My post above aimed to dismantle a very common misconception. It is something very simple. When a person grounded in the physicalist world view of today hears that in our inner life we’re dealing with living realities, things are pictured in a completely caricatured form. For example, one pictures a triangle and then thinks “So these dudes tell me that this triangle is a living being. This is laughable.” And indeed it is. This thought-perception is as alive as a bone or nail clippings. But what about our thinking activity which impresses the thought-perception? We surely feel alive when we think. Even if we don’t have philosophical definitions of what life is, there’s no need for someone to explain to us what it is to feel alive.Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 4:50 pm Cleric,
It seems to me that you have retreated from the idea of thoughts actually being independently alive (or, alternatively, I completely misunderstood you before). Are you saying you don’t believe in elementals that are capable of manifesting as living forms, or in higher dimensional angels that can appear to the devout? Are you saying that elementals and angels are not beings independent of us? If not, then your use of the term “living” for thoughts and emotions is metaphorical; you seem to be implying something like “conscious properties and habits of mind which are not fixed; they're something we can change and build on”, in which case I completely agree with you.
So if I show you some bones, rattle them with a stick, and say “Look, it’s alive”, you have all reasons to be suspicious. At the same time, if you observe your thoughts, for example you move an imaginary triangle, would it be correct to say “This triangle moves because I'm alive. The movement of the triangle is simply a testimony of my inner life.”?
So the goal is not to fantasize life where we don’t find it. It’s about being precise in our observations. And in this sense, the modern materialist who says that his sense of being alive is an illusion, is exactly as superstitious as the one who looks upon the triangle-perception and fantasizes it to be some creature.
The above is a very simple phenomenological statement and can really be used as a self-test to see to what extent we’ve been damaged by modern reductionism. If we try to feel our inner life and we can’t help but imagine some bone-thoughts (corresponding to matter, energy, information, ‘mind’ etc.), and picture how these bones rattle together and somehow miraculously our consciousness emerges from that, then we’re doing the exact same thing which we otherwise laugh at. It’s a very peculiar double standard. In one case we laugh and mock, in the other we summon all the powers of superstition and fantasize how from rattling bones, life and consciousness emerge.
These are very simple things. We’ve often mentioned something very basic about any unprejudiced approach to reality – do not discard from the given that which can’t be recovered in any other way. This is so obvious, yet somehow we do the exact opposite when it comes to life and consciousness – these must be reducible to something else!
I don’t know if I was able to make my point. In short, my previous post was about not looking for life where it is not to be found. When we’re observing our thought images and sensory perceptions we’re dealing with the bones of reality. When we’re looking at our loved one, we’re still seeing only the bones of reality. Not that the real person is the bones but our inner color perceptions. Their soul and spirit are not contained in the perceptions. We can only find them if we try to empathize with their feelings and think the ideas that they think.
Clearly, in the previous post I didn’t say anything about the living aspect of reality and that’s why it seemed that I have abandoned that idea. It was simply not in the focus of the post.
This was the simple message: don’t fantasize life where you see only its bones. Seek life where it is already a fact – in our own intuitive activity. Then the living aspect of the Cosmos will be found in the same living arena of our inner life and not in the boneyard. In other words, when we speak of living thoughts and beings it is not meant movements of inert perceptions that we arbitrarily decide to interpret as representing something alive, but coming to know more intimately the deeper arena of our soul and spiritual life. In this arena, inner life is a direct fact of experience, just like color is in sensory life.