Metamorphoses of the Spirit: Transfiguring our Thinking (Part II)

[Eugene I]

Nicely put, Eugene. I think an artist inclined to cut his ear off.

Yeah, that too. Being mischievous, curious and open to all experiences is part of artistic spirit.

[AshvinP]

I try to take it as seriously as Steiner, Barfield, Coleridge, Gebser, Spengler, Teilhard de Chardin, Jung, Heidegger (and those are just people writing in the last 100 years or so, let alone the entire 2500+ year history of Western philosophy-spirituality). BK takes it pretty seriously too. And actually I take it much less seriously than them, which is my shortcoming, not theirs. And you take it much less seriously than me! I thought I was the one with a cold intellectual approach here, but yours is even colder, as you dismiss attempts to share spiritual vision as "fantasy" for no other reason than you have not seen these things for yourself. It's like me claiming Russia doesn't exist because I have never been there and seen it. All those mapmakers are engaged in wild fantasy as far as I am concerned!

Art and music are also fantasies, yet they are beautiful and bear value and meaning.
I think you guys do not appreciate the Divine lightness and sense of humor, which is just another facet of Love.
There is a sort of heavy neurosis in taking things too seriously, and it's in a way nihilistic too - neglecting and trumping the Divine Lightness and sense of humor.

This is what I like about idealism - there is no heavy "matter" to things, nothing "substantial", nothing to hold or grasp. The world in idealism is a fantasy of Consciousness, a flow of beautiful ideal forms and conscious experiences, real yet fleeting and insubstantial. God is an artist.

Art and music are not "fantasies". Funnily enough, I have been in the process of writing an essay about that. They draw us into the truly shared realm of imagination, sometimes with little effort on our part if the art is exceptional. I already quoted you what Coleridge says about "primary imagination", and I think he had a tiny bit of experience with producing great art

When I talk about you not taking it seriously, I was not taking issue with any "sense of humor" when discussing these things. There was nothing humorous in "are you living entirely in your own [fantasy]" and "ditto". You did not intend "ditto" as a joke, did you? I meant seriously as in, at least considering the possibility that there are perceptions and ideal content which go beyond your personal experience, i.e. that you don't know everything there is to know about spiritual realms yet, and there are people who may have something to offer you in this regard. As in, have a little bit of humility and gratitude when approaching the Spirit.

[Eugene I]

Art and music are not "fantasies". Funnily enough, I have been in the process of writing an essay about that. They draw us into the truly shared realm of imagination, sometimes with little effort on our part if the art is exceptional. I already quoted you what Coleridge says about "primary imagination", and I think he had a tiny bit of experience with producing great art

The fact that fantasies can be shared between alters of the same Consciousness across their dissociative boundaries does not make them to be anything other than fantasies.

This Bach's Fugue is still his fantasy, even though is is shared between all who play or listen to it. The value and the meaning of it is its beauty

[Cleric]

Cleric, I don't think you've gone mad. But I find I can no longer enjoy too much abstraction and conceptualization - to me, it's become like dribbling round the pitch and failing to shoot for goal. This is my problem, not yours. So I apologise to you.

No need for apologies, Ben. I'm very well aware how things look from the side

It is a great sign when we begin to feel actual pain when we have to deal with dead abstractions! It's only natural to feel the dead-endedness of juggling with empty thought shells. And interestingly, it's precisely Ashvin's essays here and in the other threads that addresses this. This is also the direction we can seek and find experiences that we can never approach through the mystical mood. Mysticism is a common fallback once a seeker has become disillusioned by the floating empty husks. Then the powerful feelings we get from the surrender to the Whole (and these feelings are indeed powerful!) quite justifiably outshine the dead thoughts. Yet in this we sacrifice any hope for actual cognition of the higher worlds. But this needs not to be so. All we need is shift of focus. To seek where we have never sought so far - in the direction of the blind spot - where our spiritual thinking activity rays forth. Once we recognize that in the intimate experience of our thinking process we have a real foothold on reality, the empty husks become filled with the Life of the Spirit. It's like our true being has been hidden in the shadows all along and now we find a whole new realm of inner Life. In this realm we find again the powerful Cosmic feelings but now they are immeasurably more intense because they are penetrated with spiritual comprehension. From this perspective our thoughts and speech are no longer the hollow husks dribbling around but are living fruits proceeding from the depths of reality. Every fruit is a living testimony for the realities that our soul has expanded into, and which are illuminated with the cognizing activity of our Spirit.

So the direction that we can seek into is always there. Yes, it's not all joy and roses. Actually it's primarily sacrifice and hard work. But everyone knows that satisfaction from hard and honest work far surpasses anything we can ever receive as undeserved gift.

[AshvinP]

Art and music are not "fantasies". Funnily enough, I have been in the process of writing an essay about that. They draw us into the truly shared realm of imagination, sometimes with little effort on our part if the art is exceptional. I already quoted you what Coleridge says about "primary imagination", and I think he had a tiny bit of experience with producing great art

The fact that fantasies can be shared between alters of the same Consciousness across their dissociative boundaries does not make them to be anything other than fantasies.

This Bach's Fugue is still his fantasy, even though is is shared between all who play or listen to it. The value and the meaning of it is its beauty

This is great example that highlights the differences between the meaning and implications of our world-conceptions:

For you, all ideal content i.e. meaning for experience is "fantasy". Although you have many times acknowledged meaning is fundamental aspect of all experience, you still think of it as a thing "shared between alters across their dissociative boundaries". For me, meaning is truly fundamental aspect of MAL and we share meaning because we are all within the consciousness sphere of MAL (see Cleric's images in Deep MAL essay). That is why we experience the same ideal content of "triangle" regardless of what form of triangle we represent to ourselves. And the same goes for music and art. You imagine that I hear Bach's Fugue and create a meaning for it, and then you hear Bach's Fugue and create your own meaning for it, and when we talk about Bach's Fugue, I am merely sharing my meaning of the experience with you, and your meaning of it with me, and that is what allows us to talk about it even though our ideal content of the experience is essentially different.

That entire way of conceiving it is merely the product of the modern age and the Cartesian-Kantian divides. It does not seem that way to you, which goes to show the power of those habits of mind. That is why every time we make some progress towards a mutual understanding of MAL's fundamental essence, with fundamentally shared ideal content, we end up back here within a few days on another post. That is exactly how the mental habits operate, like an addiction with constant risk of relapse. As mentioned before, I started writing an essay about this very topic of shared meaning of Art a few days ago, which also goes to show that the Spirit is at work! Hopefully I will get it done this week or early next. For now, I will reiterate the point about taking it seriously - you are not taking our participation within the unified sphere of MAL's Consciousness seriously.

[Eugene I]

We are talking about linguistic terms but pointing to the same thing. What you call "ideal content" I call "fantasy". I agree that it is indeed ideal content. But what else can Consciousness ever create (as an ideal content) other than a fantasy? What else are the ideas, thoughts, imaginations, feelings other than just fantasies of Consciousness?

But psychologically what you are actually doing is placing a "heavy" weight on this ideal content, you want to believe that it is "substantial", something to rely on, to hold on. You trust that if a fantasy is shared, it somehow becomes more "solid" or "real" beyond just the reality of its conscious experiencing and existing as just ideas of consciousness. There is probably some fear driving such impulse.

[AshvinP]

We are talking about linguistic terms but pointing to the same thing. What you call "ideal content" I call "fantasy". I agree that it is indeed ideal content. But what else can Consciousness ever create (as an ideal content) other than a fantasy? What else are the ideas, thoughts, imaginations, feelings other than just fantasies of Consciousness?

Perhaps we are. My original response was directed at the idea that Cleric's post was "entirely in his own imagination [or fantasy]". I also take issue with describing ideal content as being "shared across alters' dissociative boundaries", although I may have misunderstood what was meant by that. Coleridge makes distinctions between primary imagination, secondary imagination, and "fancy", the latter being similar to what I assumed you meant by "fantasy":

Fancy :- Imagination and fancy differ in kind and nature. Whereas, imagination is creative, fancy, which is common possession of man, is not creative. It is a mechanical process which receives the elementary images which come to it ready made and without altering these, fancy reassembles them into a different order from that in which it was received. It only combined what it perceives into beautiful shapes, but does not fuse or unify. It is a kind of memory that arbitrarily brings together images, and even when brought together , these images continue to retain their separate and individual properties.

[JustinG]

But psychologically what you are actually doing is placing a "heavy" weight on this ideal content, you want to believe that it is "substantial", something to rely on, to hold on. You trust that if a fantasy is shared, it somehow becomes more "solid" or "real" beyond just the reality of its conscious experiencing and existing as just ideas of consciousness. There is probably some fear driving such impulse.

This brings to mind Nagarjuna's teaching that Nirvana is the cessation of grasping for foundations, and that 'there is not the slightest difference between cyclic existence and nirvana'. However, the Buddhist realization of emptiness is accompanied by compassion, which to me entails making things better, ie progressive change and metamorphosis. So I think there is space for Western ideals of progress alongside Buddhist emptiness (though the latter does imply there is not One True Path but many paths).

[AshvinP]

But psychologically what you are actually doing is placing a "heavy" weight on this ideal content, you want to believe that it is "substantial", something to rely on, to hold on. You trust that if a fantasy is shared, it somehow becomes more "solid" or "real" beyond just the reality of its conscious experiencing and existing as just ideas of consciousness. There is probably some fear driving such impulse.

Again, someone taking the idealist outlook seriously would also take psychic facts as "substantial" reality. They would ask questions about psychic processes which lead to spiritual conclusions rather than dismiss them as "fantasy", each isolated bubble of consciousness having its own fantasy to play with. The latter conception is still the infant's milk we are drinking rather than the solid food we should be eating by this metamorphic stage of spiritual development. And if one wants to find psychological motivations, the first question to ask is whether the claim alleviates a person's responsibility for disciplined thinking or puts more responsibility for such thinking on their shoulders. The reason to dismiss spiritual claims out of hand is almost always a function of the former, and I suspect it is no different right now in your dismissal of Cleric's spiritual claims.

[Eugene I]

Again, someone taking the idealist outlook seriously would also take psychic facts as "substantial" reality. They would ask questions about psychic processes which lead to spiritual conclusions rather than dismiss them as "fantasy", each isolated bubble of consciousness having its own fantasy to play with. The latter conception is still the infant's milk we are drinking rather than the solid food we should be eating by this metamorphic stage of spiritual development. And if one wants to find psychological motivations, the first question to ask is whether the claim alleviates a person's responsibility for disciplined thinking or puts more responsibility for such thinking on their shoulders. The reason to dismiss spiritual claims out of hand is almost always a function of the former, and I suspect it is no different right now in your dismissal of Cleric's spiritual claims.

We definitely have shared fantasies, no question about that. And we are definitely developing out fantasies and our fantasizing abilities, making them more sophisticated. and advanced. There is definitely a value and a meaning to that. But as always, it is good to have a balance here, because we also have a tendency to overdo and overvalue them and become slaves to the fantasized structures that we collectively create (Divine included). The Consciousness that creates the fantasies becomes a prisoner of its own fantasies by taking them for more than what they are and what they are worth. But running to another extreme to dismiss and trump them in an attempt to break free from such slavery is as much a mistake. Only when Consciousness realizes that it is the master of its own fantasies, it can use them to the full capacity and full benefit.