An excellent concise and accurate statement of the interactive dualism theory of mind

Fascinating... it does ring true with my musings that the emotion, rather, the power of love is tied to the power of creation somehow. And love can be... far more powerful than anything else. I've certainly experienced that during my more intense Ayahuasca journeys ~ love that feels boundless, limitless, utterly profound. Nothing really compares to it. A powerful unifying force through which something new can emerge.


Yes, I would certainly say so ~ though words cannot do the sensation proper justice. It's a sort of knowing that far transcends mere form. A resonance through profound spiritual love.


Yeah... maybe something Transpersonal and Transcendent, perhaps.


Makes more sense than Panpsychism's weirdness of consciousness being another particle in the particle zoo. Makes more sense that the entirety of the fabric of reality is underpinned by consciousness. As an analogy... in our dreams and imaginations, we can create entire worlds, yet within those worlds, we can have inanimate objects that are composed of dream-stuff, imagination-stuff, within our consciousness that are nonetheless without consciousness or awareness. Form with quality, yet an existence without that spark of awareness or consciousness.

A microcosmic universe of sorts within our mindscape.


Indeed... for psychics, they describe it as their mind feeling the energy around them. They must be... extending or reaching out, or the other energies extending or reaching out for them to feel. Whatever the nature of the energy, it isn't physical in any sense of the word, though it may be correlated with space and time somehow.

The only thing that partially explains it for me is the idea of... gradients of energy, from physical to... auric, psychic, astral(?) to mental, to... the perceiver. Lots of gradients... levels, layers of... vibration on some... up-down axis, from... dense to subtle to, uh... well, you can see how language utterly fails to capture these experiences properly, with their sheer, intricate nuances, and how much fine-grainedness there seems to be to it. Even though I can feel it, I still struggle immensely to conceptualize it. Metaphors barely seem to work for it.

At best, I can only sort of describe it as that this physical layer, level, vibration, of incarnate reality, this subreality of physicality within an infinity, is just a very limited subset of the higher realities ~ a very curated design with very curated qualities, to allow for a very certain sort of set of experience.

The only solution seems to be for the skeptic to have a sufficiently powerful paranormal experience of their own that they cannot rationalize away within their existing framework of reality. You cannot really convince those who already have their minds made up. Indeed... I wouldn't have my current beliefs without the powerful experiences that have by and large reshaped my perspectives on reality.

I used to have lots of doubts about the spiritual ~ I entertained it, having read spiritual stuff, but I could never really truly accept it. There was just nagging doubts in the back of my mind. A sort of... what if it's all just make-believe, what if it's not real, what if it's just fantasy, and there's really just nothing to any of it? Even when I encountered my spirit guides, those doubts never fully went away until a few years had passed. Perhaps it was depression and anxiety that interfered. But it took some very powerful Ayahuasca experiences that I couldn't actually explain in relation to anything else to truly believe ~ those experiences of parallel lives that shocked me something fierce. It's really something else to come... face-to-face with another reality that is physical, another mind that is also embodied, that acknowledges your presence and is just as perplexed as you, wondering just as much as you are that, hey, this is... real?


This would seem to make sense, though it is the case... then the nature of the fields can seem to have any scale or size, given that mystical experiences can expand one to become one with the godhead, or shrink one so as to experience the microcosm of the cell and beyond to the atom. Spiritual experiences seem to have no limit to how they can manifest ~ space and time pose not a limitation.

I have toyed with the idea that perhaps it is our subtle body, our astral body, for want of better words, that extends, as our minds embody it. Or maybe a particular layer of it. I don't know, because it seems so casually transparent and easy, to the point that it doesn't even feel like reaching out. It doesn't feel like anything special.


Yeah, this is something that I am uncertain about as well... because how would it work? Frankly, though, we could ask that about many things...


Makes sense ~ though that also raises an interesting question of what actual consciousness is... what defines it? We seem to have no issue often identifying ourselves fully with our physical body, in the case of Physicalists, or astral body, in the case of astral projectors.

Perhaps one way to approach it is to ask ~ what if we didn't identify ourselves with the physical or astral body or whatever? Where do we draw the line? How do we draw the line? How do we determine who we are, what we are, what the limits of our consciousness is?


Indeed ~ it makes sense that Cosmically Immense Souls can interact, given that during NDE life reviews, many state that they are shown the direct perspectives of those that they have impacted, suggesting interactions at a Soul level that the NDEr is allowed to see snippets of.


These sources suggest he had leanings of that sort:

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/que...philosophy

https://hollowverse.com/nikola-tesla


Keep in mind that is only true in Kastrup's Analytic Idealism. Other branches make no such statement. I don't agree with Kastrup at all on this. It makes more sense that the astral body is what is the "image", that groups and holds together the physical atoms that make up the physical form.


Makes sense.


Fascinating... makes a lot of sense, intuitively.


Indeed. During astral projection, they have a body that defines their existence and limits within in that space, whatever its nature.

Yeah, the game design metaphor is rather interesting ~ we model it perhaps unconsciously... even in say tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons where you take on a persona of a character and play that role. Perhaps its a microcosm of this reality, like this reality is a microcosm of the higher reality of the Soul.


There are definitely certain "rules" in this reality, though as Sheldrake puts it, they seem more like habits of nature ~ patterns that are strongly defined, but seem able to be bent, with enough effort put behind it, in the rare cases of purported telekinesis, or poltergeist activity, or even cases where emotions can unconsciously cause purported telekinetic stuff to happen.

I think in the Dialogue on the Speed of Gravity Vernon mentions that Newton may have been inspired by the idea of Daimons, a sort of Animist spirit type that directed aspects of Nature. Specifically he mentions the Daimon of Eros. In Symposium one of the ideas there is that Love serves a role much like gravity, and recently computer scientist/engineer Bill Mensch suggested something similar. All to say I think this idea of equating certain unifying/attractive aspects of Nature is making a comeback of sorts...also aligns with what Dante says at the end of the Divine Comedy is the "Love that moves the Sun & other Stars".

Your mention of dreamscapes does make me wonder about the nature of all dreams. I've had dreams that seemed quite real yet I don't think were more than my mere imagination. I've also had dreams that almost seem like they could be a past life or even a life lived in another reality at a faster time scale. Perhaps some are just imagination, and some are in the Imaginal? If Cosmically Immense Souls are fields they can interpenetrate each other, so that a dead loved one can appear to one or more people to comfort the grieving or announce their imminent return through reincarnation. And those dreams - some shared between shamans I believe - to other realities may actually be the refocusing of attention within our Cosmic Souls to other embodiment such as astral bodies or possibly even biological embodiment in another universe.

On the nature of energy, I think it could be aspects of reality that end up localized into "lesser" form. A field in physics seems like an attenuated Cosmic Soul, energy in physics is a faded form of Daimons or Elan Vital, etc. Not sure if they are genuinely weakened aspects or "sleeping" spirits...or perhaps these entities enjoy holding up the Laws of Physics?

I do think people who have had paranormal experiences differ fundamentally from those that don't or at least don't remember. I suspect a lot of pseudo-skeptics have had negative paranormal experiences in this life - perhaps at a young age - or in a previous life. Maybe in a dream reality?

Never done psychedelics, perhaps some day heh. I am a bit wary as part but I can see myself trying it at least once.

I'm glad you brought up mystical experiences, because it seems to me these really make sense under the idea of a Cosmic Soul within which we have these biological bodies. Some mystic visions even shift the locus of attention from the human body into a plant or some other entity.

Backward in Time causation is one of the few paranormal claims I'm very skeptical of...maybe that's a good thing. If I'm going to talk about Cosmic Souls and having an entire life in some other reality while dreaming maybe it's good there's at least one thing that hits my boggle threshold!  

I think the reason to posit a Cosmic Soul over the idea that apparitions or OOBE astral forms are one's actual soul is that at least some of the problems that are fatal to Physicalism end up crossing over, so to speak, with subtle bodies. What if they are torn apart? What structure within them would store memories or be intrinsically isomorphic to thoughts about anything? It also helps deal with certain issues regarding Super Psi...I think...maybe....

Thanks for the Tesla links, will read through them and get back to you!

Speaking of Idealism, I agree that AFACITell Kastrup's Idealism is pretty untenable. Not necessarily because it negates the possibility of Survival, but because it has various other flaws...

Table Top Role Playing Games are a good example of how a whole world can be a microcosm of imagination. JF Martel and Gordon White actually suggested these games were born from the old seance practices, not necessarily due to direct in-world historical influence but perhaps more a kind of...resonance toward mediumship..

Yeah my guess is the rules of this Universe are maintained, if not by God, then Daimons like the ones that supposedly inspired Newton...So they are really habitual behavior as you say rather than hard Laws...