Stranger wrote: ↑Wed Feb 08, 2023 4:18 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Wed Feb 08, 2023 3:45 pm
I don’t agree here, the above sounds self-contradictory - “sensory realm” means just that: a mode of experience that has to be “dual”.
There is not a neutral Mother Earth out there, that can be walked upon and experienced in various ways. There is human nature interacting with the one reality, and its way of doing it is to “
bifurcate and disintegrate its structure”, to say it with Max Leyf. This is the way “
the human being is situated in the world", or in reality.
What you say about Mother Earth sounds like a falling back into materialistic default worldview?
We have to be super careful, it’s almost ingrained in our intellect… I know how it sneaks back in, as soon as it is chased out.
I changed my wording there a little bit and said that it's not "neutral", it is actually nondual by nature. By "Mother Earth" I definitely did not mean materialistic interpretation of it. By "material" I mean sensory data related to experiences of our sensory and visible world where our consciousness functions in the human form. In fact, all these sensations are just first-person conscious experiences, there is nothing "material" in them. It is only when we build upon these direct experiences our mind-fabricated interpretation of "material world out there that causes these sensory experiences" where we arrive at materialistic worldview and/or dualistic perception of it.
Stranger wrote:
Duality is an artificial layer of perception-interpretation when we unconsciously perceive and interpret the sensory data in a specific dualistic way.
Well, there is only one way to perceive sensory data - better said:
only one way to have sense perceptions.
The way I intend sensation and perception is: every sensation is a perception, but not the other way around. Thought-pictures, for instance, are perceptions but not sensations. Once we have a perception of the type ‘sensation’, we cannot do otherwise in the moment than destroy its reality, split it in two, it’s our incarnate human nature. It is not an interpretational choice.
Ok,let me clarify, there is a subtle difference between the "raw" sensation and the perception of the raw sensory data. Assume that you are looking at an apple. The raw sensation is your visual sensation of the visual scene as it is just like a newly-born child would experience it, it is like a visual "soup". This sensation is actually your direct conscious experience inseparable from experiencing/awareness of this sensation (so it is nondual by nature). What happens next is a layer of information processing going on in your subconscious where pattern recognition occurs and shape and color are recognized. This is not duality yet, it is just consciousness associating the meanings of basic shape-color structures with the raw visual sensation, and these meanings are thought-forms that are also consciously experienced again inseparable from the awareness of them (so they are nondual). Next step is when the mind recognizes the abstract category to which these patterns correspond, such as a category of "apples". Again, this is a necessary data processing step and there is nothing dualistic in it, because we are not yet interpreting that the apple is a "separate object". But there is usually another layer of unconscious processing that most people have, which is interpreting this shape recognized and classified into a specific category as a "separate real object existing in the external objective world" (most people interpret it as a "material" object in the "material" world ), and that is the layer where the dualistic perception happens and naive-realistic-materialistic worldview resides. But all these processing layers typically happen immediately and unconsciously so a person is presented with the whole "package" of raw sensory data together with all the outcomes of these processing steps, and, as a result, the person "sees" the real separate and material "apple out there in the external world". This whole process is called "perception", and when it includes the last layer of the dualistic interpretation, it is called "dualistic perception". Turning it into nondual perception is actually straightforward: what needs to be removed is only the last step of the data processing. There is nothing wrong with the raw sensory data and the first necessary processing steps (pattern recognition and classification into categories). This dualistic perception is an incoherent/deluded way of perceiving the sensory data of what we call "material realm", while the "material realm" by itself (prior to its dualistic layer of data processing) is nondual by nature. The practical problem is that eh dualistic perception is deeply rooted in our subconscious layers and it is practically no so easy to dismantle/redeem.
Stranger wrote:as a result of such dualistic perception, the mind fabricates a humongous amount of dualistic structures of abstract meanings and ideas that are deluded and incoherent with respect to Reality
The mind (intellect) creates thought-pictures and standard knowledge, like, say, the standard curriculum of a certain university degree, or the thought-picture of a tree. Now, when Steiner says that we should
discern in the physical world the seed-grounds of the higher, he does not refer to that. Still, that is what our human mind does which makes it dualistic. What we should turn to, and inquire, and study is
the connection, the specularity, the mutual dance, of the physical world and the Spiritual, it's all part of the engine. The physical is of enormous help to
approximate our being to the structure of the spiritual, just because of this specularity.
So although it pulls us into the sensorial “destruction”, where we create thought-pictures and so on, we do need to
stay there, and persevere, because the insights that we will find there are a
key to deciphering the higher worlds. Even, its the whole reason why the physical world is there: to make us do the tough work of deciphering it and discerning in it the keys that
we cannot do without, if we want to ascend into the higher.
No shortcuts Eugene, that’s how it is!
Come-on let’s do the work, we are in the perfectly right place to do it!
That is great, I like your thoughtful approach. So, based on my above explanations (not sure if you still agree with them or not) here we come to the "deciphering" point where we need to understand what knowledge related to the so-called "physical world" is based on and derived from the dualistic perception (and therefore is inherently incoherent with reality) and what knowledge of the "physical world" is based on a coherent (nondual) way of perceiving the "physical world". Only nondual perception of the physical world can lead to a harmonious mutual dance with the Spiritual, while the dualistic way of perceiving will always be incoherent with the Spiritual.
***
Alright, Eugene, let's resume from where we left:
Stranger wrote:I changed my wording there a little bit and said that it's not "neutral", it is actually nondual by nature. By "Mother Earth" I definitely did not mean materialistic interpretation of it. By "material" I mean sensory data related to experiences of our sensory and visible world where our consciousness functions in the human form. In fact, all these sensations are just first-person conscious experiences, there is nothing "material" in them. It is only when we build upon these direct experiences our mind-fabricated interpretation of "material world out there that causes these sensory experiences" where we arrive at materialistic worldview and/or dualistic perception of it.
Yes, the change was good! So you say the Earth is non-dual by nature, and I’m fine with that: it’s all one engine. The only ‘messy’ part of the Thinking engine is us! We don’t even bother to let the thinking force inflow us
as is, we have to strip it off of itself, or split it: like in nuclear fission, we mess up the unity of reality (Uranium nucleus) because we are not capable of getting energy from its core
as is (non-dual). So we destroy the nucleus, hoping we will get the energy (Spirit) out. We do get some sub-optimum reverberations, but the sacrifice is the biggest imaginable. The sacrifice goes on until we are able to redeem the destruction
in consciousness, hence in truth. What we redeem is
all the broken pieces. It’s not that we discard some broken pieces and keep some others. We need to enter and
pervade with awareness the exact workings of all pieces, including the sensory realm, otherwise we won’t be able to re-act the nucleus.
Stranger wrote:Ok, let me clarify, there is a subtle difference between the "raw" sensation and the perception of the raw sensory data. Assume that you are looking at an apple. The raw sensation is your visual sensation of the visual scene as it is just like a newly-born child would experience it, it is like a visual "soup". This sensation is actually your direct conscious experience inseparable from experiencing/awareness of this sensation (so it is nondual by nature).
Ok I’ll call the raw sensation ‘the soup’, for simplicity. It’s described in PoF as well, it’s the famous “percept” (which, as purported in PoF - in itself and in turn - is nothing else than a concept, but let’s not complicate it too much, it’s enough here to say that a percept of an apple (a raw sensation of an apple) is a ‘
spoonful of soup’. What it means is that - as you said - the soup is a visual (or otherwise sensory)
scene, not a collection of separable singularities, like an apple or a tree. Still, for pedagogical purposes we provisionally speak of a spoonful of soup, so that we can imagine scooping it out of the scene. Hence we can speak of the percept - or raw sensation - of an apple. As you say, “
this sensation is actually your direct conscious experience”. Yes, Steiner would say, this percept is the “
immediately given content of unthinking observation”. So far everything matches. Now, exactly at this point, I encounter an issue in your reasoning. Before we come to it, let’s remember how Steiner usefully puts it at this point: the
percepts are
the content/the objects of observation, while we call
perception the
process in which we are engaged. So you say: “
This sensation is actually your direct conscious experience inseparable from experiencing/awareness of this sensation (so it is nondual by nature)”.
Alright, let’s look very carefully at this junction. I’ll try to show you that this is actually an arbitrary labeling of the percept as “good/non-dual”. It’s understandable that we do this labeling, because we start with the rough idea that
we are the problem - which is indeed correct
- and that somehow, with our cognition, we mess things up - again, correct! - and that reality as it is does not contain any errors in itself - correct! And so we conclude: then, the raw sensation/percept,
must be good and non-dual! But this is where a small inaccuracy is hidden, that derails the whole reasoning. The thing is that
the percept is the result of our ‘destructive cognition’, not reality as is!
Let’s think about fission. The percept is one of the smaller nuclei that we obtain after a neutron is made to react with the nucleus of uranium235. Now, your reasoning proceeds as if the percept was a
pristine part of the engine. It is not! So that’s the issue.
Raw sensation is not non-dual. It’s part of the by-products.
Another way to look at it: if it was true that raw percept is pristine reality, that would mean that the nature of non-dual reality, above and beyond human intervention, is
perceptual. But we know that the core of the non-dual engine is of Spiritual/Thinking nature. It’s only man who splits it, as a
condition for experiencing the sensory realm. That’s how we process the thinking force in our human organization/system.
Let’s note here that a
thought-picture is also a percept, it’s also raw content, not of sensation, such as observation with our eyes, but it’s still raw content of our perception. It appears to our consciousness the same way a visual picture does (that’s why we call it a thought-picture) and we don’t really know how and whence. Therefore, it’s also raw in a big sense. Yet, the moment we become meta-conscious of it - like we are doing now - we initiate, though in minimal way first, the process of
restoration of reality, because we are using our consciousness to extricate what’s going on (It might help here to remember that the ‘soup’ perceived by the new-born baby is an aggregate of visual, auditory, etc… contents of ‘sensation’, but also of the bodily sensations - pain, pleasure, hunger… - and of the
feelings that might come with all that. It's an inseparable bundle).
Stranger wrote:What happens next is a layer of information processing going on in your subconscious where pattern recognition occurs and shape and color are recognized. This is not duality yet, it is just consciousness associating the meanings of basic shape-color structures with the raw visual sensation, and these meanings are thought-forms
Yes, what you describe here is
Thinking resuming its workings, after the destructive passage of human cognition. Notice, this happens in Thinking,
before it happens in us. Thinking is bigger than man. We are in it, not the other way around. So what you have described here is the natural way in which the Thinking force, through us, starts the reorganization of all the broken pieces, putting back together the percepts with concepts and ideas (
meaning, as you say). In Steiner's words, it’s Thinking drawing threads from one element of observation to another, linking definite concepts [with the 'spoonfuls of soup'] and thereby establishing a relationship between them.
This activity of interrelating the soup with its ideal-conceptual half, that we ascend to (in small, standard-cognitive ways at first) is
both non-dual and dual. It’s non-dual in the sense that it’s Thinking rolling its engine, it’s Thinking operating the restoration of reality. And it’s also dual when we see it from our human perspective, because we execute this restoration at first (standard cognition) in the context of our physical world. So from this angle we come to the lawful conculsion, once again:
we cannot separate dual and non-dual, discard the first and run with the second, without making abstractions. A very thoughtful phenomenology, as we are doing, allows us to
progressively realize that. I want to emphasize here that your precise and challenging questions are an integral, positive part of this real-time phenomenology we are doing. They are helping me to become even more conscious of what I am trying to walk you through, and so I am thankful for your participation in this collective work. It’s really a progressive process of cognition that requires effort, and multiple iterations. Just as we are doing here and now.
Stranger wrote:This is not duality yet, it is just consciousness associating the meanings of basic shape-color structures with the raw visual sensation, and these meanings are thought-forms that are also consciously experienced again inseparable from the awareness of them (so they are nondual)
All the above being said, we see here that the italic part relies on inaccurate basis, and is not itself accurate.
We could continue to dissect your text, sentence by sentence, but I would prefer to pause here, because at this point there is already a lot we have laid out, that needs to be inflowed with various iterations of conscious first-person effort (again, I need to continue the iterations just as much as you…) So let’s call a little time-out now, but then we continue, OK?