Friday, September 22, 2017

more debate in Vedanta group about astral travel

Me: Thank you for your serious thoughts here! Since this is serious stuff, I will endeavor to be as precise as I can in follow-on.

Him:

Both the Astral and our physical plane composed of the baryonic matter and 4 fundamental forces are physical in the sense that

Me: As you know, I take very seriously Einstein's (early) vision of the laws of physics, governing an entire cosmos which most likely (but who knows?) is simply a curved Minkowski space. But in that view, the (Einsteinian) physical plane is actually composed only of force fields -- not exactly the four forces discussed before the discovery of EWT (by Weinberg and Salam), but a variation we can now smell but not touch, a variation which would include the foundations of dark matter and dark energy.  

 Him: 
I) both are the derivatives of the  same primordial physical physical stuff with physical being the derivative of the astral in succession.

 Me: ==================================================================

In the Einstein view, everything in this cosmos EXCEPT the underlying forces and the ultimate Lagrangian laws is emergent. Protons and electrons themselves are seen as emergent patterns (roughly, as "solitons"). Atoms, molecules and planets are even less fundamental, and more "emergent", than protons and electrons. Living organisms are at yet another level, emergent from the (oceans) of molecules or the equivalent that they emerge from, in a process more general than Darwinian evolution but inclusive of Darwinian evolution. ALL FORMS OF ACTUAL MIND ACTUALLY KNOWN TO US, except for the cosmos itself and AI and imaginary things people dream of, emerge as subsystems of such living organisms, subsystems we may call "brains," even though that would include aspects of the noosphere of our solar system, a mind so great it usually appears as a whole cosmos in itself to those humans who get to see it more and more completely. 

What we call the "astral plane," or astral bodies, is basically just a view of part of the emergent CONTENTS of  the noosphere of our solar system. Like the electronic traces of the mundane thoughts in our mundane brains, it is more like an IDEA or MODEL of reality than like reality itself.

Even if one shifted to a nonEinstein model of the cosmos, in which the underlying forces themselves are just an emergent level of something deeper, the atoms and molecules are closer to underlying reality than the ideas we see in the noosphere are... ideas which certainly include the silver cord, the humanoid forms we chose to wear/project in most astral travel, Santa Claus, all of the archetypes described by Carl Jung (and Joseph Campbell and Neil Gaiman) and the serious, powerful "shadow" images attached in human culture to names like Jehovah and Allah and even most Church versions of Jesus. (These last are cases where I see an existence both of something real, more real than the archetypes, but ALSO a shadow image of imperfect fidelity, just as Fox in his book Astral Projection describes useful but imperfect shadows of the physical world in the astral.) 


II) Both lack any innate consciousness.

Except for the cosmos itself, I view ALL consciousness we know about as emergent. Humans do often like to talk and speculate about what they know nothing about, but 
that kind of phenomenon, reinforced by groupthink, is more about human psychology than about reality. In truth, I do believe we should be vigilant in looking for REAL clues for anything which would give substantive information about reality beyond the Einstein model (if such should exist),  but  I have looked far and wide (and will continue to do so), and have only found things which provide deeper understanding of the Einstein vision. (As I type, my wife mentions a new headline: "Trump says Strange Grown Up Since Election." But Carl Jung would have no problems understanding deep aspects of how such puns arise.) I will keep looking, but the deeper understanding seems more promising to me right now. 

When I hear some folks argue about whether God is male or female or transgender, I wish they were conscious enough to consider the obvious metaphor of fetuses wasting their energy speculating about the sex lives of their parents. Fetuses have a lot of mental work to do, but it is a waste of energy to oscillate (let alone fight!) on variables which are not yet ready to converge to any kind of point estimate or weight. (Still, it is not unreasonable for a fetus to imagine that the matrix it is living in could be imaged as female.) 

Best regards,

    Paul

P.S. I apologize for using the computer science definition of "avatar" in discussing astral life before, but the term fits SO well! Not only do some people chose a cloud as their astral form in such travel; there are also folks who MODIFY their body appearance in such projection, sometimes changing it in real time. And there are Chinese mystics who regularly use nonhuman organic forms in their projections. The original term avatar from India has a very different meaning, of course, ALSO very real in the fundamental wiring of the noosphere. One of you has mentioned Joan Roberts, who talked a lot about "channeling," which in my view is a very real and important phenomenon, even when the channeller and channellee are both quite fallible. I do recall a meeting where one person talked about an experience of visiting someone else in need of a certain kind of help, and the person who had been visited was present and learned of the other half right then and there when I was watching. RELATIVELY veridical in the details,  crosschecked. The Netflix series Sense8 tries to bring some of the core ideas of the Upanishads "to life", and includes some scenes of this kind, and illustrates other basic principles you would find familiar. (Though it caters a bit more than I would like to postmodernist political groupthink.) Channeling is always two-way TO SOME EXTENT, and it can actually form a chain.
 
I suppose that (somewhat imprecise) phrase "sub Planck" could refer to the level of fundamental forces and Lagrangian laws of cosmos itself, with EVERYTHING else at  higher emergent levels, in the picture of Einstein realism. 

===========

As I think this over, I remember that some sincere, experienced mystics have argued that our mundane earth is just a "slow lane" of the astral plane, because it too can be influenced by dreams and thoughts, and because their experience in the astral plane does show varying levels of mutability already. However, even mundane human thoughts can change our mundane world simply because of ACTIONS WE TAKE. Yes, we may have had a dream before we acted, but that does not by itself make the consequences of our actions any less real. Mystics can act not only directly, through mundane body actions, but through other efferents of the noosphere, but even that does not make the consequences less real at a mundane physical level. The narratives are very important, but we should not let us lose touch with reality here.

This reminds me of one of the simple maxims I presented in Nepal:
"The further along one goes in the path, the more and more important it becomes to resist two ever more powerful delusions:  delusions of grandeur, and delusions of helplessness. " This applies both to ourselves, and to what we hear from others. 

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