Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Fri Dec 22, 2023 2:53 pm
Ashvin said:
"But if this is even conceivable as a possibility, would it at all influence your thinking about the 'Thinker-of-Reality' and its nature? Could such a possibility nudge your philosophical focus at all in a different direction, perhaps towards learning what it is within you, and within the collective human organism, that leads to such disharmonious imbalances within the Cosmos?"
The problem here is that there are too many “what-ifs” to make any assessment useful. What if there is reincarnation? What if I was a bad boy in previous lives? What if karma is real rather than human guilt and judgement projected on to the universe?
I would tend to resolve such unknowable imponderables by putting the question back to the Thinker-of Reality: why, if there are such laws of existence, were we born unaware of them? Why, if we had some sort of contract with some sort of higher self to suffer in a certain way, were we born not knowing we had signed the contract? Actually, it is interesting to ask your opinion of this as a lawyer. Can a contract be regarded as valid if the individual who signed the contract is obliged to forget that he made it (not merely that he forgot it – but that he was obliged –forced- to forget it?) Also, how can we know that when signing the contract we could not know or appreciate the depths of suffering that we were to face; after all, if we did, we would not need to actually experience it – and if we sign such a contract in a cosy (drunken?) atmosphere of love and bliss quite unable to understand what is to come, then would that not be a nasty kind of deception? Without answers to such questions, I think one must indeed remain sceptical.
Thanks for these questions, Ben. Actually, it is a very common occurrence in my field. Sometimes I ask whether people personally guaranteed a business loan, for ex., and they say "yeah, I vaguely remember signing something but I didn't even read the document, it was full of technical jargon... so doesn't that mean it's not effective?" Of course, the answer is no, the guarantee is still effective. My willful ignorance of the terms I have agreed to is not a defense to my liability. Now my client can respond, "I was
obliged not to read the terms... the language was so complex that I was practically forced into signing it without reading it".
And many people today really feel this is justified - "I signed the document because I had to, I needed the money and it benefitted me at the time, but now my business is failing, I am in over my head with repayments, and it's simply unfair that my creditors want to hold me to the contract." It is easy to see why this is a problematic disposition to go through life with - we reap the benefits of our bargain when things are going well, but when things start to turn sour, we want to disclaim our entire involvement in the bargain. If suddenly business picks up and we need a new line of credit for fresh inventory, we want to put the bargain back in place. This is a decent image of how we normally cognitively oscillate with our reaction to events that bring pleasure or pain during the course of our lives. In the former case, life is gratefully experienced with transpersonal hope, meaning, and purpose, but in the latter case, it is experienced with skepticism, cynicism, and resentment.
This analogy can't go too far, because it's all still based on our myopic and rigid sensory intuition of 'who we are' and 'what we bargained for'. We are tempted to imagine our pre-incarnate life in the higher worlds was basically the same as it is now, except in a more blissful and loving atmosphere. We are tempted to ignore the Cosmic tasks that we were involved in completing, not only for our own personal development toward higher perfection, but the perfection of the entire Earth as a living organism. The possibility that everything we perceive around us as the natural kingdoms and stellar spheres become our
inner world between incarnations is ignored or written off as absurd. The fact that we can only evaluate the bargain in the holistic context of our Cosmic evolution is conveniently forgotten.
So we have to honestly ask ourselves if we are even in a position to judge the bargains we have struck before we have gained much deeper insight into the conditions that were present when we struck them, which were quite orthogonal to everything we currently experience in our fragmented, atomic sensory states. It all comes back to the question of whether such things can be
experientially known, so they don't forever remain a black box of 'what-ifs' into which we can project our unexamined personal preferences and desires. This is why the phenomenology of intuitive activity, which leads to the intimate cognitive experience of our soul-structure, is at the root of all these existential questions and our ability to meaningfully approach them. Even the initial steps on this path make clear there is no metaphysical boundary to higher knowledge and the only thing preventing the latter is our desire to encompass it immediately and with little effort, or our conviction that, because we haven't already done so, it must be impossible.