Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 15, 2024 10:37 am
Ashvin said:
"But no one is asking for your belief or wants to prove these ideas to you, even if we could, because that would rob you of spiritual life and freedom. We are simply giving you hints in which direction to look so you can freely experience the ever-deepening layers of meaning in the perceptual flow for yourself, to which no other experience in life can compare. It would be an unspeakable travesty for either the Gods or us 'mere mortals' to rob you or anyone else of that experience."
This conversation has proved useful to me. I realise that you very much talk in terms of an individual's development. What Scott is talking about (from Barfield) is a paradigm shift, which is a cultural rather than an individual phenomenon.. It occurs to me that gullibility can actually be useful in cultural evolution. So if, as I would hope, a paradigm shift in our current materialist/consumerist culture to an idealist culture is ever to happen, I must believe (have faith) that it has happened before. So I’ll change my tune and say that in spite of my sluggish rationality, such a shift is possible. So how would it work? Well, this time, it must come from the top. The current priests (physicists and neuroscientists) must understand that materialism doesn’t work and tread new ground. BK says this is happening (privately, his work at Essentia has given him insights into the minds of these, our priests). Once some of them come out of the closet, then others will follow, and then the rest of us can jump on the new bandwagon (yes, mimicry and gullibility, idolisation of the priesthood, will play a big role). It could happen (not saying it will – but it could).
Your own gradualist approach is focused on individual changes rather than our culture as a whole. I suggest that it cannot have a broad cultural effect or provoke a paradigm shift unless it influences and captures the imagination of our cultural priests.
Ben,
I am not
only speaking of an individual's development. As we deepen our intuitive activity to resonate with higher-order perspectives that structure the perceptual flow, we discern that the Cosmos is weaved of self-similar rhythms of development at
all scales. It is fundamentally the very same rhythm that we find in our experience of thinking-perception, where coherent ideas meet and organize the 'chaos' of perceptions.
We could think of it crudely as follows. Spirit contracts from the infinite, superimposed potential of states of being into relative perspectives that traverse this potential and go through rhythms of development. These rhythms can all be likened to that of the plant growing and differentiating from a seed state of potential (manvantara, incarnation, etc.), and then contracting its forces back into a seed state of potential (pralaya, disincarnation, death, etc.) from which new forms will grow (reincarnation, rebirth), so on and so forth. At the plant scale, this rhythm is still repetitive and circular, but at the human cognitive scale, this rhythm becomes
creative and every new iteration builds on the previous - that is what we experience as 'learning' and 'evolution'. Yet, as the Spirit contracts from the infinite potential, not all relative perspectives are at the same scale - they are all nested at different scales. It is as if the Spirit stops contracting at a certain scale of coherence and begins undergoing rhythms of development, and these rhythms form the 'medium' in which other relative perspectives that continue to contract will experience their lower-order rhythms.
There is no need to imagine any of this as some metaphysical objects 'out there'. These terms are only symbols for the first-person experience of the
inner temporal rhythms through which our lives unfold. It is only at our human scale that many encompassing rhythms are experienced as an outer spatial world. We are acquainted with the Cosmic scale rhythms (viewed from the 'outside') - that of day and night, the four seasons, the planets orbiting the Sun, the Sun traversing the Zodiac. But let's take an example closer to home - language. When we type posts here, we experience a certain local rhythm in which we experience meaningful ideas in our intuition and then condense that meaning into a relatively organized set of word-perceptions through our inner voice and our keyboard. We continually alternate between these poles of the rhythm - idea and perception - to construct a post. Yet we know this local rhythm is also unfolding within overarching linguistic constraints - we can say our local cognitive activity is flowing through the linguistic 'riverbed' which shapes the perception of our inner voice. It is well known that the language we think in greatly shapes the way we think and the sort of thoughts we generate. Of all the possible ideas we could have and ways we could be steering those ideas, our thinking language will filter out a subset of those.
At the same time, the flow of our local thinking is also working back on the riverbed, like in erosion, gradually reimagining its constraints to allow for greater
degrees of cognitive freedom. This is fundamentally the principle of evolution - the rhythmic feedback between spiritual activity and the riverbeds through which it flows, which leads the former to ever-expansive degrees of freedom (of course language isn't the only one, there are also the riverbeds of our personal character and temperament, our sociocultural atmosphere, our physical inheritance, the sensory world, and so forth). This is how languages evolve over time. The greater degrees of freedom are experienced in the fact that the linguistic riverbed accommodates a greater palette of thinking-states which we can experience. So the linguistic riverbed is itself evolving through rhythms of development, which is conceptually explored through the study of philology. That is what Scott pointed to in his essay and one (of the many) transformations that Barfield, Gebser, and others used to discern the evolution of collective cognitive consciousness in clear contours.
As an aside, we can see how the above knowledge can also have quite practical relevance for our times - if someone comes along with an agenda to fix the language in stone, it's like they are crystallizing the riverbed so the flow of thinking is tied to the channels that have already been carved out and these channels lose their pliability. The thinking individuals can only know themselves in the reflection of these limited linguistic pathways which respond less and less to their creative feedback. This greatly caps their potential for further cognitive development. In that sense, many so-called attempts to 'protect' people through such political measures are hampering their inner development. The policies that strictly 'police language' only serve to rigidify the pathways of inner cognitive development. I only point this out as an example of why the above is not only abstract head-knowledge but can help us gain practical insight into what promotes and what hampers the evolution of greater degrees of individual and collective freedom.
All of this is pretty abstract and isn't intended as some overarching metaphysical explanation of reality or evolution - it is only pointing to the fact that there are no rigid boundaries between the evolutionary rhythms of the individual and the collectives. These are in dynamic relation with one another and, most importantly, are in the process of
spiraling together through imaginative thinking. We have already arrived at the point where individuals can think somewhat independently of linguistic constraints, for ex. in mathematical thinking. Regardless of which linguistic riverbed our activity flows through, we can meet with others in shared understanding through mathematical thinking, where we ourselves participate in fashioning new riverbeds of 'mathematical languages' (which of course is the basis for most modern science). It is the same thing with many forms of philosophical, artistic, and religious thinking. Yet all of these efforts are capped in their potential until they are also turned toward the very spiritual activity that makes them possible.
Just think about all the thinking effort that is funneled into this or that science, art, religion, philosophical view, political system, economic system, marketing scheme, etc. Every field of inquiry and practice has many sub-fields and each one of these has been refined to the most detailed knowledge and expert strategies. If only a tiny fraction of that spiritual activity was redirected toward investigating the structure of the activity itself, i.e. phenomenology of spiritual activity, we would witness something like this:
Indeed, this is how it is experienced at the individual scale - we go from trudging along from perceptual fact to perceptual fact as passive observers, building ever-more complicated and confusing models of reality with diminishing returns, to an inversion point where every new insight into the perceptual flow feeds back exponentially into new insights that are, at the same time, active participation in reimagining the perceptual riverbed constraints,
starting with the rigid dogmas, beliefs, assumptions, habits, etc. that we have adopted with and through the 'high priests'. The more the riverbeds are 'eroded', the more momentum our spiritual activity gains to accomplish further erosion more quickly and effectively. This is the very process by which the individual and the collective are reconciled in spiritual degrees of freedom, as the relative perspectives of the Spirit across all scales harmonize their self-similar rhythms of activity. The higher-order scales are already relatively harmonious - as we see in the symphonic functioning of the Cosmos and Nature - and are waiting for the human scale to freely attune its rhythms, instead of spreading its cacophony into the whole organic system.