X wrote: "When applying the first-person approach, the GS-level is impassable. It means that, in an attempt to construct a theory of consciousness, we cannot rely on other persons' claims about their paranormal experiences."
My reply:
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judgments of a sort about our experiences and the experiences of others. Those of us who sincerely believe that "paranormal" or "spiritual" aspects do exist or might exist, and are important if true, cannot avoid making such judgments. (I will get around to the issue of whether I believe what Fox says about his out of body experiences, but FOUNDATIONS COME FIRST).
I liked the introduction to one of Piaget's books, where he makes a rough but important distinction between three LEVELS of study of human development: (1) the invariant biological foundations, the laws of what he calls "assimilation and accommodation" (what we now often simply call learning); (2) the study of practical stages of development, his emphasis; and (3) the direct practical and applied level. ALL THREE are important, and we need to maintain connections between the three levels of study, but each is important also as a focus area in its own right. I have gone very, very deep into (1), which is where universal principles like consciousness are understood in general terms (but not as Godel or as pilot waves or bad puns in general). Yet as we live life, we can USE our knowledge of level (1), but must address practical issues at levels (2) and (3).
At level (3) (and even some aspects of (2)), life is complicated. Only those living in solipsistic fantasy worlds imagine otherwise -- and such disconnected alienated people do not fully believe such stuff in ALL parts of their mind.
Making the necessary judgments is not at all trivial. Jesus said "judge not lest yet be judged." Von Neumann and Raiffa would say "Consider multiple possibilities, attach probabilities to them. Always keep updating those probabilities as new evidence comes in, and actively buy information to bring yourself closer to reality." Deeper study of the mind shows that our judgments are not so simple as scalar probabilities, but the same kind of approach is called for. (As I post this, I have been watching a Netflix series "Touch," which does a nice job of illustrating this theme of making judgments but being careful about them. If Netflix were at all enlightened, they would cancel the plan to delete the series soon.)
I have often felt a kind of visceral revulsion towards "hermeneutics," a practice developed over the centuries most notably in the Catholic Church, but translated a bit and popularized first by German philosophers and then in a later wave by all manner of alienated left brained postmodernist philosophers. But in all fairness, it began as a very well-motivated sober effort to make JUDGMENTS about what to believe and what not to believe, in figuring out what was the original text of some document. What revolts me is the idea that words and historic documents by themselves provide a firm basis for understanding ourselves, our minds, our universe, and our telos.
It GROSSLY violates the basic requirements for the lowest levels of what I sometimes call "sanity" or "zhengqi" (www.werbos,com/Mind_in_Time.pdf). It fails to respect the fundamental importance of fully manifesting our natural tendency to learn from first person experience, the real bedrock of sanity, integrity ... and effectiveness in our pursuit of telos. Did St. Paul say he who has the law but not the spirit has nothing?
But this morning, from my usual morning meditations, I realize that there is a different kind of hermeneutics of great importance to practical spiritual practice, a hermeneutics of making sense of one's own direct experience, which naturally carries over to how one learns from ("interprets") authentically recorded experiences of others. In fact, this is HUGELY IMPORTANT to real yoga-like spiritual practice, from what I see. Anyone who just BELIEVES what they see in astral dreams, for example, must either be incredibly inexperienced, or naive, or asking for incredible trouble as the walls around his or her deluded mind inevitably crumble. (One worthwhile source related to hermeneutics of nonverbal experience is the introductory part of https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Time-Machine-Perception-Predictions/dp/157174102X/, well grounded in the best information available from US government funding of paranormal operations.)
Someone asked why I now make a "fail" judgment on a 'pass/fail" grading system for the writings of Fox on Astral Projection. But no, I don't make THAT kind of excessively narrow judgment. (Not of Fox, not of Donald Trump, not of Narendra Modi. Not even of my wife or my younger son, who loom much larger on my personal horizon.) For Fox's book, I consider two very different DIMENSIONS as I evaluate: (1) did he give an accurate account of what his experience WAS?; and (2) do I agree with his interpretations, his brain's reaction to what he saw, like the idea of visiting a physical place while out of body and seeing a silver cord?
In the 1970's, I really was impressed by Fox's book (and Steiger's In My Soul I am Free) because of how authentic he seemed by test (1). He came across as an honest witness, much more so than most writers on such subjects. He reminded me of certain news reporters for the New York Times, who were incredibly careful to give you the exact facts, so that you could easily form a different opinion or conclusions from those facts without having to blindly accept his own conclusions. (Come to think of it, I remember in the 1970's being impressed by how much more authentic the Times was that way than the Washington Post. Life demanded such judgments of me, however tentative and conditional.) But no, I DO NOT BELIEVE that the place he visited was ordinary physical reality (which I do believe exists, and is more physically real than the astral plane). It was ever so easy to PROJECT and CREATE something like a "silver cord" when hundreds of Western spiritualists were attached to that image, and it is possible to create a kind of astral reality for it, but it is far more imaginary than Santa Claus and other important thought forms which float around in the noosphere. If you look for it, you can create it and even be bound by it, by why bother and why limit yourself in that way? (But yes, if you see others binding themselves in that way, it is good to notice. I usually don't hang around such places.)
In toto, my judgment on Fox's book was that it was very worthwhile for me to have read it, that it remains of great value to this day, BUT THAT I DON'T just endorse all his conclusions, any more than I simply rubber stamp my own astral dreams, like the one I had last night which stimulated these later lines of thought both at higher and at mundane levels. In a similar spirit, I deeply value Annie Besant's book on Thought Forms, which Ghandi also valued (I have the photo of his bookshelves in Mumbai!), but somehow never felt moved even to read any of Blavatsky's books or the Urantia book, despite recommendations form others that I do so. They didn't feel as real to me.
There are those on this list who still believe in the silver cord, for understandable reasons, based on what they really did see on the astral plane. There are many reasons why I don't. Soon after I read Fox, I did a bit of experimenting myself. Fox warns "don't leave home without it (without keeping that connection)." But I carefully did, no problem.
Also, in Steiger's account, I was impressed by the picture of how different rules SEEM to apply, and SEEM to be basic, in different parts of the astral plane (or noosphere in general). Fox rules really work in zones where people agree to them, but Catholic rules apply in other places, Moslem in others, and so on... though all zones have boundaries and are subject to more invariant rules, just as the Us Constitution provides a more invariant set of rules in the complex system of laws and regulations in the US. (Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work. The US is not as ancient or as ecologically grounded as the noosphere, nor is its Constitution as well protected.)
I think Steiger quoted the Bible "My Father's house has many mansions." In later years, still in the 1970's, experience showed me that the bipedal humanoid body we normally project for ourselves as our avatar (AVATAR AS IN COMPUTER JARGON) in the astral plane is also something of an illusion, an attachment; more precisely, when I innocently violated the rules of one "mansion" by being present where I was not supposed to be, it was unpleasant to have one's avatar banished/disintegrated, but I could still function and monitor the place from a cloud avatar, and l later met others who frequently did the same. The humanoid avatar is important, even though it is just a short term construct of the mind, but the silver cord is more dispensable. The ordinary physical body itself is also a kind of emergent form, but it is far more real, more fundamental, than any of these astral forms.
Of course, when I read the Book of Revelations or read about Mohammed's white horse, I do apply some empathy, and naturally assume the same kind of nonverbal hermeneutics ( should I call it antihermeneutics?) I use on my own experience. And I do not usually overcommit to "THE interpretation" even in my own experience, even when it is not a dream of any kind at all; constant reality testing and checking is essential, no matter how far along one is.
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P.S.For what it's worth, that astral dream last night PRESENTED ITSELF to my brain as a visit to Hungary, including a very impressive castle, and some mention of a king maybe using Latin in an important conference. But when I woke to a higher state, and did "antihermeneutics", I remembered immediately that I had BEEN to Hungary, that it had no castles quite like that, and that this was almost certainly (can't be totally sure) a brain reconstruction to echo the powerful FEELINGS of the people I was visiting, who have the same feelings about India (or its northern neighbors?) that I do about the zone of Rhine and Danube. The scenery was more compatible with Jodhpur or Nepal than any of the many places I have visited in Europe, and the person I spoke to most reminds me much more of people I met in Nepal than anyone I have ever met in person in Europe. But no, I do not make strong judgments about this particular one. It is far less veridical (at least so far) than many, many other first person experiences.
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