Philosophy And Spirituality

[Epsilon_The_Imperial]

Leo, this is Epsilon here from the forum, and I would really appreciate it if you would comment on this post here.

For a while now, I have sort of taken a break from your content and from consuming personal development information in general, just for a few weeks. One of my biggest problems with the culture of self-help and spirituality is how these fields eschew higher, theoretical understanding and knowledge in favor of practical knowledge and a direct, unmediated experience and integration of the Real, Absolute, God, or however you want to call it.

The prevailing assumption is that it is impossible to develop a personal understanding of these experiences because the way that human understanding works is that it is based on thoughts. Those thoughts have to grasp onto objects, language, and mentally-constructed spaces and environments within which these different mental images can occur. Like you said, these thoughts and beliefs are grounded in assumptions, assumptions which define how the thought plays out. Furthermore, thoughts are often subject to self-serving biases and circular logic. Our thinking, even when we use the help of intuition, can never be the thing itself. It is always a synthetic reality that we create because it equips us with mental tools for interfacing with our environment. Our suffering, our emotions, our aspirations and our fears all play into how we construct our beliefs and concepts.

The point is, we're not good enough for the absolute truth, we have to put ourselves aside and subject ourselves to a rigorous practice and study of even the fundamentals of fundamentals before we can proceed with any certainty or hope towards an immanent experience of non-duality. Even becoming truly mindful of your thoughts and actions takes effort, concentration, and consistency to punch through the illusions-so to speak. So what is my problem?

The problem is that with the self-help spirituality culture, it doesn't realize that it is also a culture with its own assumptions. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not about to trumpet the divine truth of a "rational" universe, nor am I going to project any spiritual dogma or spiritual misgivings. What I'm concerned with is that self-help spirituality culture claims to be self-empowering, but it can also be oppressive and dismissive of the personal needs and agendas of the people who would otherwise be okay with using these techniques or tarrying with these different consciousness-based philosophies.This is the same problem with academia, where you are subject yourself to the Truth, the universals which define everything else. You don't really matter. You're biased and flawed, shut up and do the work.

I myself have already defined my life purpose to be a philosopher-sage, where I can navigate both the abstract and the concrete to make both immanently tangible under the light of intuition and my own experience. When I read the phenomenology of spirit or the critique of pure reason, my intuition does a lot to make these concepts real for me, in a way where I can just see these things play out in my life or in the world around us. Even though I am aware that this really only applies to our base level of consciousness and that it is still a model which probably falls apart somewhere, this sort of rational-intuitive understanding has still benefited me enormously. It is beautiful and sweet in and of itself, even though it takes suffering and a perceptive eye to reach this level of philosophical understanding. Even though it may be dismissed by self-help culture and self-help spirituality as merely theoretical nonsense, this is still practical for me because to me, it's important that we also use our intuition to develop a big TOE with abstract concepts by making them real to us in our own experience. It may not be the Absolute Truth, but it would be myopic and oppressive on the side of mysticism to reduce all the effort found in philosophical-intuitive understanding to mere illusions, just as it would be the same for philosophers or rationalists to reduce all mystical practices to mere illusions.

Regardless of whether or not something is in line with the absolute infinity of God, it doesn't invalidate the personal desires of people who would seek to develop their own big TOE which fits in line with their inclinations or proclivities. Every person is different, and it's perfectly fine if they don't do all the practices or think about their experiences in the same light as a strictly spiritual person would. That's not to say all perspectives are valid, but all perspectives should be tailored to the person while maintaining a grounding in the universals/Truth/experience/being/ existential understanding.

It's never been my goal to contain Truth within a conceptual framework, but it's always been my goal to love perspectives and see the truth in them, spiritual or otherwise, to develop an intellectual ethics of love which brings me closer to the thoughts of other people so that I'm also closer to their reality. In turn, I see my own reality in a new light and become aware of what structures my assumptions, but at the same time differentiating my own and empowering myself with my own philosophy. It would be oppressive and cruel to discount the value of that as being merely delusion, because to discount the ideas of a person would also be to deny the suffering and needs of that person;  all synthetic reality is based in suffering and in ego, but it comes out of suffering and ego when it comes across what Levinas calls a "trace" of the divine. Even though people aren't aware of it, there is always some connection or distortion to the Divine, however small, which helps us as well. 

The same goes for the ego and for the ego's needs as well. Rather than denying the ego or clinically addressing how the ego can be strengthened or loved, it shouldn't be looked down upon to truly  value the ego for all of its suffering, delusions, and emotions. It doesn't seem to make logical sense, but we're also important, the individual which thinks that it persists even through Enlightenment, because the illusion can still be beautiful.

We still matter.

[Leo Gura]

Right, well... you're a true philosopher: a lover of wisdom.

I'm the same way.

Philosopher's tend to love exploring the conceptual domain of reality for its own sake. Often to the brink of madness.

Nothing wrong with that per se, as long as you're careful and you don't treat it as the Absolute, but more as play or art.

I tend to justify my highly conceptual work to myself these days as "just my art-form." One the greatest joys I get in life is from thinking about deep abstract stuff.

Then gain, if you ever do taste the Absolute, you might slap yourself in the head for all the time you've wasted lost in thoughts and how pitiful that pleasure is compared to the Infinite love contained in the Absolute.

But until you do taste it, it's just hearsay, and can have no impact on you.

In the end, whatever your path turns out to be, that's how it should have been. If it takes you 40 years of philosophy to finally taste the Absolute, then that's your karma.

Although it would be wise to get your priorities straight as soon as possible. Because tasting the Absolute tends to change your entire outlook on life. When you know there's a big epiphany to be had which can flip your entire paradigm upside down and inside out, it might be worth making that your first priority. But that's up to you to decide.

From a strategic thinking point of view, you don't want to spend too much time arranging the pillows on the bed before you've laid down the bed sheets, because you'll just have to arrange them all over again.

But if something gives you joy (that is, philosophy), you do have a right to pursue it. Love requires no justifications.

Basically, follow your deepest passions, AND grow your consciousness.

But also keep in mind that you could just be fooling yourself And this really could all have no more significance than a dream. Maybe your karma is to be the guy who's jerking off in his own dream to the sound of his own thoughts