Federica,Federica wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 8:08 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 6:27 pm Thanks for sharing, Federica. I am sure you realize most of this already, but perhaps it is an opportunity to further strengthen our intuitive orientation for these ideational realities. We should be careful with some of these assertions, such as what follows, not because they are 'wrong', but because they merge with our normal habits of thinking in misleading ways:
Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see around us really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs. The only thing that truly exists is the Universe as a whole.
The aliased perspective of consciousness that views the interference of spiritual relations as discrete units interacting through the 'laws of nature' in spacetime, is a real intuitive stream with a real moral purpose in the Cosmic telos. I would say that is a big part of the (appropriate) resistance to the 'Oneness' spiritual interpretation by modern scientists - it seems to sweep under the rug the fact that everyday life for most people proceeds from a definite relational perspective, with definite utilitarian and moral tasks. For the fulfillment of these tasks, the reality of particles, physicists, cats, and dogs and their interaction through laws of nature cannot be ignored. There is something great lost if the scientists stop doing research, probing to see how the Oneness lawfully expresses itself in various domains of experience from the microscopic to the macroscopic, the inner to the outer, and just declare that they have now come back to the reality of ancient monism and rest satisfied.
As we know, what quantum physicists are really probing, as all modern scientists, is their own thinking activity-structure. The first step for awakening is for them to simply recognize that they were the ones who intricately designed the experiments that unveiled the 'strange' quantum effects of interacting states that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Nature can only present these subtle effects to us once human consciousness has reached into the layer of more archetypal ideas and can therefore resonate with the former. The reality that our thinking consciousness has now reached (back) into that layer is reflected by the conception of the various experiments that cleverly provide opportunities for us to discern more of Nature's mysterious secrets. At the level of the microscopic, our thinking cannot rest on the sense-perceptible spectrum (already manifested thoughts) anymore so it begins chasing its own thought-forms abstracted from the spectrum (sub-atomic particles, quanta of energy, etc.), trying to catch up with them in real-time. It is similar to what we try to attain directly in concentration/meditation from a much different spiritual angle, when we focus on a thought-image unrelated to normal sensory experience.
Because they are chasing their thinking in an indirect manner, through the confines of the intellect designing outer experiments, they cannot make the connection between the effects of what they are observing and their own first-person activity and states of being across the rhythms of Time-consciousness. I think a few of them, like perhaps Bohm and Wigner, have traced it to the 'agency of the mind' in the abstract, but that's about as far as they get. If all these quantum effects are taken as metaphorical for spiritual (moral) inner processes that structure our souls and outer nature, on the other hand, then we get closer to their real meaningful significance. It's interesting how many aspects of the QM paradigm can be used as metaphors for our dream experience - nonlocality, entanglement, superposition, path of least action, etc. Our dream states are often nonlinear, with 'strange' time experiences, objects and characters in the dream are entangled with no clear delineations of quantitative 'properties', with more multi-layered qualitative experiences, and so forth.
Ashvin,
Yes, I follow your warning that we should be careful not to fall in mysticism and not to remain satisfied with the abstract idea of one universe, one universal wave function, etcetera. I would add: the few words you have quoted from the essay, when read in the context of the paragraph and in the context of the whole essay, don't suggest that scientists should stop investigations because materials, forces, researchers and experimental hutches alike don't exist.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting to stop scientific investigations, but I think someone like BK would suggest that we will gain no concrete and vitally important insights into spiritual reality from such investigations. He would say that these investigations can help develop technology for various Earthly purposes but they won’t take us beyond the spiritual truths of ancient monism. That probably doesn’t apply to the Aeon author, but again, the way of presenting the QM research and its spiritual implications is something that can subtly influence our thinking, so it helps to work through these subtleties and avoid the most common traps. The BK position is only half correct and, as we know, the intellect often feeds on these half-truths to mislead itself.
Greater insight into spiritual reality comes from the strengthening of our inner forces, both through the work of inner cleansing/concentrating and through dedicated investigation of outer nature. Here we mean “insight” not only as receiving passive knowledge and wisdom, but also as morally transforming impulses that seed new imaginative worlds through which the One will manifest its potential. The very structure of Nature is designed so that it embeds the spiritual forces that are needed for us to create a new Nature. We could say for ex. that the results of research and experiments provide feedback to the higher hierarchies so they more effectively work on shaping the curvatures of Earthly destiny that they are responsible for, not because they study the mathematical outputs of experiments like we do, but due to what they reveal about the quality and course of human thinking at any particular stage of its development.
I previously used the example of when we are agitated or in a hurry and reach out recklessly for some object like a glass, knocking it over and shattering the pieces. The consequences that we observe then provides feedback for us to adjust our spiritual activity so that we are more calm, collected, patient, and so forth when interacting with objects in the future. It provides the opportunity for our “I” to reflect on its current organization and better harmonize the various layers of its being (although these days it seems people are more likely to blame the glass breaking on their ‘bad luck’ or the ‘tyrannical patriarchy’ that resulted in civilization and glass formation than their own activity). So that is a crude metaphor for how our higher self works with the results of our rigorous thinking to move towards the goal of inner-outer perfection, not just for us personally (like in the case of the glass), but the whole Earthly landscape. These are the sorts of things that I feel are too readily ignored by thinking that leans towards mystical reduction of the phenomenal realm.
The other thing ignored is the possibility of higher cognitive research that is informed by the results of natural scientific experiments, i.e. the latter provides hints and clues, especially when contradictions and paradoxes emerge, as to where spiritual researchers should concentrate their efforts. Of course, I am not engaged in any such clairvoyant research, so that is just my speculation of how it may proceed based on my reasoning through things I have encountered from others who are so engaged.
Federica wrote:AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 6:27 pm Normally most of our dream experiences escape the stream of memory and the ones that are embedded in that stream fade into unconsciousness rapidly because the "I" is hardly present for them (spiritual science reveals exactly why this is the case). Through higher development, our "I" can remain present in the dream state which unfolds during sleep but is also superimposed on our waking state. This gives us a much more concrete sense of what QM has been outwardly exploring - the cognitive rhythms of feeling that narrow down our thinking-perceptual states from the 'quantum potential'. If we were to intensely remember most of our dream experiences (like they are almost present with us in our current state), then we would discern interfering patterns of feeling that structure our waking life.
These rhythms guide our states of being along certain curvatures that lead our waking experience to deviate more or less from the 'path of least action', i.e. the most effective stream of experience for the perfection of our thinking-feeling-willing activity. (keep in mind the examples from Cleric's post referenced before). With that higher knowledge, we would start to understand many of the real reasons we think-perceive the way we do and the content that we perceive, i.e. we would begin to know the real reasons how the Newtonian, discrete, linear, particles-as-apples perspective emerges from the disorganized currents of our soul-life. And we begin to realize how Nature is so intelligently and wisely structured that true knowledge of her secrets is only that which tends towards inner moral transformation-perfection.
These last two paragraphs are the most interesting to me. I'm not sure I properly understand the connection you are making between QM and rhythms of feeling. I do see how our subjective soul life of preferences and affinities seamlessly pushes us towards certain constrained patterns in our flow of becoming, and that remain opaque to us (we don't see how our flow could have evolved very differently if free from those constraints and we imagine external causes).
I do see how QM provides a portrait of this 'randomness', this instability bias generated by our arbitrary soul qualities, but is this the meaning of the "rhythms of feeling"? Also, I am not sure what post by Cleric you are pointing to?
I will say here that my intuition of the comparison is not sufficiently developed to flesh it out with lucid concepts a whole lot more. The basic question is, where do we qualitatively experience the sort of things pointed to by QM science and philosophy? Through the lens of the latter, the classical physical world becomes something more unified, more flowing, more overlapping, less rigid in space and time, and so forth. I would say the average person only experiences the feeling-imbued qualities of this new worldview in their artistic imagination or in their dream states. When we are able to remarry the qualitative dimension of feeling with these abstract scientific outlooks conceived in thinking, then we come closer to their underlying spiritual significance. The deeper rhythms of feeling, with their more universal ‘time-signature’, are what the QM scientists are probing without knowing it, yet.
Remember the bomb experiment – the experimental setup allows us to gain insight into the state of the bomb without ever directly interacting with it. What is that a symbol for? One could even call it a very rudimentary and outward-quantitative form of clairvoyance. If those same thinking forces were to be redirected inwardly, then we would eventually come to the reality of spiritual beings who weave the curvatures of destiny that precipitate from our life of feeling and thereby provide imaginative and inspired insights into the physical states of systems around us, such as light-color phenomena. Quite independently of QM, cognitive scientists have begun to realize that the seeds of all such insights we attain in waking consciousness are planted in our life of sleep and dreaming, i.e. the life of intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. We know that is also confirmed by spiritual science.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA225/En ... 22p02.html
Steiner wrote:This leads us, through a right conception of ordinary human existence to recognise that, bordering on this ordinary world that is interwoven by natural law, there is another world where these laws are no longer valid.
If these matters are looked at rightly, we can only infer that, adjoining the world ruled by the laws of nature of which we make a study, there is another world independent of these laws and ruled by quite different ones of its own. By sinking into the world of dreams in a realistic way we come to a world where natural laws are no longer effective. That the human being, with his ordinary consciousness, perceives this world as fantastic, is due to his inability to understand the conditions he meets there. He himself introduces the fantasy. But what weaves and lives in it belongs to an altogether different world-sphere, and it is this sphere into which a man sinks in his dreams.
This leads us on directly to another thing. If we talk to somebody wedded to the usual world-conception of today, he will say: I study what law it is that governs the fall of a stone, and discover the law of gravitation. Then I go further out into the universe and apply the same law to the stars. – And this is what thinks: Here on earth I discover the laws of nature; there outside is the cosmos (drawing is made). The laws I have discovered for the earth I imagine still to be valid for the nebula of Orion, or anything else.
Now everyone knows that, for example, the force of gravity diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance, becoming weaker and weaker; and he knows that light too decreases. I have already told you that the truth of our natural laws also diminishes. What down on earth is true as regards them is no longer true in the cosmos; it is true only for a certain distance. Beyond that distance, out in the cosmos, the same law begins to hold sway which we meet with in our dreams. Hence we should be clear that, looking out at Orion with its nebula and in order to understand it, we must not think in accordance with the experimental method of physics, but begin to dream – for Orion shows its conformity with dream-law.
Could this principle also apply not only at the macroscopic scale but also when we go into the microscopic quantum realm? It seems to me that QM scientists are also dimly creating opportunities to probe phenomena that obey a mixture of natural law and ‘dream-law’ within a sort of threshold between the physical world and the spiritual proper. The realm of dream-law can give us direct insight into the realm of natural law (but not the other way around), because it is more attenuated to the pole of cohered meaning than the pole of fragmented perception, provided that we can bring our "I"-consciousness into the dream world. Otherwise, the experiences remain too fragmented, dim, chaotic, and short-lived to provide much insight. What we do with our imaginative insights in the realm of natural law feeds back into our capacity to gain further insights into the higher realms and discover-invent or re-create their spiritual architecture through humility, reverence, faith, and love, which are modes of being that can only be properly incepted and cultivated in the realm of natural law.
The post by Cleric that I was referring to is the one quoted on the other thread about the prospects of phenomenal idealism, also quoted on this thread a few posts back, where he discusses the curvatures of feeling that narrow down our thinking-perceptual states from the higher, superimposed Time-potential.