KASTRUP AND SHELDRAKE ON THE COSMIC MIND
Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2024 5:26 am
A wonderful wide-ranging dialogue full of nuance, respect and insight. Not a final resolution but surely a deep philosophical pleasure,
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 5:11 pm
Thanks, Lou. Bernardo certainly looks much healthier now!
When you say "not a final resolution", I wonder what a "final resolution" would look like to you? If you can say this discussion is not a resolution, then you must be measuring it against some expectation of what such a resolution would look like. What exactly are we resolving, how are we resolving it, and what would the resolution look like?
The word I would most apply positively would be 'respect', which is what I loved in this dialogue, a respect that kept the dialogue open and on-going.Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 10:22 pm Lou said: "I dunno about 'final resolutions'."
Perhaps "reconciliation" is a more appropriate term? The two geniuses were mostly reconciled. One difference was that Rupert thinks stars have independent agency, whereas Bernardo sees them more as semi-autonomous (semi-dissociated) mental complexes within the Universal Mind.
Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sat Jan 06, 2024 10:22 pm Lou said: "I dunno about 'final resolutions'."
Perhaps "reconciliation" is a more appropriate term? The two geniuses were mostly reconciled. One difference was that Rupert thinks stars have independent agency, whereas Bernardo sees them more as semi-autonomous (semi-dissociated) mental complexes within the Universal Mind.
The hypothesis I put forward is that, if the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon and the Non-Human Intelligence(s) behind it are real, they are unlikely to be extra-terrestrial. Instead, they may consist of remnants of industrial, technological NHIs evolved on Earth up to 350 million years ago. We cannot find conspicuous archaeological or geological footprints of such civilisations because, according to the so-called ‘Silurian Hypothesis,’ not only weather erosion, but also the regular recycling of the Earth’s crust through plate tectonics, erase them. The anthropocentric notion that nothing intelligent has arisen on our planet in the billions of years for which no conspicuous evidence would have remained on the geological record is unjustified. There has been plenty of time and opportunity for many technological, industrial, but non-human civilisations to have arisen and disappeared from the surface of the Earth.
Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Sun Jan 07, 2024 2:56 pm Ashvin,
A semi-autonomous complex in the Universal Mind would be something on its way to being an egoic being, but which hasn’t got there. The egoic beings we normally experience on Earth can be recognised by independent and often unpredictable activity – they don’t seem to follow laws that can be readily simulated algorithmically or put in an equation. Semi-dissociated beings would have boundaries of a sort (as Rupert said, the solar system is bounded by the heliopause) and may have limited agency - Rupert suggested the Sun might be able to send a huge solar flare to wipe out technological civilisation if it had the will to do so. On the whole, though, the Sun's behaviour follows predictable laws (luckily for us - a lawless universe would be chaotic) and behaves more like a computer program than a Greek God.
To say that the archetypes are alive and have their own independent telos (rather than being the natural properties or resonant frequencies of the Universal Mind) is not, I think, something that can be demonstrated empirically. Can you share any evidence you have for this?
BK’s stuff about NHIs at first seems odd, but if they do in fact exist in our spacetime reality, it’s actually more reasonable an idea than believing that aliens solved the problem of transporting themselves across millions of light years and then surviving in Earth’s atmosphere (think, for example, of the fate of Martians in The War of the Worlds). But they could just be dreamed-up hallucinations - until I see evidence, I'm personally sticking with this.
What could this ever-expansive meaningful temporal context be? If we say it is something of a different nature than our idea of 'going to the store' that contributes to uniting the perceptual frames of our walk or drive, then we have an irreconcilable dualism. Even if we call it "consciousness", "will", "formlessness", [semi-autonomous mental complex], etc. we have a hard problem that divides the meaningful context from our intimate experience of cognitively willed intent (idea). So if our idea of 'going to the store', experienced from our first-person perspective, is what structures (in part) our lawful perceptual flow from our house to the store, then there is no reason to think the higher-order Ideas that structure the flow of Earthly destiny are any different. And if we pursue the phenomenology of spiritual activity deeper and deeper through the portal of concentration, we can indeed experience something of the first-person perspectives responsible for those overarching Earthly and Cosmic rhythms.