KASTRUP AND SHELDRAKE ON THE COSMIC MIND

[Lou Gold]

A wonderful wide-ranging dialogue full of nuance, respect and insight. Not a final resolution but surely a deep philosophical pleasure,

[Ben Iscatus]

Thanks, Lou. Super!

[AshvinP]

A wonderful wide-ranging dialogue full of nuance, respect and insight. Not a final resolution but surely a deep philosophical pleasure,

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?

[Lou Gold]

A wonderful wide-ranging dialogue full of nuance, respect and insight. Not a final resolution but surely a deep philosophical pleasure,

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?

There seemed to be a suggested either/or between panentheism and idealism at the start. I was grateful that it was left open or evolving or surely 'nuanced'. Guess I'm a 'process-guy'. I dunno about 'final resolutions'. All things considered, I personally feel more aligned with Sheldrake. My nature leans toward art more than analysis. Thanks for asking.

[Ben Iscatus]

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.

[Lou Gold]

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 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.

[AshvinP]

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.

What it is a "semi-autonomous mental complex within Universal Mind"? Not that it matters, really.

The really interesting thing to me is that, because Bernardo refuses to seriously understand the Cosmos and its archetypes as living, supra-intelligent, and intentional agencies, he is forced to write articles with conclusions like this below, because he still maintains a duality between Earthly physical-biological life and Cosmic soul-spiritual being. He can't conceive that the living archetypes are also actively and intelligently shaping the flows of Earthly destiny. Also, because of that duality, he has nowhere left to go with analytical idealism, gets bored, and starts weighing in on international politics and UAPs


https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/01 ... at-is.html

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.

Lou, I also think Sheldrake has much more interesting insights to offer here, because he avoids metaphysics and sticks mostly to phenomenology/science.

[Ben Iscatus]

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.

[AshvinP]

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.

Yes, the evidence is here (phenomenology of Time-Consciousness spectrum).

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.

This image from Cleric, when taken as a symbol for inner soul mood and thinking perspective, also holds the key (WFT = Willing, Feeling, Thinking).





People simply refuse to stop thinking of themselves and the whole Earth as an atomic unit in space (left image), separated from the 'noumena' by some impenetrable veil, where their inner life (including sensory life) unfolds completely apart from the 'extra-terrestrial' (spiritual) worlds. If they were to orient toward the right image, concretely, then it would become perfectly clear that we can't make sense of anything happening on Earth, such as natural and cultural streams of evolution, without the 'extra-terrestrial' or 'inter-dimensional' etc. intelligences, the archetypal beings, who structure the flow of Earthly destiny through our inner life, which is concentrically embedded within their own.

We conceive and perceive UAPs and alien intelligences because our thinking lives in and unfolds through the creative Ideas of those intelligences. But we reduce those supersensible (non-spatial) experiences to the lowest common denominator of sensory-like manifestations and then spin out metaphysical theories about where they came from, how they got here, where they have been hiding on Earth, etc. All of that is completely unnecessary and becomes increasingly absurd the longer it goes on in this way.

If Bernardo were to reorient more toward the phenomenological-scientific approach of someone like Sheldrake or Levin, these things would become much more clear to him. It's only our desire to turn everything into abstract metaphysics (including natural science and history) that leads to these ever-more externalized and complex speculations about otherwise simple spiritual phenomena that flow through our first-person thinking perspective. The evolving consciousness that conceives UAPs has been documented by countless 20th century thinkers, such as Gebser and Barfield, who Bernardo claims to have read. But because he hasn't oriented toward these ideas from the concrete first-person thinking perspective, they all remain abstract and therefore he ignores their implications when it comes to Earthly events happening in the here-and-now, and instead takes refuge in completely physicalist theories.

(of course this doesn't apply to only Bernardo, but a lot of people)

[Ben Iscatus]

Ash, I think you do BK a disservice by saying he hasn't oriented towards a phenomenological approach. He said in the discussion that he shared many of Rupert's intuitions but that he deliberately takes an analytic approach to reach an audience with a literalist materialist mindset (the rational mind is the bouncer of the heart etc). That's his whole purpose, and it's an important one because the dominant materialism and consumerism are leading us into a hopeless quagmire.

If the spiritual agencies you refer to are in charge of our cultural direction, then they're really not doing a very good job! Your diagram looks to me like a hypothesis, not evidence. I would expect to see evidence of a backlash against consumerism and materialism. But if it exists, it's miniscule. However, if physicists and neuroscientists start coming on board (they are our culture's priests), things could start to change. Change won't come by consulting angels!