The Two Birds

[Nick_A]

Pattern-chaser asks on the connections thread: So why do we commit the atrocity of reductionism? Because we have no choice. The universe is just too big for our minds to swallow in one bite. We get mental indigestion if we try, and we achieve little or nothing.

The Resistance thread has proven to me that we have resistance to wholeness but no idea why. I’ll try and explain how I understand from the Hindu perspective so anyone well studied in Hindu philosophy is invited to explored the depths of the Two Birds and help me better understand the cause of resistance and the natural devolution into reductionism.

I know from Plato and esoteric Christianity that we are not ONE. The human organism has both higher and lower parts. It is the same with the Hindu perspective.

The two birds dwell on the same tree which represents the human organism. They are connected vertically. The bird above represents the immortal supreme soul wile the bird below represents the individual soul. The bird below eats the fruit while the bird above watches but at the same time is the source of the individual. Man’s higher parts are attracted to its source while Man’s lower parts are attracted to the earth. These birds should be connected but man has lost this connection. I know this loss as being third force blind but does Hinduism explain third force?

Can the two birds evolve to live as one from the Hindu perspective?

[Nick_A]

Duality occurs in the world. It is the struggle between yes and no that governs the lives of animals on earth including Man. The struggle is on one level: the earth. However the myth of the two birds indicates that this struggle between yes and no is the life of the lower bird. From Wiki

This separating forgetfulness is maha-maya, or enthrallment, spiritual death, and constitutes the fall of the jiva into the world of material birth, death, disease and old age. The second bird is the Paramatman, an aspect of God who accompanies every living being in the heart while she remains in the material world.

Simone Weil gives a vivid example of the yes and no of war in the beginning of her essay on the Iliad:

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us:

... the horses
Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground Lay,
dearer to the vultures than to their wives.
The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:

All around, his black hair
Was spread; in the dust his whole head lay,
That once-charming head; now Zeus had let his enemies
Defile it on his native soil.
The bitterness of such a spectacle is offered us absolutely undiluted. No comforting fiction intervenes; no consoling prospect of immortality; and on the hero’s head no washedout halo of patriotism descends.

Force is the third force which sustains the effects of duality. When its effect are seen from above or the domain of the Paramatman, the higher bird, a person gets an inklng of the futility of duality to lead to freedom from cave life. All the opposing opinions assure cave life will be the norm. This raises two question: If we are a slave to force as in the Iliad, can a person evolve from the addiction to duality or binary thought to reveal human meaning and purpose and experience the lower self from above? Also, what is force?

[JackDaydream]

@Nick_A

I believe that one concept relevant to this is what Plato referred to as the daimon, as the highest self. I have also come across the idea of an oversoul in some esoteric philosophies. Also, I think that the idea of duality, but within a larger higher framework is captured in the yin and yang symbol with the two opposing aspects curled around together into a circle, Generally, I think that some of the Eastern philosophies are able to embrace and reconcile apparent duality and the larger frame of reference better than many have been able to within Western philosophy,

[Nick_A]

@Nick_A

I believe that one concept relevant to this is what Plato referred to as the daimon, as the highest self. I have also come across the idea of an oversoul in some esoteric philosophies. Also, I think that the idea of duality, but within a larger higher framework is captured in the yin and yang symbol with the two opposing aspects curled around together into a circle, Generally, I think that some of the Eastern philosophies are able to embrace and reconcile apparent duality and the larger frame of reference better than many have been able to within Western philosophy,

Imagine that the tree the birds live in is like a eight story building. The lower bird lives on the third floor while the higher bird lives on the fifth floor. Is the daimon a part of the higher bird or something that is created between the birds?

The ideal is for Man to be balanced. The lower bird reflects the higher bird. The higher bird receives from above, a higher floor, and gives to the lower bird. Has something happened between the higher and lower birds that disconnected them? Basarab Nicolescu believes it has.

https://parabola.org/2017/07/30/the-hidden-third/

“The greatest responsibility of all: the transmission of the mystery.”
—Basarab Nicolescu

In response to this call, physicist and author Basarab Nicolescu’s recent fragmentary text offers a view of humanity’s current spiritual situation. In thirteen sections, items as brief as a few words are linked to delineate the cosmic obligation, at the same time respecting the silence of the sacred. Following suggestions of Maurice Blanchot, the fragments remind us that the whole is never given and that the beginning of understanding is always imminent. Fragmentation also mirrors a prime discovery that Nicolescu draws from his own area of scientific expertise, broken symmetry. Physicists now believe that a breakdown in laws of symmetry supplied the initial condition of the Big Bang. Thirdly, humans’ relation to God (or “Absolute Evidence” in Nicolescu’s account) and to the celestial order has ruptured. The holy reconciling force has withdrawn and the pathway once illuminated by it, is no longer visible. While we now pray for divine support, no reply is forthcoming.

The call, moreover, is blocked from our ears by deep habits of thought and language. Inherited from the ancient Greek world, their source lies in binary logic: either this or that but not both. Nicolescu’s rejection of binary-ism is strong: “The fiendish dialectics of binary thought have the redoubtable yet subtle force of being able to kill in the name of ideas.” The death consists in foreclosing the middle, the “third not given”: what is there before and remains there after the division into two. Yet that death preserves in hiding the excluded element, which allows a direct perception of multiple levels of reality, up to that of Absolute Evidence. Fear of confronting a many-dimensioned cosmos lies behind the embrace of the binary. We opt for ready knowledge and survival of the status quo rather than participation in a work of co-creation. Because we fail to see the ambiguity in “yes or no,” our spirit is blinded and put in shackles.

The act of creation has resulted in the breakdown in laws of symmetry supplied the initial condition of the Big Bang. This has created the apparent void between levels. Without the third force which connects these two levels of reality, Man seeks to do it through imagination created by dualistic reason. Lacking the balance between the higher and lower levels of reality has resulted in the needs and desires of the lower bird starving out the higher bird.

Has the Hindu philosophy elaborated on this wonderful analogy to include the necessity and effects of being third force blind? Can the birds and their levels of reality evolve to once again compliment each other serving their universal purpose rather than reflecting the results of binary thought from being third force blind?

[Nick_A]

Being third force blind puts a person under the power of imagination which the East knows as Maya. How does the East deal with Maya; this power that fills the vertical void between these two birds.

Christianity describes the energy of grace as opposing Maya but I am curious how the East opposes Maya or the power of imagination or illusion.

"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it We must continually suspend the work of the imagination in filling the void within ourselves."
"In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out, we have a void (the poor in spirit). In no matter what circumstances... imagination can fill the void. This is why the average human beings can become prisoners, slaves, prostitutes, and pass thru no matter what suffering without being purified." Simone Weil