ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[Federica]

(...)

That was very entertaining to read, thanks for sharing!
The ChatGPT might be suffering from has-been complex, trying to manage guilty feelings for not being up-to-date on BK
From a previous session:

Q: Yes, I wonder if there is a way to know if you will be there to answer questions in the future. Can one count on you for that?

A: As an AI model, I am not a living being and my availability to answer questions depends on the systems that are running me. As long as the systems are up and running, and there is no maintenance or updates, I should be available to answer questions. However, please note that the answers generated by me are based on the information available at the time of my training, and the information may be outdated.


Q: Ok, I understand. When was the last time you had training?

A: As an AI model, I am continuously being fine-tuned and updated to improve my performance. However, my knowledge cut-off date is 2021, so any information that is more recent than that, I may not be aware of. If you have any specific questions that may be affected by this, please let me know and I'll do my best to help with the information I have.

[AshvinP]

Not to press too much on this point, but please consider what happened on this point you conceded. When I made the point, you felt it was a 'hurried and inaccurate statement' spurned by a 'defensive reaction', which failed to carefully read your original post. We should simply notice how often we may start with such a conviction only to have them greatly weakened or overturned when we hear the same point expressed in a slightly different way, from a slightly different angle.

Ashvin,

There’s misunderstanding here: I conceded that I hadn’t carefully read what you wrote. I didn’t concede your main points in that paragraph: “I am pointing out why you have done something similar to the people who hold its language use reflects intelligence - you have simply assumed it is using language”. “Since you know it's not intelligent, you conclude that means language must be separable from thought/meaning”. These were inaccurate suppositions indeed, where you credited me with assumptions I hadn’t made, and words I hadn’t used. Regardless, it’s true that further exchanges could make convictions evolve. Still, all I can do until it happens is to focus on remaining humble and careful. I can’t go ahead of myself.

I guess the important point here is that we understand why language is never separate from thinking-thought-meaning.

Yes, I guess I have understood what you mean. The problem was a vocabulary issue. You mean that if we set ourselves from the perspective of language, where there’s language there’s necessarily meaning. Which is clear. But I didn't understood that reading the essay. To me, the meaning of 'separable/separate' is symmetrical, whilst in the essay it’s used asymmetrically. So I initially understood: language and meaning always exist in association with one another/are inseparable. But meaning certainly doesn’t need language (Merriam Webster’s) in order to be experienced. That would negate higher cognition. Hence the confusion, and the reason why I quoted Cleric in my initial post. Because I didn’t get such use of 'separable’, and you didn’t get the origin of my confusion (though there was a big cue in my quote of Cleric), you made the inaccurate supposition that I was dwelling in the blind spot.
One doubt remains. Earlier you reversed the essay’s premise: “the premise that thought/meaning is inseparable from language is correct (intuitive activity and its outer physiognomy are inseparable).” I take you to mean that, at principal level, reality is unitary and neither spectrum can be considered in isolation, not that meaning can’t be experienced separately from language, right?

Federica,

You wrote previously - "Just because the engine manipulates language, it doesn’t mean it’s synthetizing any thought/meaning, because these are indeed separate from language. And the wrong premise is that they are inseparable = "if it can arrange language, it can arrange meaning.""

If you are saying now this only meant that sometimes we have thought/meaning without human language, then that's fine and I accept your clarification, but it should be clear why the above led me to the "inaccurate suppositions".

But meaning certainly doesn’t need language (Merriam Webster’s) in order to be experienced. That would negate higher cognition.

If you are restricting "language" to abstract human words such as we find in the dictionary, then that's correct. Otherwise, we should understand all higher-order spiritual activity as a mode of speech which impresses its forms in higher-order language. Intuition, Inspiration, Imagination - this is all higher-order speech. That is why the Christ principle is known as the Cosmic Word. It is exactly the same principle which works in our current human language as impressions of our spiritual activity. Our current language is simply a very decohered form of the Cosmic language which has been impressed in everything from the forms of Universes to those of souls, life, and physical bodies within the Universes. Steiner provides many exercises by which we can try to recover the deeper layers of WFT meaning from the consonants and vowels of our current language.

***

"Here is where my frustration lies in this discussion. You initially responded to point out an apparent tension, perhaps even contradiction, between what Max wrote and what Cleric and I had expressed on the VR discussion, and briefly on this thread as well, about the redemptive pedagogical value. You didn't give any explanations for what you thought was going on, just pointed it out and implicitly asked what was going on there. My initial response to you gave my reasons for what was going on, which you blew off completely."
I found that initial response overly cautious and that it didn’t tie in with my questions.

So then I tried to make it more explicit (euphemism) and you dug your heels in further (dysphemism). We still haven't heard your explanation for what is going on - why is it that I (and perhaps Cleric) cannot notice this stark contradiction in the arguments about material technology?
I don’t know what’s going on, hence my initial post with questions! It would be pretentious of me to make suppositions about what’s going on. You are the one who, on the one hand, see the appearance (I'm using this word to give the benefit of doubt) of generalized statement of danger with AI in the essay, as described in my orange-blue post (you even said that in all honesty you were expecting my doubts!) and, on the other hand, negate it, letting nonetheless my specific questions fall (I still have no answers on generalization, context, and whether you still pretend I have mental issues bordering insanity).
So you may know why Max expressed things in the way he did. But you must know why you have been first minimizing (“This is admittedly a bit more complex and I am not sure exactly where Max stands…”) and later negating ("You are manufacturing your own generalized, absolutized argument about 'dangerous and pernicious' AI technology and projecting that onto what Max wrote") the apparent divergence. Therefore, instead of supposing/concluding, I asked!

Am I just too biased in favor of Max and feel the need to defend him at all costs? Or was Max's argument, similar to your argument on VR, a valid position on the absolute 'dangerous and pernicious' nature of these technologies and it just took his essay for me to admit it, but now I am trying to avoid that admission?
That you have an actively protective attitude towards the ones you have consideration for is beyond any doubt.
Now, I tried to stay open to alternative explanations. Hence my initial questions! Max’s position certainly sounds (as I put it) at odds with yours (should I add that any reference to possible pedagogical value is lacking in it) but if it really is at odds with yours, I still have to ascertain. I am trying to!

One thing to consider is as follows - what if Max is mistaken in his arguments, similar to how you were on the VR issue? What have we learned about the principles of spiritual evolution and where do we go from there? I think we can learn a lot about our own cognitive pathways by asking what the result of our questioning and arguments would be - will it simply prove us 'right' on something yet leave us in the dark on advancing our living spiritual understanding.
Again, I am reluctant to build a house of cards on unascertained suppositions. I am not in a position to determine if he’s “mistaken” in his arguments, hence my initial questions! Moreover, it’s maybe fine that two different perspectives coexist, more or less inclined to see pedagogical value in AI, without any of them being “mistaken”.

It remains my view that you are holding fast to unexamined opinions and assumptions which work their way into your perception of the arguments, yet you feel as if you are confronting them with 'fresh eyes' and without bias. You feel just as confident in your unbiased reasoning as you felt when reasoning through the VR issue,
No, confidence is not the right word. My true level of ‘confidence’ in the question can be assessed from my initial post in this thread. I was signaling there is something to clarify, not because I felt unbiased (I know I'm biased) but because there is a writing in which, according to the rules of standard language, generalized evaluations are made that elicit question marks. There's not too much my unexamined opinions could do to make general statements fictionally appear to my consciousness, if there were none in black and white in the text. I don’t think either that my biases could eclipse any statement of pedagogical value from my sight, if there were any. Conversely, my unexamined opinions can operate with great effect, when it’s a matter of understanding something much larger such as the evolutionary meaning of VR. So my only confidence is that there is something worth clarifying. Everything else that you call confidence is in the result of the blowup due to the turn this conversation has taken. I am unfortunately not good at keeping that separate from the argumentation itself.

yet on the latter you eventually recognized the following: “I might embark on these familiar thinking tracks sometimes, without realizing it. Then I might reemerge above the surface of unconsciousness, somewhere down the road, maybe prompted by a comment. As a consequence, I would typically try to sew together elements of the old and new thinking paths, to bridge the discontinuity with a half logic, half stubborn sewing thread. Obviously the result cannot be smooth and flawless.” That doesn't mean the same thing is happening here, but it's a distinct possibility and we shouldn't underestimate it - these habits don't just fade away that easily. It also remains my view that you will gain a lot of value from these 'half stubborn sewing' attempts as long as you remain open to their existence and to digging deeper into their significance. Perhaps what Cleric pointed out about the GPT bot is also pedagogical in this situation: “It's like contemplating the cognitive labyrinths into which we fights each other, passionately identifying with one or another corridor. In a certain sense we can be stricken with the fact how elementary in a certain respect, how superficial, today's thinking life really is. It's like GPT says "Here, look at me. I'm the summary of the framework in which you spend your lives. I'm a superficial projection of the linguistic labyrinth in which you are lost and in the corridors of which you unleash your passions.”
The recognition I made above regards how I had approached the idea of descent in the sensory spectrum, when I had questioned its ability to teach new insights to spiritually awakened persons. There was no reference to the VR issue in particular. Although I recognized some thinking issues, I couldn’t entirely unveil how such recognition is supposed to guide choice, and action, and descent, and redemption in the physical plane. It remains an unsolved question for me.
Anyways, yes, I want to remain vigilant on how these flaws keep operating, as I am sure they do. With this in mind, I repeat I feel confident in the rationality of my questions here. Not because I feel unbiased, but because they are basic, circumscribed questions. I don’t feel “certain shame” (referring now to Cleric’s comment you quoted) with regards to this particular question I posed in this thread. I do feel certain shame for the superficial, labyrinth-wandering mode of my everyday thinking, for example in work, and even here, at times. I also feel it with regards to exchanges like this one, when I struggle, like now, to remain centered in my thinking, measured in my language, and neutral to the specific person I’m exchanging with, in this case you.


***

Of course, I am not immune to mistaking the superficial thinking projections of my soul-life for my 'pure, unbiased reasoning' either. In this situation, I have the added benefit of knowing Max, having conversations with him, and understanding the spiritual foundation from which his arguments flow forth. It is a foundation which is centered in Christ. Again, I think this particular essay had a very limited scope and was addressed mainly to the average person without any PoF or spiritual scientific understanding, so such issues weren't even within the orbit of his arguments at all. The essay simply wasn't speaking to this issue in the least, except for a brief part at the end. When we speak of sacrificial-redemptive 'descent' to restore the 'very good' creation - to elevate our humanity - the image of the Christ events should be the first which come to mind. I am very confident that when Max speaks of 'elevation of our humanity', he has exactly the Christ ideal in mind.

"And immediately, coming up from the water, He [Jesus] saw the heavens parting and the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove."

After the Baptism, we of course have the further 'descent' of the incarnate Christ-being into the belly of the Jewish and Roman powers that be (the latter being like the technological materialist Goliath of its time), into the darkest depths of despair, torture, and crucifixion to fulfill the Will of the Father. Christ within us is the high redemptive ideal. He is the courage which makes us strong, brave, and fearless when confronting the depths of the materialistic world. There is nothing beyond the sphere of redemption when Christ lives in our hearts. I will reiterate here, though, that it hardly matters whether I am correct about Max or not. Whether, if he were to write a follow up essay actually addressing this issue, he would make similar points to those we made in the VR discussion. What matters is whether we understand this high ideal and are willing to seek it with open minds and open hearts.

Well, thanks for suggesting this interpretation of the final prescription. Based on the little I can gather from my ignorant perspective, it seems very reasonable. But it also makes it unreasonable that the essay was addressed to the average materialist, unaware of PoF and impressed by the intelligence of the chat bot. How could Max imagine that such an average person would grasp the sense of the prescription? Anyway, this is too much speculation. I am sure I have exhausted anyone who for some reason has kept reading to this point, including you and me. Thank you for sharing your thoughts at length.

Your strategy of "asking" here has been similar to,

Q: What's your favorite color?
A: Blue.
Q: But you said it was red earlier [insert quote which doesn't clearly say blue or red], so what's the reason for this discrepancy?
A: The initial quote meant [insert explanation] and therefore is aligned with the blue answer.
Q: I don't think so... that didn't seem to be the 'spirit' (intent) of the initial quote. Also, why did this other person say your favorite color is red?
A: He didn't - he wasn't even aware the question about my favorite color was asked.
Conclusion: I disagree, he was clearly talking about your favorite color. But I'm not supposing anything here, just asking!

Do you see the issue here? It's quite odd when someone tells you that you don't realize the spirit of your own comment a few weeks ago, and therefore rejects your attempts to explain the apparent discrepancy with someone else's comment, assuming the latter's comment must be relevant to the earlier comment, also finding the explanations to be "overly cautious" and not tying in with their questions (which weren't asked), and then keeps asking for more explanations until they converge with your expectations of what the explanation should be. But my explanation isn't going to change. Here's yet another angle on the same explanation that I included in my initial response to you. You quoted Cleric before:

it's worth noting that being able to think in more than one language is already a very good way to loosen the etheric body, if we turn it into a conscious exercise. If we meditate on producing the same meaning in different languages, we'll quickly see that our spiritual being lives in the meaning itself. The languages are only symbolic gestures expressing that meaning. When we advance on the path of spiritual development, we attain to the possibility to think directly within this layer of meaning in pictorial form, without having to precipitate words.

My position is that you are approaching Max's essay as if the few sentences on the 'dangerous and pernicious' aspects of GPT bot exhaust the meaning of the intuitive intent with respect to the much more involved topic we were discussing on the VR thread, i.e. the redemptive value of material technologies and phenomena in general within the context of holistic spiritual evolution. Or you are at least saying it's still 'up in the air' and that's why you keep asking about it. But it's obvious that this wasn't a topic of consideration for the essay. If it were brought up, the essay would be much longer and I would hazard a guess that most of his readership would have no idea what he was going on about. Many of them may not have any concrete understanding of "spiritual evolution" to begin with. I had a difficult enough time making my arguments across pages of the VR thread without delving into 'arcane' details of spiritual science. Either way, there is no justification to draw any such conclusions from the few words which were written. This is why I say positions and debates are being "manufactured". The 'asking' stops being understandable when this is repeatedly pointed out to you yet you refuse to accept the explanation, while, at the same time, not offering any alternative explanation of your own for the supposed discrepancy. I understand perfectly well why you initially felt there was a discrepancy, but I don't understand why you continually refuse to seriously consider the explanation that there is no discrepancy based on this one short essay.

[AshvinP]

...

Also, since it seems there is nowhere left to go with this particular line of argument, although I am open to hearing any response, let me also posit a hypothetical:

Max was wrong. He took a generalized unredemptive position towards the GPT technology in that essay. I should have noticed he was taking that position before sharing the essay, but I didn't. What Cleric responded by itself shows that there can be redemptive value from exploring the GPT chat with living thinking i.e. openness to Self-knowledge. What is your position on that now?

[Federica]

Not to press too much on this point, but please consider what happened on this point you conceded. When I made the point, you felt it was a 'hurried and inaccurate statement' spurned by a 'defensive reaction', which failed to carefully read your original post. We should simply notice how often we may start with such a conviction only to have them greatly weakened or overturned when we hear the same point expressed in a slightly different way, from a slightly different angle.

Ashvin,

There’s misunderstanding here: I conceded that I hadn’t carefully read what you wrote. I didn’t concede your main points in that paragraph: “I am pointing out why you have done something similar to the people who hold its language use reflects intelligence - you have simply assumed it is using language”. “Since you know it's not intelligent, you conclude that means language must be separable from thought/meaning”. These were inaccurate suppositions indeed, where you credited me with assumptions I hadn’t made, and words I hadn’t used. Regardless, it’s true that further exchanges could make convictions evolve. Still, all I can do until it happens is to focus on remaining humble and careful. I can’t go ahead of myself.

I guess the important point here is that we understand why language is never separate from thinking-thought-meaning.

Yes, I guess I have understood what you mean. The problem was a vocabulary issue. You mean that if we set ourselves from the perspective of language, where there’s language there’s necessarily meaning. Which is clear. But I didn't understand so reading the essay. To me, the meaning of 'separable/separate' is symmetrical, whilst in the essay it’s used asymmetrically. So I initially understood: language and meaning always exist in association with one another/are inseparable. But meaning certainly doesn’t need language (Merriam Webster’s) in order to be experienced. That would negate higher cognition. Hence the confusion, and the reason why I quoted Cleric in my initial post. Because I didn’t get such use of 'separable’, and you didn’t get the origin of my confusion (though there was a big cue in my quote of Cleric), you made the inaccurate supposition that I was dwelling in the blind spot.
One doubt remains. Earlier you reversed the essay’s premise: “the premise that thought/meaning is inseparable from language is correct (intuitive activity and its outer physiognomy are inseparable).” I take you to mean that, at principal level, reality is unitary and neither spectrum can be considered in isolation, not that meaning can’t be experienced separately from language, right?

Federica,

You wrote previously - "Just because the engine manipulates language, it doesn’t mean it’s synthetizing any thought/meaning, because these are indeed separate from language. And the wrong premise is that they are inseparable = "if it can arrange language, it can arrange meaning.""

If you are saying now this only meant that sometimes we have thought/meaning without human language, then that's fine and I accept your clarification, but it should be clear why the above led me to the "inaccurate suppositions".
Yes, this is what I am saying, the quote I shared makes clear what I meant.

But meaning certainly doesn’t need language (Merriam Webster’s) in order to be experienced. That would negate higher cognition.

If you are restricting "language" to abstract human words such as we find in the dictionary, Yes I am. then that's correct. Otherwise, we should understand all higher-order spiritual activity as a mode of speech which impresses its forms in higher-order language. Intuition, Inspiration, Imagination - this is all higher-order speech. That is why the Christ principle is known as the Cosmic Word. It is exactly the same principle which works in our current human language as impressions of our spiritual activity. Our current language is simply a very decohered form of the Cosmic language which has been impressed in everything from the forms of Universes to those of souls, life, and physical bodies within the Universes. Steiner provides many exercises by which we can try to recover the deeper layers of WFT meaning from the consonants and vowels of our current language.

***

"Here is where my frustration lies in this discussion. You initially responded to point out an apparent tension, perhaps even contradiction, between what Max wrote and what Cleric and I had expressed on the VR discussion, and briefly on this thread as well, about the redemptive pedagogical value. You didn't give any explanations for what you thought was going on, just pointed it out and implicitly asked what was going on there. My initial response to you gave my reasons for what was going on, which you blew off completely."
I found that initial response overly cautious and that it didn’t tie in with my questions.

So then I tried to make it more explicit (euphemism) and you dug your heels in further (dysphemism). We still haven't heard your explanation for what is going on - why is it that I (and perhaps Cleric) cannot notice this stark contradiction in the arguments about material technology?
I don’t know what’s going on, hence my initial post with questions! It would be pretentious of me to make suppositions about what’s going on. You are the one who, on the one hand, see the appearance (I'm using this word to give the benefit of doubt) of generalized statement of danger with AI in the essay, as described in my orange-blue post (you even said that in all honesty you were expecting my doubts!) and, on the other hand, negate it, letting nonetheless my specific questions fall (I still have no answers on generalization, context, and whether you still pretend I have mental issues bordering insanity).
So you may know why Max expressed things in the way he did. But you must know why you have been first minimizing (“This is admittedly a bit more complex and I am not sure exactly where Max stands…”) and later negating ("You are manufacturing your own generalized, absolutized argument about 'dangerous and pernicious' AI technology and projecting that onto what Max wrote") the apparent divergence. Therefore, instead of supposing/concluding, I asked!

Am I just too biased in favor of Max and feel the need to defend him at all costs? Or was Max's argument, similar to your argument on VR, a valid position on the absolute 'dangerous and pernicious' nature of these technologies and it just took his essay for me to admit it, but now I am trying to avoid that admission?
That you have an actively protective attitude towards the ones you have consideration for is beyond any doubt.
Now, I tried to stay open to alternative explanations. Hence my initial questions! Max’s position certainly sounds (as I put it) at odds with yours (should I add that any reference to possible pedagogical value is lacking in it) but if it really is at odds with yours, I still have to ascertain. I am trying to!

One thing to consider is as follows - what if Max is mistaken in his arguments, similar to how you were on the VR issue? What have we learned about the principles of spiritual evolution and where do we go from there? I think we can learn a lot about our own cognitive pathways by asking what the result of our questioning and arguments would be - will it simply prove us 'right' on something yet leave us in the dark on advancing our living spiritual understanding.
Again, I am reluctant to build a house of cards on unascertained suppositions. I am not in a position to determine if he’s “mistaken” in his arguments, hence my initial questions! Moreover, it’s maybe fine that two different perspectives coexist, more or less inclined to see pedagogical value in AI, without any of them being “mistaken”.

It remains my view that you are holding fast to unexamined opinions and assumptions which work their way into your perception of the arguments, yet you feel as if you are confronting them with 'fresh eyes' and without bias. You feel just as confident in your unbiased reasoning as you felt when reasoning through the VR issue,
No, confidence is not the right word. My true level of ‘confidence’ in the question can be assessed from my initial post in this thread. I was signaling there is something to clarify, not because I felt unbiased (I know I'm biased) but because there is a writing in which, according to the rules of standard language, generalized evaluations are made that elicit question marks. There's not too much my unexamined opinions could do to make general statements fictionally appear to my consciousness, if there were none in black and white in the text. I don’t think either that my biases could eclipse any statement of pedagogical value from my sight, if there were any. Conversely, my unexamined opinions can operate with great effect, when it’s a matter of understanding something much larger such as the evolutionary meaning of VR. So my only confidence is that there is something worth clarifying. Everything else that you call confidence is in the result of the blowup due to the turn this conversation has taken. I am unfortunately not good at keeping that separate from the argumentation itself.

yet on the latter you eventually recognized the following: “I might embark on these familiar thinking tracks sometimes, without realizing it. Then I might reemerge above the surface of unconsciousness, somewhere down the road, maybe prompted by a comment. As a consequence, I would typically try to sew together elements of the old and new thinking paths, to bridge the discontinuity with a half logic, half stubborn sewing thread. Obviously the result cannot be smooth and flawless.” That doesn't mean the same thing is happening here, but it's a distinct possibility and we shouldn't underestimate it - these habits don't just fade away that easily. It also remains my view that you will gain a lot of value from these 'half stubborn sewing' attempts as long as you remain open to their existence and to digging deeper into their significance. Perhaps what Cleric pointed out about the GPT bot is also pedagogical in this situation: “It's like contemplating the cognitive labyrinths into which we fights each other, passionately identifying with one or another corridor. In a certain sense we can be stricken with the fact how elementary in a certain respect, how superficial, today's thinking life really is. It's like GPT says "Here, look at me. I'm the summary of the framework in which you spend your lives. I'm a superficial projection of the linguistic labyrinth in which you are lost and in the corridors of which you unleash your passions.”
The recognition I made above regards how I had approached the idea of descent in the sensory spectrum, when I had questioned its ability to teach new insights to spiritually awakened persons. There was no reference to the VR issue in particular. Although I recognized some thinking issues, I couldn’t entirely unveil how such recognition is supposed to guide choice, and action, and descent, and redemption in the physical plane. It remains an unsolved question for me.
Anyways, yes, I want to remain vigilant on how these flaws keep operating, as I am sure they do. With this in mind, I repeat I feel confident in the rationality of my questions here. Not because I feel unbiased, but because they are basic, circumscribed questions. I don’t feel “certain shame” (referring now to Cleric’s comment you quoted) with regards to this particular question I posed in this thread. I do feel certain shame for the superficial, labyrinth-wandering mode of my everyday thinking, for example in work, and even here, at times. I also feel it with regards to exchanges like this one, when I struggle, like now, to remain centered in my thinking, measured in my language, and neutral to the specific person I’m exchanging with, in this case you.


***

Of course, I am not immune to mistaking the superficial thinking projections of my soul-life for my 'pure, unbiased reasoning' either. In this situation, I have the added benefit of knowing Max, having conversations with him, and understanding the spiritual foundation from which his arguments flow forth. It is a foundation which is centered in Christ. Again, I think this particular essay had a very limited scope and was addressed mainly to the average person without any PoF or spiritual scientific understanding, so such issues weren't even within the orbit of his arguments at all. The essay simply wasn't speaking to this issue in the least, except for a brief part at the end. When we speak of sacrificial-redemptive 'descent' to restore the 'very good' creation - to elevate our humanity - the image of the Christ events should be the first which come to mind. I am very confident that when Max speaks of 'elevation of our humanity', he has exactly the Christ ideal in mind.

"And immediately, coming up from the water, He [Jesus] saw the heavens parting and the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove."

After the Baptism, we of course have the further 'descent' of the incarnate Christ-being into the belly of the Jewish and Roman powers that be (the latter being like the technological materialist Goliath of its time), into the darkest depths of despair, torture, and crucifixion to fulfill the Will of the Father. Christ within us is the high redemptive ideal. He is the courage which makes us strong, brave, and fearless when confronting the depths of the materialistic world. There is nothing beyond the sphere of redemption when Christ lives in our hearts. I will reiterate here, though, that it hardly matters whether I am correct about Max or not. Whether, if he were to write a follow up essay actually addressing this issue, he would make similar points to those we made in the VR discussion. What matters is whether we understand this high ideal and are willing to seek it with open minds and open hearts.

Well, thanks for suggesting this interpretation of the final prescription. Based on the little I can gather from my ignorant perspective, it seems very reasonable. But it also makes it unreasonable that the essay was addressed to the average materialist, unaware of PoF and impressed by the intelligence of the chat bot. How could Max imagine that such an average person would grasp the sense of the prescription? Anyway, this is too much speculation. I am sure I have exhausted anyone who for some reason has kept reading to this point, including you and me. Thank you for sharing your thoughts at length.

Your strategy of "asking" here has been similar to,

Q: What's your favorite color?
A: Blue.
Q: But you said it was red earlier [insert quote which doesn't clearly say blue or red], so what's the reason for this discrepancy?
A: The initial quote meant [insert explanation] and therefore is aligned with the blue answer.
Q: I don't think so... that didn't seem to be the 'spirit' (intent) of the initial quote. Also, why did this other person say your favorite color is red?
A: He didn't - he wasn't even aware the question about my favorite color was asked.
Conclusion: I disagree, he was clearly talking about your favorite color. But I'm not supposing anything here, just asking!

Do you see the issue here? It's quite odd when someone tells you that you don't realize the spirit of your own comment a few weeks ago, and therefore rejects your attempts to explain the apparent discrepancy with someone else's comment, assuming the latter's comment must be relevant to the earlier comment, also finding the explanations to be "overly cautious" and not tying in with their questions (which weren't asked), and then keeps asking for more explanations until they converge with your expectations of what the explanation should be. But my explanation isn't going to change. Here's yet another angle on the same explanation that I included in my initial response to you. You quoted Cleric before:


Ashvin, I referred to that old statement once. It was two or three exchanges ago. You said it wasn't relevant, and I immediately let it out of the discussion, and I have only been referring to this thread since. Why do you bring it back now? By the way, it should be noticed that you asked me to stop interpreting your old statement, and to stick to this thread, however you continually try to drag the conversation back to the VR discussion, and to what I supposedly admitted about VR, based on your interpretation.

it's worth noting that being able to think in more than one language is already a very good way to loosen the etheric body, if we turn it into a conscious exercise. If we meditate on producing the same meaning in different languages, we'll quickly see that our spiritual being lives in the meaning itself. The languages are only symbolic gestures expressing that meaning. When we advance on the path of spiritual development, we attain to the possibility to think directly within this layer of meaning in pictorial form, without having to precipitate words.

My position is that you are approaching Max's essay as if the few sentences on the 'dangerous and pernicious' aspects of GPT bot exhaust the meaning of the intuitive intent with respect to the much more involved topic we were discussing on the VR thread, i.e. the redemptive value of material technologies and phenomena in general within the context of holistic spiritual evolution. Or you are at least saying it's still 'up in the air' and that's why you keep asking about it. But it's obvious that this wasn't a topic of consideration for the essay. If it were brought up, the essay would be much longer and I would hazard a guess that most of his readership would have no idea what he was going on about. Many of them may not have any concrete understanding of "spiritual evolution" to begin with. I had a difficult enough time making my arguments across pages of the VR thread without delving into 'arcane' details of spiritual science. Either way, there is no justification to draw any such conclusions from the few words which were written.

Again, I don't draw conclusions (seems like I wrote the blue paragraphs above for just nothing) I draw questions, based on what those few words suggest. You say those suggestions are not relevant to infer possible discepancies between your positions, because they are addressed to a different audience. Ok, I'll try to live with that!

This is why I say positions and debates are being "manufactured". The 'asking' stops being understandable when this is repeatedly pointed out to you yet you refuse to accept the explanation, while, at the same time, not offering any alternative explanation of your own for the supposed discrepancy. I understand perfectly well why you initially felt there was a discrepancy, but I don't understand why you continually refuse to seriously consider the explanation that there is no discrepancy based on this one short essay.

I don't continually refuse anything. I definitely wrote paragraphs for nothing. Your explanation relies on the fact that these few sentences about the danger AI are 1) addressed to a different audience, and 2) are not significant in relation to the length of the essay. As said, I agree the discrepancy is not ascertained. Surely a longer essay with spiritual scientific elaboration would have helped! And I am doing my best to believe the audience makes the difference. What to say... I hope that longer essay will come, so that those few sentences can be either confirmed or overturned!

[Federica]

Ashvin,
I want to stress that there is no need to hypothesize that Max is wrong, in order to make me go somewhere with this line of argument. You want to imply the only way out is to hypothetically concede to me that he's wrong. But this is false. See below.

Also, since it seems there is nowhere left to go with this particular line of argument, although I am open to hearing any response, let me also posit a hypothetical:

Max was wrong.

I am not in a position to determine if he’s “mistaken” in his arguments, hence my initial questions! Moreover, it’s maybe fine that two different perspectives coexist, more or less inclined to see pedagogical value in AI, without any of them being “mistaken”.

He took a generalized unredemptive position towards the GPT technology in that essay.

I now know and accept your explanation how to read the prescription in terms of Christ events, but notice that even before that, I never thought Max's positon was unredemptive:

the prescription offered points to counterbalancing the non-human, through the “elevation” of humanity. If we carefully consider the meaning, elevation has the opposite meaning to ‘descent’. Therefore, it seems to me there is at the very least a strong clue that the sort of redemption conceived by Max Leyf could be different from the one we have been discussing on the other thread, which comprised the idea of descent.

I should have noticed he was taking that position before sharing the essay, but I didn't.

You did notice the "position": "in all honesty, when I was posting the Max essay, I thought, 'maybe Federica will think this is at odds with my previous position on VR and I should address that now, but then I decided not to. "

What Cleric responded by itself shows that there can be redemptive value from exploring the GPT chat with living thinking i.e. openness to Self-knowledge. What is your position on that now?

Because this technology arranges language, it can be instantly experienced besides the forum, or even from within the forum, by reading the bot’s answers, which we have done. Different from VR in this respect. So Cleric’s comment has not argued or suggested a pedagogical value. It has made the technology pedagogical on the spot, directly. Incidentally this “position” was already clear from my latest blue comments (Did I already say I must have written them for nothing?)
Why do you call the value we can extract from it “redemptive” and not pedagogical? We can learn about ourselves by looking in the mirror of the bot’s chatter, but to redeem the technology it would be necessary that it doesn’t express/impress any harmful intents anymore, I would think. The site should be visited like a museum is visited, not with the intent of delegating thought production. What is the real meaning of redemption? Isn’t ‘saving by transforming’?

[AshvinP]

So then I tried to make it more explicit (euphemism) and you dug your heels in further (dysphemism). We still haven't heard your explanation for what is going on - why is it that I (and perhaps Cleric) cannot notice this stark contradiction in the arguments about material technology?
I don’t know what’s going on, hence my initial post with questions! It would be pretentious of me to make suppositions about what’s going on. You are the one who, on the one hand, see the appearance (I'm using this word to give the benefit of doubt) of generalized statement of danger with AI in the essay, as described in my orange-blue post (you even said that in all honesty you were expecting my doubts!) and, on the other hand, negate it, letting nonetheless my specific questions fall (I still have no answers on generalization, context, and whether you still pretend I have mental issues bordering insanity).
So you may know why Max expressed things in the way he did. But you must know why you have been first minimizing (“This is admittedly a bit more complex and I am not sure exactly where Max stands…”) and later negating ("You are manufacturing your own generalized, absolutized argument about 'dangerous and pernicious' AI technology and projecting that onto what Max wrote") the apparent divergence. Therefore, instead of supposing/concluding, I asked!

Am I just too biased in favor of Max and feel the need to defend him at all costs? Or was Max's argument, similar to your argument on VR, a valid position on the absolute 'dangerous and pernicious' nature of these technologies and it just took his essay for me to admit it, but now I am trying to avoid that admission?
That you have an actively protective attitude towards the ones you have consideration for is beyond any doubt.
Now, I tried to stay open to alternative explanations. Hence my initial questions! Max’s position certainly sounds (as I put it) at odds with yours (should I add that any reference to possible pedagogical value is lacking in it) but if it really is at odds with yours, I still have to ascertain. I am trying to!

One thing to consider is as follows - what if Max is mistaken in his arguments, similar to how you were on the VR issue? What have we learned about the principles of spiritual evolution and where do we go from there? I think we can learn a lot about our own cognitive pathways by asking what the result of our questioning and arguments would be - will it simply prove us 'right' on something yet leave us in the dark on advancing our living spiritual understanding.
Again, I am reluctant to build a house of cards on unascertained suppositions. I am not in a position to determine if he’s “mistaken” in his arguments, hence my initial questions! Moreover, it’s maybe fine that two different perspectives coexist, more or less inclined to see pedagogical value in AI, without any of them being “mistaken”.

It remains my view that you are holding fast to unexamined opinions and assumptions which work their way into your perception of the arguments, yet you feel as if you are confronting them with 'fresh eyes' and without bias. You feel just as confident in your unbiased reasoning as you felt when reasoning through the VR issue,
No, confidence is not the right word. My true level of ‘confidence’ in the question can be assessed from my initial post in this thread. I was signaling there is something to clarify, not because I felt unbiased (I know I'm biased) but because there is a writing in which, according to the rules of standard language, generalized evaluations are made that elicit question marks. There's not too much my unexamined opinions could do to make general statements fictionally appear to my consciousness, if there were none in black and white in the text. I don’t think either that my biases could eclipse any statement of pedagogical value from my sight, if there were any. Conversely, my unexamined opinions can operate with great effect, when it’s a matter of understanding something much larger such as the evolutionary meaning of VR. So my only confidence is that there is something worth clarifying. Everything else that you call confidence is in the result of the blowup due to the turn this conversation has taken. I am unfortunately not good at keeping that separate from the argumentation itself.

yet on the latter you eventually recognized the following: “I might embark on these familiar thinking tracks sometimes, without realizing it. Then I might reemerge above the surface of unconsciousness, somewhere down the road, maybe prompted by a comment. As a consequence, I would typically try to sew together elements of the old and new thinking paths, to bridge the discontinuity with a half logic, half stubborn sewing thread. Obviously the result cannot be smooth and flawless.” That doesn't mean the same thing is happening here, but it's a distinct possibility and we shouldn't underestimate it - these habits don't just fade away that easily. It also remains my view that you will gain a lot of value from these 'half stubborn sewing' attempts as long as you remain open to their existence and to digging deeper into their significance. Perhaps what Cleric pointed out about the GPT bot is also pedagogical in this situation: “It's like contemplating the cognitive labyrinths into which we fights each other, passionately identifying with one or another corridor. In a certain sense we can be stricken with the fact how elementary in a certain respect, how superficial, today's thinking life really is. It's like GPT says "Here, look at me. I'm the summary of the framework in which you spend your lives. I'm a superficial projection of the linguistic labyrinth in which you are lost and in the corridors of which you unleash your passions.”
The recognition I made above regards how I had approached the idea of descent in the sensory spectrum, when I had questioned its ability to teach new insights to spiritually awakened persons. There was no reference to the VR issue in particular. Although I recognized some thinking issues, I couldn’t entirely unveil how such recognition is supposed to guide choice, and action, and descent, and redemption in the physical plane. It remains an unsolved question for me.
Anyways, yes, I want to remain vigilant on how these flaws keep operating, as I am sure they do. With this in mind, I repeat I feel confident in the rationality of my questions here. Not because I feel unbiased, but because they are basic, circumscribed questions. I don’t feel “certain shame” (referring now to Cleric’s comment you quoted) with regards to this particular question I posed in this thread. I do feel certain shame for the superficial, labyrinth-wandering mode of my everyday thinking, for example in work, and even here, at times. I also feel it with regards to exchanges like this one, when I struggle, like now, to remain centered in my thinking, measured in my language, and neutral to the specific person I’m exchanging with, in this case you.


***

Federica,

Since you wanted me to address your blue text:

I was expecting your doubts because I thought you would draw too many generalized conclusions from what Max wrote in those few sentences, not because I thought there was actually a generalized statement of danger with AI expressed by him. I am taking "generalized" here to mean a blanket statement that there is no redemptive pedagogical value to these phenomena for living thinking, or some text which very clearly implies that. There could be no such statement because the entire topic of 'redemptive pedagogical value for living thinking' was beyond the purview of the essay. That is also why I was not sure exactly where Max stands - because there is no indication of where he stands in the essay and I have never discussed that particular topic with him. I said that "I have my guesses" because of the Christ-centered spiritual foundation mentioned previously, which is practically synonymous with "all Earthly phenomena will be redeemed through the course of our active spiritual evolution". In a real concrete sense, the redemption has already happened and our current task is to become more conscious of how it has happened. That is how we participate in the redemption.

Besides this influence, a second, different stream is also making itself felt. This is geared to helping us find the Christ-principle, as we call it, in all we do... the angelic beings who reached their goal in the ancient Egypto-Chaldean cultural period and encountered Christ at that time can instill other ideas in us. They can teach us that substance is permeated with the spirit of Christ right down to the smallest parts of the world. And, however strange it may seem now, a time will come when chemistry and physics will not be taught as they are today... Instead, scientists will teach that matter is built up piece by piece the way Christ ordered it. People will find Christ even in the laws of chemistry and physics, and a spiritual chemistry and a spiritual physics will develop.

Undoubtedly this now seems to many people merely a daydream or worse. But yesterday's folly is often tomorrow's wisdom. Careful observers can already discern the factors working toward this end in our cultural development.

We should be clear that, although the necessity of the redemptive principle to make spiritual evolution possible is clear enough to discern, the question of what it truly means and how it will happen is a very complex spiritual scientific one, and it will take much peristent effort on our part to progressively answer the question. Our life itself should begin to answer the question. My point in the hypothetical was to imply that the line of questioning about whether Max was right, wrong, or something in between, in the best possible circumstance where we reach a firm resolution, would only lead us to the beginning of a complex inquiry which we could tackle much more directly, leaving Max out of it altogether, and which has value for our understanding of what the redemptive spiritual evolutionary process entails. Our spiritual activity is already four convolutions deep in the bureaucracy of our conceptual thinking, so we don't need to make it even more of a bureaucratic endurance by teasing apart sentences and wordings. Instead we should seek the leeway of our inverted spiritual activity which rises from the fragmented perceptions to fleshed out holistic intuition.

Playing by the rules of standard language won't get us very far at all if we intend to pursue this red thread of redemption upwards. This is why I say the topic is nowhere to be found in Max's essay. In my view, and perhaps contrary to your expectations, it's not one that can be discursively analyzed by the intellect. It certainly won't be treated adequately in any short paragraph or essay. It's basically what Cleric is also writing about on the Demiurge thread:

Here’s something subtle that we very often overlook. Let’s say that a cup falls down and shatters. Then I think “I wish that didn’t happen. If the world is of spiritual essence why can’t I simply imagine the pieces coming back together and the cup jumping intact on my desk?” But in the literal sense we do exactly that! We imagine the cup coming together. This is what we do with our spiritual activity and this is what we get! We indeed steer the World state in a direction where we imagine the cup coming together. And all of this is really part of the World state, our brain fires differently in that direction – firing that is in harmony with the holistic direction in which we move.

When we imagine the cup coming together we steer through states where we experience such imaginative content and it is holistically in tune with corresponding parts of the sensory spectrum. We shouldn’t conceive that our imagination ‘sends waves’ that cause the brain to fire in some way or vice versa. The World-state evolves as something whole. The question is in what ways we can feel creatively responsible for the evolution of the state.

To summarize – when we imagine the cup coming together, this is what we get – we evolve towards a World state where the contents of our imagination and the brain state, and in fact everything in the Cosmos, is just what it should be for our state to be what it is.

It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.

If we can't imagine ways in which the 'humpty dumpty' of holistic spiritual phenomena can be put back together again after cracking into the zillion fragments of physical, life, soul, and cultural phenomena, then it simply means we need to work on our imagination (myself included, of couse). As Cleric said before, everything should stand before us as a mighty riddle. The redemption has already happened through the Christ-being's descent into the physical plane, yet it is also going to happen through our lawful ascent as we become true humans - the imagination begins to resolve these seeming paradoxes for the intellect. Redemption (elevation of our humanity) is not either descent or ascent, it is both/and (I know this may sound like a Lou-ism, but all the spiritual evolutionary value comes in discerning exactly how it is both/and).

Because this technology arranges language, it can be instantly experienced besides the forum, or even from within the forum, by reading the bot’s answers, which we have done. Different from VR in this respect. So Cleric’s comment has not argued or suggested a pedagogical value. It has made the technology pedagogical on the spot, directly. Incidentally this “position” was already clear from my latest blue comments (Did I already say I must have written them for nothing?)
Why do you call the value we can extract from it “redemptive” and not pedagogical? We can learn about ourselves by looking in the mirror of the bot’s chatter, but to redeem the technology it would be necessary that it doesn’t express/impress any harmful intents anymore, I would think. The site should be visited like a museum is visited, not with the intent of delegating thought production. What is the real meaning of redemption? Isn’t ‘saving by transforming’?

I'm not sure what you mean it has made the technology pedagogical on the spot. Cleric was suggesting that it would be pedagogical if we are able to confront its implications honestly and really internalize how our own thinking, flowing through unconscious linguistic pathways conditioned by our passionate soul-life, is often imitatively reconfiguring elements already known to it, trying to figure out which words should follow which other words with its shallow probabilistic assessment. We often have no sense for how new spiritual impulses flow into our soul-life and really make possible all novel individual ideas and cultural development. Instead we find ways to be convinced that our habitual thinking comes up with new ideas and builds culture from the bottom-up. Then we hold passionate debates about who is better at building up the culture than whom. Instead we can attune ourselves to these top-down forces which have already solved the problems of tribalized human culture, have already redeemed the fragmented materializing technology of the world. To gain this pedagogical value takes a lot of interactive, introspective effort - it's not about only asking the bot questions and reading its answers (not implying that's what you meant).

Extracting the spiritual pedagogical value of phenomena is one and the same with their redemption. That's because their redemption is one and the same with the process of learning more about ourselves through them. It is saving by transforming ourselves so that we may be transformed by the guiding forces - "change your inner being [metanoia], for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near". The transformation is no orindary thing - it's the same sort of transformation we go through to some extent during sleep, to a more expansive extent after our physical death, and that the Earth goes through at the end of her ages. It is more properly called a 'transfiguration'. The moral experiences we attain through living knowledge of the phenomenal world, and therefore ourselves, are transmuted into spiritual forces which will progressively feed back through to transformations of the phenomenal world into more and more spiritualized states. We shouldn't expect the potential expression of harmful intents to go away - that would be a regression to an instinctive 'morality', rather than a fully conscious one. It is precisely because we have difficulty imagining these dynamics with ordinary thinking that we should be impelled to transform ourselves further - if we had no difficulty imagining, then we would always be satisfied with where we currently are.

Of course there is much more to be said on this topic, but I will leave it here for now.

[Federica]

Federica,

Since you wanted me to address your blue text:

I was expecting your doubts because I thought you would draw too many generalized conclusions from what Max wrote in those few sentences, not because I thought there was actually a generalized statement of danger with AI expressed by him. I am taking "generalized" here to mean a blanket statement that there is no redemptive pedagogical value to these phenomena for living thinking, or some text which very clearly implies that. There could be no such statement because the entire topic of 'redemptive pedagogical value for living thinking' was beyond the purview of the essay. That is also why I was not sure exactly where Max stands - because there is no indication of where he stands in the essay and I have never discussed that particular topic with him. I said that "I have my guesses" because of the Christ-centered spiritual foundation mentioned previously, which is practically synonymous with "all Earthly phenomena will be redeemed through the course of our active spiritual evolution". In a real concrete sense, the redemption has already happened and our current task is to become more conscious of how it has happened. That is how we participate in the redemption.

Besides this influence, a second, different stream is also making itself felt. This is geared to helping us find the Christ-principle, as we call it, in all we do... the angelic beings who reached their goal in the ancient Egypto-Chaldean cultural period and encountered Christ at that time can instill other ideas in us. They can teach us that substance is permeated with the spirit of Christ right down to the smallest parts of the world. And, however strange it may seem now, a time will come when chemistry and physics will not be taught as they are today... Instead, scientists will teach that matter is built up piece by piece the way Christ ordered it. People will find Christ even in the laws of chemistry and physics, and a spiritual chemistry and a spiritual physics will develop.

Undoubtedly this now seems to many people merely a daydream or worse. But yesterday's folly is often tomorrow's wisdom. Careful observers can already discern the factors working toward this end in our cultural development.

We should be clear that, although the necessity of the redemptive principle to make spiritual evolution possible is clear enough to discern, the question of what it truly means and how it will happen is a very complex spiritual scientific one, and it will take much peristent effort on our part to progressively answer the question. Our life itself should begin to answer the question. My point in the hypothetical was to imply that the line of questioning about whether Max was right, wrong, or something in between, in the best possible circumstance where we reach a firm resolution, would only lead us to the beginning of a complex inquiry which we could tackle much more directly, leaving Max out of it altogether, and which has value for our understanding of what the redemptive spiritual evolutionary process entails. Our spiritual activity is already four convolutions deep in the bureaucracy of our conceptual thinking, so we don't need to make it even more of a bureaucratic endurance by teasing apart sentences and wordings. Instead we should seek the leeway of our inverted spiritual activity which rises from the fragmented perceptions to fleshed out holistic intuition.

Playing by the rules of standard language won't get us very far at all if we intend to pursue this red thread of redemption upwards. This is why I say the topic is nowhere to be found in Max's essay. In my view, and perhaps contrary to your expectations, it's not one that can be discursively analyzed by the intellect. It certainly won't be treated adequately in any short paragraph or essay. It's basically what Cleric is also writing about on the Demiurge thread:

Here’s something subtle that we very often overlook. Let’s say that a cup falls down and shatters. Then I think “I wish that didn’t happen. If the world is of spiritual essence why can’t I simply imagine the pieces coming back together and the cup jumping intact on my desk?” But in the literal sense we do exactly that! We imagine the cup coming together. This is what we do with our spiritual activity and this is what we get! We indeed steer the World state in a direction where we imagine the cup coming together. And all of this is really part of the World state, our brain fires differently in that direction – firing that is in harmony with the holistic direction in which we move.

When we imagine the cup coming together we steer through states where we experience such imaginative content and it is holistically in tune with corresponding parts of the sensory spectrum. We shouldn’t conceive that our imagination ‘sends waves’ that cause the brain to fire in some way or vice versa. The World-state evolves as something whole. The question is in what ways we can feel creatively responsible for the evolution of the state.

To summarize – when we imagine the cup coming together, this is what we get – we evolve towards a World state where the contents of our imagination and the brain state, and in fact everything in the Cosmos, is just what it should be for our state to be what it is.

It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.

If we can't imagine ways in which the 'humpty dumpty' of holistic spiritual phenomena can be put back together again after cracking into the zillion fragments of physical, life, soul, and cultural phenomena, then it simply means we need to work on our imagination (myself included, of couse). As Cleric said before, everything should stand before us as a mighty riddle. The redemption has already happened through the Christ-being's descent into the physical plane, yet it is also going to happen through our lawful ascent as we become true humans - the imagination begins to resolve these seeming paradoxes for the intellect. Redemption (elevation of our humanity) is not either descent or ascent, it is both/and (I know this may sound like a Lou-ism, but all the spiritual evolutionary value comes in discerning exactly how it is both/and).

Because this technology arranges language, it can be instantly experienced besides the forum, or even from within the forum, by reading the bot’s answers, which we have done. Different from VR in this respect. So Cleric’s comment has not argued or suggested a pedagogical value. It has made the technology pedagogical on the spot, directly. Incidentally this “position” was already clear from my latest blue comments (Did I already say I must have written them for nothing?)
Why do you call the value we can extract from it “redemptive” and not pedagogical? We can learn about ourselves by looking in the mirror of the bot’s chatter, but to redeem the technology it would be necessary that it doesn’t express/impress any harmful intents anymore, I would think. The site should be visited like a museum is visited, not with the intent of delegating thought production. What is the real meaning of redemption? Isn’t ‘saving by transforming’?

I'm not sure what you mean it has made the technology pedagogical on the spot. Cleric was suggesting that it would be pedagogical if we are able to confront its implications honestly and really internalize how our own thinking, flowing through unconscious linguistic pathways conditioned by our passionate soul-life, is often imitatively reconfiguring elements already known to it, trying to figure out which words should follow which other words with its shallow probabilistic assessment. We often have no sense for how new spiritual impulses flow into our soul-life and really make possible all novel individual ideas and cultural development. Instead we find ways to be convinced that our habitual thinking comes up with new ideas and builds culture from the bottom-up. Then we hold passionate debates about who is better at building up the culture than whom. Instead we can attune ourselves to these top-down forces which have already solved the problems of tribalized human culture, have already redeemed the fragmented materializing technology of the world. To gain this pedagogical value takes a lot of interactive, introspective effort - it's not about only asking the bot questions and reading its answers (not implying that's what you meant).

Extracting the spiritual pedagogical value of phenomena is one and the same with their redemption. That's because their redemption is one and the same with the process of learning more about ourselves through them. It is saving by transforming ourselves so that we may be transformed by the guiding forces - "change your inner being [metanoia], for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near". The transformation is no orindary thing - it's the same sort of transformation we go through to some extent during sleep, to a more expansive extent after our physical death, and that the Earth goes through at the end of her ages. It is more properly called a 'transfiguration'. The moral experiences we attain through living knowledge of the phenomenal world, and therefore ourselves, are transmuted into spiritual forces which will progressively feed back through to transformations of the phenomenal world into more and more spiritualized states. We shouldn't expect the potential expression of harmful intents to go away - that would be a regression to an instinctive 'morality', rather than a fully conscious one. It is precisely because we have difficulty imagining these dynamics with ordinary thinking that we should be impelled to transform ourselves further - if we had no difficulty imagining, then we would always be satisfied with where we currently are.

Of course there is much more to be said on this topic, but I will leave it here for now.

************

In a real concrete sense, the redemption has already happened and our current task is to become more conscious of how it has happened. That is how we participate in the redemption.

I am sure this is connected to a proper understanding of time, and this must be why I can’t grasp the real (living) meaning of the already happened redemption. Abstractly, I see it means the focus should go on conscious integration/conscious steering, which somehow, would more and more translate in a reality on all planes, including the physical. Then, whether or not the redemption is really accomplished, the broken cup is really reconstituted, and so on, will dissolve as questions, as we move our home in the control room of the creative unfolding of our states. But we have to initiate that understanding by a willed imaginative act, so that we can see more and more states, larger and larger states as affectable/affected by our intentional activity. As soon as they appear as affectable in our consciousness, they become affected. I see all that. But only as an intellectual reasoning. When I try to quit the reasoning, and to descend in the realization, i.e. when I try to make it, with my thinking gestures, I get either stuck in a Sci-Fi-like scenario, or scared by a sort of feeling of implosion, that powerfully thrusts me back to where I was coming from. So I’m back to seizing the realization at its word-handles with the pliers of my intellect. In the end, only the words remain caught in the grip, and the realization itself vanishes. I see that the verbal structure of our languages does not help. It’s a decohering school. It’s by far the most consistent education we have ever received in our life, it should stay at the top of our education section in our resumes: “date-of-birth - to date / ubiquitous - World Decohering School”

Our spiritual activity is already four convolutions deep in the bureaucracy of our conceptual thinking, so we don't need to make it even more of a bureaucratic endurance by teasing apart sentences and wordings. Instead we should seek the leeway of our inverted spiritual activity which rises from the fragmented perceptions to fleshed out holistic intuition.

Yes, I’m eager to find these coordinates and direction.

Playing by the rules of standard language won't get us very far at all if we intend to pursue this red thread of redemption upwards. This is why I say the topic is nowhere to be found in Max's essay. In my view, and perhaps contrary to your expectations, it's not one that can be discursively analyzed by the intellect. It certainly won't be treated adequately in any short paragraph or essay.

Yes, I have some awareness of the inadequacies of standard language.
Coming to Cleric’s post and the broken cup example, as I said, I find it somewhat scary, in a strange way. In a sense it has the taste of tautology. Not saying of course it’s a tautological illustration, but only that such taste signals to me I can’t properly grasp it. Tautology and implosion. I can’t explain that rationally, it’s a feeling. Or maybe it's not a feeling, it's an unconsequential thought. I'm not sure. Rationally I do follow the argument, as I’ve described above. Yet there is, in that post, a specific element that has somewhat advanced my holistic understanding, as far as I can tell. Similar to the plunge feeling you recently described. These were the crucial words for me, both helping and scary (not a contradiction):

It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.

***

If we can't imagine ways in which the 'humpty dumpty' of holistic spiritual phenomena can be put back together again after cracking into the zillion fragments of physical, life, soul, and cultural phenomena, then it simply means we need to work on our imagination (myself included, of couse). As Cleric said before, everything should stand before us as a mighty riddle. The redemption has already happened through the Christ-being's descent into the physical plane, yet it is also going to happen through our lawful ascent as we become true humans - the imagination begins to resolve these seeming paradoxes for the intellect. Redemption (elevation of our humanity) is not either descent or ascent, it is both/and (I know this may sound like a Lou-ism, but all the spiritual evolutionary value comes in discerning exactly how it is both/and).

I am following this summary.

I'm not sure what you mean it has made the technology pedagogical on the spot.

I mean that the pedagogical value can be experienced immediately. Provided that one is open to looking at oneself in that mirror, the experience is instantly possible, because the mirror was brought right inside the thread. In the case of VR, that wouldn’t be possible. What I experienced is a less than edifying reflected image, not only of the appearance of my language-shaped thinking as conditioned by my passionate soul-life, but also of my soul-life itself.

our own thinking is often imitatively reconfiguring elements already known to it, trying to figure out which words should follow which other words with its shallow probabilistic assessment.
Instead we can attune ourselves to these top-down forces which have already solved the problems of tribalized human culture, have already redeemed the fragmented materializing technology of the world.

Yes, I intuited that, but your more detailed illustration is helpful.

Extracting the spiritual pedagogical value of phenomena is one and the same with their redemption. That's because their redemption is one and the same with the process of learning more about ourselves through them. It is saving by transforming ourselves so that we may be transformed by the guiding forces - "change your inner being [metanoia], for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near". The transformation is no ordinary thing - it's the same sort of transformation we go through to some extent during sleep, to a more expansive extent after our physical death, and that the Earth goes through at the end of her ages. It is more properly called a 'transfiguration'. The moral experiences we attain through living knowledge of the phenomenal world, and therefore ourselves, are transmuted into spiritual forces which will progressively feed back through to transformations of the phenomenal world into more and more spiritualized states. We shouldn't expect the potential expression of harmful intents to go away - that would be a regression to an instinctive 'morality', rather than a fully conscious one. It is precisely because we have difficulty imagining these dynamics with ordinary thinking that we should be impelled to transform ourselves further - if we had no difficulty imagining, then we would always be satisfied with where we currently are.

Thank you.

[Cleric K]

Yes, I have some awareness of the inadequacies of standard language.
Coming to Cleric’s post and the broken cup example, as I said, I find it somewhat scary, in a strange way. In a sense it has the taste of tautology. Not saying of course it’s a tautological illustration, but only that such taste signals to me I can’t properly grasp it. Tautology and implosion. I can’t explain that rationally, it’s a feeling. Or maybe it's not a feeling, it's an unconsequential thought. I'm not sure. Rationally I do follow the argument, as I’ve described above. Yet there is, in that post, a specific element that has somewhat advanced my holistic understanding, as far as I can tell. Similar to the plunge feeling you recently described. These were the crucial words for me, both helping and scary (not a contradiction):

It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.

Maybe that example has been little misleading. I hope that it hasn't been gathered that in the future our life will consists into moulding the physical laws in any way we like, such as as reversing the shattering of a cup.

The example was meant only to counteract a common misconception in idealism (and a main reason why materialists instinctively reject it). Namely that reality is similar to our human-stage imagination (a dream or whatever) that we simply, for some strange reasons, can't reimagine differently. The goal was only to hint that the changes in the full spectrum of the World-state require corresponding forms of spiritual activity.

Even T, F, W can't be fully separated. It wouldn't be correct to say that thinking is only mental, while willing is the mental descending into the sensory. This is clearly not the case, since thinking already descends into the sensory as brain activity and probably in other ways which bend the configuration spaces of our bodily organism. What we call will is the form of activity that specifically engages the limb or speech system, through which we can metamorphose more of the World-state.

Putting cups together will probably never be something that we'll do. That's because such desires are very short-sighted. It's like having a fluid and wanting to reach in and exchange the positions of two droplets. Our hand however will inevitably set the whole volume in motion and will result in changes that we never intended. In a similar way we naively imagine that a cup should physically come together, yet we don't stop to think that if this is to happen, all kinds of consequences should ripple through. The cup doesn't exist in isolation. It's in contact with air, with electromagnetic fields and so on. If we would arbitrarily put the cup together we should also take care of the surrounding environment which should be rearranged accordingly. The flow of the physical laws should be disrupted because of our personal (and quite egoistic) desire. If we continue to work outwards we'll see that there's no boundary where we can say "this part of the physical world I can change without it having any consequences for the other parts." Everything is related, it's all communicating vessels.

In this sense, if that was to happen - to put the cup together - we simply don't realize that this would result into a wholly different World-state, where all laws have to be adapted to accommodate our local change.

Here I've cooked a very simple example of Fourier transform (I remind of this visual example). Think of the upper graph as the spatial picture that has to be drawn by the arrows, except that it is one dimensional. The lower graph shows what arrows we have to stack together tip to tail and how long each one has to be in order that their cumulative motion results in our desired form (the initial phase of the arrows is not presented on the graph). The bars to the left correspond to slower arrows, those to the right to quicker.

There's one thing to notice: draw some random shape and observe the spectrum below. Then change only one single bar from the upper graph and observe how all arrows have to be readjusted. For example, if we take the human figure of Fourier from the video and decide to keep everything the same except making the nose a little longer, we would have to readjust the length and phase of all arrows. This is very important to grasp. There are not arrows that are responsible for the nose, others that are responsible for the ear and so on. All arrows are responsible for everything and a small change in something local to the spatial picture requires change in all arrows.

This is the simple intuition that we have to gather. Trying to change a single bar from the spatial domain is like wanting to reconstruct our cup (changing its bar) while everything else remains the same. But if this was really to happen we would end up with a very different spectrum of reality, to the extent that the state before the reconstruction and the state after the reconstruction would be so dissimilar (as spiritual experience) that there's no way they can be experienced as lawfully following each other. In other words, there would be disruption in the continuity of consciousness.

This is the intuition about the way the World-state evolves. In theory we can imagine that our next state could be anything, yet only those that can be experienced as gradual integration of memory, can constitute the experience of evolving worldline of a being. This is really akin to the anthropic principle, except that we don't have to imagine external universes, some of which give the possibility of consciousness and some not.

The fact that we have used highly technical Fourier metaphor may sound too abstract and dubious. But this metaphor speaks to a very basic intuition. All we need is to follow the threads of phenomena and realize that nothings can be what it is if the whole remaining Cosmos was not in place in the way it is. If we were to change a single element this would have to reflect in all other elements in some way.

If we intuit the implications of this, it will also be palpable that our experience of having a nicely dissociated body and consciousness is only the result of a myopic experience. The World-state evolves as something whole. All phenomena are like entangled vessels, even if this seems absurd to the materialist. Actually, there's no reason for it to be absurd because it should be so even from the materialist's own perspective. If all the energy of the Cosmos has been in the singularity of the Big Bang then everything is already in quantum entanglement with each other. This entanglement is smeared out throughout the Universe yet what happens in a particle here in my body is in mathematical relations to what happens with every particle in the Universe, just like Alice's and Bob's entangled particles are related, even if very far apart.

Realizations like these can serve as scientific impetus for working against egoism. As long as we imagine that here on Earth or in some other sphere of existence, we're like an isolated bubble that can do whatever it wants without this having any consequences for the whole Cosmos, then we don't yet realize the interconnectedness of all existence.

The cup was used only as an example of how the totality of the World-state evolves but if taken in the wrong way (and I admit that in the way it was presented, the example readily invites such a wrong view) it gives the impression that we evolve as some more and more powerful ego that can singlehandedly reimagine reality in any way it wants. In reality, in the course of evolution we become more and more sensitive to the mutual dependence of all things and we steer our spiritual activity in constant intuition of the way all beings work together.

[AshvinP]

In a real concrete sense, the redemption has already happened and our current task is to become more conscious of how it has happened. That is how we participate in the redemption.

I am sure this is connected to a proper understanding of time, and this must be why I can’t grasp the real (living) meaning of the already happened redemption. Abstractly, I see it means the focus should go on conscious integration/conscious steering, which somehow, would more and more translate in a reality on all planes, including the physical. Then, whether or not the redemption is really accomplished, the broken cup is really reconstituted, and so on, will dissolve as questions, as we move our home in the control room of the creative unfolding of our states. But we have to initiate that understanding by a willed imaginative act, so that we can see more and more states, larger and larger states as affectable/affected by our intentional activity. As soon as they appear as affectable in our consciousness, they become affected. I see all that. But only as an intellectual reasoning. When I try to quit the reasoning, and to descend in the realization, i.e. when I try to make it, with my thinking gestures, I get either stuck in a Sci-Fi-like scenario, or scared by a sort of feeling of implosion, that powerfully thrusts me back to where I was coming from. So I’m back to seizing the realization at its word-handles with the pliers of my intellect. In the end, only the words remain caught in the grip, and the realization itself vanishes. I see that the verbal structure of our languages does not help. It’s a decohering school. It’s by far the most consistent education we have ever received in our life, it should stay at the top of our education section in our resumes: “date-of-birth - to date / ubiquitous - World Decohering School”

Our spiritual activity is already four convolutions deep in the bureaucracy of our conceptual thinking, so we don't need to make it even more of a bureaucratic endurance by teasing apart sentences and wordings. Instead we should seek the leeway of our inverted spiritual activity which rises from the fragmented perceptions to fleshed out holistic intuition.

Yes, I’m eager to find these coordinates and direction.

Playing by the rules of standard language won't get us very far at all if we intend to pursue this red thread of redemption upwards. This is why I say the topic is nowhere to be found in Max's essay. In my view, and perhaps contrary to your expectations, it's not one that can be discursively analyzed by the intellect. It certainly won't be treated adequately in any short paragraph or essay.

Yes, I have some awareness of the inadequacies of standard language.
Coming to Cleric’s post and the broken cup example, as I said, I find it somewhat scary, in a strange way. In a sense it has the taste of tautology. Not saying of course it’s a tautological illustration, but only that such taste signals to me I can’t properly grasp it. Tautology and implosion. I can’t explain that rationally, it’s a feeling. Or maybe it's not a feeling, it's an unconsequential thought. I'm not sure. Rationally I do follow the argument, as I’ve described above. Yet there is, in that post, a specific element that has somewhat advanced my holistic understanding, as far as I can tell. Similar to the plunge feeling you recently described. These were the crucial words for me, both helping and scary (not a contradiction):

It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.

***

If we can't imagine ways in which the 'humpty dumpty' of holistic spiritual phenomena can be put back together again after cracking into the zillion fragments of physical, life, soul, and cultural phenomena, then it simply means we need to work on our imagination (myself included, of couse). As Cleric said before, everything should stand before us as a mighty riddle. The redemption has already happened through the Christ-being's descent into the physical plane, yet it is also going to happen through our lawful ascent as we become true humans - the imagination begins to resolve these seeming paradoxes for the intellect. Redemption (elevation of our humanity) is not either descent or ascent, it is both/and (I know this may sound like a Lou-ism, but all the spiritual evolutionary value comes in discerning exactly how it is both/and).

I am following this summary.

I'm not sure what you mean it has made the technology pedagogical on the spot.

I mean that the pedagogical value can be experienced immediately. Provided that one is open to looking at oneself in that mirror, the experience is instantly possible, because the mirror was brought right inside the thread. In the case of VR, that wouldn’t be possible. What I experienced is a less than edifying reflected image, not only of the appearance of my language-shaped thinking as conditioned by my passionate soul-life, but also of my soul-life itself.

our own thinking is often imitatively reconfiguring elements already known to it, trying to figure out which words should follow which other words with its shallow probabilistic assessment.
Instead we can attune ourselves to these top-down forces which have already solved the problems of tribalized human culture, have already redeemed the fragmented materializing technology of the world.

Yes, I intuited that, but your more detailed illustration is helpful.

Extracting the spiritual pedagogical value of phenomena is one and the same with their redemption. That's because their redemption is one and the same with the process of learning more about ourselves through them. It is saving by transforming ourselves so that we may be transformed by the guiding forces - "change your inner being [metanoia], for the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near". The transformation is no ordinary thing - it's the same sort of transformation we go through to some extent during sleep, to a more expansive extent after our physical death, and that the Earth goes through at the end of her ages. It is more properly called a 'transfiguration'. The moral experiences we attain through living knowledge of the phenomenal world, and therefore ourselves, are transmuted into spiritual forces which will progressively feed back through to transformations of the phenomenal world into more and more spiritualized states. We shouldn't expect the potential expression of harmful intents to go away - that would be a regression to an instinctive 'morality', rather than a fully conscious one. It is precisely because we have difficulty imagining these dynamics with ordinary thinking that we should be impelled to transform ourselves further - if we had no difficulty imagining, then we would always be satisfied with where we currently are.

Thank you.

Federica,

I thought of another angle to approach from. Besides sleep and death, there is another phenomenon which is more accessible to our modern scientific understanding - the inner world of our physical body (which actually consists of the etheric-astral-ego depth structure as well). The outer world stands in a similar relation to this inner world as how our waking life stands in relation to sleep-death. It is a 'liminal space' in which our ordinary cognition has no knowledge or only dreamy knowledge of what is taking place. First we can notice that the inner world unfolds more directly to even our ordinary cognition as temporal processes, unlike the outer spatial world with its mostly fixed objects where we barely notice any evolution. 





Secular science falls prey to the aliasing effect - it simply assumes that what goes into the body from external nature, and what goes out of the body in the form of excretions, retains that fundamental character as it undergoes all the liminal processes within the body. What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil. Any one of these spaces - inner bodily world, sleep, death - if investigated carefully with living thinking, reveals very similar processes. It reveals the intentional activity of spiritual forces, in which we ourselves participate, which transmutes sense-perceptions, experiences, external substances, etc. into WFT forces which restore the vitality, health, life, spiritual content, of the former. Secular science speaks of this vaguely and abstractly with respect to sleeping-dreaming. Yet the archetypal spiritual reality of these liminal processes reveal much more profound truths. 

In any case, we see an immediate transformation when external, physical substances are taken in — let us say, by the mouth. We need only put a small grain of salt in the mouth and it is at once dissolved. The transformation is immediate. The physical body of man is not the same, in its inner nature, as the external world; it transforms what it takes in, and then transforms it back again. Thus we must seek for something within the human organism that is, at first, similar to external nature and, on excretion, becomes so again. It is what lies between these two stages that we must first discover.

Try to picture this that I have said: On the one hand, we have what the organism takes in; on the other, what it gives of including even the physical body as a whole. Between these are the processes within the organism itself. From the study of what the human physical organism takes in we can say nothing at all about the relation of man to external nature. We might put it this way: Though external physical nature does destroy man's corpse, dissolving and dissipating it, man does, with his organism, ‘get even’ with Nature. He dissolves everything he receives from her. Thus, when we commence with man's organs of assimilation, we find no relationship to external nature, for this is destroyed by them. We only find such a relationship when we turn to what man excretes. In relation to the form man bears into physical life, Nature is a destroyer; in regard to what man casts off, Nature receives what the human organism provides. Thus the human physical organism comes eventually to be very unlike itself and to resemble external Nature very much. It does this through excretion.

If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They are, today, just what they have become; but they have certainly not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys — or transforms — what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say ‘transforms’.) At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the substances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which some-thing within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.

Actually this restoration occurs every duration of our waking experience as well, and the qualia of that experience - colors, smells, tastes, sounds, textures - are forces at the threshold of the spiritual world continually impinging on our physical consciousness but dying out rapidly when we remain with ordinary waking cognition (unlike in our dreams where we open up to and flow along with them in an instinctive manner). It is the same principle as the thought-distractions - we are constantly dying in our inattentive selfish thoughts, returning to the spiritual world, and then reincarnating in 'fresh' thought by its good grace. In this sense, the redemptive principle is always at work within the liminal spaces of experience. 

Within color (as within the form of those entities that we behold) lies the hope that matter will again become light—the light that it is in the depths; moreover, there lies the hope that matter will reawaken as the light of ideas, as the warmth of life within the human soul. This is the Earth's secret. It is the secret of the light's rebirth insofar as it rises up as the fabric of thought, within thought, by ceasing to die out into the specter of space, or into the specter of time. We can reascend from the specter to the light.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 49). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

One clear aspect of what takes place in these liminal spaces is what Cleric has described as the 'last in, first out' principle of computer processing (that only being a dim mechanized cultural shadow of actual living processes). Throughout all of spiritual scientific research, we find descriptions of how we run through our experiences in reverse during sleep and after death. For ex., the reverse 'life-review' that we experience as an imagistic panaroma in the etheric body after casting off the physical body. A similar review happens every time we sleep.  Instead of experiencing only the outer physiognomy of those experiences in dim perceptions-concepts clothed in abstract space and linear time, we experience from the perspective of the inner spiritual forces which holistically impressed them. So these are really the same experiences viewed from opposite poles of consciousness, although that rhythmic alternating process introduces new shades of meaning to the experiences. Consider the following. 

Still another question arises here, moreover a very important one. — What happens when we have a very short sleep — for example an afternoon nap? Or indeed when we have a brief forty winks during a lecture, but really do go to sleep; the whole thing may last only two or three minutes, perhaps only a minute or half a minute. What happens then? If the sleep were real, we were in the spiritual world during that half minute.

The truth is, my dear friends, that for this short nap even during a lecture, the same holds good as for the all-night sleep of a lie-a-bed — I mean, of course, a human lie-a-bed! As a matter of fact, whenever a man falls asleep, even for a brief moment, the whole sleep is a unity and the astral body is an unconscious prophet; it surveys the whole sleep up to the point of waking ... in perspective, of course. What is remote may lack clarity, as when a short-sighted person looks down an avenue and does not see the trees at the farther end of it. In the same way the astral body may be short-sighted, figuratively speaking, in the subconscious. Its perception does not reach the point where the individual earth-lives begin. But broadly speaking, the fact is that even during the briefest sleep we rush with tremendous, lightning-like rapidity through all our earthly lives. This is a matter of extraordinary significance. Naturally it is all very hazy; but if somebody falls asleep during a lecture, then the lecturer or those who share his power of observation have it in front of them. Think of it: the whole of earth-evolution, together with what the sleeper has experienced in previous earthly lives! When somebody falls asleep during a lecture everything lacks clarity because it happens with such terrific rapidity; one thing merges quickly into another, but it is there, nevertheless. From this you will understand that karma is perpetually present, inscribed as it were in the World-Chronicle. And every time a man falls asleep he has opportunity to approach his karma. This is one of the great secrets of existence.

Every short nap we take, we have the opportunity of approaching our entire Karma and thereby setting on the process of redeeming it. In other words, every duration of our experienced world-state is only what it is because the holistic forces of our entire spiritual evolution continually inflow our consciousness and thereby constitute it. These fundamental principles of our spiritual existence shouldn't be treated as only partially applicable, which is practically how the secular culture treats them - when it comes to dead things of the perceptible world, the principles are upheld dogmatically, but when it comes to living things, to ideal things, to moral things, the liminal forces from which the principles actually flow forth, they are discarded or modified or selectively paid attention to as we please. The redemptive principle which works through the liminal spaces of experience is not only limited to certain phenomena and not others - to natural phenomena and not cultural phenomena, or to some cultural phenomena and not others. They are universally applicable, which is why we have such an archetypally and lawfully structured spiritual evolution which reflects dimly, at our current stage, into our natural and cultural laws.

It is very true that discerning these principles is only the very beginning of our work and they will remain things we are seizing only with the pliers of the intellect until we also persistently engage our inverted spiritual activity during meditation, so that we make more conscious this ceaseless inflowing of Cosmic impulses from the liminal spaces. The meditative state is a willful trusting of our thinking force to the Wise spiritual guidance of humankind. Nevertheless, that spiritual guidance needs something to work with and these holistic principles we are discerning through our conceptual reasoning provide it with the foundation on which our Imaginative life can be erected, or the purified sheaths in which the Spirit can find a proper vessel for its intuitive becoming. Trust me, I know the feeling of 'man, I am hopelessly stuck surveying these things from only the outer side, as abstract schemas', but I also know the consistent defying of such habitually expected limitations when remaining prayerfully persistent and trusting in pursuit of attunement with the Wise guidance. Just in the process of writing this one post, I have had the opportunity to revisit key texts from the archive and the forum and deepen my living understanding. There are always new depths of meaning to redeem from the forms of the world through our devoted spiritual activity. 

[Federica]

Yes, I have some awareness of the inadequacies of standard language.
Coming to Cleric’s post and the broken cup example, as I said, I find it somewhat scary, in a strange way. In a sense it has the taste of tautology. Not saying of course it’s a tautological illustration, but only that such taste signals to me I can’t properly grasp it. Tautology and implosion. I can’t explain that rationally, it’s a feeling. Or maybe it's not a feeling, it's an unconsequential thought. I'm not sure. Rationally I do follow the argument, as I’ve described above. Yet there is, in that post, a specific element that has somewhat advanced my holistic understanding, as far as I can tell. Similar to the plunge feeling you recently described. These were the crucial words for me, both helping and scary (not a contradiction):

It is our own erroneous assumption that ordinary imagination should somehow be holistically reflected in the sensory cup, in the same way it is reflected in our nervous system. It certainly points us in a direction but obviously we need to evolve that imagination in completely new degrees of freedom if we should be able to steer the World-state towards a state where the cup is intact.

Maybe that example has been little misleading. I hope that it hasn't been gathered that in the future our life will consists into moulding the physical laws in any way we like, such as as reversing the shattering of a cup.

The example was meant only to counteract a common misconception in idealism (and a main reason why materialists instinctively reject it). Namely that reality is similar to our human-stage imagination (a dream or whatever) that we simply, for some strange reasons, can't reimagine differently. The goal was only to hint that the changes in the full spectrum of the World-state require corresponding forms of spiritual activity.

Even T, F, W can't be fully separated. It wouldn't be correct to say that thinking is only mental, while willing is the mental descending into the sensory. This is clearly not the case, since thinking already descends into the sensory as brain activity and probably in other ways which bend the configuration spaces of our bodily organism. What we call will is the form of activity that specifically engages the limb or speech system, through which we can metamorphose more of the World-state.

Putting cups together will probably never be something that we'll do. That's because such desires are very short-sighted. It's like having a fluid and wanting to reach in and exchange the positions of two droplets. Our hand however will inevitably set the whole volume in motion and will result in changes that we never intended. In a similar way we naively imagine that a cup should physically come together, yet we don't stop to think that if this is to happen, all kinds of consequences should ripple through. The cup doesn't exist in isolation. It's in contact with air, with electromagnetic fields and so on. If we would arbitrarily put the cup together we should also take care of the surrounding environment which should be rearranged accordingly. The flow of the physical laws should be disrupted because of our personal (and quite egoistic) desire. If we continue to work outwards we'll see that there's no boundary where we can say "this part of the physical world I can change without it having any consequences for the other parts." Everything is related, it's all communicating vessels.

In this sense, if that was to happen - to put the cup together - we simply don't realize that this would result into a wholly different World-state, where all laws have to be adapted to accommodate our local change.

Here I've cooked a very simple example of Fourier transform (I remind of this visual example). Think of the upper graph as the spatial picture that has to be drawn by the arrows, except that it is one dimensional. The lower graph shows what arrows we have to stack together tip to tail and how long each one has to be in order that their cumulative motion results in our desired form (the initial phase of the arrows is not presented on the graph). The bars to the left correspond to slower arrows, those to the right to quicker.

There's one thing to notice: draw some random shape and observe the spectrum below. Then change only one single bar from the upper graph and observe how all arrows have to be readjusted. For example, if we take the human figure of Fourier from the video and decide to keep everything the same except making the nose a little longer, we would have to readjust the length and phase of all arrows. This is very important to grasp. There are not arrows that are responsible for the nose, others that are responsible for the ear and so on. All arrows are responsible for everything and a small change in something local to the spatial picture requires change in all arrows.

This is the simple intuition that we have to gather. Trying to change a single bar from the spatial domain is like wanting to reconstruct our cup (changing its bar) while everything else remains the same. But if this was really to happen we would end up with a very different spectrum of reality, to the extent that the state before the reconstruction and the state after the reconstruction would be so dissimilar (as spiritual experience) that there's no way they can be experienced as lawfully following each other. In other words, there would be disruption in the continuity of consciousness.

This is the intuition about the way the World-state evolves. In theory we can imagine that our next state could be anything, yet only those that can be experienced as gradual integration of memory, can constitute the experience of evolving worldline of a being. This is really akin to the anthropic principle, except that we don't have to imagine external universes, some of which give the possibility of consciousness and some not.

The fact that we have used highly technical Fourier metaphor may sound too abstract and dubious. But this metaphor speaks to a very basic intuition. All we need is to follow the threads of phenomena and realize that nothings can be what it is if the whole remaining Cosmos was not in place in the way it is. If we were to change a single element this would have to reflect in all other elements in some way.

If we intuit the implications of this, it will also be palpable that our experience of having a nicely dissociated body and consciousness is only the result of a myopic experience. The World-state evolves as something whole. All phenomena are like entangled vessels, even if this seems absurd to the materialist. Actually, there's no reason for it to be absurd because it should be so even from the materialist's own perspective. If all the energy of the Cosmos has been in the singularity of the Big Bang then everything is already in quantum entanglement with each other. This entanglement is smeared out throughout the Universe yet what happens in a particle here in my body is in mathematical relations to what happens with every particle in the Universe, just like Alice's and Bob's entangled particles are related, even if very far apart.

Realizations like these can serve as scientific impetus for working against egoism. As long as we imagine that here on Earth or in some other sphere of existence, we're like an isolated bubble that can do whatever it wants without this having any consequences for the whole Cosmos, then we don't yet realize the interconnectedness of all existence.

The cup was used only as an example of how the totality of the World-state evolves but if taken in the wrong way (and I admit that in the way it was presented, the example readily invites such a wrong view) it gives the impression that we evolve as some more and more powerful ego that can singlehandedly reimagine reality in any way it wants. In reality, in the course of evolution we become more and more sensitive to the mutual dependence of all things and we steer our spiritual activity in constant intuition of the way all beings work together.

Thank you so much, Cleric!
I actually haven't interpreted the cup example in the sense that the event can be rewound like a cassette tape, and the cup reconstituted, while everything else stands still and unaffected, waiting until we are ready to push play again. I understand this view would once again fail to grasp the workings of mutual causality across levels, to speak in terms of the Levin's model. Elsewhere in the post I put it like so:

In a real concrete sense, the redemption has already happened and our current task is to become more conscious of how it has happened. That is how we participate in the redemption.

(...) I see it means the focus should go on conscious integration/conscious steering, which somehow, would more and more translate in a reality on all planes, including the physical. Then, whether or not the redemption is really accomplished, the broken cup is really reconstituted, will dissolve, as questions, as we move our home in the control room of the creative unfolding of our states. But we have to initiate that understanding by a willed imaginative act, so that we can see more and more states, larger and larger states as affectable/affected by our intentional activity. As soon as they appear as affectable in our consciousness, they become affected.

Nonetheless, the further explanations of the intuition of 'intrinsic interconnectedness' are helpful. Thank you for the Fourier function! The intuition is clear. Stupid question: As per the YT video, if my target drawing is a circle, only one arrow is required. Yet, if I erase all bars in the upper graph (straight line) that's what I get in the lower, just one arrow?
(I know this is off topic, but maybe my confusion hangs to a very simple point that's quick to tell?)