Monday, May 28, 2012

Postmetaphysical rigpa

Continuing from the previous post (see it for links):

For example, from p. 1 of the states thread a base state was described, tonic attention. It is a "condition for" contents in consciousness, akin to the embodied transcendental discussed above. And it can be honed and developed through meditative discipline. I've made the case that it requires the 'witness' of abstract formal thought for this development. The latter allows us to observe the contents of consciousness and slowly, methodically, let them unwind back to this base state.


However the flip side of formal operations is that it is metaphysical in that it is stuck in binary thought. So while this 'tool' is necessary to transform the raw baseline state into a meditative state, the same tool interprets it as an abstract, transcendent universal as source of the universe, as well as conflating consciousness per se into that same source. But the research in the referenced thread shows the source is this early brain state awareness, which is then expanded upon by emergent processes, where it becomes more than what it originally was.

To me this was also Gebser's mistake. He was right in that there is this 'ever-present' awareness of source, and that we must return to it in a sense to get beyond binary deficient rationality. And that in so doing an awareness would emerge that would integrate the previous state-stages. And yet one can see he still maintains a sort of deficient rationality in interpreting this Source metaphysically as universal source rather than an immanent, contextual and historical specific regime of attraction particular to human beings. He did not have the benefit of such neuroscientific research or the pomo de/re movement, let alone onticology, that give us these developments. Integral-aperspectival yes, but not as he imagined.

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