Intuition of the material world

[Federica]

No it can't, since consciousness is only half awake, half in control, in feeling.
And feeling as perception - like in the picture: "feeling something like love" - is a subset in thinking.

Consciousness or awareness is half awake?

Are you simply stating a truism like "the self depends on self-consciousness"?

I don't know what definitions you put behind these labels.
Please replace "consciousness" with your preferred word to signify the sense of self as you experience it.

[Lou Gold]

Consciousness or awareness is half awake?

Are you simply stating a truism like "the self depends on self-consciousness"?

I don't know what definitions you put behind these labels.
Please replace "consciousness" with your preferred word to signify the sense of self as you experience it.

Ramana Maharshi, who believed there was no self, reported that his consciousness (as he was aware of it) was like being wide awake in deep dreamless sleep.

I'm no where near that no-self level but I can report finding myself reacting before being aware of what I'm reacting to. Awareness follows and surely involves thinking about it.

[Federica]

Consciousness or awareness is half awake?

Are you simply stating a truism like "the self depends on self-consciousness"?

I don't know what definitions you put behind these labels.
Please replace "consciousness" with your preferred word to signify the sense of self as you experience it.

Ramana Maharshi, who believed there was no self, reported that his consciousness (as he was aware of it) was like being wide awake in deep dreamless sleep.

I'm no where near that no-self level but I can report finding myself reacting before being aware of what I'm reacting to. Awareness follows and surely involves thinking about it.

It seems to me, Lou, that you are, like Lorenzo, under the influence of the "the demon who loves the easy path".

[Lou Gold]

I don't know what definitions you put behind these labels.
Please replace "consciousness" with your preferred word to signify the sense of self as you experience it.

Ramana Maharshi, who believed there was no self, reported that his consciousness (as he was aware of it) was like being wide awake in deep dreamless sleep.

I'm no where near that no-self level but I can report finding myself reacting before being aware of what I'm reacting to. Awareness follows and surely involves thinking about it.

It seems to me, Lou, that you are, like Lorenzo, under the influence of the "the demon who loves the easy path".

As a scientific first person experiential experiment, please try to stop thinking for awhile and report whether you find it as an easy path.

[Federica]

What is the world around us from a Ss perspective?

Güney,

This passage from GA 108 is another angle to approach your question:

Anyone who believes that thought is merely an activity that takes place within his head or in his soul cannot have the right feeling for thought. Whoever harbors this idea will be constantly diverted by a false feeling from seeking right habits of thought and from making the necessary demands on his thinking. He who would acquire the right feeling for thought must say to himself: “If I can formulate thoughts about things, and learn to understand them through thinking, then these things themselves must first have contained these thoughts. The things must have been built up according to these thoughts, and only because this is so can I in turn extract these thoughts from the things.”
(...)
In the works of man it is easy to picture this to ourselves, but with the works of nature it is not so easily done. Yet these, too, are the result of spiritual activities and behind them are spiritual beings. Thus, when a man thinks about things he only re-thinks what is already in them. The belief that the world has been created by thought and is still ceaselessly being created in this manner is the belief that can alone fructify the actual inner practice of thought.
(...)
Considering the real practice of thought, it must be realized that thoughts can only be drawn from a world in which they already exist. Just as water can only be taken from a glass that actually contains water, so thoughts can only be extracted from things within which these thoughts are concealed. The world is built by thought, and only for this reason can thought be extracted from it.

So the world around us is densified thinking, that can be extracted again from it, as thoughts.

[Federica]

Ramana Maharshi, who believed there was no self, reported that his consciousness (as he was aware of it) was like being wide awake in deep dreamless sleep.

I'm no where near that no-self level but I can report finding myself reacting before being aware of what I'm reacting to. Awareness follows and surely involves thinking about it.

It seems to me, Lou, that you are, like Lorenzo, under the influence of the "the demon who loves the easy path".

As a scientific first person experiential experiment, please try to stop thinking for awhile and report whether you find it as an easy path.

We already had this discussion, Lou. I am familiar with that kind of experiment.
The egoic thought "let's opt out of egoic thought" is like... I'll let you decide what it may be like.

[AshvinP]

The enjoyment of a cup of coffee or a sunset is as easy as falling off a log, and apparently, so did Jesus think of his path.
To make any kind of spiritual progress, or to understand spiritual progress, should not require rigorous philosophical thinking, or intuitions outside of one's daily experience. It should be explainable to a child.
Steiner, Cleric and Ashwin use flowery fancy phrases to create the false impression that spiritual progress has a steep entry, and that spiritual progress requires skills beyond the authentic inclinations of the mind and heart. As I've suggested in earlier threads - Steiner (PoF) is about creating a perceived need for High Priests.

Lorenzo, maybe you can simply offer to Guney your simple few-words child-level explanation of how to understand the nature of the physical world.

Guney had specifically asked re an Ss explanation - which I cannot provide - and it appears, no one can provide an explanation using ordinary language.
I'm under the opinion that an "understand the nature of the physical world" is a red herring. There is no true single explanation of reality, there are only relative individual\species specific explanations. Knowledge of the world is based in consciousness.

Lorenzo,

As a purely sociological experiment, I am curious whether you feel the same way about the 'explanations' we are given in standard secular science. For ex.:

The Oort cloud (/ɔːrt, ʊərt/),[1] sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud,[2] is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years).[3][note 1][4] The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.[5]

The cloud is thought to comprise two regions: a disc-shaped inner Oort cloud aligned with the solar ecliptic (also called its Hills cloud) and a spherical outer Oort cloud enclosing the entire solar system. Both regions lie well beyond the heliosphere and are in interstellar space.[4][6] The Kuiper belt, the scattered disc and the detached objects—three other reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects—are more than a thousand times closer to the Sun than the innermost portion of the Oort cloud.

The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographic boundary of the Solar System. This area is defined by the Sun's Hill sphere, and hence lies at the interface between solar and galactic gravitational dominion

Surely, this is also 'flowery' language of the high priests of science (although I bet most people here can easily approximate its meaning with relatively little effort). Can you conceive of a way to give this explanation of the Oort cloud with more 'ordinary language'? Or is it simply a red herring that any useful understanding can be gained by thinking through such astronomical dynamics, and the best explanation is that it is all "based in consciousness"?

[Lou Gold]

It seems to me, Lou, that you are, like Lorenzo, under the influence of the "the demon who loves the easy path".

As a scientific first person experiential experiment, please try to stop thinking for awhile and report whether you find it as an easy path.

We already had this discussion, Lou. I am familiar with that kind of experiment.
The egoic thought "let's opt out of egoic thought" is like... I'll let you decide what it may be like.

I'm not trying to opt out of egoic thought. For sure, I'm full of it. But, as my energy is waning, I do seek to lessen my attachments to it. When I do, it feels quite liberating. I like to say, "I feel SUPER... sometimes." It's not a bowl of cherries and I do seek to avoid making it more difficult than it needs to be. In my present context, "live and learn" takes on new meanings.

[Federica]

As a scientific first person experiential experiment, please try to stop thinking for awhile and report whether you find it as an easy path.

We already had this discussion, Lou. I am familiar with that kind of experiment.
The egoic thought "let's opt out of egoic thought" is like... I'll let you decide what it may be like.

I'm not trying to opt out of egoic thought. For sure, I'm full of it. But, as my energy is waning, I do seek to lessen my attachments to it. When I do, it feels quite liberating. I like to say, "I feel SUPER... sometimes." It's not a bowl of cherries and I do seek to avoid making it more difficult than it needs to be. In my present context, "live and learn" takes on new meanings.

I was not referring that to you personally, Lou, but to the no-self mouvement you seemed to refer to.

[lorenzop]

Lorenzo, maybe you can simply offer to Guney your simple few-words child-level explanation of how to understand the nature of the physical world.

Guney had specifically asked re an Ss explanation - which I cannot provide - and it appears, no one can provide an explanation using ordinary language.
I'm under the opinion that an "understand the nature of the physical world" is a red herring. There is no true single explanation of reality, there are only relative individual\species specific explanations. Knowledge of the world is based in consciousness.

Lorenzo,

As a purely sociological experiment, I am curious whether you feel the same way about the 'explanations' we are given in standard secular science. For ex.:

The Oort cloud (/ɔːrt, ʊərt/),[1] sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud,[2] is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years).[3][note 1][4] The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.[5]

The cloud is thought to comprise two regions: a disc-shaped inner Oort cloud aligned with the solar ecliptic (also called its Hills cloud) and a spherical outer Oort cloud enclosing the entire solar system. Both regions lie well beyond the heliosphere and are in interstellar space.[4][6] The Kuiper belt, the scattered disc and the detached objects—three other reservoirs of trans-Neptunian objects—are more than a thousand times closer to the Sun than the innermost portion of the Oort cloud.

The outer limit of the Oort cloud defines the cosmographic boundary of the Solar System. This area is defined by the Sun's Hill sphere, and hence lies at the interface between solar and galactic gravitational dominion

Surely, this is also 'flowery' language of the high priests of science (although I bet most people here can easily approximate its meaning with relatively little effort). Can you conceive of a way to give this explanation of the Oort cloud with more 'ordinary language'? Or is it simply a red herring that any useful understanding can be gained by thinking through such astronomical dynamics, and the best explanation is that it is all "based in consciousness"?

Re the secular language in your example - any verbiage I don't initially grasp or know, I can lookup (Google) and learn. For example, I can Google "Sun's Hill sphere" from your example above.
Re Ss, looking up Ss verbiage, Google\ChatGPT and etc., simply describe Ss verbiage as belonging to certain occult beliefs . . . Google is just as baffled as I am : ) - - - believe me I've tried to look up many of the phrases you and Cleric use.

I'm currently thinking that for a person to understand Ss (PoF), they first must have a gut feeling of acceptance for it. To me it makes no sense intellectually or intuitively.