Yes we have free, but will complicates the issue.

However, I would vary from what seems to be implied in your suggestion that one must be ripe for enlightenment, or find institutions that facilitate it.

Let me qualify that, I meant to be ripe on one’s soul (or equivalent). Not that the institutions facilitate this ripeness. But rather enable the flowering if the soul is ready.

My suggestion is that enlightenment is an awakening to the fictional nature of that agent. The so called transcendental ego, remains, nevertheless, the ego. Enlightenment neither involves, nor happens to that agent. The ego, mind, and human history have displace the human's natural being. Enlightenment is a shedding of that displacement. It is an emancipation from the fictional narratives restructuring reality for humans.

Yes, I agree entirely, but I would caution that we really don’t know the processes involved here. All we have to go on is scripture. So we are always approximating something we don’t know, that is hidden from us.

I take it that by ‘transcendent ego’, you mean an equivalent to the soul?

The church told us in an authoritarian way that God was watching every single thing we did, could even see in our thoughts to see if we were a sinner. This along with a strong moral code, reinforced every Sunday in church, enabled us to pull through the dark ages into the enlightenment without falling back into warring tribes, or corrupt competing kingdoms.
In a sense, Christianity enabled the enlightenment, by engendering a moral stability.

Don’t forget when the tropics become uninhabitable.

No. They can, of course they can, but they don't want to. The US crisis is deliberately created with malice aforethought. Disaster economics are being used to accumulate wealth in a few hands and the mass of the population is being deliberately impoverished, disempowered, and angered, because they are no longer needed by the rich and powerful. The economy used to run on mass production and mass consumption, but automation and 3d printing makes the mass of people unnecessary. The psychopaths no longer rely on the rest of us for their power. The plan is to get rid of most of the people, and sort out the climate later.

The last mass-production factories will be producing autonomous hunter-killer drones.

Yes this is the other front we will have fight on. Not just climate change, but bond villains too. Oh and mass migration too, nearly forgot that.

Very true :pray:

Namaste

Interesting, reminds me of the antique trade. Traders are looking for what’s in fashion and offloading what’s going out of fashion. What you guys describe is on a much more massive and volatile scale.

The problem I see here is where the foam becomes a house of cards. Inflated by hardware and resources which have no other use than the use they currently have. So when the house of cards collapses, whole swathes of hardware become useless and worthless. Also there is what looks like economies propped up by these bubbles. Economies which have become unsustainable due to Covid shutdown disruption, and tariffs war instability.

Let’s hope Trump doesn’t impose martial law, or a civil war doesn’t break out.

there are fairly coherent and consistent schemas of (let’s say) experiential insight that aspirants progress through on the spiritual journey. Whilst not scientific in the sense that physics or chemistry can be, neither do they rest solely on the idiosyncratic expressions and utterances of their adherents (although there will always be idiosyncratic types as well). But then, on the other hand, many of its modern enthusiasts may take it to be a science in the way that is not, in lacking the deep enculturation that it’s emic adherents naturally possess.

As I see it there is a confusion in the way Western commentators and teachers describe and teach and how aspirants operate and form ideas in this endeavour. They are confusing two processes, although one of them they might not even acknowledge is there. Firstly they tend to think that the spiritual endeavour is about working with the mind (and emotions to a lesser extent). That one can control the mind, direct it, deconstruct and rebuild it, in such a way as to result in spiritual insights and progress towards enlightenment, or even if they just get it right, it will happen in a flash. That once they have done this, they can then just perform the necessary practice and lifestyle and they will naturally reach their goal*.
The second process is the actual development of their being**, a development which is following a natural physical and spiritual course one which the person isn’t aware of, or can control in any way, other than in removing any conditioned, or cultural blockages in its path. By analogy, a plant can’t flower until a bud has grown and is ready to open. The science of this aspect of the spiritual path is entirely absent and unknown from the teaching and understanding.

So, in reality what teachers and aspirants are doing is endeavouring to remove blockages in the being of the aspirant, that is all. Whether they realise it, or not.

*many aspirants fail to reach their goal and then conclude that there isn’t a spiritual path to enlightenment at all, or that they are a failure of some sort. While in reality their bud wasn’t ready to open.

** a development which will take many lifetimes to come to fruition.

So all it takes is a pause in momentum, and we'll fall a lot further than we would have normally. If we do go into crash mode, it won't be Trump's fault, or anybody's really. It's just something capitalism is prone to, and automated trading amplifies it.

That sounds like a description of what happened in 2008. This time there is a vast crypto bubble being inflated by Trump, Thiel and Sachs. Which is totally opaque.

The approach to infinite wealth.

But that future of inexhaustible total abundance is within reach.

Though the most important "trend among trends" to appreciate is that everything is accelerating.

It’s looking like a bubble to me.

I agree. If this next jump in human life fails, we will not get another chance. A failure at that scale would be much more devastating than 2008, as you say.

Too big to fail.

You’re not filling me with hope here.

I was watching a documentary (BBC Panorama) yesterday in which they showed footage of Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Knox, Sachs, all glad handing Trump. And forming an unholy alliance headed up by Spacex/Tesla and Palentir. Using AI to win big surveillance and military contracts. Including ex-Palentir employees saying how, the programmes developed for military use on the battlefield were being used by Trump’s henchmen to identify undesirables.

While all this is going on, Trump in league with David Sachs and Peter Thiel are building a crypto empire, which again looks like a bubble. In which large sums are moving around unregulated and undocumented.

Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

-David Bentley Heart.
Not only this, but in that reverence, it’s inherent sense of community, people naturally become collegiate, eager to contribute towards the common good, and wish to give of themselves, for a greater good or purpose.

By contrast we have in Western society an unassailable reduction to science, material fact and monetary value. Meaning (the deeper meaning you are talking about) has nowhere to go, other than the satiation of personal desires, or the profit motive. This vacuum eventually becomes filled by the exploitative influences of manipulative agencies. Themselves devoid of meaning and purpose. The race to the bottom will take us into dark places like rule by oligarchs and the end of freedoms which during the 20th century we, in the West, took for granted.

It's an entrapment of the materialistic attitude of modern society. Focus on the means narrows, or limits the end, to that which we're good at. Narrowing the end is a restriction on freedom. That is the impoverishment of purpose.

Very much so.
Where are we going now? that science and reason are king?
We are blind.

Here she is with her white hair.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CampingandHiking/comments/11ns3is/view_of_the_most_elusive_mountain_mount_nanda/

Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the “eclipse” of reason—the point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.

This rationality becomes blind, a Minotaur, a Frankenstein’s monster. Look at the leader of the free world we have now, a sad indictment of the progress of the human race. Just when we realise the depth of the omni crisis we are embarking on, the system comes up with a narcissistic manchild to lead the charge.

I’m with you all the way on this, I’ll illustrate what I mean with an anecdote. Once on my travels in India, I set myself a mission to get to a point where I could see Nanda Devi, across the valley of flowers (the highest and one of the most sacred, mountains in India). Whenever I mentioned what I was doing to local people they would go into a state of reverence, which I found disconcerting at first, as I thought they were somehow revering me, a modest traveller, wearing the same clothes as them and travelling on the same cheap buses as them. After a while I realised that the reverence was for a sense of pilgrimage, or for the mere mention of Nanda Devi. This resulted in a moment of great reverence, magic, wonder and joy, the likes of which I have never experienced in the West. I was explaining what I was doing to a young boy, I thought he probably wouldn’t have heard of Nanda Devi, he didn’t know what mountain it was at first, so I said it’s the mountain that often has a cloud hovering above it like a trail of long hair. Then he realised and immediately there was a sense of something sacred and revered. He knew the story about the goddess Nanda Devi with her trailing white hair. The whole group around us were in a state of wonder. I felt like a magician, a conjurer, while at the same time humbled and just as in awe as the rest of them. You could have cut the sense of mystery with a knife, it was so thick.

I realised on many occasions what the rationality of the world I lived in back home had done to us, by comparison.

The problem with that kind of attitude they have towards this thread is that the basis of the whole thing was concerns about the awful things that almost undoubtedly are going to happen.

Yes, he/she was always attacking general comments about climate related issues, within a philosophical overview with badly researched data. It became pointless to debate them and it put people off posting.

I appreciate naming the things we are referring to in discussion overall, just because i literally did think you were hinting that maybe i was "the troll" since I responded to unenlightened in an almost opposite way.

There’s a difference between countering what someone is saying in a confrontational way and the continuous trolling of everyone who posts on a thread with walls of copy and paste data, for months on end. You’re not trolling at all.

You all can worry about inevitable global warming from behind a computer screen (sometimes i do since the wildfires create air pollution, and GW could lead to extra crop failures and water shortages), but talking about it through computers is not really addressing the problem, or coming anywhere close to lowering the carbon emissions.

Yes, you are right, but what can an individual do, other than make some ethical choices in what they buy and reducing their fossil fuel use where they can?
There is a serious problem of Malaise, feelings of powerlessness, reluctance to make big changes in one’s lifestyle, while most other people, or governments don’t. In some ways, the problem is just too big, too far away in the future for people to cope with, or grasp the urgency. In many ways, it’s already too late and we’re all just running with our eyes shut and our hands over our ears towards a cliff edge like lemmings.

For example, it's important to know that militaries disproportionately create carbon emissions. Why this tends to stay out of news media discussions is beyond me, except maybe it doesn't mesh with the profit motive of the news industry

Yes and right wing populists taking advantage of people’s fears, economic and political instability and war mongering are the very worst things we could be doing and yet the worse these things become, the more the populists and oligarchs thrive.

In other words, kids coming out of school need to focus on things that only humans can do.

Yes, exactly. Although one of my kids who’s 35 and has been working in IT his whole life. Lost his job last year and can’t find work anywhere.

It is my opinion that this "AI bubble" is not going to pop, and will continue to grow exponentially for at least the next 5-10 years. Unless there is a catastrophic change to the way our world works. Which is certainly possible.

Hi, and thanks for your input.
You do sound like an insider who is very excited about developments within a bubble. I’m holding my breath, I just don’t know what will happen, but all the warning signs are there. They might just fade away rather than cause a pop.
You say exponential growth for 5-10 years, well that is bound to pop because it’s so top heavy. What I mean is that when there is a bubble forming in a new technology, there are always some startups that fall by the wayside. While the general trend continues. It’s like a fizzing of excitement with little side bubbles popping. The problem is when it is on such a vast scale that those little side bubbles are large compared to other critical sectors of the economy and can cause disruption in other sectors. If this happens too much, a cascade can begin and there’s no way to stop the pop by then.

Take the sub-prime mortgage bubble in 2008. There was insider trading going on daily with amounts in the trillions being bet everyday on dodgy debt based investments. The froth was on such a scale that it dwarfed the real economy. By the time people began to realise, it was too late.

I take on board the idea that a lot of the growth is in real hardware and on a more sound footing. But this just means that if the bubble does bursts it will be much more devastating. Which introduces the idea of too big to fail. When people start saying something is too big to fail, then people stop being cautious and pump even more money into things that haven’t been carefully considered, because it’s “too big to fail”. Then we have an unpoppable bubble.

Have you read the posts and exchanges by Agree to Disagree?
Not just in this thread, but all climate change threads.

Well we don’t know much.

The 'receiver/transmitter' model of mind and consciousness. Alduous Huxley also considered that idea when tripping on mescaline. In Doors of Perception, he wrote that the total potential of consciousness, which he terms "Mind at Large," is too vast and overwhelming for biological survival. The brain and nervous system have evolved to perform an "eliminative" or "reducing" function, filtering out the mass of "useless and irrelevant knowledge" from the Mind at Large. What remains is a "measly trickle" of consciousness, which is the selective awareness necessary for us to stay alive, focus on practical matters, and operate on "this particular planet." This idea has many resonances, not least in current models of 'predictive processing' and 'relevance realisation'.

I had a trip once where I realised that the atoms in my brain were 99.999% (or something) empty space and if I rocked the boat too much I would fall into the gaps between these atoms and never be able to get back out. Also on another trip, the distinction between me and the outside world became reversed. So I was the outside world talking and thinking back at me and my body was external (other) to that, or the subject being talked to.

the world is full of claims about which we have inadequate or no knowledge

This is the Flying Spaghetti Monster (fsb) argument, it goes;
Because there are no actual fsb’s out there I would need to see evidence of their existence before I take them seriously.
If there is a God, you need to provide evidence, or you could be claiming any of an infinite number of fanciful claims, like the fsb.

Where it falls down is it confines belief to the contents of human imagination. But God is implicitly defined as something outside the confines of human imagination. So it doesn’t fit into the category we are being confined to. The argument fails to address the issue in question, by insisting that God must fit into the category of human imagination and that that confined imagined entity must be demonstrated to exist to be taken seriously.

That's interesting. Why deism?

Well I find the omni’ attributes of an infinite God unpalatable. I prefer creator Gods with a more Brahman like backdrop. You know, Theosophy.

Well any brand of agnosticism (take your pick) is the only rational conclusion. I’m toward the deistic agnosticism end of the spectrum.

But I confess I also don’t know whether or not Marduk defeated the chaos dragon Tiamat, as described in the Enuma Elish.

You are familiar with these arguments presumably? This is a strawman.

Our metaphysical conclusions should be derived from, and not stray away from, the whole of the pre-reflective experience that linguistically mediated reflectivity is parasitic upon. Otherwise we land in a "hall of mirrors".

But we always were in a hall of mirrors, to deny that doesn’t remove the philosophical dilemma.

Hmm. 2 months since my last post, and 4months since anyone else's.

There really is nothing to discuss is there? It's all our funerals, and so no one will attend.

Well at least the troll (don’t mention him by name) has left the thread.

Maybe we can now get back to serious discussion.

So if pressed, you would declare agnosticism?

I don’t want to argue about who is the most despicable. But in terms of genocide, the holocaust wasn’t that unusual, albeit on a grand and industrial scale. The pertinent point is the process of dehumanisation and insatiable need for more and more horrific treatment and killing. The perpetrators become radicalised and themselves inhuman.

Trump backed down in his standoff against China. Indeed all Trumps antics have strengthened China and weakened the US on the world stage. China had already won the trade war, before Trump was elected to office. They must be taking him for a chump now.

Apologies, I missed these two questions, thinking there were only two questions.

Weren't their canons created because they knew they would die? So how can transcendental-ego practices be off limits?

Firstly we don’t know why their cannons were created, it would seem to me that they were organising into religious movements. Which would require formal teachings to be written and disseminated.

Regarding transcendental practices, the way I see it is that if a being is ripe for the development of enlightenment, they would naturally be drawn to institutions where it is facilitated. The implication being that people joining these institutions who aren’t ripe, so to speak, will not achieve enlightenment. The conclusion being that people cannot force enlightenment, which I agree with.

Yes, it appears to happen in all cases of genocide. The aggressor feels a moral duty to continue the genocide until the victim is extinguished.

If I may, i have some questions:

Of course.

what kind of evolution are you referring to, the mythical rebirth cycles of buddhism, maybe something easier to grasp that you think is fundamental to enlightenment?

No not evolutions as given to us in religious ideology. Rather any actual evolution that is going on. This is on the assumption that there is a spiritual, or other, dimension. Something that we can’t verify. But we can verify that evolution and natural growth processes go on in organisms, using science and the spiritual teachings passed down to us state that we are evolving souls (in most cases). It is this evolution, if it is actually going on, that I’m referring to. So the idea is that one will only reach enlightenment when one’s soul has reached the point of development where it is ready to (through natural developmental processes) undergo that transformation.

The ancients produced the canons which these traditions either rely on, or refer to. There is the New Age movement which has come up with modern ideas about this. But on the whole spiritual and mystical movements rely on historical teachings. I can’t really comment on phenomenological ideas as I haven’t studied that field.

This is not to deny that there can be different notions as to what revelation consists in―is it, for example from a God, or a universal consciousness, or an inner self or soul experiencing anamnesis?

Yes, we are in the dark on this issue, all we have are the accounts from people who claim to have experienced revelation. I include myself, as I have experienced something which I interpreted as revelation. But I withhold judgement as it might just aswell be something innate in the human condition that I experienced in a peculiar way.

I say mystical experiences are in the latter category―the best that can be achieved is an interpretation, usually heavily conceptually mediated by some traditional religious context or other. It is this conceptual dependency on cultural and religious contexts which leads me to think the idea of direct knowing is unsupportable.

Agreed, it should only be taken as raw experience, for study within a personal framework of mystical enquiry, by people who have a serious interest and predisposition for this kind of endeavour.

I see direct knowing in the sense of 'being familiar with' as applying to both everyday experience and mystical experience, but this kind of knowing is not a discursive knowing―that is nothing propositional is known. So, when people say they know God exists, or that karma is real, or that there is an afterlife or rebirth, I have no doubt they are confusing the 'knowing that' of propositional knowledge with the direct knowing of acquaintance, of felt experience that we all enjoy every day. Of course we do need to learn to attend to that experience, and for me that is the value of meditation, which I say can be, in principle, constantly practiced―it is not confined to being in a particular posture.

Agreed, I think it is important when considering such study and practice to adopt a rigorous philosophical, self critical, sceptical stance. Develop a deep humility and be very critical of any beliefs one begins to hold.

As soon as we try to talk about these things, in any way other than via an allusive language meant to evoke, as soon as we imagine that we are accessing some real knowledge (in the propositional sense) we go astray. But it seems we just can't help ourselves―we can't help imagining that propositional metaphysical knowledge must be possible.

Perhaps this why it is called esoteric. It is incumbent upon the practitioner to have a rigorous approach so as to learn to navigate these distractions etc.
But propositional knowledge is not necessarily required, why would it be, it is only something to be found in the heads of people. It is something within human nature, part of what mysticism entails is to break out of this straight jacket.

Of course precise descriptions of fictional entities are possible, but they have no ground other than imagination.

There are accounts of it happening to real people too.

I think this is a terrible idea. It, and other ideas about "higher realms" being more important than this life are a large part of the problem, and offer no real solution to the human condition at all. I have come to see the whole idea of salvation or spiritual liberation as being, ironically, a narcissistic obsession with the self and a bolster for elitism.

You make a good point here, it is unfortunate that such ideas along with religion are so amenable to corruption, especially for political purposes and control of populations. When it comes to solutions to the human condition, prophets have tried to offer guidance, like Jesus for example. But it is only really applicable in prehistoric and medieval cultures. Although we mustn’t omit the very real legacy left in our cultures by the moral codes offered by these religions. One only need imagine the last couple of thousand years if religions hadn’t developed to realise how self destructive and exploitative human nature can be. We may well observe it’s destructive nature over the next few years.

I’ll share something with you and would be grateful for your general feedback

Yes, I relate to your definitions here and my next point was going to be about what you refer to here;

More complexly, all humans will typically hold a proto-understanding throughout our adult life of being a human earthling—rather than of being,

Which I was getting ready to explain myself. I would add that this proto-understanding is shared with all plants and animals and we can learn a lot from communing with nature.

So roughly expressed, the mystic does not gain an allo-understanding of what I’ll here again term “ultimate truth” but, rather, a very profound proto-understanding of it, at which juncture everything more or less clicks into place in terms of the transcendental ego’s (and not necessarily the empirical ego's) understanding of being and of the existence in which being per se is embodied.

Again I agree and would add another system I use a lot, the idea of orientation. So the clicking into place is like focussing a lense. Or like an astrolabe, we are like a combination lock, a combination of a number of parts which when aligned allow the clear passage of light. This is built upon a foundational belief* of the idea that we are already at our destination (enlightenment), there is not really any extension in time and space and that all that is required is to re-orientate in subtle ways.

In parallel, be it addressed as Nirvana, the divine simplicity of God, a complete henosis with “The One”, etc., I verbally then interpret this ultimate reality yet to be actualized to be constituted of limitless and, hence, infinite proto-understanding that is perfectly devoid of all allo-understanding (more broadly, infinite pure being that is perfectly devoid of all existence, i.e. that which stands out)—thereby being pure bliss which is divinely simple and hence utterly nondual (I’ll add to this, in which one comes to fully know oneself as pure being (this in a non-JTB sense of knowing)).

I don’t think we can presume any of these ideas about the nature of Nirvana, God, or a deeper reality. These can only be taken on faith, on trust so to speak, of what sages have written down the ages. There must be something in common in the form these descriptions take, as they are all similar and follow a common pattern. But I choose not to define it myself, because It may be a consequence of human nature, ie a reflection of something in us. As such we may be idolising something about ourselves.

What does the abbreviation JTB represent?

* I don’t hold any beliefs in the traditional sense, only those that are required to live a life in the world.

Take Sufism for yet another example. In most everything a Sufi does and says, the Sufi seems to have an understanding for this potential ultimate end which is simultaneously residing both within and without.

Yes, Sufi’s have developed a good language for expressing these things. I remember the first spiritual book I read when a teenager, Autobiography of a Yogi. On reading it, I had an intuitive understanding and familiarity with what was being described.

To deny that at least certain Buddhists, Sufis, and many another all hold a deep, non-conceptual understanding of this ultimate truth (here, truth signifying "conformity to that which is real") regarding what is ultimately real—“Nirvana without remainder” for Buddhists, “Oneness with the divine simplicity of God” for Sufis—is, to my mind, to then construe all mystics world over to be utter charlatans

“Truth signifying “Conformity to that which is real” is an appropriate way of using the term truth in this area of discussion. And yes, I agree that there are people who have this deeper understanding. But there is a subtle distinction to be made here, which is I think the cause of confusion when addressing this topic. It might not be appropriate to describe it as an understanding, yes there is an understanding. But an understanding which does not entail thought as produced in the brain. It is a more subtle understanding in which, communion (presence), witness (to bear witness to something), recognition and familiarity play more formative roles. It is the thinking in the brain which attempts to articulate this experience, in our “dualistic” world. Hence when the experience is conveyed, it is done via thinking, language and intellectual understanding. Which is quite different from how understanding manifests in the subtle realm.

This ultimate end to me is, poetically expressed, like the very core of a jewel which can only be perceived by us dualistic egos via its many facets, each facet depicting just one of its many attributes, all of them in fact being perfectly unified in non-dualistic divine simplicity within the core.

Nice imagery.

To me, the mystic has understood the jewels core—not via debated conceptualizations but via a type of eureka moment applicable to the transcendental ego within all of us. But, in remaining a dualistic ego embedded within a specific culture which has its own ready existent scaffoldings, the mystic will then utilize the cultural and linguistic scaffoldings of his/her surroundings to navigate the waters of existence toward this very same end.

Very much so, although “eureka moment” implies some kind of strained, extreme moment. It is not always like this, it might be a subtle distinction meeting a memory, met with a sigh, or seem to always have been that way, with no real knowledge of when it became so. Or knowing through doing, in which the mind is not really all that involved.

Anyways, buddhist meditation made a lot of sense to me in the goal of doing away with anything extraneous or superfluous, but I eventually realized that you cannot change yourself, and therefore, you cannot become enlightened.

You can open yourself to the possibility that a development within yourself can result in enlightenment. Provided your evolutionary stage of development has reached that point of awakening.
We cannot know if people did actually reach enlightenment during the heyday of the Buddhist and Hindu religions, when they wrote their teachings down. Or if it represented a goal of their practice. We really don’t know how things were back then.

So mystical experience, which is characterized and identified in terms of feelings (even though certain kinds of thoughts are variously culturally associated with those feelings) is really no different than ordinary experience except in virtue of those heightened feelings and sensitivities.

There are plenty of documented cases, although they are mainly from the east (there are some in the Christian tradition and also shamanistic traditions) and are all regarded as anecdotal, when it comes to philosophy. One encounters the problem of provability, which can’t be provided*.
Also the documented experiences are often different to ordinary experience, including revelation.

The "deep inner understanding" is not really an understanding at all but a heightened feeling. To qualify as an understanding it would have to be capable of precise articulation, which thousands of years of documented attempts show cannot be done.

Again it has been done, it’s just not verifiable. Or as James Randi demonstrated, produced on demand.
We don’t need to go down the rabbit hole of just what precise articulation means.

Let me explain how it is articulated in Eastern traditions. If you look at the statue of Shiva in this article you will see that he is standing on a little man, lying on his side and yet trying to look up. In turn they are both standing atop the petals of a lotus flower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nataraja

Now there is a rich, complex and precise language and teaching describing and articulating what this deity represents in the Hindu tradition. What it depicts is a being who has subjugated his lower self, the self incarnated into the physical world, with all that entails, animals passions, avarice, greed etc etc. This is the little man, They are both standing on a lotus flower which represents the thousand petalled lotus of the crown chakra, the highest chakra of the seven chakras in the human body(again, there is extensive literature on this). This indicates that the being has fully awakened the crown chakra and is inhabiting a more subtle divine world, of which the physical world is a pale reflection. The little man looking up is his incarnate self trying to get a glimpse of this world.

If you look at any Hindu, or Buddhist religious art work you will see this iconography in almost all of them.

cannot even begin to imagine how a precise measure, or actually any measure, of beauty could be discovered. I personally believe there are degrees of aesthetic quality, that some works are better, more profound or more beautiful than others, but I have no illusions that I could ever demonstrate it such that any unbiased interlocutor would be rationally constrained to agree.

Actually beauty has been quite well explained, although I won’t go into that here as it’s a distraction from the OP, in terms of evolutionary conditioning to distinguish between mating partners, to find the better mate, the faculty was developed in most larger animals.

*It would be impossible to prove God exists even if he/she came down and tapped you on the shoulder and introduced himself.

Science only works with what we can detect with instruments. Its conclusions are limited to that. It is mute about the basis of existence and key philosophical questions.

I know what you are saying, but there is a problem with the use of truth and knowledge here. These are both things which us mortals experience and work with in this world. Whereas in the nirvana you talk about, they have fallen away, there is direct experience, direct knowing. There isn’t anymore a question of truth or falsity, or knowledge in the sense of having learned, or understood something. It is more direct than that.
There is a whole language in Buddhism developed to talk about and describe these exalted states. Something which has not been developed very much thus far in the Western traditions.

It is impossible to generalize since we are all unique. Some need a guru, a sangha, an advisor, a wise friend. But these are all things that must be left behind.

Quite, I remember when I met and became friends with a guru at his ashram. I had expressed an interest in meeting him and when he came to sit with me, he was defensive at first which surprised me. Then I realised that most people who approached him in this way wanted him to lift a burden, to somehow solve their problems. Or be someone they can lean on (metaphorically) and somehow leave all their worries behind. When I conveyed to him that I didn’t want anything from him and just wanted to hang out in friendship. He was visibly relieved and we spent a week enjoying the practice of puja, with a sense of fun and humour. During which I realised that there was a complex dynamic of seekers, worshippers, people working through their own spiritual, or mystical processes. All using him as their focus, crutch, motivation. It was very fertile ground and I made some important realisations there.

There is really nothing to be learned, nothing to be gained, nothing to be known, beyond simply becoming able to relax completely and let go, and be yourself without any fear of missing any mark or any truth, or making any mistake.

Yes, to remove the impediments to being yourself, in stillness and joy, or contentment. And yet there is still value, meaning and education to be gained alongside that and work that can be done.

The deepest illusion, the most profound nonsense that needs to be expunged is the idea that enlightenment consists in finding the Absolute Truth, coming to know the Ultimate Essence of Reality.

Yes, but this along with other aims of the seeker are understandable, because one is blind at that stage. Blind in the sense that there is no sense of direction, no goal, no means of attaining one’s perceived goal. One is just trying anything that looks like it might work. This is where a guide is useful, or a school.
I liken this stage to questing, a series of quests that one undertakes and comes to realisations about oneself and the path and the direction of travel. Eventually one reaches a point of stillness, focus and direction*.

What this indicates to me is that this is not a process of intellectual learning, or wisdom as such, but more one of a development in the self. A process in the body, the being.

*Many seekers never reach this point.

Instability makes money for people. So it's questionable whether the cause of that is "misunderstanding" or intent.

The man’s a moron. But I accept there are clever people behind the scenes playing him for a fool.