Laura said:
I suppose we'll want to look at that again at some point to see how materialistic it actually is; we need to be able to read without projecting into what we read more than the author intended.
Yes, there’s quite a process of revue needed there with regard to G (or at least as I find it in myself), to decouple what has been projected into his writings based on other things that have been studied here and the idea of hyper-dimensional realities / densities. There’s a sense though that that will be no bad thing, there IS this air of mystery around G which he seems to have gone out of his way to create.
I notice as well that there’s a part of me that
wants G to be perfect and have all the answers, and that part happily fills in the blanks where it doesn’t make sense, with all sorts of justifications as to why, the solution to which is that the error must be within oneself. That’s quite a hook, and that at a distance from his writings long after G has gone. Reading first hand accounts of his students they often did indeed seem to be in thrall to him. It’s always been a curious question though as to what they then did, what were the long term fruits?
On reading the opening post to the thread this passage cames to mind:
[quote author=In Search of the Miraculous]"But first of all another thing must be understood, namely, that knowledge cannot belong to all, cannot even belong to many. Such is the law. You do not understand this because
you do not understand that knowledge, like everything else in the world, is material. It is material, and this means that
it possesses all the characteristics of materiality. One of the first characteristics of materiality is that matter is always limited, that is to say, the quantity of matter in a given place and under given conditions is limited. Even the sand of the desert and the water of the sea is a definite and unchangeable quantity. So that, if knowledge is material, then it means that there is a definite quantity of it in a given place at a given time. It may be said that, in the course of a certain period of time, say a century, humanity has a definite amount of knowledge at its disposal. But we know, even from an ordinary observation of life, that the
matter of knowledge possesses entirely different qualities according to whether it is taken in small or large quantities. Taken in a large quantity in a given place, that is by one man, let us say, or by a small group of men, it produces very good results; taken in a small quantity (that is, by every one of a large number of people), it gives no results at all; or it may give even negative results, contrary to those expected. Thus if a certain definite quantity of knowledge is distributed among millions of people, each individual will receive very little, and this small amount of knowledge will change nothing either in his life or in his understanding of things. And however large the number of people who receive this small amount of knowledge, it will change nothing in their lives, except, perhaps, to make them still more difficult.
"But if, on the contrary, large quantities of knowledge are concentrated in a small number of people, then this knowledge will give very great results. From this point of view it is far more advantageous that knowledge should be preserved among a small number of people and not dispersed among the masses.
"If we take a certain quantity of gold and decide to gild a number of objects with it, we must know, or calculate, exactly what number of objects can be gilded with this quantity of gold. If we try to gild a greater number, they will be covered with gold unevenly, in patches, and will look much worse than if they had no gold at all; in fact we shall lose our gold.
"The distribution of knowledge is based upon exactly the same principle. If knowledge is given to all, nobody will get any. If it is preserved among a few, each will receive not only enough to keep, but to increase, what he receives.
"At the first glance this theory seems very unjust, since the position of those who are, so to speak, denied knowledge in order that others may receive a greater share appears to be very sad and undeservedly harder than it ought to be. Actually, however, this is not so at all; and in the distribution of knowledge there is not the slightest injustice.
"The fact is that the enormous majority of people do not want any knowledge whatever; they refuse their share of it and do not even take the ration allotted to them, in the general distribution, for the purposes of life. This is particularly evident in times of mass madness such as wars, revolutions, and so on, when men suddenly seem to lose even the small amount of common sense they had and turn into complete automatons, giving themselves over to wholesale destruction in vast numbers, in other words, even losing the instinct of self-preservation. Owing to this, enormous quantities of knowledge remain, so to speak, unclaimed and can be distributed among those who realize its value.
"There is nothing unjust in this, because those who receive knowledge take nothing that belongs to others, deprive others of nothing; they take only what others have rejected as useless and what would in any case be lost if they did not take it.
"The collecting of knowledge by some depends upon the rejection of knowledge by others.
"There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations."[/quote]
That quote has been raised before as the final paragraph seems to fit with what we see actually happening, so there’s a degree of projection (if that fits then make the rest of it fit!), G must
know. But you don’t need the 'knowledge is matter’ idea for those latter observations to still be accurate / relevant. He just came at it from the wrong angle.
So yes, a process of discerning what is the baby and what is the bathwater would be good, to be free of any illusions there.
Coincidentally this snippet from article posted on SOTT a couple of days ago fits well here. Given the knowledge available at the time, as suggested already, perhaps G had no way of conceptualizing the non-material realm/s, the idea didn’t exist?
Advanced life may exist in a form beyond matter
Astrophysicist Paul Davies at Arizona State University suggests that advanced technology might not even be made of matter; that it might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries; is dynamical on all scales of space and time; or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern; does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system, or a subtle higher-level correlation of things. Are matter and information, Davies asks, all there is? Five hundred years ago, Davies writes, " the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes electrons? If so, this "third level" would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, still less at the matter level.
We should be open to the distinct possibility that advanced alien technology a billion years old may operate at the third, or perhaps even a fourth or fifth level - all of which are totally incomprehensible to the human mind at our current state of evolution.
