Philosophical Speculations

Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:39 am Nice quote, Justin. It might be useful if we all saw things differently, and with complementary functions. Thus if a slug saw a lettuce as a beautiful but temporary object of contemplation, there would be no competition with me seeing it as food...(note to MAL for the next universe).

The image of a slug enthralled in rapturous contemplation of a lettuce is my favorite thing that's happened in this whole conversation.

The image of a slug enthralled in rapturous contemplation of a lettuce

Yay! So long as it doesn't drool...

Ben Iscatus wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 8:39 am Nice quote, Justin. It might be useful if we all saw things differently, and with complementary functions. Thus if a slug saw a lettuce as a beautiful but temporary object of contemplation, there would be no competition with me seeing it as food...(note to MAL for the next universe).

When I lived in BC the 8 inch long 'banana' slugs seemed only aesthetically enamoured of glistening wet rocks ... ever tried stone soup?

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 5:19 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 11:14 pm

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 10:37 pm

For me it sounded like DS was describing animistic gnosis as a self evident given. I don't know if you have had or have a e.g. a dog or cat as family member... Like with human members, with the dog dude we constantly "read" each others emotions, intentions etc., and develop a common language to express also differences of opinions and ways to negotiate and resolve such differences.

Replacing experiencing with "thought" in the vocabulary can guide towards rationalizing interpretations and projections. No matter how far we want the expand the semantic scope of thought, the prototypical meaning of internal dialogue and rationalizing looping remains affective.

I disagree completely, and this is the basic contention Cleric and I are always debating here - "prototypical meaning" (or any meaning) is always brought through Thinking-thought in its highest possible sense (the sense implicitly understood by pre-Socratics through to medieval Scholastics, with perhaps a few gaps in between). The first thing to understand is that this claim is not being made through naïve sense of attachment to rational thinking or anything of that sort... it is based on a ton of consideration of various Western idealist philosophies and deep examination of our own experience (much more in Cleric's case than my own). Based on that, we conclude meaning is never discovered by way of willing or feeling or any non-thinking processes.

re: pets - I have been around enough to know the emotional connection you are speaking of and the "common language", but I also think the dog and myself are not experiencing that connection in the same way. It is natural for me to project my own inner perspective onto the dog when I lack actual experience of the dog's perspective but that does not make it correct. Again, this question comes back on how broadly we want to define "purpose" - if it includes all natural instinctive actions and reactions then yes those animals are acting with purpose. But I am challenging that definition.

This seems like as good a place as any to jump in with this particular part of the conversation.

While I will personally bite the bullet on the purposefulness of instinctive actions (obviously -- over the course of this conversation, that bullet has acquired many toothmarks), I don't think that's what the question of the dog comes down to. The question of the dog is whether you can justify asserting that, because the dog isn't human, she has no sense of self-versus-other, no ability to conceptualize what she wants before seeking it out, no personality as such, just a cluster of instinctive behaviors so automatic in nature that the closest available analogy is to machines. That animals often do have just such personalities and capacities seems to me almost trivially true, but as you noted, the modern world makes it all too easy to deny what's trivially true.

SS wrote:In animistic experience our relations are very much intuitive and based on the Ground of phenomenal empathy, whether we relate as human and dog or human and human. Again, the humanist argument that non-humans are categorically different and function only based on mechanized instincts and reaction, is based on rationalism, separating purely conceptual language from the poetry and dance of animistic languages and declaring superiority of purely conceptual language.

As the dog invites me to a walk, and gets thrilled in the dog language of scent, I recognize that for dogs, pee is poetry.

DS wrote:YES! This is almost exactly what I've been trying to say. How do I know that my cat isn't mechanical? Because she and I recognize each other recognizing each other. Abstracting from that moment of recognition a series of concrete behaviors and attempting to categorize them as "free" or "automatic" to assess whether she acts with purpose is only necessary in a world that's swallowed Descartes and hasn't managed to spit him out again.

Cleric and I have tried to explain this nature of Thinking in so many different ways at this point that I am not sure what other ways are left. Although, in fairness to DS, she has not been around for most of it. Let me just state my conclusion up front - intuition is a mode of Thinking. That is definitely how Bergson, Steiner, and Jung considered it, and I cannot think of any modern philosopher who discussed intuition and claimed otherwise. Likewise, "recognizing each other recognizing each other" is almost the definition of reflective Thinking. Consider the word, re-cognize. Also when we speak of re-membering or re-storing or anything words similar to those, we are implicating Thinking. I write about that connection in essay on Thinking, Memory, and Time.

So you could just say, "fine, then dogs and cats are engaged in Thinking and therefore have purpose." Certainly that is the implication of DS' comment that the cat is "conceptualizing what she wants before seeking it out". But there is a hesitance to say the animals are Thinking, and I think that is precisely because it makes obvious the qualitative difference between what animals engage in and what adult humans engage in or could possibly engage in. Thinking does not only encompass intuition (and also attention, which was brought up in another comment by SS), but also imagination. Through the latter humans produce amazing works of art, such as poetry discussed in Spiritual Aesthetics essay which I believe you both read, and we see how that faculty cannot possibly exist at the level of non-human animal cognition.

Now these distinctions may not matter much in the middle of the bell curve so to speak, where the average person spends most of their day. But as get out to the tail ends, to the limit cases, the distinction between animal and human perception-cognition (Thinking) begins to matter a great deal. It makes the difference to whether we see any reason to extend our Thinking into ever-expanding realms of higher knowledge, or instead we feel we have pretty much exhausted its capacity to take us any further. I know this is the point many people start to take offense, but please remember I am including myself in the category of people who have not taken my Thinking more than a tiny step towards where it could potentially go, and I also feel the hesitation to do so on a daily basis. It takes great effort to keep Thinking out of our "blind spot" until we advance it much further.

I think the animals are brought up in the first place to unconsciously or semi-consciously divert away from the essence of Thinking in individual humans such as ourselves. Animal cognition remains murky enough so that any number of qualities can be projected into their experience and behavior. As I said before, I believe these animals are ensouled and have a deep emotional life in addition to their instinctive life. There is nothing mechanical about them. In fact, I don't see anything mechanical in the essence of plant life for that matter. I take Goethe's view on the latter, which is a very high view of Nature and her dynamics, but he also clearly perceived where human thought-action becomes necessary to bring Nature to its fullest possible expression. He did not view art as fundamentally different from philosophy or science - all of them are tied together through their Thinking elements which reveal the meaning of their pursuits.

"In the human heart lies the capability of thinking things through to the end and of pouring forth what has been the intention of nature. Goethe sees nature as the great, creative artist that cannot completely attain her intentions, presenting us with something of a riddle. The artist, however, solves these riddles; he thinks the intentions of nature through to the end and expresses them in his works." - Steiner

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 6:25 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jun 29, 2021 11:14 pm I disagree completely, and this is the basic contention Cleric and I are always debating here - "prototypical meaning" (or any meaning) is always brought through Thinking-thought in its highest possible sense (the sense implicitly understood by pre-Socratics through to medieval Scholastics, with perhaps a few gaps in between). The first thing to understand is that this claim is not being made through naïve sense of attachment to rational thinking or anything of that sort... it is based on a ton of consideration of various Western idealist philosophies and deep examination of our own experience (much more in Cleric's case than my own). Based on that, we conclude meaning is never discovered by way of willing or feeling or any non-thinking processes.

"Prototypical meaning" was expression referring to Lakoff's semantics. Prototypical meaning can be considered a structuralist inverse of Platonic forms. We think of a concrete example - a prototype - and then metaphorically and analogically expand the semantics to various connotations through associative chains.

Lakoff's semantics seem empirically valid. What you appear to be trying to mean by "thinking" does not function as prototypical, concrete example. Speaking of pre-Socratics, a concrete example of "thinking" is told in the joke of Thales thinking so intently heavenly matters, that he didn't see a hole in the ground and fell.

Hence, a concrete and familiar prototypical meaning of "thinking" manifests in the phenomenon of 'mind-wandering', not staying sentiently present and attentive. Getting lost in thoughts can, and empirically speaking, does often to lead to loss of coherent meaning, inattentive behaviour and physical injury.

If meaning is never discovered by non-thinking process, do you agree that deep sleep can be a non-thinking process? If so, do you really caim that the you don't "discover meaning" if you are in a deep sleep, and I throw a bucket of ice cold water on you?

The narrowing down of meaning and semantics to abstract conceptualizing, that you build your case on, remains protypical rationalism.

I would love for you to find the comment where I "narrowed down" anything to "abstract conceptualizing". That is pretty much the opposite of what I am always doing here, which is attempting to convince others that our understanding of Thinking must be expanded well beyond that. As I have stated before, I view the above as a means of abstractly thinking away the true role of Thinking. You are jumping through many intellectual hoops to somehow divorce meaning (semantics) from "thinking" and "mind". So then "mind-wandering" somehow is not associated with Thinking anymore. I do not dissociate attention from thought. And I do not think there is any experience where no Thinking-thought is present, including deep sleep. In fact, I believe its possible for someone to become consciously aware of what they are experiencing during deep sleep, although that takes a lot of contemplative training.

DandelionSoul wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 4:30 am

AshvinP wrote: So while your formulation on reincarnation above may very well be true, it's just too low resolution to be useful. Everything must eventually be judged by both its coherency in light of Reason and also its practical utility for spiritual growth (the two should never be at odds). Because I do not have any such high resolution on this process of reincarnation, I really try not to even speak about it. I suspect its relevant for this issue of "implicit memories", but I can't say for sure. So I mention this just to keep in mind going forward

So you use the word "resolution" a lot, and my intuitive reading of that word is an analogy to, like, image resolution, but can you draw out that concept a little more? It seems to me that very low resolution imagery has its use -- the process of learning itself is a bit like loading a picture on dialup, after all. First there's nothing but big blocks of color, which progressively sharpen until, at some point, you can see what the image is, and then later, you can see it in all its sharpness. And it seems to me that "resolution" is always a relative quantity, but when you invoke it, it feels as though you’re using it as an absolute. Thirty years ago, 800x600 was a relatively high-resolution monitor, and _twenty_ years ago, one megapixel was a fairly high-resolution digital camera. In terms of ideas, let's take a look at, say, our knowledge of DNA: we've gone over the course of a couple hundred years from discovering the structure of the cell to the double-helix structure of DNA to the understanding of the function of DNA to mapping the human genome to... whatever comes next. And that's only to zoom in on one part of cell physiology, which is itself to zoom in on one part of our biological makeup. But in zooming in, we lose the context, the larger-scale structures that are necessary to make sense of what we saw at the higher resolution, structures that only fit fully within the scope of our attention at lower-resolution.

Likewise, our peripheral vision is not as sharp -- not as high-resolution -- as our central vision, but it serves a necessary purpose in contextualizing and framing what's at the center of our view, giving us a sense of what we're not yet paying attention to. The bits about reincarnation/panincarnation in the discussion are like this: we could zoom in and talk about this concept in more detail, but it's peripheral to our main discussion, so what I offered was a deliberately low-resolution statement meant to leave the idea on the periphery where, for now, it seems to belong: it has more utility being low-resolution in this conversation than it would’ve had for me to center it and write a monograph about it.

I think the last point I'd make about "resolution" as a concept here is that some images are such that there is no meaningful way to gauge resolution. Fractals are sometimes like that. Because as I "zoom out" a fractal to get a better sense of the larger structures in which the smaller structures are embedded, I see the same structures again and end up, as it were, right where I started. There seems, in some such cases, to be a range of resolutions that cycles: zoom in, and new structures appear, but zoom in further, and the old structures reappear, and so on forever.

You really went to town on this "resolution" topic

I basically just use "low resolution" to mean "vague and fuzzy" or "lacking details". It is true that normally we must find a balance between detailed resolution and the larger context. However, I hold that we are moving towards consciousness which can zoom in on details without sacrificing much of that context - this is related to 'aperspectival' consciousness mentioned before. But these things will not be simply given to us without our own individual effort. Here is an example of what I mean by "low resolution" that we can all relate to - BK's formulation of MAL. It is just detailed enough that it can be considered obviously true under idealism but no more than that. Many people come to the forum asking questions about what it actually means to be an 'alter' within MAL because none of that resolution is provided within the formulation itself. So I say BK's MAL is useful when contrasting with materialism-dualism, but apart from that is so low resolution that it is pretty much useless, especially if we are trying to assess views within idealist and non-dual traditions.

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: So I think what you are calling "mystification" here is what I call the normal state of affairs in the modern age. We are self-aware, but mostly we do not truly reflect on our Selfhood and how it manifests in our spiritual activity of W-F-T. Instead, we seek our meaning and purpose in 'things' external to us, whether they are religious or secular, natural or cultural, etc. We act out of compulsion and blind obedience rather than genuine knowledge and desire to act the way we do. We definitely have the capacity for Self-determination, but very few people are Self-determined to a significant extent.

I would say you're right, and the Existentialists certainly thought that people were living in all manner of what they termed "bad faith," which is to say, in the denial of their own freedom. De Beauvoir outlines several different archetypal ways that people flee their own freedom and the responsibility therefrom. In mystification, however, she means something more specific, in that it is imposed deliberately by other people upon the mystified:

Simone de Beauvoir wrote: There are cases where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him. The slave is submissive when one has succeeded in mystifying him in such a way that his situation does not seem to him to be imposed by men, but to be immediately given by nature, by the gods, by the powers against whom revolt has no meaning; thus, he does not accept his condition through a resignation of his freedom since he can not even dream of any other; and in his relationships with his friends, for example, he can live as a free and moral man within this world where his ignorance has enclosed him.

I am intrigued by this "mystification" concept as expressed above but still fuzzy on it (side note: this is also close to how Steiner refers to "mysticism" often). The above quote seems like it would apply very well to the philosophical divides of Descartes or Kant. I don't think they were intentionally trying to enslave anyone, but their philosophies have the effect of convincing people there are mind-matter divisions and fundamental limits to knowledge inherent in the structure of reality (nature and gods). And therefore "revolt has no meaning" because we cannot "even dream of any other" possibility if we unconsciously accept those divides. Do you think that's a correct application?

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: Yet I also think this course of evolution - this "dark night of the soul" - was necessary to bring about the conditions from which we can truly overcome our enslavement to the physical world and external agents and gain our spiritual freedom from within. It should never be thought of as "stepping outside ourselves", though, because the whole point is to see how we ourselves are participating in the unfolding of our experience, in the co-creation of the phenomenal world.

I kinda wondered if you'd object to my phrasing of "stepping outside of ourselves." What I mean is just that in our capacity to see our actions reflected back at us in the world, we are able, to some extent, to see ourselves through a perspective that is not our own, as we might see our bodies through a perspective that is not our own when we look into a mirror or see ourselves on camera. We behold ourselves, to some extent, in the gaze of the other, and that makes us very self-conscious in terms of our behavior. This is, incidentally, not only a human trait: many animals know when they're being watched and will behave differently. My cat is sneaky like that -- if she wants to go somewhere she knows is off-limits, she'll wait until I've turned my back and then scurry as quickly as she can to the forbidden wonders. But I've seen this behavior even in much simpler and less innately social creatures, like wolf spiders, where they won't move as long as I'm looking at them, and then scurry off and find a place to hide when I turn away. I haven't actually dug into research on spider cognition, so I can only speak from my own interactions with them, but the whole thing always leaves me a bit awestruck -- how does the spider even know that I'm looking at it?

Why do you think so? In what does our enslavement to the physical world consist? Who's the referent of the "we"? What does "spiritual freedom" mean to you?

Right, I don't really disagree with any of that. But I think we just need to be careful that we are not assuming we have adequately stepped into another perspective, i.e. enough to truly understand that other perspective, when we are only operating in the realm of abstract thinking rather than intuitive thinking. The latter only comes about through much discipline and effort in my view. But that is not to say we cannot have useful intuitions about these things with normal cognition.

Enslavement to the physical consists of the actual physical limitations of our existence in bodies and also the psychic enslavement to only perceiving-cognizing spiritual reality in physical terms, and those two are not unrelated in my review. I believe "spiritual freedom" is possible to overcome a significant amount of the latter psychic enslavement in our current lifetimes, and the former physical enslavement will also be overcome in a much longer timespan. "We" refers to you and I, and all humans in general (and eventually all beings in general).

DS wrote:

Ashvin wrote: If a person claims that they have observed a spiritual realm (by lifting off veil on "physical" realm) in which certain beings are directly responsible for my physiological processes, for ex., then I cannot automatically rule out the claim because it is entirely possible such observations could occur. If that person claims there is a God who is responsible for all natural processes, but he exists entirely separate from the realm of knowing human mind, then I rule out that claim because the God, by definition, cannot possibly be observed or known. Does that make sense?

I think so! Essentially, the question you're asking yourself is whether the claim to have witnessed something contradicts itself, and if it doesn't, then you can't rule out the claim a priori?

Yes, but also claims that something is true, regardless of whether it was witnessed, when that claim cannot possibly be verified because it is derived from a perspective (3rd person) which does not exist anywhere in reality. Actually people never claim to have witnessed these sort of things because it isn't possible. I will respond to the rest of your post later.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:10 pm I would love for you to find the comment where I "narrowed down" anything to "abstract conceptualizing". That is pretty much the opposite of what I am always doing here, which is attempting to convince others that our understanding of Thinking must be expanded well beyond that. As I have stated before, I view the above as a means of abstractly thinking away the true role of Thinking. You are jumping through many intellectual hoops to somehow divorce meaning (semantics) from "thinking" and "mind". So then "mind-wandering" somehow is not associated with Thinking anymore. I do not dissociate attention from thought. And I do not think there is any experience where no Thinking-thought is present, including deep sleep. In fact, I believe its possible for someone to become consciously aware of what they are experiencing during deep sleep, although that takes a lot of contemplative training.

I'm very sympathetic towards to the purpose of the project of redefining 'thinking' so that the word loses distinctinctive meaning, and means anything and everything. I get that the purpose of the project is to try to divert attention from the purely abstract and conceptual thinking more into the sensual and poetic and spiritual, and I fully support and sympathize that.

However, mere conceptual redefining of the word "thinking" does not do the trick alone, and can also lead to dogmatic semantics, where the new abstract conceptualization of "thinking" as anything and everything can continue it's old habit of trying to attach and control everything as conceptual.

Attention is alive and actual living experience, and the therapeutic and liberating rebalancing of attention between sensual and conceptual needs to be actual and empirical, not only theoretical. I know you are also doing the actual, slow by slow, and as a fellow traveler on the same path trying to share some tips and constructive criticism, so that with wholesome balancing of attention with sentience genuinely transforms thinking into sapience. So that the Europe that named humans "sapient" can heal and reborn and becomes homo sapient not only in name, but in actual wisdom and loving kindness.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 3:33 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 2:10 pm I would love for you to find the comment where I "narrowed down" anything to "abstract conceptualizing". That is pretty much the opposite of what I am always doing here, which is attempting to convince others that our understanding of Thinking must be expanded well beyond that. As I have stated before, I view the above as a means of abstractly thinking away the true role of Thinking. You are jumping through many intellectual hoops to somehow divorce meaning (semantics) from "thinking" and "mind". So then "mind-wandering" somehow is not associated with Thinking anymore. I do not dissociate attention from thought. And I do not think there is any experience where no Thinking-thought is present, including deep sleep. In fact, I believe its possible for someone to become consciously aware of what they are experiencing during deep sleep, although that takes a lot of contemplative training.

I'm very sympathetic towards to the purpose of the project of redefining 'thinking' so that the word loses distinctinctive meaning, and means anything and everything. I get that the purpose of the project is to try to divert attention from the purely abstract and conceptual thinking more into the sensual and poetic and spiritual, and I fully support and sympathize that.

However, mere conceptual redefining of the word "thinking" does not do the trick alone, and can also lead to dogmatic semantics, where the new abstract conceptualization of "thinking" as anything and everything can continue it's old habit of trying to attach and control everything as conceptual.

Attention is alive and actual living experience, and the therapeutic and liberating rebalancing of attention between sensual and conceptual needs to be actual and empirical, not only theoretical. I know you are also doing the actual, slow by slow, and as a fellow traveler on the same path trying to share some tips and constructive criticism, so that with wholesome balancing of attention with sentience genuinely transforms thinking into sapience. So that the Europe that named humans "sapient" can heal and reborn and becomes homo sapient not only in name, but in actual wisdom and loving kindness.

No the purpose is to restore its distinctive meaning without arbitrarily limiting it to modern rationality, which was not at all how any pre-modern philosophy regarded it. If we say meaning is inherent to willing and feeling or "experiencing", as you were saying, then we are trying to get rid of all distinctions in the qualities of our experience. We are trying to get rid of knowledge as a precondition to experiencing the full extent of what it means to will or feel something. That is convenient, because it convinces us we can stay at the lowest possible resolution on these issues without any further thinking and still gain all the meaning there is to be gained from experience. But without that knowledge via Thinking, we are allowing ourselves to remain chained to the illusion of freedom rather than the actual and living experience of freedom. Again, the fact that you must jump through so many conceptual hoops to divorce these things from each other should indicate to us when we are straying from the givens of experience, i.e. perception-thought and meaning are always found together, to add on abstract assumptions. We then say we are "free" because we can merely talk about "loving kindness" in conceptual terms rather than enriching the meaning of that loving kindness by enriching the mental images we are forming of it. The way to the heart is truly through the head.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jun 30, 2021 4:03 pm No the purpose is to restore its distinctive meaning without arbitrarily limiting it to modern rationality, which was not at all how any pre-modern philosophy regarded it. If we say meaning is inherent to willing and feeling or "experiencing", as you were saying, then we are trying to get rid of all distinctions in the qualities of our experience. We are trying to get rid of knowledge as a precondition to experiencing the full extent of what it means to will or feel something. That is convenient, because it convinces us we can stay at the lowest possible resolution on these issues without any further thinking and still gain all the meaning there is to be gained from experience. But without that knowledge via Thinking, we are allowing ourselves to remain chained to the illusion of freedom rather than the actual and living experience of freedom. Again, the fact that you must jump through so many conceptual hoops to divorce these things from each other should indicate to us when we are straying from the givens of experience, i.e. perception-thought and meaning are always found together, to add on abstract assumptions. We then say we are "free" because we can merely talk about "loving kindness" in conceptual terms rather than enriching the meaning of that loving kindness by enriching the mental images we are forming of it. The way to the heart is truly through the head.

"To divorce", again, implicates separation by binary logic in the conceptual chaining. The Way of the Heart is through the heart, and feeds the head.

But of course, if from the start you are stuck in the head, you gotta find a way from head to heart. As long as you are not well grounded (ie. "alienated") there's temptation to try head first, starting from activating Crown chakra first. That's how you let in the "thieves and burglars", as e.g. in the concrete example of Sahaja Yoga, and very potentially make yourself a slave soul victim of of a highly manipulative and authoritarian cult, and/or maintain yourself as a slave soul. Of course every authoritarian cult have a sales speech where slavery=freedom, "Arbeit mach frei" etc. etc. et.

I have to get ready for work soon so I won't be able to write a whole essay here in response, but I thought I would touch on what I can get through pretty quickly:

So I say BK's MAL is useful when contrasting with materialism-dualism, but apart from that is so low resolution that it is pretty much useless, especially if we are trying to assess views within idealist and non-dual traditions.

Yes, this is what I mean: low-resolution "thumbnails" of ideas have use precisely in showing us what we might want to pay closer attention to later in the conversation, so "useful" is always relative. For example, I think we might end up chasing down the "panincarnation"/"reincarnation" view a little bit further down thread because my sense is that we have very different understandings of embodiment. But I ask about that a little later, so I won't here.

I am intrigued by this "mystification" concept as expressed above but still fuzzy on it (side note: this is also close to how Steiner refers to "mysticism" often). The above quote seems like it would apply very well to the philosophical divides of Descartes or Kant. I don't think they were intentionally trying to enslave anyone, but their philosophies have the effect of convincing people there are mind-matter divisions and fundamental limits to knowledge inherent in the structure of reality (nature and gods). And therefore "revolt has no meaning" because we cannot "even dream of any other" possibility if we unconsciously accept those divides. Do you think that's a correct application?

Interestingly, I usually use "mysticism" to mean something very different: the set of practices and techniques which enable one to experience reality without the blinders of mystification. They have at their heart the word "mystery" (or, rather, the Greek word mysterion) but I think they're almost opposites: mystification makes the world more impenetrably mysterious to someone, and mysticism is how someone penetrates to the heart of Mystery.

I think your use is probably pretty close to what she means. She uses "mystification" pretty frequently in The Second Sex to mean something like the way the world at that time was structured such that women were from birth taught all kinds of things about who they were meant to be (subservient to men, only good for having children, etc.) -- in this case, the acts of mystification were legion and were sort of baked into everything from religion to politics to education, so that women were born immersed into a world where they were put at a distance from the knowledge of their own freedom.

Right, I don't really disagree with any of that. But I think we just need to be careful that we are not assuming we have adequately stepped into another perspective, i.e. enough to truly understand that other perspective, when we are only operating in the realm of abstract thinking rather than intuitive thinking. The latter only comes about through much discipline and effort in my view. But that is not to say we cannot have useful intuitions about these things with normal cognition.

Right, but my sense is that it's far more abstract to begin with a concept of "automatic instinct" and "free action" and then try to suss out which of a creature's actions fall into which category, rather than to engage in an intuitive mutual recognition with the creature.

Enslavement to the physical consists of the actual physical limitations of our existence in bodies and also the psychic enslavement to only perceiving-cognizing spiritual reality in physical terms, and those two are not unrelated in my review. I believe "spiritual freedom" is possible to overcome a significant amount of the latter psychic enslavement in our current lifetimes, and the former physical enslavement will also be overcome in a much longer timespan.

How do you define "physical" here? What are the "actual physical limitations of our existence in bodies" that are to be overcome?