is not meant to make an intellectual model of reality. Everything should be considered to provide only anchor points for stabilizing our intuitive orientation within the stream of becoming.
As said previously, it’s pointless to fantasize the nondual existence as something absolutely orthogonal to our present stream of becoming. If this was the case, then any ideas about higher existence are as valuable as pure noise. As you have said yourself, there’s something of the nondual state which is present even at this very moment.
Thus we can conceive that whether we’re talking about dual or nondual state, as long as we can speak of temporal existence, there should be some kind of becoming, metamorphoses of our state of being.
We don’t need to postulate an outer world. Our experiential state of being is already an experience of the world state. It is already clear that we never know a world apart from our first-person spiritual experience. All true world-knowledge is really knowledge of spiritual perspectives of beings.
With this it’s not meant that the world exists contained within our personal consciousness but only what relativity has found in other ways – that we can’t speak of an absolute frame of reference.
The lack of absolute frame of reference doesn’t mean that all relative perspectives are hopelessly fragmented. Different perspectives can experience the world totality in different ways such that that totality makes lesser or greater holistic sense. The classic example we often use here is helio- and geocentricity. Both are valid frames of reference but one makes it possible to grasp things in a more holistic way.
So in the most general sense we can see our stream of becoming as continuous metamorphosis of our state of being. This will be true even in the nondual state. In all cases these transformations are not entirely arbitrary. We do feel creatively involved in the way our states evolve but these transformations are subject to certain lawfulnesses. In our sensory state we can’t yet teleport among states that correspond to different spatial perspectives. We have to take the ‘bureaucratic’ way and tediously transform our states of being by gradually passing through intermediate states of experiencing our legs moving one in front of the other and so on.
I believe you would agree that the way our state will evolve in the nondual state would still be subject to similar lawfullnesses. Otherwise we wouldn’t be a nondual being among beings but some kind of absolute being which without any restraints could transform the whole world state in arbitrary ways. The arguments on this thread are really about what the constraints in the higher state are, what factors play into being pulled into a new incarnation or freely navigating states that can keep us in orbit as much as we like. As said, I leave these questions aside.
Now when we speak of configuration spaces, as said previously, it’s not the point to fantasize some abstract structures but only to recognize our holistic intuitions. For example, our intuition of physical space doesn’t really depend on space existing out there in itself. It has been shown before how this can be demonstrated with a video game (for example fps shooter), where there’s certainly no space inside the CPU, yet we develop certain intuition about the ways we can navigate the machine states.
It is in this sense that we speak of configuration/phase/state spaces. It is our intuitive orientation about the ways we can steer our stream of becoming in a certain direction that for one or another reason we would love to explore.
Similarly to our intermediate leg movement states, our higher intuitive flow is presently experienced through the intermediate states of our intellectual thinking. These are the climber’s holds, the steps of the staircases through which we traverse higher order topology. The most important thing to realize is that this traversal is not categorically different from that of the higher (nondual) flows. We simply have to overcome the habit to live in the meaning of thoughts
about things where we consider ourselves to have become a closed system, completely orthogonal and irreconcilable with our higher spiritual existence. Instead, our intellectual voice should be experienced as what happens to our higher willed stream of becoming when it becomes more and more constrained (quantized as it were).
I’ll stop here. I just would like to synchronize the understanding of the basic dynamics of existence. Let’s put it thus:
1. We’re continually metamorphosing through states of being, which are like relative experiences of the world’s totality. A state is only a label for the momentary totality of our conscious experience. It's not implied that reality is 'made of' such state-entities. In fact we can never know a state in isolation. We live in eternal transition between states. So the concept is just a handle for our intellect, to help us get a grip on the flow of becoming.
2. We feel spiritually involved in the steering within the stream of becoming. For example, when we move our ray of attention in our imagination, we’re going through states of being where our point of focus feels differently in each state. We feel at least to some extent united with the causal activity that determines the position of the point of focus in each state.
3. Our transformation of states are not arbitrary but follow certain lawful constraints. We speak of worlds only as far as we have certain intuition about the ways in which parts of the spectrum of our states of being transform. For example, the intuitive grasp of the lawfulness of the ways our sensory spectrum transforms we call ‘physical world’.
4. We know our higher being insofar we can glimpse how it is forced to tediously micromanage the transitions along heavily constrained states. In hypothetical circumstances we could imagine that we could simply ‘quantum tunnel’ between the state of being at birth and that at death. This would be like superfluid transformation without friction. There’s nothing that prevents our transition from our birth state to our desired death state. In reality however, this transition encounters the friction of countless other spiritual perspectives. This decoheres our state and we need to micromanage the partial transitions. The clearest way to experience this is in our thinking, which is like micromanaged transitions along conceptual states, which are attuned to a more holistic, overarching intuition of becoming. For example, a musical intuition has to be temporally decomposed and the states of us playing the piece have to be micromanaged. It’s similar with singing, speech and thinking. This would be true even in the nondual state. The constraints would be much more fluid, yet our steering through higher order spaces is still a kind of micromanagement of our becoming, albeit on a different level of integration.
Even though expressed with fancy words, all of these are very basic things that can be extracted from immediate phenomenology. It’s a kind of minimalistic conceptualization of our stream of becoming. The goal is not to theorize about the world but only to find minimal, yet general enough principal patterns that can capture the characteristics of our existential stream. These principles should be valid for both the dual and nondual modes. It is OK to say that no sequence of intellectual states can produce the higher flow but it should be possible for our nondual flow to partially express itself through conceptual and imaginative states. You see, the goal here is to peel the accumulated layers of cognitive constraints as to reach the essential principles of our stream of becoming.
Let’s see how all this fits with you. Is this all clear? Where do you agree, where do you disagree? I repeat that all this is completely independent of the question of reincarnation. I’m just trying to suggest a common language that can capture the essential principles of both the dual and nondual modes. When using this language we shouldn’t feel as if we theorize about how reality works but as if we put into words essential patterns of our stream of existence which are valid for both dual and nondual modes.
As I said, I do not believe in progress in the dualistic domain, it' just going in circles, with periods of seeming improvements followed by periods of degradation, even though the landscape is constantly changing so it looks like the train is going somewhere. That's why it is called "the wheel of samsara" in Buddhism, or Ecclesiastes describes it the best.
