ScottRoberts wrote: ↑Sun Oct 08, 2023 10:22 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Oct 08, 2023 1:56 pm
But maybe you meant it in a different way that I haven't understood?
I think so, and I think I should apologize for trying to express things without also providing sufficient background for why I express things in the way I do. The following may help to provide that background:
https://sites.google.com/site/nondualistlogic/thinking-and-feeling-language-and-perception
So, roughly, I define mathematical thinking as non-referential thinking, and I am saying that the thinking of beings of the spiritual hierarchy that creates worlds is non-referential. But the same is happening in the worlds that our mathematical thinking creates. It's just that they are tiny and don't have the strength to think an atom into existence.
Leaving PoF in the background for a moment, can we go to your “
Divine and Local Simplicity, and the Question of Will” (since the essay you linked above refers to it as background)? I've tried to follow your argument and noted my comments, but please take them as questions. I know you have carefully pondered these topics and distilled these essays through time and I’m afraid I’ll be much like an elephant in the porcelain store. I apologize in advance for the 'results'.
For me, what raises questions in the unfolding of your argument at first, is the absence of any gradient between God and our human experience. You briefly refer to God’s being and thoughts, and simply put them side by side with our human experience. For example you say: “For God, a thought is an act of will is a feeling etc.” This implicitly prompts us to think of a thought of God as sharing something immediately intelligible with what we commonly conceive as “a thought”, or at least it prompts us to imagine a thought of God as being understandable ‘just like that’ but gesturing as we usually do in common language with words and concepts like “thought” and “feeling”.
It’s like trying to directly catch God’s reality at the starting point of inquiry, by throwing the net of our worldly language, with no preparation, as if common words and concepts were ‘natural’, ‘impartial’, 'external' tools of knowledge. This seems to me like an implicit assumption in your argument. By contrast, in PoF, one is prompted to embark on an exploration that does point to the wholeness of reality, and ultimately to God, but along a gradient that starts from the given of human experience, and promises to take years, decades, or entire lives before it can yield fruits.
The next juncture I notice in your reasoning, when you go from the unitary simplicity of God all the way to the nature of our human thinking, feeling and willing activity, is when you argue: “
throughout reality, a thought is a feeling is an act of will. It is only our limitations that have caused us to have separate words.” Here I wonder why you restrict the separation to the “
words”. This seems to me another implicit assumption. From my perspective it’s our
human experience of TFW that is differentiated, not only the
language we use to point to it. But you make it a linguistic question, rather than an experiential one, and then write the other essay (Thinking and Feeling, Language and Perception) on that premise.
In this way, you conclude that our consciousness is fundamentally as simple as divine consciousness, only “
made enormously complex by being local, or limited”. While I believe this is a
final realization common to all monistic perspectives, Anthroposophy, and the vast majority of our current discussions on this forum, argumenting it in this extremely simplified way sounds abstract to me, and in fact mystical.
But to continue on the point of various qualities of thinking, as you say: “
when doing a mathematical exercise, we are, inseparably, thinking and willing”. I agree, but when we do Cleric’s vowel exercise it’s the same. We are inseparably thinking and willing. It’s also the same in any exercise of concentration. Would you call the thought-images of the vowel exercise referential or non-referential? As I said before, I think what counts is the willed thinking gesture that brings consciousness - through the object -
back to the activity, no matter if the object is referential or not. In mathematics it’s more straightforward, because we don’t have to take the detour through the sensory world. It’s sense-free activity, and it’s 'easier' to bring consciousness to what we are doing. However, when one concentrates on a pin, one can ascend in a similar way to a higher level of consciousness of the activity.
The fact that we don’t bring a pin into material existence by concentrating on it is not important for our purposes, since we don’t “
create and maintain into existence” a triangle either, when we think it (here I have to confirm disagreement already expressed in a previous post). The triangle doesn’t need our activity to exist and to remain in existence. We don’t
create the triangle. Rather, we orient and center our consciousness ‘around’ the reality of the triangle, and we seek in that gesture to willingly connect with the beings that
are it. In conclusion, my
impression is that, when you distinguish between a house (or a pin) that we can’t create through thinking, and a triangle that we (supposedly) create, you are being too anchored in the sensory sphere, using the sensory/non-sensory as the main watershed (=we create, since we are not limited by references to matter). But what counts is how conscious we can be inside our activity, rather than whether or not we have to take a deeper plunge all the way down into the sensory sphere, as we have to when we concentrate on a pin. Sure, we don't create a material pin, but that comparison is misleading. Anyway, before we can master matter from the outside, and create pins, we will have to first learn to create plants, and then animals. We are not even close... so I would completely drop matter as a point of reference, that's not the focus.
To see that, I think one should try to put oneself more holistically, more neutrally, in the perspective of the
gradient of spirit-soul-physical reality, rather than living in our sensory experience as
implicit background of the philosophical reflection. Then we can see that what counts is to search for the gradual experience of coincidence of the object with the first-person activity, through freedom and discipline.
In other words, it’s
not that in mathematical thinking our task is accomplished, and our thinking is perfect. There are still ample ways to remain lost in abstraction there. Moreover, a triangle
does refer to something outside of it. True, it’s sense-free thinking, and that is helpful, but in a sense that’s secondary, because we may think of a triangle and still have no idea of the dynamic interplay of thought-seeds and archetypal forms the triangular form is made of. The intelligences behind the triangle, and the form of our concentric existence in that context, may still completely escape us.
These were my initial thoughts on the first essay. I can imagine you have already considered ‘objections’ of this sort, and I’d be interested in how you would reason through these thoughts.