Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Tue Dec 05, 2023 11:00 am More prosaically: I'd like to be a genius pianist, but I recognise I just don't have the skill in me; my daimon has a simpler agenda. Cleric needs to appreciate that most people's daimons don't work as hard or heroically as he wants them to.
Ben - would you acknowledge that the picture you paint of reality here is one of unfreedom? That we have been appointed 'daimons' (how and from whence, who knows) and these determine what skills we can have, how hard we can work, how much we can care about the world, etc.? I think the first thing on any knowing path is to honestly confront the truth of where the content of our thinking leads. Does it lead us to a picture of reality that more and more resembles the mindless mechanisms of materialism which have no place for agentic freedom to continuously realize higher potential?
To find the foundation of spiritual activity, we need a thirst for freedom from the dream images appointed to us by the mindless universe, the daimon, or whatever else. Then we begin to realize there is one place where the dream images are not appointed but our own free creation. Our thought-perceptions (concepts) are the only place where meaning is immediately transparent to us in an experiential way. With all other perceptions, we have to reflect on them before some specific meaning is revealed, including our feelings and desires. But our thought-perceptions are more like a lens through which already experienced meaning is focused. If we had to reflect on the meaning of our inner voice, we could never think! It would be an endless recursion - we reflect on the meaning of the inner voice and generate a new stream of inner voice, for which we have to reflect on and generate a new stream of inner voice, and so on.
In this way, we realize the fountain of our spiritual activity is also the fountain of our freedom. As Cleric said, it's the only thing that remains when everything else fades away. We realize the inner voice that we use to theorize and opinionate about the 'nature of reality' - theories and opinions which always change and eventually evaporate - conceals the true experiential nature of reality that persists. The path of investigating our own spiritual activity is the seed point from which we can bridge the chasm between what we have been 'appointed to be' and what we imagine we could be. That doesn't mean we can fantasize to become whatever we like - our imagination still needs to fit into a lawful curvature of what is best for all other free beings. But now our whole stream of experience is irradiated by the reality of our own free agency, like normally our personal imaginations are experienced as free. There is nothing long and involved about this simple fact of experience that anyone can take hold of in good faith.