(Essay) Turning Our Fate into Freedom: Polar Forces (Part 1)

[lorenzop]

Hello Cardenio,

It is my pleasure!

Thank you for pointing this out. I think maybe I skimmed over this aspect too quickly, both in contemplating and writing it. Maybe the confusion comes because I am characterizing it from the Ego-"I" perpsective of the spiritual pole in that quote? I am thinking of it as gaining momentum through an active descent from higher meaning into fixed perceptions, which then makes possible an ascent from perception back into meaning. The descent naturally makes us work through the perceptions back to more integrated meaning with our thinking-organism. Since every rhythmic cycle embeds the previous cycles, we are spiraling upwards and becoming more experientially integrated with each passing moment and day, as you indicate. In other words, we are not 'retracing our steps' back to a previous state of meaningful existence (I originally had more discussion on this in the essay but cut it out for Part 2). There are also many nested cycles in any given day. Would that make sense of why we can more easily remember the moment of awakening in the morning than the moment of drifting off the night before, in your view?

For the benefit of anyone else following, I think we should make clear all of this is symbol for the rhythmic activity of our willing(material)-feeling-thinking(spiritual) organism. From the spiritual perspective, each day we are leaving the spiritual realms with our active instinctual will and our more passive reflective thinking-organism takes over before we return back to the spiritual realms in dreaming and dreamless sleep. In that sense, the actual evolution takes place while we are asleep microcosmically, and between death and rebirth macrocosmically. With a naturally harmonized rhythm, we would gradually be making our journeys into the spiritual realms more and more conscious. However, our age has abandoned the natural rhythm by forsaking the thinking-organism to a large extent, by idolizing the perceptual sense-reflections and forgetting there are actually spiritual realms. In a certain sense, all that we (as intellects) perceive around us while awake, including our own thoughts, are dying and have been only kept on life support by the dim memories of higher spiritual worlds, i.e. the Divine meaning we still manage to extract from various sense-world pursuits.

That being said, I may have mixed things up somewhere along the way. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Probably the difficulty comes from the fact that there are many superimposed rhythms (the most obvious of which is the sleeping-waking rhythm). In the widest sense, beings evolve as world-lines of Time-integration. This is consistent with the way things are portrayed in spiritual science, where man evolves through Saturn, Sun, Moon aeons with gradual development of consciousness. Man attains to dream-like consciousness on old Moon and awakens in the Earth aeon.

I liked very much something from the movie Inception. There they use the reality-check to test if they're in a dream - "Do you remember how you got here?" This is such a magnificent observation. Indeed we never have consciousness of how the dream started. We always find ourselves somewhere along the dream. This is the case even for our current incarnation. We take it for granted that we were born by our mother but this knowledge is abstract. In reality we awaken at some point of our child's life without consciousness of how our life started.

So it is also in the grand evolutionary journey of man. Other beings were fully conscious when the spiritual being of man was taking form, but we only awaken at certain point without consciousness of how things have started - we witness them already in progress.

We need flexibility of thinking here. Even though our path to the Earthly realm has been one of descent (involution), from our perspective it is still one of gradual awakening. One can be awake in the highest regions and in the lowest. The primordial Saturn condition is of a much more spiritual nature. It's practically a Cosmic Mirror of the deeds of Idea-beings (in the way our thought-perceptions are the mirrored images of our ideal activity).

In the Earthly stage this World of Reflection has passed through several iterations, which 'multiply' the interactions and result in a highly complex dynamics. It's something like adding more mirrors - each new one reflects everything already in existence but then this new reflection is also reflected by all prior mirrors. This always reminds me also of the bifurcation diagram.



So the key here is that indeed man's evolution begins descending from a very coherent spiritual state of the Cosmos, yet man's own organization was still such that it could not yet reflect back individual consciousness. This happened only in our Earthly stage, amidst very complicated reflections.

From this situation, evolution is much like the creative endeavor to correlate the fragmented reflections into higher unities. These won't be the same as the one which initially bifurcated but new.

In other words we need to make distinction between the fact that the Earthly stage has been formed by gradual complexification of a more coherent spiritual state on one side, and on the other - that within this Cosmic process, the consciousness of man was gradually awakening from the darkness. Humans may still possess memories of this descend from a higher world, but we should be clear that when we were still in the higher world we had only dream-like consciousness. In the descent we lose the cosmicallity of our existence but we become more and more awake to our spirit, even though within a much more fragmented environment.

Instead of spending decades unpacking all this, analyzing the dark - just bring in the light and snap one is done. As my grandma used to say, don't look into every crumb and stain on the table, just wipe it clean.

[Lou Gold]

Instead of spending decades unpacking all this, analyzing the dark - just bring in the light and snap one is done. As my grandma used to say, don't look into every crumb and stain on the table, just wipe it clean.

Separating the good shit from the bad shit does pose challenges ... like the smell. For the light, there are endless new horizons. This too shall pass.

[Cardenio]

Thank you for pointing this out. I think maybe I skimmed over this aspect too quickly, both in contemplating and writing it. Maybe the confusion comes because I am characterizing it from the Ego-"I" perpsective of the spiritual pole in that quote? I am thinking of it as gaining momentum through an active descent from higher meaning into fixed perceptions, which then makes possible an ascent from perception back into meaning. The descent naturally makes us work through the perceptions back to more integrated meaning with our thinking-organism. Since every rhythmic cycle embeds the previous cycles, we are spiraling upwards and becoming more experientially integrated with each passing moment and day, as you indicate. In other words, we are not 'retracing our steps' back to a previous state of meaningful existence (I originally had more discussion on this in the essay but cut it out for Part 2). There are also many nested cycles in any given day. Would that make sense of why we can more easily remember the moment of awakening in the morning than the moment of drifting off the night before, in your view?

I'm not sure. I am inclined to keep one hand on what is directly given to experience and it means I won't be in the deep end of the pool until my reach expands. I think this point has been broached on many occasions but what we have to work with are (a) directly-given percepts, on one hand, and (b) the meaningful ideal structure by which our thinking activity is able to organize and render coherent those directly-given percepts, on the other. It's crucial to respect both aspects of the polarity lest we simply "set the facts aside and .... proceed hypothetically...as our physicists do every day,” to quote Rousseau.

This being said, a useful analogy offers itself when I try to imagine this. Consider approaching a glass door from inside of a lighted room at night. The glass serves as a mirror that reflects the contents of the room while concealing what is outside of it. As we step through the doorway, the situation is reversed such that what is beyond the door is no longer concealed by the reflection. And yet it will not be visible to our physical sight because of the surrounding darkness (imagine a very vast space, or even outer space). On the return, the situation is reversed such that we may perceive our reflection even on our approach to the door all the way up to the point of re-entry into the room, at which point we settle ourselves into a throne on the back wall and once again perceive a reflection of the room's contents from inside. The analogy is somewhat crude and it is only meant to symbolize particular aspects of the issue in question and not all of them. But if it is considered that we, as souls and spirits, represent the light source, then it may perhaps illustrate how the entry and exit of the I and astral body into the "room" of the physical and etheric bodies according to the diurnal rhythm of sleeping and waking is reflected in the acuity of our perception on the threshold to this transition. On the way out into sleep, we lose consciousness the moment we leave behind our reflecting apparatus. Conversely, on awakening, our orientation is reversed such that the light of our vision is not cast into space but rather back towards the glass (now lit from outside and dark within) and hence we have some possibility to experience the approach and threshold of re-entry. That a portion of this reflection is actually transpiring from outside of the physical and etheric bodies perhaps accounts for the numinous cast of many of the liminal experiences. So in short, I expect is has something to do with the "direction" or "vector," non-spatially conceived, of our soul-spiritual being in the transition from waking to sleeping and sleeping to waking, respectively.

[AshvinP]

Hello Cardenio,

It is my pleasure!

Thank you for pointing this out. I think maybe I skimmed over this aspect too quickly, both in contemplating and writing it. Maybe the confusion comes because I am characterizing it from the Ego-"I" perpsective of the spiritual pole in that quote? I am thinking of it as gaining momentum through an active descent from higher meaning into fixed perceptions, which then makes possible an ascent from perception back into meaning. The descent naturally makes us work through the perceptions back to more integrated meaning with our thinking-organism. Since every rhythmic cycle embeds the previous cycles, we are spiraling upwards and becoming more experientially integrated with each passing moment and day, as you indicate. In other words, we are not 'retracing our steps' back to a previous state of meaningful existence (I originally had more discussion on this in the essay but cut it out for Part 2). There are also many nested cycles in any given day. Would that make sense of why we can more easily remember the moment of awakening in the morning than the moment of drifting off the night before, in your view?

For the benefit of anyone else following, I think we should make clear all of this is symbol for the rhythmic activity of our willing(material)-feeling-thinking(spiritual) organism. From the spiritual perspective, each day we are leaving the spiritual realms with our active instinctual will and our more passive reflective thinking-organism takes over before we return back to the spiritual realms in dreaming and dreamless sleep. In that sense, the actual evolution takes place while we are asleep microcosmically, and between death and rebirth macrocosmically. With a naturally harmonized rhythm, we would gradually be making our journeys into the spiritual realms more and more conscious. However, our age has abandoned the natural rhythm by forsaking the thinking-organism to a large extent, by idolizing the perceptual sense-reflections and forgetting there are actually spiritual realms. In a certain sense, all that we (as intellects) perceive around us while awake, including our own thoughts, are dying and have been only kept on life support by the dim memories of higher spiritual worlds, i.e. the Divine meaning we still manage to extract from various sense-world pursuits.

That being said, I may have mixed things up somewhere along the way. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Probably the difficulty comes from the fact that there are many superimposed rhythms (the most obvious of which is the sleeping-waking rhythm). In the widest sense, beings evolve as world-lines of Time-integration. This is consistent with the way things are portrayed in spiritual science, where man evolves through Saturn, Sun, Moon aeons with gradual development of consciousness. Man attains to dream-like consciousness on old Moon and awakens in the Earth aeon.

I liked very much something from the movie Inception. There they use the reality-check to test if they're in a dream - "Do you remember how you got here?" This is such a magnificent observation. Indeed we never have consciousness of how the dream started. We always find ourselves somewhere along the dream. This is the case even for our current incarnation. We take it for granted that we were born by our mother but this knowledge is abstract. In reality we awaken at some point of our child's life without consciousness of how our life started.
...
In other words we need to make distinction between the fact that the Earthly stage has been formed by gradual complexification of a more coherent spiritual state on one side, and on the other - that within this Cosmic process, the consciousness of man was gradually awakening from the darkness. Humans may still possess memories of this descend from a higher world, but we should be clear that when we were still in the higher world we had only dream-like consciousness. In the descent we lose the cosmicallity of our existence but we become more and more awake to our spirit, even though within a much more fragmented environment.

Cleric,

Thank you for these insights! I am also fond of Inception and the numerous points of reference to these sleeping-awakening Time-dynamics that it provides. The temporal harmonizing of the awakening through the 3 layers of nested dreams was also magnificently executed by Nolan. Most of his movies seem to explore this harmonic convergence of polar dynamic between past and future, dreaming and awakening, hope and memory, willing and thinking. Memento and Tenet are also great ones to contemplate in that connection. Actually all of them. Even The Dark Knight explores the dynamic of totalitarianism and nihilism (the Joker).

It is very helpful to 'zoom out' on these dynamics to get a more holistic sense of how we are participating in them, as you did above. When we try to understand from the lower material perspective, we can easily get caught up in the fragmented and distorted Time-rhythms of our current stage, losing sight of the bigger picture.

I'm not sure. I am inclined to keep one hand on what is directly given to experience and it means I won't be in the deep end of the pool until my reach expands. I think this point has been broached on many occasions but what we have to work with are (a) directly-given percepts, on one hand, and (b) the meaningful ideal structure by which our thinking activity is able to organize and render coherent those directly-given percepts, on the other. It's crucial to respect both aspects of the polarity lest we simply "set the facts aside and .... proceed hypothetically...as our physicists do every day,” to quote Rousseau.

This being said, a useful analogy offers itself when I try to imagine this.

Thanks, Cardenio! That analogy was very helpful. You are absolutely on target - when the intellect tries to gain a concrete first-person understanding, it inevitably ends up favoring one pole of the other. It hones in on the concrete experience at the expense of the overarching ideal structure of the rhythmic process or vice versa. The prudent move is to stay in the shallow end of the pool, as you say, until we overcome the mere intellectual understanding. My strategy for Part 2 will be to focus on more collective percepts, i.e. transpersonal psychological and cultural phenomena, as somewhat concrete examples of the polar rhythm and higher levels of meaningful integration and where we are now in that unfolding process. Hopefully others find it as helpful as I do when contemplating.

[Lou Gold]

Thank you for pointing this out. I think maybe I skimmed over this aspect too quickly, both in contemplating and writing it. Maybe the confusion comes because I am characterizing it from the Ego-"I" perpsective of the spiritual pole in that quote? I am thinking of it as gaining momentum through an active descent from higher meaning into fixed perceptions, which then makes possible an ascent from perception back into meaning. The descent naturally makes us work through the perceptions back to more integrated meaning with our thinking-organism. Since every rhythmic cycle embeds the previous cycles, we are spiraling upwards and becoming more experientially integrated with each passing moment and day, as you indicate. In other words, we are not 'retracing our steps' back to a previous state of meaningful existence (I originally had more discussion on this in the essay but cut it out for Part 2). There are also many nested cycles in any given day. Would that make sense of why we can more easily remember the moment of awakening in the morning than the moment of drifting off the night before, in your view?

I'm not sure. I am inclined to keep one hand on what is directly given to experience and it means I won't be in the deep end of the pool until my reach expands. I think this point has been broached on many occasions but what we have to work with are (a) directly-given percepts, on one hand, and (b) the meaningful ideal structure by which our thinking activity is able to organize and render coherent those directly-given percepts, on the other. It's crucial to respect both aspects of the polarity lest we simply "set the facts aside and .... proceed hypothetically...as our physicists do every day,” to quote Rousseau.

This being said, a useful analogy offers itself when I try to imagine this. Consider approaching a glass door from inside of a lighted room at night. The glass serves as a mirror that reflects the contents of the room while concealing what is outside of it. As we step through the doorway, the situation is reversed such that what is beyond the door is no longer concealed by the reflection. And yet it will not be visible to our physical sight because of the surrounding darkness (imagine a very vast space, or even outer space). On the return, the situation is reversed such that we may perceive our reflection even on our approach to the door all the way up to the point of re-entry into the room, at which point we settle ourselves into a throne on the back wall and once again perceive a reflection of the room's contents from inside. The analogy is somewhat crude and it is only meant to symbolize particular aspects of the issue in question and not all of them. But if it is considered that we, as souls and spirits, represent the light source, then it may perhaps illustrate how the entry and exit of the I and astral body into the "room" of the physical and etheric bodies according to the diurnal rhythm of sleeping and waking is reflected in the acuity of our perception on the threshold to this transition. On the way out into sleep, we lose consciousness the moment we leave behind our reflecting apparatus. Conversely, on awakening, our orientation is reversed such that the light of our vision is not cast into space but rather back towards the glass (now lit from outside and dark within) and hence we have some possibility to experience the approach and threshold of re-entry. That a portion of this reflection is actually transpiring from outside of the physical and etheric bodies perhaps accounts for the numinous cast of many of the liminal experiences. So in short, I expect is has something to do with the "direction" or "vector," non-spatially conceived, of our soul-spiritual being in the transition from waking to sleeping and sleeping to waking, respectively.

Cardenio,

This could be a reasonable portrayal of the dualist experience but how might it apply to Ramana Maharshi describing his conscious as being wide awake in deep dreamless sleep?

[AshvinP]

Instead of spending decades unpacking all this, analyzing the dark - just bring in the light and snap one is done. As my grandma used to say, don't look into every crumb and stain on the table, just wipe it clean.

Her surname wasn't "Brown", was it?