Hi Marco! If your ears are burning, you are right: at the link below we are wondering about your enigmatic reference to “multi-perspectival vision” and how it may translate into a practice or path of awakening to lucid cognition. I couldn’t find the answer in the above-linked video of your Integral Cosmology presentation at the Jean Gebser Society either. If by any chance you are interested in clarifying our questions directly, please join the discussion on our cell intelligence forum thread:
Well, in a sense, taking a "multi-perspectival vision" IS an awakening to a sort of lucid cognition. One “sees” the world in a completely different manner. However, by "multi-perspectival seeing" I didn't mean any particular spiritual awakening or transcendental or superconscious experience. What I’m talking about here is a cultural and intellectual shift, it doesn’t pretend to constitute a spiritual awakening (even though I believe it can help that purpose as well.) I mean something more mundane and less "psychedelic" but nevertheless more in the reach of everyone. In part V I talk of a sort of “practice” with “an inquiry into the structure of reality from a first-person perspective”: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/the-unexpected-comeback-of-the-conscious-66c Moreover, the kind of practice that could come nearer to what I’m talking about here, is that of Goethe. Here is a link to an extract from my book "Spirit calls Nature" on Goethe's phenomenology: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G5RnWuGOw9ADr0gAeDjOW665CZnixNHT/view?usp=sharing
Having said that, meanwhile, the only "practice" that I suggest here is to "see differently". First by looking inside at our habitual thought patterns that have been programmed and imposed onto us by society with its cultural, educational, and religious context. Thought patterns that make us live inside intellectual bubbles that we call “disciplines”, but unwilling to go beyond its own pre-designed cultural frameworks. In a sense, I believe this series of posts on integral cosmology is an attempt that wants to furnish an example of how to see "multi-perspectivally." One does not see things only from the standpoint of the biologist, or only of the philosopher, or only the psychologists, or only of the physicist, or only the mystic, but from all of them together. This does not mean putting all the teachings together in a mere multi-disciplinary and scholarly manner (even though, one must learn some stuff–that is, the parts–to see beyond the parts) but that of becoming able to see reality, life, and our human consciousness, from all the perspectives of these disciplines that, so far, propose themselves as the only way to perceive and understand reality (of course, none of them admits this, but truth is that this is what they do.) Of course, without higher forms of spiritual realization, one might not know what the mystics' perspective of a superconscious vision of reality might be. However, for the time being, it would already be a great leap forward to accept that something alike exists (here is my point on why science should take the mystic experience seriously: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/why-science-needs-to-take-seriously), posit it as one's worldview, at least as a working hypothesis, and bring it into one’s disciplinary practice, and then see where it leads us. For example, what I miss in B. Kastrup’s analytic idealism is that it is only analytic. A bit more openness to this mystic perspective would have been desirable. Missing (or, at least not sufficiently addressed) in the M@L is also the evolutionary perspective. Then, Reber's and Thompson's approaches to biology are fascinating and, I believe, go in the right direction. However, they are unwilling to go beyond a physicalist perspective, for example by questioning whether biology should reconsider a vitalist perspective (something particularly disappointing in Thompson's case who comes from a Buddhist background and could have complemented his "autopoietic enactivism" with a deeper insight.) Psychologists did open up to some degree to the spiritual perspective, but the evolutionary soul-based perspective of the human dimension remains anathema. While my general critique to monistic or dualistic paradigms is that they lack of a multidimensional perspective (subconscious, material, life, mental, superconscious planes, etc.) and that they try to reduce the world to only mind and body, or only mind. This fails to see the mind as only a part of a wider spectrum (Spinoza's perspective) while, at the same time, there is ultimately only One, and that is consciousness (the Vedantic perspective). The lack of a multi-perspectival seeing also fails to discern the difference between mind and consciousness, leading, again, to misunderstandings or too simplistic reductions. However, one can discern the difference with a 1st-person approach practice, as I outlined here: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/the-mind-consciousness-conflation Many philosophers and scientists then like to resort to so-called "principles of parsimony" cutting away, again, other perspectives only because it makes things easier.
So, what an integral cosmology proposes is that of a multidimensional, evolutionary, and panentheistic, soul-based perspective that tries to see all these at once not as mutually exclusive but as complementary to each other. Keeping this multi-perspectival standpoint as an underlying paradigm in all human practices and disciplines would change everything. Or, at least, I say this: Let us posit it as working hypothesis, and then see where it leads us.
Many thanks for taking the time to write this. Yes, it clarifies to an extent, though I will read further, as you suggest, to try and understand more precisely. Thanks again!
Thank you, Marco, for this illuminating series of essays! I think it makes the 'integral' philosophy of thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo very accessible and relevant to our modern ways of thinking. You may be familiar with another such thinker, Jean Gebser, and what you have written reminds me of this quote:
"In addition, life has a tendency to find its equilibrium. Since we live in a consciousness structure pervaded, as ours is, by conceptions of perspectivity, we must bring this structure into balance with the others if we are to act against life itself. The fact that we achieve such an equilibrium by living an integral and not merely a fragmented life is the basic condition that makes possible the mutation which could possibly surmount the dualistic dead-end into which we have maneuvered ourselves.
Let us note the decisive fact that man is the integrality of his mutations. Only to the extent that he succeeds in living the whole is his life truly integral. But we should go one step further: only if life is integral in this sense of equally living-to-the-full the structures which constitute us does it encompass the emerging structure not only potentially, but in an actual and acute sense. By this time it should be evident that we are not merely toying here with thoughts, but are turning our mind to the prime difficulties that face the realization of an integral life."
-Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin
Of course, if this is not to remain an abstract floating conception of "realizing an integral life", we would need to also explore what concrete practices can support the new 'mutation' of consciousness that brings more of the Whole into our first-person experiential perspective, not in some indefinite future, but in the here and now. I see that you started to address that in Part VIII. I haven't had a chance to go through all the videos with Mr. Shirazi, but in the embedded video, you begin to speak about first-person intuitive experience of the subconscious and supra-conscious.
What do you envision are the limits to penetrating those 'higher planes' with lucid cognition, if any? Can we awaken from within our normal waking consciousness just as we may awaken from within a dream and become lucid? Our dream character usually has no consciousness that its entire sense of 'me' and the dreamscape through which it transforms, unfolds along the 'curvatures' of the waking self - the latter's ideas, fears, anxieties, physical pains, etc. Yet just as our dreaming self can become lucid to these curvatures, could our waking self awaken from within the sensory-intellectual dream to these higher-level ideations that structure the etched 'channels' and 'pathways' of its experiential flow, i.e. what we generally experience as the flow of our personal biographies - our patterned life phases of development - and those of collective human and natural history?
I am very interested to hear your thoughts on these questions, if you don't mind sharing, and thank you again for the stimulating essays!
Thank you for reading and your thoughtful comments.
I like your analogy between lucid dreaming and "lucid cognition." Indeed, that awakening from our ordinary to a lucid state of consciousness is more urgent than ever.
One of my points is that we have to learn to "see integrally." And by seeing integrally I don't mean by being multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, etc. These are still the old way of understanding the world where we sum up the parts by creating a fictitious whole. What we need instead, is the ability to see reality with a multi-perspectival vision. It is not (or not only) an intellectual ability, it is a completely new way of seeing comprehensively/integrally that does not necessarily need information and technical knowledge (even though, in certain contexts, that might be desirable.) This is somewhat tentatively what I tried to do with science, spirituality, philosophy and evolution in these ten posts. It might still not be the "living-to-the-full the structures which constitute us" to "the realization of an integral life," but it could help us to direct the attention in that direction. We all struggle to do this (and in most cases, only believe to do so.) We all still live in our intellectual, religious or spiritual bubbles and are unable to build bridges.
So, yes, I'm talking of a vision a la Gebser (you might know that Gebser in his last years said that he was inspired by Sri Aurobindo and even visited the ashram.) Anyway, I'm not an expert of Gebser's views, nevertheless here you can also watch my talk that was inspired by him, among others, in the frame of consciousness studies: https://youtu.be/YpJZspN0N6o)
Thanks Marco. This combined with your response to Federica above gives me a great sense of what you are speaking of. I think you are correct that seeking out earth-shattering spiritual experiences should never be the starting point or even the goal, but at best only a second-order effect of learning more intimately about the structure of our everyday thinking and perceptual experience. Not by building abstract intellectual models of that experience, but through first-person phenomenological investigation in the spirit of Goethe.
I think it is largely unsuspected how greatly such an approach can orient our intuition of the spiritual 'topology' that structures the normal flow of experience. Our normal cognitive life is so limited in its 'range of movement' that it hardly has any first-person experience to work with, its dataset is limited to immediate sensory phenomena and the abstract configuration of philosophical, scientific, religious, etc. concepts.
Asa metaphor, we could imagine that we spent our entire life using our hands to pick up things, move objects, press buttons, turn keys, scratch itches, and so forth. Then one day, through a flash of insight, we look at the hand and realize we can make it the object of contemplation - we can investigate the hand itself and learn to know its constraints and possibilities from within, by moving and bending it in the most varied ways. This is a limited analogy because there is only so much we can accomplish by investigating our hands, but there is no such limit on exploring the dynamics and degrees of freedom of our cognitive activity.
When it comes to the movements of our cognitive activity, we are not bounded by any spatial considerations. Our hand can only bump into objects within its zone of reach and its zone of spatial extension, yet our thinking can awaken deeper within its flow by 'bumping into' more holistic thought-perceptions, more holistic constellations of meaning. It can find its reflection not only in fragmented sensory impressions or dim concepts that provide feedback on personal and myopic tasks, but in fluid imaginations that provide feedback on its whole life destiny within the broader context of Earthly evolution.
On that note, I invite you to check out the following phenomenological essays written by a friend whenever you have the time. It would be great to hear what you think, or rather, how you *experience* them!
I will take a look at the essays. Meanwhile… Doesn’t our thinking “awaken deeper within its flow” by stopping to try to think? I mean, doesn’t the first-person phenomenological investigation of the totality capture its “more holistic constellations of meaning” better when the mind surrenders in a silent pause that waits for the answer while contemplating the phenomena as they are without trying to intervene? For example, letting the senses like hearing and seeing bridge an inner consciousness that goes beyond the thought and without the mind always tripping its emergence?
Thanks for checking out the essays! It may also be helpful to keep the following response in mind when working through them.
When it comes to exploring the inner dynamics of the mind, I would say we need to become both active and receptive at the same time, balancing the head polarity (sometimes associated with the 'brow chakra'). I like the metaphor of dancing here - when we dance with a partner, we can't just become completely passive like a soft rag and let the other person carry our weight, yet we also can't simply impose whatever movements we want on our partner or we fall out of synchronization. So instead we need to be very sensitive to our partner's movements, to use them as feedback for our own movements, while at the same time remaining active in those movements.
Any artistic practice can also be a good metaphor here, like sculpting. We seek to impress our imaginative activity into the form of the clay, for which we need to be active with our hands, but at the same time, we need to be receptive to how our movements are shaping the clay substance and let that perception flow back to our imaginative activity and adjust our hand movements accordingly. We can imagine the same principle at work for learning and playing any instrument. A delicate balance of activity-receptivity needs to be reached for our thoughts and movements to faithfully reflect our musical intuition. When such a balance is stricken to a high degree, we often refer to it as entering a 'flow state'.
So, in that sense, when contemplating the meaningful transformation of our phenomenological experience, we actively will our thinking within the spaces of transformation (ideal, emotional, sensory) yet also remain receptive to how the meaning we perceive in response should continually guide our thinking deeper along the same direction or in altogether new directions. Of course, this is not aimed at modeling some 'external' reality with our thoughts, as is the standard practice, but *discerning the place of our thinking within reality*, i.e. how our cognitive activity fits into the flow of reality and harmonizes or clashes with that flow.
Just as in artistic practice, it is truly a new *skill* that we are developing, which does not only remain within the cognitive space but extends into the spaces of feeling and instinct. We aren't trying to cram the entire World into our intellect, into some theory, but to experience our intervening intellect as the outermost expression of ideal processes that are much more mysterious and holier than anything we normally experience or conceive. The linear thoughts are experienced as the overtones modulated over much deeper sub-harmonics. Indeed, sacrificing the verbal intellect, putting its intervening chatter on pause, is a precondition for reaching these more awakened states, but then our cognition freed from the verbal formatting can still remain active within the deeper strata.
Right. Mind is in its nature an active faculty, but it works best when receiving the suggestion from above. And one should not confuse silence with passivity. The activity of consciousness is best in the silence of the mind (with “mind” I mean the analytic, rational and intellectual cognition, in contrast to the supraconscious trans-rational “mentality”.) I don’t mean mind as synonymous with all cognition. Because, again, there could be a suprarational cognition that has nothing to do with logic, reason, rational discourse, etc. You might be familiar with the three gunas of the Indian philosophy: rajas (restlessness), sattwa (equanimity, equilibrium), and tamas (inertia.) Sattwa is not tamas. A receptive mind is not inert, it is sattwic. Meaning that it can eventually do its job actively, but only because of a higher non-mental intimation. Mystics compare the mind with the reflecting surface of a lake shining the moon’s rays. One can discern the moon only if the rippling of the lake does not distort its image. This doesn’t mean that the mind hasn’t a function anymore. At our stage of evolution it remains absolutely indispensable, when we have to reflect in the practice, organizing, speaking or writing (the example of the artistic practice you do is a good example) it remains necessary. There is also a physical mind in the body that is also quite ignorant, stubborn, repetitive, yet essential because, when it doesn’t go its way, it can be a phenomenal tool of technical precision and both remain central in learning skills for, say, playing a musical instrument, acquiring technical skills, etc. But the mind and the physical mind are mostly ignorant receiving ends, not the original creative powers. They best work when they are receptive to what goes beyond them and become active only in the practical realization of what the inner inspiration suggests. I believe that most great scientists that made great discoveries and who worked with their “imaginative activity” had the best ideas when the imaginative power transcended the mind. The same can be said of the notorious ‘flow state’. The question is whether it is a flow from the mind or despite the mind? While the “feeling” (the revelatory one, not the fear-based) may have yet another source in the soul (that’s why I have this fixation with “soul-factors”… 😉 ) Don’t we often say that our mind suggests something but the heart does otherwise? What is that? A subconscious intellectual activity or an inner feeling (cognition) that goes beyond the rational? And, yes, let’s not cram the entire world into our intellect, but it is not my experience that the source of the “ideal processes“ come from the “intervening intellect”. Their flows is much more intense without the intellect intervening.
Anyway, we don’t have to agree. That’s my different perception of the thing… And, I like your idea of the dance between receptivity and activity. Reminds me of the Vedic organization of the faculties of consciousness. They also were talking about mind, seeing, hearing, feeling, speaking etc. as receptive, active, subjective, objective, etc., from a perspective that nowadays we would label as ‘phenomenological’. I would not be surprised if all this was well known in ancient times and we are only reinventing the wheel. 😊
Right, the mind, in the sense you are using it, is not the original creative power and yet is indispensable at our stage of evolution, as you point out. The source of ideal processes is not the intervening intellect, but rather the latter is the former's *outer physiognomy*, like a person's countenance is the outer physiognomy of their inner states of being. In no way can we work solely with the properties of the countenance, measuring and relating them in various ways, to recover an understanding of the inner states that shape them. At best, the countenance can only act as a symbol that allows for a 'portal of resonance' between our soul life and the soul life of another being, provided we are deeply interested in the latter and make some effort to understand it. It is the same with our intellectual concepts in relation to the deeper, supra-rational processes. The former can act only as symbols that help us intuitively orient to the deeper processes that gave birth to and shape them.
We know there are varied sorts of lawfulness within our thinking experience. The lawfulness that we intuit from the transformation of billiard balls in motion is not exactly the same as that which we intuit from the growth, decay, and rebirth of plant matter. Likewise, the latter is not the same as that which we intuit from the transformations of our soul life, the rhythms of sympathies, emotions, impulses, etc. that we share in common with animals. And none of those are the same as our intuition for the transformations of our thought-life which we generally describe as "logic". This is the whole phenomenological reason why the physical, vital, astral, and mental principles have been distinguished, because people over the ages have intuited their varied transformation signatures (the intuition of the mental transformation arrived relatively more recently). None of these principles are reducible to the others, yet we know they overlap in various ways and influence one another.
There is also an interesting *asymmetry* in the principles. We can imagine experiencing the mental principle in the absence of the others (even if this does not actually happen in the flow of life), but we can't imagine the lower principles in the absence of the mental principle. The very act of 'imagining' implicates the mental principle and its lawfulness. This points us to the fact that there is something fundamental about the logical lawfulness of thinking, even if we don't have a clear idea of what that something is. For example, if we add two numbers together, like 84 and 167, we can sense that we are doing something, making certain 'thinking gestures' to move around the mathematical puzzle pieces in various ways, bumping them into each other and eventually fitting them together. People may carry this operation out in slightly different ways, but we all make the thinking gestures. What we are inwardly *doing* to make those gestures nevertheless remains mysterious. Normally we are preoccupied with the results of the operation and don't try to observe the gestures we are making.
So we don't know the lawfulness of the lower principles directly but only through the prism of the mental principle, and even with the latter there is some mystery as to how exactly our mathematical thoughts, for ex., transform through mental space. Yet within the mental space, we at least have some lucid sense of being *creatively involved* in the gestures that are responsible for the transformation. We can't say the same for any of the other spaces. Healthy reasoning shows that just because we can follow the transformations of mineral-mechanical elements, organic beings, and soul beings with our thoughts, and notice their distinctions, that doesn't mean we actually understand why those transformations occur at any deep level. We certainly don't feel creatively involved in the deeper physical, organic, and psychic processes. Hence we still have the 'problem of abiogenesis' and the 'hard problem of consciousness'. These are only problems for reductionist thinking and it's quite possible that expanding the mind into the superconscious will also shed light on the deeper nature of the soul, organic, and mineral lawfulness.
What we experience as 'logic' at the intellectual level must have some relation to the supra-rational creative faculty, and the latter must also be related to the lower subconscious principles (perhaps as an image to a reflection), if we are not to stray into dualism. For example, when we encounter certain hardcore materialistic or atheistic arguments about how everything in our living experience, including our consciousness itself, must be driven by mindless and mechanical interactions, most of us have probably felt a certain amount of pain. When beholding the cognitive dissonance required for such arguments, it strikes a chord with not only our rational mind but somewhere deeper in our being. Probably not as much pain as we feel when we accidentally burn ourselves, but still the very experience of the argument falls somewhere on the gradient of pain. It's not necessarily the content of the argument that causes the pain, but the underlying dissonance that the content reflects. We can intuitively sense that the person's deeper soul factors are grinding against each other in very unpleasant ways for them to express their thoughts in such a blatantly contradictory fashion.
In that sense, 'logic' can be understood as our ability to perceive consonances and dissonances between deeper psychic and ideal processes, even if we don't have any clear idea of what the latter are. By thinking logically, we dimly probe the supra-rational spaces and extract fragments from them, fitting those fragments together in ways that strike resonant chords and create consonance. When we think illogically, it is as if we are out of tune and out of sync with the deeper relations, leading to a potentially painful cacophony of tones. This is why I would say the logical mind is indispensable at our current stage, not only because it helps us with the tasks you mentioned, but also because it helps develop the *forces* that are needed to penetrate the supra-rational spaces with lucid cognition of the ideal consonances and dissonances that are characteristic across the whole spectrum of reality. These forces are also characteristic of the original creative power. It's only that in the higher spaces of consciousness, we don't only work with fragmented extracts of the ideal processes that can be related with one another through discursive logic, but with a much more holistic spectrum of those processes. The latter is what also projects into our normal thinking experience as the lawfulness of the psychic, organic, and physical domains.
Your prophecy of the dramatic changes in the physical, life and mind sciences best I’ve seen.
And the summary of the three areas lacking in most proposed non materialistic philosophies:
Lacking in multi dimensionality,
Missing the evolutionary perspective
Ignoring the radical importance of the Supra-rational (while dwelling too much on the infra-rational
I have estimated it’s usually taken from 3 to 6 months of regular conversations with folks who follow Steve Taylor, Bernardo Kastrup and similar thinkers for folks to even grasp minimally the importance of the Supra-rational element. I’ll ask at some point, “So there’s this blind infra-rational Will. - and THAT is what holds the stars and planets in their orbits - how is that different, fundamentally, from materialism?”
And at some point LONG after the beginning of the conversation, they’ll write and wonder, how could something so obvious have been so mysterious at first?”
In any case, your patience is admirable. I tend to get impatient quite fast, and I could learn a lot about non attachment to views and outcomes in working on these things!
I guess this is because there still lacks an inner contact with these dimensions. All this is felt to be too much and too far from one’s habitual worldviews. The problem is that those who do have an inner contact usually make a mess out of it. Typical example: the New Age esoteric woo. Then people see this and think this confirms their presuppositions. So, it becomes a vicious circle… Everyone talks about multidisciplinarity or interdisciplinarity but there seems to be a long way to go to learn to see integrally.
Hi Marco! If your ears are burning, you are right: at the link below we are wondering about your enigmatic reference to “multi-perspectival vision” and how it may translate into a practice or path of awakening to lucid cognition. I couldn’t find the answer in the above-linked video of your Integral Cosmology presentation at the Jean Gebser Society either. If by any chance you are interested in clarifying our questions directly, please join the discussion on our cell intelligence forum thread:
https://metakastrup.org/viewtopic.php?p=24476#p24476
That would be fantastic! Alternatively, could you please indicate any resources relevant to the question of practice in particular? Thank you!
Well, in a sense, taking a "multi-perspectival vision" IS an awakening to a sort of lucid cognition. One “sees” the world in a completely different manner. However, by "multi-perspectival seeing" I didn't mean any particular spiritual awakening or transcendental or superconscious experience. What I’m talking about here is a cultural and intellectual shift, it doesn’t pretend to constitute a spiritual awakening (even though I believe it can help that purpose as well.) I mean something more mundane and less "psychedelic" but nevertheless more in the reach of everyone. In part V I talk of a sort of “practice” with “an inquiry into the structure of reality from a first-person perspective”: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/the-unexpected-comeback-of-the-conscious-66c Moreover, the kind of practice that could come nearer to what I’m talking about here, is that of Goethe. Here is a link to an extract from my book "Spirit calls Nature" on Goethe's phenomenology: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G5RnWuGOw9ADr0gAeDjOW665CZnixNHT/view?usp=sharing
Having said that, meanwhile, the only "practice" that I suggest here is to "see differently". First by looking inside at our habitual thought patterns that have been programmed and imposed onto us by society with its cultural, educational, and religious context. Thought patterns that make us live inside intellectual bubbles that we call “disciplines”, but unwilling to go beyond its own pre-designed cultural frameworks. In a sense, I believe this series of posts on integral cosmology is an attempt that wants to furnish an example of how to see "multi-perspectivally." One does not see things only from the standpoint of the biologist, or only of the philosopher, or only the psychologists, or only of the physicist, or only the mystic, but from all of them together. This does not mean putting all the teachings together in a mere multi-disciplinary and scholarly manner (even though, one must learn some stuff–that is, the parts–to see beyond the parts) but that of becoming able to see reality, life, and our human consciousness, from all the perspectives of these disciplines that, so far, propose themselves as the only way to perceive and understand reality (of course, none of them admits this, but truth is that this is what they do.) Of course, without higher forms of spiritual realization, one might not know what the mystics' perspective of a superconscious vision of reality might be. However, for the time being, it would already be a great leap forward to accept that something alike exists (here is my point on why science should take the mystic experience seriously: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/why-science-needs-to-take-seriously), posit it as one's worldview, at least as a working hypothesis, and bring it into one’s disciplinary practice, and then see where it leads us. For example, what I miss in B. Kastrup’s analytic idealism is that it is only analytic. A bit more openness to this mystic perspective would have been desirable. Missing (or, at least not sufficiently addressed) in the M@L is also the evolutionary perspective. Then, Reber's and Thompson's approaches to biology are fascinating and, I believe, go in the right direction. However, they are unwilling to go beyond a physicalist perspective, for example by questioning whether biology should reconsider a vitalist perspective (something particularly disappointing in Thompson's case who comes from a Buddhist background and could have complemented his "autopoietic enactivism" with a deeper insight.) Psychologists did open up to some degree to the spiritual perspective, but the evolutionary soul-based perspective of the human dimension remains anathema. While my general critique to monistic or dualistic paradigms is that they lack of a multidimensional perspective (subconscious, material, life, mental, superconscious planes, etc.) and that they try to reduce the world to only mind and body, or only mind. This fails to see the mind as only a part of a wider spectrum (Spinoza's perspective) while, at the same time, there is ultimately only One, and that is consciousness (the Vedantic perspective). The lack of a multi-perspectival seeing also fails to discern the difference between mind and consciousness, leading, again, to misunderstandings or too simplistic reductions. However, one can discern the difference with a 1st-person approach practice, as I outlined here: https://marcomasi.substack.com/p/the-mind-consciousness-conflation Many philosophers and scientists then like to resort to so-called "principles of parsimony" cutting away, again, other perspectives only because it makes things easier.
So, what an integral cosmology proposes is that of a multidimensional, evolutionary, and panentheistic, soul-based perspective that tries to see all these at once not as mutually exclusive but as complementary to each other. Keeping this multi-perspectival standpoint as an underlying paradigm in all human practices and disciplines would change everything. Or, at least, I say this: Let us posit it as working hypothesis, and then see where it leads us.
I hope that clarifies better what I meant.
Many thanks for taking the time to write this. Yes, it clarifies to an extent, though I will read further, as you suggest, to try and understand more precisely. Thanks again!
Thank you, Marco, for this illuminating series of essays! I think it makes the 'integral' philosophy of thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo very accessible and relevant to our modern ways of thinking. You may be familiar with another such thinker, Jean Gebser, and what you have written reminds me of this quote:
"In addition, life has a tendency to find its equilibrium. Since we live in a consciousness structure pervaded, as ours is, by conceptions of perspectivity, we must bring this structure into balance with the others if we are to act against life itself. The fact that we achieve such an equilibrium by living an integral and not merely a fragmented life is the basic condition that makes possible the mutation which could possibly surmount the dualistic dead-end into which we have maneuvered ourselves.
Let us note the decisive fact that man is the integrality of his mutations. Only to the extent that he succeeds in living the whole is his life truly integral. But we should go one step further: only if life is integral in this sense of equally living-to-the-full the structures which constitute us does it encompass the emerging structure not only potentially, but in an actual and acute sense. By this time it should be evident that we are not merely toying here with thoughts, but are turning our mind to the prime difficulties that face the realization of an integral life."
-Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin
Of course, if this is not to remain an abstract floating conception of "realizing an integral life", we would need to also explore what concrete practices can support the new 'mutation' of consciousness that brings more of the Whole into our first-person experiential perspective, not in some indefinite future, but in the here and now. I see that you started to address that in Part VIII. I haven't had a chance to go through all the videos with Mr. Shirazi, but in the embedded video, you begin to speak about first-person intuitive experience of the subconscious and supra-conscious.
What do you envision are the limits to penetrating those 'higher planes' with lucid cognition, if any? Can we awaken from within our normal waking consciousness just as we may awaken from within a dream and become lucid? Our dream character usually has no consciousness that its entire sense of 'me' and the dreamscape through which it transforms, unfolds along the 'curvatures' of the waking self - the latter's ideas, fears, anxieties, physical pains, etc. Yet just as our dreaming self can become lucid to these curvatures, could our waking self awaken from within the sensory-intellectual dream to these higher-level ideations that structure the etched 'channels' and 'pathways' of its experiential flow, i.e. what we generally experience as the flow of our personal biographies - our patterned life phases of development - and those of collective human and natural history?
I am very interested to hear your thoughts on these questions, if you don't mind sharing, and thank you again for the stimulating essays!
Thank you for reading and your thoughtful comments.
I like your analogy between lucid dreaming and "lucid cognition." Indeed, that awakening from our ordinary to a lucid state of consciousness is more urgent than ever.
One of my points is that we have to learn to "see integrally." And by seeing integrally I don't mean by being multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, etc. These are still the old way of understanding the world where we sum up the parts by creating a fictitious whole. What we need instead, is the ability to see reality with a multi-perspectival vision. It is not (or not only) an intellectual ability, it is a completely new way of seeing comprehensively/integrally that does not necessarily need information and technical knowledge (even though, in certain contexts, that might be desirable.) This is somewhat tentatively what I tried to do with science, spirituality, philosophy and evolution in these ten posts. It might still not be the "living-to-the-full the structures which constitute us" to "the realization of an integral life," but it could help us to direct the attention in that direction. We all struggle to do this (and in most cases, only believe to do so.) We all still live in our intellectual, religious or spiritual bubbles and are unable to build bridges.
So, yes, I'm talking of a vision a la Gebser (you might know that Gebser in his last years said that he was inspired by Sri Aurobindo and even visited the ashram.) Anyway, I'm not an expert of Gebser's views, nevertheless here you can also watch my talk that was inspired by him, among others, in the frame of consciousness studies: https://youtu.be/YpJZspN0N6o)
I hope this answers your questions.
Thanks Marco. This combined with your response to Federica above gives me a great sense of what you are speaking of. I think you are correct that seeking out earth-shattering spiritual experiences should never be the starting point or even the goal, but at best only a second-order effect of learning more intimately about the structure of our everyday thinking and perceptual experience. Not by building abstract intellectual models of that experience, but through first-person phenomenological investigation in the spirit of Goethe.
I think it is largely unsuspected how greatly such an approach can orient our intuition of the spiritual 'topology' that structures the normal flow of experience. Our normal cognitive life is so limited in its 'range of movement' that it hardly has any first-person experience to work with, its dataset is limited to immediate sensory phenomena and the abstract configuration of philosophical, scientific, religious, etc. concepts.
Asa metaphor, we could imagine that we spent our entire life using our hands to pick up things, move objects, press buttons, turn keys, scratch itches, and so forth. Then one day, through a flash of insight, we look at the hand and realize we can make it the object of contemplation - we can investigate the hand itself and learn to know its constraints and possibilities from within, by moving and bending it in the most varied ways. This is a limited analogy because there is only so much we can accomplish by investigating our hands, but there is no such limit on exploring the dynamics and degrees of freedom of our cognitive activity.
When it comes to the movements of our cognitive activity, we are not bounded by any spatial considerations. Our hand can only bump into objects within its zone of reach and its zone of spatial extension, yet our thinking can awaken deeper within its flow by 'bumping into' more holistic thought-perceptions, more holistic constellations of meaning. It can find its reflection not only in fragmented sensory impressions or dim concepts that provide feedback on personal and myopic tasks, but in fluid imaginations that provide feedback on its whole life destiny within the broader context of Earthly evolution.
On that note, I invite you to check out the following phenomenological essays written by a friend whenever you have the time. It would be great to hear what you think, or rather, how you *experience* them!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QVoo5wcdUgaz_wgqssrHokNEhzYaXjIHoY4tH-XjmZg/edit?usp=sharing
I will take a look at the essays. Meanwhile… Doesn’t our thinking “awaken deeper within its flow” by stopping to try to think? I mean, doesn’t the first-person phenomenological investigation of the totality capture its “more holistic constellations of meaning” better when the mind surrenders in a silent pause that waits for the answer while contemplating the phenomena as they are without trying to intervene? For example, letting the senses like hearing and seeing bridge an inner consciousness that goes beyond the thought and without the mind always tripping its emergence?
Thanks for checking out the essays! It may also be helpful to keep the following response in mind when working through them.
When it comes to exploring the inner dynamics of the mind, I would say we need to become both active and receptive at the same time, balancing the head polarity (sometimes associated with the 'brow chakra'). I like the metaphor of dancing here - when we dance with a partner, we can't just become completely passive like a soft rag and let the other person carry our weight, yet we also can't simply impose whatever movements we want on our partner or we fall out of synchronization. So instead we need to be very sensitive to our partner's movements, to use them as feedback for our own movements, while at the same time remaining active in those movements.
Any artistic practice can also be a good metaphor here, like sculpting. We seek to impress our imaginative activity into the form of the clay, for which we need to be active with our hands, but at the same time, we need to be receptive to how our movements are shaping the clay substance and let that perception flow back to our imaginative activity and adjust our hand movements accordingly. We can imagine the same principle at work for learning and playing any instrument. A delicate balance of activity-receptivity needs to be reached for our thoughts and movements to faithfully reflect our musical intuition. When such a balance is stricken to a high degree, we often refer to it as entering a 'flow state'.
So, in that sense, when contemplating the meaningful transformation of our phenomenological experience, we actively will our thinking within the spaces of transformation (ideal, emotional, sensory) yet also remain receptive to how the meaning we perceive in response should continually guide our thinking deeper along the same direction or in altogether new directions. Of course, this is not aimed at modeling some 'external' reality with our thoughts, as is the standard practice, but *discerning the place of our thinking within reality*, i.e. how our cognitive activity fits into the flow of reality and harmonizes or clashes with that flow.
Just as in artistic practice, it is truly a new *skill* that we are developing, which does not only remain within the cognitive space but extends into the spaces of feeling and instinct. We aren't trying to cram the entire World into our intellect, into some theory, but to experience our intervening intellect as the outermost expression of ideal processes that are much more mysterious and holier than anything we normally experience or conceive. The linear thoughts are experienced as the overtones modulated over much deeper sub-harmonics. Indeed, sacrificing the verbal intellect, putting its intervening chatter on pause, is a precondition for reaching these more awakened states, but then our cognition freed from the verbal formatting can still remain active within the deeper strata.
Right. Mind is in its nature an active faculty, but it works best when receiving the suggestion from above. And one should not confuse silence with passivity. The activity of consciousness is best in the silence of the mind (with “mind” I mean the analytic, rational and intellectual cognition, in contrast to the supraconscious trans-rational “mentality”.) I don’t mean mind as synonymous with all cognition. Because, again, there could be a suprarational cognition that has nothing to do with logic, reason, rational discourse, etc. You might be familiar with the three gunas of the Indian philosophy: rajas (restlessness), sattwa (equanimity, equilibrium), and tamas (inertia.) Sattwa is not tamas. A receptive mind is not inert, it is sattwic. Meaning that it can eventually do its job actively, but only because of a higher non-mental intimation. Mystics compare the mind with the reflecting surface of a lake shining the moon’s rays. One can discern the moon only if the rippling of the lake does not distort its image. This doesn’t mean that the mind hasn’t a function anymore. At our stage of evolution it remains absolutely indispensable, when we have to reflect in the practice, organizing, speaking or writing (the example of the artistic practice you do is a good example) it remains necessary. There is also a physical mind in the body that is also quite ignorant, stubborn, repetitive, yet essential because, when it doesn’t go its way, it can be a phenomenal tool of technical precision and both remain central in learning skills for, say, playing a musical instrument, acquiring technical skills, etc. But the mind and the physical mind are mostly ignorant receiving ends, not the original creative powers. They best work when they are receptive to what goes beyond them and become active only in the practical realization of what the inner inspiration suggests. I believe that most great scientists that made great discoveries and who worked with their “imaginative activity” had the best ideas when the imaginative power transcended the mind. The same can be said of the notorious ‘flow state’. The question is whether it is a flow from the mind or despite the mind? While the “feeling” (the revelatory one, not the fear-based) may have yet another source in the soul (that’s why I have this fixation with “soul-factors”… 😉 ) Don’t we often say that our mind suggests something but the heart does otherwise? What is that? A subconscious intellectual activity or an inner feeling (cognition) that goes beyond the rational? And, yes, let’s not cram the entire world into our intellect, but it is not my experience that the source of the “ideal processes“ come from the “intervening intellect”. Their flows is much more intense without the intellect intervening.
Anyway, we don’t have to agree. That’s my different perception of the thing… And, I like your idea of the dance between receptivity and activity. Reminds me of the Vedic organization of the faculties of consciousness. They also were talking about mind, seeing, hearing, feeling, speaking etc. as receptive, active, subjective, objective, etc., from a perspective that nowadays we would label as ‘phenomenological’. I would not be surprised if all this was well known in ancient times and we are only reinventing the wheel. 😊
Right, the mind, in the sense you are using it, is not the original creative power and yet is indispensable at our stage of evolution, as you point out. The source of ideal processes is not the intervening intellect, but rather the latter is the former's *outer physiognomy*, like a person's countenance is the outer physiognomy of their inner states of being. In no way can we work solely with the properties of the countenance, measuring and relating them in various ways, to recover an understanding of the inner states that shape them. At best, the countenance can only act as a symbol that allows for a 'portal of resonance' between our soul life and the soul life of another being, provided we are deeply interested in the latter and make some effort to understand it. It is the same with our intellectual concepts in relation to the deeper, supra-rational processes. The former can act only as symbols that help us intuitively orient to the deeper processes that gave birth to and shape them.
We know there are varied sorts of lawfulness within our thinking experience. The lawfulness that we intuit from the transformation of billiard balls in motion is not exactly the same as that which we intuit from the growth, decay, and rebirth of plant matter. Likewise, the latter is not the same as that which we intuit from the transformations of our soul life, the rhythms of sympathies, emotions, impulses, etc. that we share in common with animals. And none of those are the same as our intuition for the transformations of our thought-life which we generally describe as "logic". This is the whole phenomenological reason why the physical, vital, astral, and mental principles have been distinguished, because people over the ages have intuited their varied transformation signatures (the intuition of the mental transformation arrived relatively more recently). None of these principles are reducible to the others, yet we know they overlap in various ways and influence one another.
There is also an interesting *asymmetry* in the principles. We can imagine experiencing the mental principle in the absence of the others (even if this does not actually happen in the flow of life), but we can't imagine the lower principles in the absence of the mental principle. The very act of 'imagining' implicates the mental principle and its lawfulness. This points us to the fact that there is something fundamental about the logical lawfulness of thinking, even if we don't have a clear idea of what that something is. For example, if we add two numbers together, like 84 and 167, we can sense that we are doing something, making certain 'thinking gestures' to move around the mathematical puzzle pieces in various ways, bumping them into each other and eventually fitting them together. People may carry this operation out in slightly different ways, but we all make the thinking gestures. What we are inwardly *doing* to make those gestures nevertheless remains mysterious. Normally we are preoccupied with the results of the operation and don't try to observe the gestures we are making.
So we don't know the lawfulness of the lower principles directly but only through the prism of the mental principle, and even with the latter there is some mystery as to how exactly our mathematical thoughts, for ex., transform through mental space. Yet within the mental space, we at least have some lucid sense of being *creatively involved* in the gestures that are responsible for the transformation. We can't say the same for any of the other spaces. Healthy reasoning shows that just because we can follow the transformations of mineral-mechanical elements, organic beings, and soul beings with our thoughts, and notice their distinctions, that doesn't mean we actually understand why those transformations occur at any deep level. We certainly don't feel creatively involved in the deeper physical, organic, and psychic processes. Hence we still have the 'problem of abiogenesis' and the 'hard problem of consciousness'. These are only problems for reductionist thinking and it's quite possible that expanding the mind into the superconscious will also shed light on the deeper nature of the soul, organic, and mineral lawfulness.
What we experience as 'logic' at the intellectual level must have some relation to the supra-rational creative faculty, and the latter must also be related to the lower subconscious principles (perhaps as an image to a reflection), if we are not to stray into dualism. For example, when we encounter certain hardcore materialistic or atheistic arguments about how everything in our living experience, including our consciousness itself, must be driven by mindless and mechanical interactions, most of us have probably felt a certain amount of pain. When beholding the cognitive dissonance required for such arguments, it strikes a chord with not only our rational mind but somewhere deeper in our being. Probably not as much pain as we feel when we accidentally burn ourselves, but still the very experience of the argument falls somewhere on the gradient of pain. It's not necessarily the content of the argument that causes the pain, but the underlying dissonance that the content reflects. We can intuitively sense that the person's deeper soul factors are grinding against each other in very unpleasant ways for them to express their thoughts in such a blatantly contradictory fashion.
In that sense, 'logic' can be understood as our ability to perceive consonances and dissonances between deeper psychic and ideal processes, even if we don't have any clear idea of what the latter are. By thinking logically, we dimly probe the supra-rational spaces and extract fragments from them, fitting those fragments together in ways that strike resonant chords and create consonance. When we think illogically, it is as if we are out of tune and out of sync with the deeper relations, leading to a potentially painful cacophony of tones. This is why I would say the logical mind is indispensable at our current stage, not only because it helps us with the tasks you mentioned, but also because it helps develop the *forces* that are needed to penetrate the supra-rational spaces with lucid cognition of the ideal consonances and dissonances that are characteristic across the whole spectrum of reality. These forces are also characteristic of the original creative power. It's only that in the higher spaces of consciousness, we don't only work with fragmented extracts of the ideal processes that can be related with one another through discursive logic, but with a much more holistic spectrum of those processes. The latter is what also projects into our normal thinking experience as the lawfulness of the psychic, organic, and physical domains.
Each gets better, and this the best yet.
Your prophecy of the dramatic changes in the physical, life and mind sciences best I’ve seen.
And the summary of the three areas lacking in most proposed non materialistic philosophies:
Lacking in multi dimensionality,
Missing the evolutionary perspective
Ignoring the radical importance of the Supra-rational (while dwelling too much on the infra-rational
I have estimated it’s usually taken from 3 to 6 months of regular conversations with folks who follow Steve Taylor, Bernardo Kastrup and similar thinkers for folks to even grasp minimally the importance of the Supra-rational element. I’ll ask at some point, “So there’s this blind infra-rational Will. - and THAT is what holds the stars and planets in their orbits - how is that different, fundamentally, from materialism?”
And at some point LONG after the beginning of the conversation, they’ll write and wonder, how could something so obvious have been so mysterious at first?”
In any case, your patience is admirable. I tend to get impatient quite fast, and I could learn a lot about non attachment to views and outcomes in working on these things!
Thank you, Don, for the kind words.
I guess this is because there still lacks an inner contact with these dimensions. All this is felt to be too much and too far from one’s habitual worldviews. The problem is that those who do have an inner contact usually make a mess out of it. Typical example: the New Age esoteric woo. Then people see this and think this confirms their presuppositions. So, it becomes a vicious circle… Everyone talks about multidisciplinarity or interdisciplinarity but there seems to be a long way to go to learn to see integrally.