On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Stranger]

PS: He doesn't designate consciousness to Being, because consciousness is an attribute of beings, which are possible because of Being.

That is correct. Yet, there is another very elusive aspect of Being that even Heidegger seemed not to recognize (although I did not read the whole text of "Time and Being", so may be he did but I missed it). Since it is beyond consciousness and human language, there is no good word to describe it. Let's call it "Eing" for a lack of a better word. Sometimes the word "Awareness" is used for it, but this designation is misleading and prone to wrong interpretations because usually we understand awareness as a faculty of consciousness, the ability of being aware of ourselves or of something in the world, but this is not what "Eing" means. The Buddhists used the word "clarity" or "clear light" for it, but I think it can be as much misleading as the word "awareness". It is basically about the innate ability of Being to be directly clear to itself, which gives the ability to every being and phenomenon of the world to be clearly present. Or in other words, it s the "clarity of here-and-now presence" immanent to any of our direct subjective first-person experience, and to any being and phenomenon in the world. This is what makes the things in the world "experienceable". These are still not exact descriptions of "Eing", but only indirect linguistic pointers prone to misinterpretations.

[AshvinP]

This is the mystery of Heidegger’s ontology. It always withdraws and remains hidden, while things (entities, thoughts, etc.) only have their being through it. Heidegger even states that God is not being but is subordinate to it. However, he does not attribute consciousness to being; rather, he remains silent, as these matters are forever ineffable.

Does this remind you of anything, perhaps the discussion of 'present thinking' in PoF chapter 3?

I think it should be clear that, when the spiritual scientist speaks of 'present thinking', for example, no one is imagining another entity, process, etc. that is known and effable. In fact, we are using symbolic tokens to point toward that which continually withdraws and remains hidden, while 'everything that was made' (John 1) has their being through it, just as you did with the tokens in your post. The problem is not using such tokens, but the producer or reader of the tokens forgetting the ineffable present thinking process through which all such thought tokens have their being. To this forgetful soul, it feels as if anyone using symbols to help orient consciousness toward ineffable Being is trying to turn the latter into yet another thing or process, yet another being.

So let's be perfectly clear that this is well understood by SS, not only in a theoretical philosophical way (Heidegger), but as a patent fact of higher cognitive development that we live through. The soul never catches its present thinking as some thing in this developmental process, no matter what stage of evolution, and we come to know this in the most intimate way. In fact, it is precisely those who keep it as a theoretical boogey man, a mental picture of "Being" that is beyond all beings within a theoretical system, who have implicitly presumed to catch it as some already encompassed thing or process (which Kaje also pointed to above). They use their mental picture of 'Being' to preserve the perfectly isolated state of the ego, to forestall the process of gradually discovering the Being of other beings within the lonely ego. All of this becomes clear when we simply try to remain consciously present in the thinking process while we condense such tokens to symbolize what 'Being' is or is not. There is no need to even philosophize about it, only to know it first-hand, and to humbly and trustingly allow ineffable Being to lure our cognitive becoming into its inexhaustible depths.

[Cleric]

I did read the article. The reason is that there are many ways in which different people understand or interpret the "Being". When the Being is understood as the "core subjectivity", the "MAL", or the "I", then surely it refers to a pole on this inner axis which Cleric was refferring to, and here we obviously have a polarity of such "Being" as opposed to other phenomena that such "Being" perceives. In this paradigm there is a polarity and duality between the "Being that perceives" and everything else which is not the "Being" and which is perceived by the "Being". But this is not at all what Heidegger and non-dual traditions meant by Being. Stil, the core subjectivity, the "I", does exist, and such interpretation of "Being" described by Cleric has its validity and he described such interpretation correctly. But it's just that its completely irrelevant to the non-dual Being of Heidegger and non-dual traditions which transcends the "I" and subjectivity, but is still equally immanent to both the subjectivity and to all the phenomena that the subjectivity perceives.

There’s a great misunderstanding here. Maybe the image that I used (sphere) suggests that what I’m talking about is something finite and bounded. Then one assumes that it is all a kind of metaphysical anatomy. When the North Pole is mentioned, one grasps it in the same way the anatomist says, “So here’s the brain, here’s the spleen…” If things are seen in this way, what I’ve described is grasped like an anatomist pointing at the brain and saying, “This is what consciousness is.” Of course, for anyone who has not lost all their sanity, it’s more than obvious that the anatomist conflates things (often purposefully, because it’s easier to deal with fewer mysteries).

Like Kaje noted, what we’re speaking of here is not some metaphysical nomenclature but practical recipes for living experience. I’ll try to recast things through the perspective of your own living experience.

Above, you introduced the word “Eing”. Why? Because you want to highlight the fact that what you try to convey is not something that can be found as a wax imprint in our familiar box. By using a new word, it’s like an invitation to step outside of the box; it’s like saying, “If you want to understand what I’m speaking of, you’ll have to leave your fixed conceptions behind and follow me into a whole new level of experience.”

This has been the leitmotif in all our conversations over the years. Even here, you confirm that we can speak of such poles, of such axis, etc., “But it's just that it’s completely irrelevant to the non-dual Being of Heidegger and non-dual traditions which transcends the "I" and subjectivity.” In other words, you are implying a certain experiential direction that seems to be completely unaddressed by whatever is said here.

Do you feel a polarity here (between what we seem to be dabbling in and what you are trying to point at)? Not some abstract metaphysical conjecture but a living experience surveyable from your own first-person perspective. All that is needed is to observe what happens in your inner process. Try to feel how when you read the words speaking of hemispheres and poles, certain mental images are stimulated in your inner space, and for some reason they feel dry and fragmentary, banging in one another like empty tin cans. Then you feel, “This is missing something essential”. What is it that it is missing? Something which cannot be pointed at, but is like the living existential context of our Be-ing. And already the words of the previous sentence will sound like banging tin cans for many. And sure enough, you too have pointed out that even your “Eing” is likely to be received by many as an empty tin can making annoying screechy sounds.

Thus, it is clear that the reality of “Eing” can only be known/experienced when we make the inner effort to transform our inner state in a certain direction. ‘Direction’ not in a spatial sense but as a direction of inner metamorphosis. When you sit for meditation, there are infinite directions in which your inner flow may drift. Most of these directions only kick tin cans down the road. But when you snap out of it and say “Enough can-banging”, then you know that there’s some intuitive direction that you must pursue if you are to approach a more purified experience of Eing. Of course, even can-banging is in itself a form of Eing (after all, in the most general sense, everything is an experience of existence/becoming), but this Eing attains to a particular clarity when we intentionally seek to experience its ‘suchness’. Now one may object that the experience of pure Eing cannot be pursued in the usual sense, as setting out sight on a certain point (desired state) and trying to move nearer to it. And this is completely right. In a sense, we need to apply negative pursuit. It’s like surrounding ourselves with infinite point-goals and going through each one saying “This is not it, this is not it, …” and trying to magnetically repel from each of these non-goals. If we imagine that we have thus repelled from all infinite non-goal points, we would have some sense of the sought-after Eing. Yet, even though described in such a negative (inverse) way, effectively, we’re still describing a certain direction (recipe) that leads to the reality of what we describe.

Hopefully, you can now feel in a very immediate way this axis – (1) being sucked toward the countless point goals and (2) repelling the suction of these movie continuations which compete to become ‘the’ movie stream of our existence, thus approaching a very peculiar flow mode that feels closer to the ground of pure potentiality (instead of being sucked into particularity).

Now consider for a moment the unthinkable – that maybe what was designated as the North Pole is not yet another metaphysical point that sucks in our existential flow and shapes it into its particular curvature, but precisely this negative limit that we approach as we try to repel all such infinite suction points. Incidentally, AI has generated the picture of the sphere in such a way that there’s no point at the North Pole. Rather, there’s nothing there. It is as if it alludes to the fact that it is not a ‘thing’ we can fix our gaze on and approach, but an inexplicable mode of existence as we follow the lines of manifestation in the reverse direction (by repelling ourselves from the suction points below). Nothing superstitious is implied about AI here, just noting the fortunate output, which was manually selected among many other not-so-fortunate results.

Does this further explanation change anything for you? Does this help to realize that what was designated as North Pole is a symbolic pointer (in the inverse sense) to practically the same reality that you want to point at (again in the inverse sense) by coining words like Eing?

If we are on the same page here, then the next stage would be to consider: what happens if we continue pursuing this negative direction even further? Not theoretically, not by speculating what might be ‘there’, but in a completely real and experiential way in which you yourself approach the purified experience of Eing?

[AshvinP]

That's right, but as I said in the previous post, Cleric was (rightly!) criticizing one of the distorted interpretations of "non-duality" which is actually quite common in the modern "spiritual" scene.

Mhh. Well, I don't see the reason for this discussion then. If both of you are, essentially, saying the same, then what's wrong? Am I missing something? Maybe Cleric and Ashvin can elaborate on that further.

But as you can tell from the latest Güney's post, the Being (in the Heidegger's sense) can not be distilled into some "pure awareness" polarity separate from the rest of the world because it is inseparably imminent to every world's being, form and phenomena. There is basically no gap at all between the Being and all beings, forms and phenomena of the world.

I think this is really the crux of the issue here, then. Who is right? Should we treat "Being" as yet another state or not?

Seeing Cleric's POV, I can see that he essentially says that spiritual ascension does not lead one away from other beings, but deeper into their being.
And this seems to mean that true oneness does not mean dissolving into a formless ocean, but experiencing how one's own being is interwoven with the being of all other beings ("to know how other beings live in our being and vice versa"). And this is, probably, where the collision here with you and Güney happens, I assume: One gains direct, intuitive knowledge of the reality of other beings, instead of perceiving them only as indirect "imprints" in one's own consciousness. It is a path of community and deep connection, not isolation. Did I get this right? Or are you agreeing here as well with Cleric?

I believe you have tracked the essence of the discussion quite precisely, Kaje. Things get tricky because, as we explore such a discussion with "indirect linguistic pointers prone to misinterpretation" (as Eugene put it), it is quite easy to reach a general "agreement" about ineffable Being. Yet when this 'inverse direction' is pursued further and hints toward the possibility of discovering (direclty intuiting) how one's being is interwoven with the being of all other beings, in a precise and lucid way, suddenly the indirect linguistic pointers are treated as a fatal mistake, an error that the soul using the pointers must be unaware of. This is how we get all the accusations of SS (I use this as a broad term to describe any soul pursuing the intuitive path of cognitive development) being caught up in the details of beings, entities, processes, etc., and losing sight of Eing.

It's enough to notice, however, that we could never condense a symbolic token such as "Eing" if we were not intuiting some experiential 'direction' of meaningful existence along which our consciousness can expand, as Cleric noted above. All we need to do is calmly take note of this phenomenological fact. Once we do that, we can begin contemplating the possibility of purifying this intuitive (inverse) direction of meaningful existence. It is useful for Kant, post-Kantians, Heidegger, et al., to philosophize about the mystery of Eing. Yet, once everyone is on the same page about this fundamental mystery, the more we keep philosophizing about how mysterious Eing is beyond all beings and linguistic pointers, the more we find excuses to avoid pursuing the inverse direction into purified consciousness of the 'North Pole' further.

Of course, many people will say they are pursuing this inverse direction through their preferred spiritual paths. Then it becomes a question of whether we can speak of an objective lawfulness, i.e., "how one's being is interwoven with the being of all other beings", that is discovered along this path, which cannot simply be avoided. Once again, this is when those speaking of such a lawfulness are suddenly accused of turning linguistic pointers into beings, processes, states, etc. The common theme is that such an accusation always surfaces when the ego is threatened with experiencing its seemingly 'private' inner content as woven from the most varied intuitive intents of beings, as an 'interference pattern' of such intents. Then the ego feels forced to conclude that whatever is being spoken of is missing something essential (completely irrelevant) to the mystery of Eing.

[Stranger]

Does this further explanation change anything for you? Does this help to realize that what was designated as North Pole is a symbolic pointer (in the inverse sense) to practically the same reality that you want to point at (again in the inverse sense) by coining words like Eing?

If we are on the same page here, then the next stage would be to consider: what happens if we continue pursuing this negative direction even further? Not theoretically, not by speculating what might be ‘there’, but in a completely real and experiential way in which you yourself approach the purified experience of Eing?

Correct, what you described as NP is a pointer to the reality of Being in a "negative sense". But it only describes the intermediate stage of searching for the experiential reality of Being rather than the realization of that reality. You rightly described the typical meditative effort on the path to such realization when our mental attention needs to be withdrawn from the things of the world in order to discover the Being. At that stage the mysterious "Being" seems to be an abstract polarity, a not-yet-reached North Pole as something seemingly opposite to the "wax imprints", the things of the world. So yes, the NP is a correct pointer for that intermediate stage of seeking in the direction of negating. You also correctly described some possible errors and distortions on this path when the Being is conflated with the sense of ego-"I", in which case such practice can indeed lead to the state of cosmic-scale inflated ego. Ashvin is also correctly describing another typical way to approach Being by means of philosophical inquiry, and a typical error along this approach when Being becomes an abstract mental concept.

But what I was pointing to, and what you are pointing to in your question " what happens if we continue pursuing this negative direction", is the Being as it is actually experientially realized in direct first-person experience, as opposed to the abstract image/concept of "Being" when it is still being sought. When this realization happens, it becomes a radical change of perspective and it becomes obvious that Being is not something alien to the things of the world and is not some polarity in the spiritual universe of things, or an abstract philosophical concept, but it is the most intimate and immanent essence of all things and beings of the world. In other words, on the path to this realization we try to "purify" our experience to arrive at some raffinate "pure" state or concept of Being stripped of all impressions and perceptions of the things of the world, but once we discover the actual Being experientially, we find that it is not some raffinate essence alien to the things of the word, but quite the opposite, the most immanent aspect/essence of every thing and every being of the word. Along the path of searching, we go towards no-thing away from things, but only to discover that this "no-thing" is actually everything and in everything. And this is where we arrive at "oneness" because it becomes intuitively and experientially obvious that Being equally "pervades" the whole world and every thing and every being of the world and "binds" all of them together into one indivisible reality which is still manifested as multiplicity. Oneness and multiplicity may seem like polarity when approached abstractly, but in the reality of direct experiential realization they are not a polarity, but inseparable simultaneity. In spite of the seeming multiplicity, it never breaks the unity/oneness of the universe in its Being. And in spite of the equality and oneness of all things in Being, it does not negate or break the hierarchical structures and lawfulness of the multiplicity of things in the world.

[Cleric]

Correct, what you described as NP is a pointer to the reality of Being in a "negative sense". But it only describes the intermediate stage of searching for the experiential reality of Being rather than the realization of that reality. You rightly described the typical meditative effort on the path to such realization when our mental attention needs to be withdrawn from the things of the world in order to discover the Being. At that stage the mysterious "Being" seems to be an abstract polarity, a not-yet-reached North Pole as something seemingly opposite to the "wax imprints", the things of the world. So yes, the NP is a correct pointer for that intermediate stage of seeking in the direction of negating. You also correctly described some possible errors and distortions on this path when the Being is conflated with the sense of ego-"I", in which case such practice can indeed lead to the state of cosmic-scale inflated ego. Ashvin is also correctly describing another typical way to approach Being by means of philosophical inquiry, and a typical error along this approach when Being becomes an abstract mental concept.

But what I was pointing to, and what you are pointing to in your question " what happens if we continue pursuing this negative direction", is the Being as it is actually experientially realized in direct first-person experience, as opposed to the abstract image/concept of "Being" when it is still being sought. When this realization happens, it becomes a radical change of perspective and it becomes obvious that Being is not something alien to the things of the world and is not some polarity in the spiritual universe of things, or an abstract philosophical concept, but it is the most intimate and immanent essence of all things and beings of the world. In other words, on the path to this realization we try to "purify" our experience to arrive at some raffinate "pure" state or concept of Being stripped of all impressions and perceptions of the things of the world, but once we discover the actual Being experientially, we find that it is not some raffinate essence alien to the things of the word, but quite the opposite, the most immanent aspect/essence of every thing and every being of the word. Along the path of searching, we go towards no-thing away from things, but only to discover that this "no-thing" is actually everything and in everything. And this is where we arrive at "oneness" because it becomes intuitively and experientially obvious that Being equally "pervades" the whole world and every thing and every being of the world and "binds" all of them together into one indivisible reality which is still manifested as multiplicity. Oneness and multiplicity may seem like polarity when approached abstractly, but in the reality of direct experiential realization they are not a polarity, but inseparable simultaneity. In spite of the seeming multiplicity, it never breaks the unity/oneness of the universe in its Being. And in spite of the equality and oneness of all things in Being, it does not negate or break the hierarchical structures and lawfulness of the multiplicity of things in the world.

That's fine. The intermediate stage can be said to be as if we are with one foot in the actual (wordless) reality of Being, while with the other foot we are precipitating the mental pointer-images (which, if stripped from their holistic context of Being, immediately become empty tin cans). So just as you didn't imply the intermediate state while speaking of Eing, neither did I imply that by speaking of NP. It is the radical change of perspective that we have always been after.

Now that we have moved a notch further along the axis (we have passed the intermediate stage), I repeat the question: What happens if we continue pursuing this negative direction even further? In other words, can the radical stage be an intermediate stage in its own right? Can we pursue a direction that leads us to an even more radical change? Or you would rather say that once we find the radical Oneness, we're done? After all, what can be more One the One? We hit the upper Oneness boundary of Being, and from that point onward, everything is 'below' our inner gaze?

[Stranger]

Now that we have moved a notch further along the axis (we have passed the intermediate stage), I repeat the question: What happens if we continue pursuing this negative direction even further? In other words, can the radical stage be an intermediate stage in its own right? Can we pursue a direction that leads us to an even more radical change? Or you would rather say that once we find the radical Oneness, we're done? After all, what can be more One the One? We hit the upper Oneness boundary of Being, and from that point onward, everything is 'below' our inner gaze?

Right, and the answer is "no", we are never done on this path because the depths of Reality in both the dimension of Oneness and the dimension of multiplicity with all its structural hierarchical complexity is inexhaustible. Form my own experience I can only tell that the more I travel along this path, the more I see that I'm just scratching the surface of this bottomless mystery of Reality.

[Cleric]

Right, and the answer is "no", we are never done on this path because the depths of Reality in both the dimension of Oneness and the dimension of multiplicity with all its structural hierarchical complexity is inexhaustible. Form my own experience I can only tell that the more I travel along this path, the more I see that I'm just scratching the surface of this bottomless mystery of Reality.

OK. So will I be right to say that in your view these are two distinct and largely independent 'half-planes' of Reality:
(1) The dimension of multiplicity and complex hierarchical structures that we gaze at and manipulate through their symbolic wax imprints
(2) The dimension of Oneness, in respect to which, in your words, (1) is completely irrelevant?

[Stranger]

OK. So will I be right to say that in your view these are two distinct and largely independent 'half-planes' of Reality:
(1) The dimension of multiplicity and complex hierarchical structures that we gaze at and manipulate through their symbolic wax imprints
(2) The dimension of Oneness, in respect to which, in your words, (1) is completely irrelevant?

They are inseparable. As a rough analogy, consider the two dimensions of space - vertical and horizontal. These two dimensions are conceptually and experientially distinguishable (we can imagine moving along each direction, or we can actually move along each direction). But can we actually isolate one dimension from the other? No, we cannot, they are simply two aspects of one inseparable reality of continuous but still multidimensional space. Likewise, it is impossible to isolate and distill the Being apart from things/beings, and likewise isolate the things/beings apart from Being. In reality there are no beings without their Being (because without Being they would simply not be able to exist), and likewise there is no Being without beings (because if there is no "thing/being", then what is there to "Be"?). We can do such separation only as abstraction, but such abstraction does not have a "magic power" to actually split the Reality into two separate "half-planes".

[Cleric]

They are inseparable. As a rough analogy, consider the two dimensions of space - vertical and horizontal. These two dimensions are conceptually and experientially distinguishable (we can imagine moving along each direction, or we can actually move along each direction). But can we actually isolate one dimension from the other? No we can not. Likewise, it is impossible to isolate and distill the Being apart from things/beings, and likewise isolate the things/beings apart from Being. In reality there are no beings without their Being (because without Being they would simply not exist), and likewise there is no Being without beings, (because if there is no "thing/being", then what is there to "Be"?). We can only do such separation as an abstraction, but such abstraction does not have a "magic power" to actually split the Reality into two separate "half-planes".

Great. I guess you still stand by your view that the communications of SS are not drawn from the dimension of Oneness. Instead, as people usually imagine it, Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition, are considered only progressively 'looser' and 'intuitive' (bordering on hallucinatory) intellectual arrangements of mental pictures that aim to 'explain' the total panorama of appearances.

If this is the case, then what would communications that indeed draw from the dimension of Oneness be like (a question asked many, many times, most recently by Ashvin a little above)? Since, as you say, the dimensions are not fully orthogonal but work into one another, then it's logical that certain experiences in the dimension of Oneness should be found as tied with corresponding phenomena in the dimension of phenomenal appearances. What could communicating such interrelated experiences be like, such that they wouldn't be immediately dismissed as mere shuffling of esoteric mental images in the phenomenal dimension? I asked Guney something similar. Effectively, if you think that the communications of SS do not sound as emerging from the dimension of Oneness, this implies that you have certain intuition about what such communications should be like (otherwise there would be nothing to contrast the comm. of SS to, thus you wouldn't be able to say where they are likely to be drawn from). So what betrays SS? For example, what makes it implausible that an Initiate can grow into highly radical forms of Being in the dimension of Oneness, and there experience directly from first-person Oneness something of the perspective of, say, an Archai, then trace how the intuitive intents intrinsic to that higher-order perspective play out in the phenomenal shadows? Is it that the Being of the Archai cannot be found in the dimension of Oneness in the first place (it doesn't exist there but only down in the shadows)? Or you doubt concretely the ability of, say, Steiner to reach Oneness (within the dimension of Oneness) with the Being of the Archai and glimpse through the momentarily merged perspectives?