If it is accepted that metaphysical idealism not too different from that of Bishop Berkeley's is the basically proper description of the way reality is, then it is no longer a matter of wonder concerning what sort of cosmos it is in which we exist, or in which anyone exists. It is itself a mental person, perhaps as much greater in scale and complexity compared to a human mental person than is he from that of an atom of iron inside of a hemoglobin molecule within his own body. It's not any sort of stretch of the imagination, and it seems actually to be a significant stretch to assume a world that is different, where there is such a thing as a mindless atom, mindless structures composed of atoms, all emanating or physically evolving from some primordial mindless singularity and then, at some particular phase of its compounding complexity, resulting in an "emergent property" which we refer to as consciousness, which supervenes over the neurobiological structures which "give rise" to it as though nothing more than some passive effect of its active, "objectively describable" features. Rather, it is this materialist viewpoint that "gives rise" to nothing more than correlationism, which is not a form of explanation at all and is really an incredibly superfluous intellectual sort of tap-dancing around the problem of "what is the mind in itself", the actual primary phenomenon with which the mind itself is immediately confronted, long before it models relationships with an experience which it calls "the brain" and with which it maps correlations through scientific processes which can never, in themselves nor with the help of the mind which does the correlating, ever produce a sense of why something supposedly without any mental qualia should ever "give rise" to such.
Locke handled this problem admirably well in his "Essay on the Human Understanding". Descartes, Berkeley, Locke and Hume all contribute insights of different sorts into these issues which, if seriously examined and connected to one another in proper fashion will make it clear that the burden of proof lies with those who declare of there being something which exists "in and of itself" and is not a mental person. It may not be enough to convince someone who already has an obsession with such a conceptual plaything as "material monism", but there are people who won't be convinced of many things plain to common sense, and there are also people who seem to have some sort of dogma or doctrine, sometimes many and of many kinds, so ingrained into them through conditioning from a young age that they cannot seem to muster the will to think outside of the box in which such conditioning has placed their thought processes. It isn't the responsibility of what is true and real to convince, but rather it is incumbent upon each person to reach his own realization of the what is true and real. Many people survive quite well in a basic biological sense without ever grasping the nature of logical thought and how it differs from fallacy, but that's not because fallacies are reasonable thought processes, and it isn't because logic is untrue, useless, or a spurious and arbitrary invention of the mind (though fallacies are useless, except as useful for fostering delusion). There is no need to win people over to the proper understanding of things, as that is not the responsibility of those who possess that understanding. When someone understands the truth and reality of things, their responsibility is fulfilled immediately. Those who fail to do so, waiting around for someone else to break through their obstinate idiocy, should be left to the wayside where they prefer to linger for whatever perverse reasons or for whatever reasons of deficiency or preference. When, if ever, they should decide finally to leave their donkey's ears behind and pay attention to reality then, if their prior obstinacy hasn't given them too ill-starred a fate, they might, I say possibly might be graced with some sort of indication of what they had formerly and willfully ignored or rebuked in stupidity. But reality is not necessarily the sort of place where such benign fates are in any way guaranteed or even likely, though people seem to have many cherished notions of secret powers according to wishful thinking. They are followers of a particular mindset, and that will be explained in later realizations.
Regardless of that, and back to the matter which subsists truly beyond the world of delusion. So it is with the proper understanding of the way reality in fact is that it becomes clear that we are never in a condition of impersonal forces acting blindly, never in a realm where things have no purpose or meaning, and never in a state of being without accountability for what we are and do. One must always relate to some other person, on some level of existence, with whom there will be a meaningful relationship of some form. What remains to be better investigated is what has always remained to be investigated anyway, both for those who understand reality in a fundamental way and those who don't, and that is to discover what is the nature of the relationship. Reductionists (materialists are the only a kind of reductionist, technically), are happy to obsess with studying beings which can be treated by abstract measurements at a distance, and to develop models of what their behavior will be in varying conditions with varying degrees of probabilistic accuracy and precision. They are voyeurs of a sort, and would like nothing more than to watch what other entities do. But in fact they are not only that in many cases, and they would also like to develop ways to thwart or facilitate some of these behavioral potentials of beings, and would like a matrix of feedback from entities which enables them to develop models of their behavior that yield a basic reliable set of probable outcomes given some reliably fixed environmental conditions, inevitably with the hopes of assisting some tyranny into coming about, often poorly disguised as some hopeful utopia, wherein they often feel more at home in some role as technical support or some sort of managerial bureaucrat, when they're not actually members of the perverse class of "end users" of such a system. Again, more on such matters later.
But the perversity of the reductionist-mandarin entities is not any sort of construction in a vacuum, produced merely to serve any spiteful misrepresentations on my part. It is simply a sublimation of their obsession with limiting relationships between beings to their own natural and/or preferred level and way of understanding how such ought to be. What is that but the essence of seeking control? It is the complementary aspect of what they avoid realizing about the nature of being and beings, which is that they have an inherent dignity and worth within them which is a power and value of being itself, which is expressed in their very entity. It's expressive gestures may have a relatively simple or complex band of manifestation on a spectrum of possibility, and the whole range of what may be ideally understood as the free expression of Real Liberty contains all those manifestations in all of their possible manifestations and relations to one another. Not in a vacuum either, but rather as a sort of living dream or daydream perhaps, within a mind of greater scope which includes their actions as a partial subset of its own experiences, as microcosmic expressions of its own self-expression. All a "cosmos" is, within this paradigm, is the upper boundary of what sort of mental person it is that contains some set of beings that are within the scope of its influence. That being itself already offers to those beings within its scope a domain of expressive possibility which will be partly defined by its own expressive tendencies, which then exists as a partly determinative matrix of those who will manifest within it as an environment for their active and passive expressions of their very own living characters.
Different sects of religion, mystery schools, schools of philosophy, traditions of shamanism, and in fact in his own way each and every being which exists, all model in some way their implicit understanding of this actual and real relationship. They may or may not recognize such an understanding in an explicit form peculiar to a sentient and conceptually mature human being or similar type of being, but that is only a fact of what those particular beings are capable of doing, not a limit on what the facts of reality are beyond those beings' capability or willingness. But these relationships are bound to manifest in whatever way they will according to the nature of the beings related, as in all cases. The only question which remains, as I said a few paragraphs ago, is "what kind of relationship, modeled with what sort of understanding". That's where there will be a more empirical and pragmatic science of these matters that is less immured in the abstractions of transcendental metaphysical concepts and their clarifications. And this is the realm of development which is naturally complementary to that abstract realm of understanding, as it is in fact the world of phenomenal contents which actually embody the form of the metaphysical models which are derived from those phenomenal expressions of beings in their actual relations with one another.
These are the empirically immanent "facts of life" which obtain among a set of beings who relate to one another within a plane that is, relative to their nearest neighboring sets of beings, distinct unto themselves and nested in relation to the other sets of beings within some larger context which subsumes them all. That is a condition which I think best defines what a "world" is. It is a coherent whole that is formed in relation to other coherent wholes that are, as are all wholes, comprised of parts which relate to one another in a way that is capable of generating beings and events that would not otherwise exist, and which is, properly speaking, an expression of that class of beings "as such". There can be relations between spheres of a world which bring them into a greater harmonic of wholeness that expresses what can manifest as a kind of systematic being that would not exist, again, without their harmonic coexistence together, and which manifests as their expression together which is peculiar to that coexistence in particular. Such a being may have an existence that is "coming to be" in a particular realm, and may be guiding those beings in that realm in order to manifest its own expressive spirit, its own natural character, partly through them, partly because of them, and also the reverse. It would live through them as an epitome of their expression insofar as their systematic expression together enables that relation-in-essence to manifest. And it may not gain its own entity from manifesting in simply one realm per se, and may have a higher-dimensional form of existence that intersects with multiple realms, such that there is a critical set of varied realms which must each be developed toward a certain sort of world in order for a "world being" to exist in its own right, and it would manifest as different phases of developments in those different realms.
A sort of homeostasis would exist which would not become fully manifest to any of the particular realms which participate in it, but their character as worlds would be marked by its influence, and would each contribute their participation in it as active members of that critical set of realms which give rise to a world being. So rather than a world only, it is a "sort" of world, perhaps less than or greater than what is necessary to create an independent and unique world-being on its own, and which may be some cell or organ which contributes to the existence of a world-being that goes far beyond a given world-more-or-less (a realm of some kind), and which may require changes in a realm so that it may be some particular sort of tributary into such which would be its more transcendent totality. Without trying to go too much into those sorts of dynamics and their specifics, let's say that a cosmos would be a greater context in which realms of a certain minimum scale would coexist with varying sorts of relations to one another, and that a cosmic scale being would be something like what many consider a "god" to be.
That's just to speak of a sort of context of discussion of kinds of relationships between beings by indicating how they act as participants with one another, who have beings participating within them, and who all together participate within beings of an even greater scale. The realm we call "Earth" is a representative case of a world. What kind of world it is cannot be discovered simply by such a generic and abstract discussion as was had here, and must be understood through an empirical investigation of the sorts of beings and events which occur within it. But in fact this brief accounting of scales of beings will become relevant as a context for that discussion, and so it seemed necessary to go into it a bit here. In the next installment of this series I'll look specifically at the Earth Realm and what sort of world it is.
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