Stranger wrote: ↑Sat Feb 11, 2023 10:57 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Feb 11, 2023 10:30 pm
So would it be accurate to say that, when in normal activities mode, you have various sympathies and antipathies? For ex., you have a sympathy for doing creative musical and drawing meditations, more so than doing exercises such as concentration on 'I think the words'. But in the nondual meditative state, no such sympathies or preferences are conditioning your willing gestures anymore, and therefore you have 'Free Will' to evaluate all curvatures of meaning equally and follow them or not follow them?
Correct. That does not mean the "Free Will" makes always the right choices because of the limitations of my current knowledge and perspective, so it is an iterative process of assessing the currently available knowledge of the meanings, practically following their curvatures, and reassessing after new perspectives and knowledge opens along the path. So, in a way, it is a living-flowing process.
Ok but irrespective of whether we are making the 'right' choices or not, the question is to what extent are our willing gestures conditioned within the context of the personalized soul-forces.
Let's refer to the Newton color theory. I use this example for simplicity, but it could just as easily be applied to practically all secular scientific theories. He set up a prism, passed light through it, and observed the differentiated color spectrum emerge. From that, he concluded there is pure white light existing in the world 'out there', which contains all the colors within it and, when refracted through a prism, the colors emerge. What he failed to account for was
his own willing-thinking perspective which designed and executed the experiment. That by itself doesn't give us enough knowledge to determine what exactly is happening, but one thing is for sure - no account of reality can possibly be complete or heading towards completion if it fails to consider the agentic thinking perspective which is always participating in the phenomenal process.
A similar thing happens in your 'account' of the nondual state. You are forgetting that you only arrive to the nondual state because of all the soul-force conditioning which exists in the normal state. The most direct one being your sympathy towards certain spiritual practices, but we must also include practically every factor which led you to be born into a certain family, in a certain place, with a certain upbringing, to attend certain schools, to choose a certain career path, to arrive on the nondual path, etc. All of these reflect the lawful, fractal conditioning forces across incarnations and during the current incarnation which are
embedded in your current perspective, and which
chooses to do the nondual meditations. We can only safely ignore that conditioning if we declare it irrelevant or forget about it altogether, like the secular scientist. Otherwise we need to squarely confront the fact that it exists and is working into our current perspective regardless of whether we are in the meditative state or not. Then we realize our choice of which curvatures to explore isn't so freely willed after all.
To be clear, we are not claiming you have this conditioning and those pursuing Anthroposophical methods don't. We all have that conditioning. But it is only the modern initiatory method through the brow chakra which allows us to become conscious of the conditioning, not in any abstract intellectual way (as we are speaking of it now), but as living forces which steer our intuitive becoming. In the process of becoming conscious of these forces, we discover certain leeway in the 'riverbed' of our soul-life through which our intuitive activity can find novel ways to flow through and manifest itself in our conceptual and bodily life. I know this likely sounds very monotonous, boring, slow grind, but the living process of engaging this quest is the most intimately real experience we can have. It is the very process of evolving higher cognition so that we can
consciously cross the threshold of sleep-death, with discerning judgment intact, and dwell with archetypal beings whose activity is responsible for the Earthly kingdoms, thereby building the gradient to Earthly consciousness.