Comments by "Peter deWolf" (@StoneShards) on "Daemons, Demons, God, \u0026 the Meaning Crisis | Dr. John Vervaeke | EP 414" video.
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"Delusional or self-deceptive revelations" may be the most important problem of psyche for each individual. Currently, I'm working from a peculiar conception: the natural, unperturbed process of the "imagination" is the presentation to the mental awareness of the previous moment's experience of psyche, reflected, as it were, in the "skin" of the spiritual awareness, which also provides "leadings" as if through a two-way mirror. What the mental awareness does with this presentation in critical to the development of the being, as the movements of the emotional awareness may produce powerful perturbations in the imagination, distorting the presentation and obscuring the leadings of the spirit, resulting, perhaps, in an existential confusion "loop". You dedicate yourself to God by holding to truth as the highest good within yourself, and its pursuit, your greatest purpose. "Pain" you suffer by knowing the truth is a good and proper corrective; that fact should provide the courage to confront yourself relentlessly. As a child, rudimentary intelligence drove us to touch everything, and explore, to know what there was in our existence. We developed our intelligence as we matured, but its foundational value persists as "the monkey mind", enthusiastically contrary and rambunctious like the child, and a disruptive influence in the adult, it has become the "trickster", the "tempter", and saboteur of focus. Follow your thoughts relentlessly and you will see the monkey in action--and as soon as you do he'll insist you don't. But, in this way, relentlessly following your thoughts, you can chase the monkey until he stops running! A bit like the wild horse which, once "broken", serves its rider devotedly.
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There is both, a "unity" and a "plurality". The elements of the plurality are the differentiations of the unity. On the involutionary arc of creation, the unity differentiates as it "radiates"; on the evolutionary arc, it integrates. Earth represents the completion of involution, in the manifestation of densest "form", and the beginning of evolution, an abstraction, or complexification, of form into essence. Angels and demons, so-called reside on the involutionary side of the cycle, actively building forms for required functions; a hierarchy of human apperception resides on the evolutionary side. Here are the forms humans built from images from associations to personal experiential memory in the effort to approach the unknown using the familiar as comparison; forms of gods and devils, faces of the human fear of the unknown reality. We expand order into the unknown by comparison of it to what we know. The result of that comparison characterizes the knowledge value of that contact with the unknown. The process repeats recursively for as long as you can take it! Digesting the unknown, we grow big and strong. 🤗
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"What is 'thought'?" "Secular prayer"? Eh-hem, and what might "prayer" be? Rather, I think what thought MUST be, if everything I "know" is to be "true". Thought is the product of thinking. Thinking occurs as an arrangement of words. Words are mental linguistic expressions attached to emotional complexes (which are continuously forged in ongoing sensory experience) by the mental awareness in acts of "naming"--"Naming is knowing"--which is also why it is sacrilegious to give God a name/form. The articulation of the name is the bedrock of thought. Thought complexes are formed by the repeated associations of these names in the same patterns, eventually becoming semi-autonomous, able to function "in the background", without special attention, producing values available for immediate association--a sort of "pool of possibility". Now, you can create thought complexes that formulate spiritual potencies for the direction of the mental awareness. But, that's the stuff of which magic is made, so, take care, now!
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"How fundamental a given thought is is dependent on how many other thoughts are dependent on it for its validity", Jordan says at 3:25. He must have meant, "their validity", since he's describing a hierarchy, the lesser thoughts being built upon, or springing from, more fundamental thoughts. In general, ok, but he takes off into "social status", and assorted psychological language, on his way to "the adventure of spirit". I wouldn't say it's exactly "wrong", but it goes in the wrong direction, outwards. Fundamental thoughts proceed from fundamental experience. What is the foundation experience of human being? The birth event, of course! The birth event is the pattern of all personal experience going forward, and the model of "trauma", to be re-experienced in every later fear. The birth event precipitates a stimulus--response cascade purposed to accommodate the novel experience of the sudden changes in temperature, humidity, pressure, brightness, weight, loudness. Repetition establishes habituation mechanisms, and the trauma subsides, but the original sensory experiences are imprinted at the "fundamental" level of psyche, ready to respond to stimulus, so that, when you think of fire, for example, your thoughts are in terms of "images" from experiential memory that correspond to "fire". Your idea of "fire" develops by association, or resonance, with your experience of it and your articulation of that experience. We perpetually observe, identify, and associate in our natural desire to know the world, to know what is; this big picture of reality is continuously forming and is the form God takes in your imagination--unless you're an idolator. "Knowledge" is what happens as you evaluate your success in imposing "Order" on the unknown, the "Disorder", in a sort of emotional balancing act in which the barrier region between the known and unknown is maintained usefully, allowing progress of order into the bordering disorder while resisting the pressure of disorder.
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Jeepers, John, I wish you hadn't have defined a word in terms of itself--"My faith is a faithfulness to a corrective process...", at 52:36. That definition, though, isn't generally applicable. What is "faith" except the emotional experience of "expectation"! It may be important that the lesson life teaches is "continuance". From that first breath onwards, one moment seems to follow upon another, repeatedly, without fail. Experience trains us to expect to continue into the next moment. Perhaps...that expectation, that faith, "saves us", in the moment of death, to a "continuance" in the emotional and mental being we'd come to know in life, but without the accustomed basis in physicality. Is it such a stretch to imagine that the belief in an afterlife actually creates that afterlife? Such should be the irony of atheism--a cosmic joke with a bitchin' punchline!
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