The Central Topic

[Cleric K]

How can I understand what is meant by it if I have no direct experience of it? It's like asking a blind person to understand what it meant by "red color"

It's not the same, Eugene. There are things which are indeed function of karmic circumstances, like being born as the king's son or being born blind but what we speak of is really the ability to deepen our experience of thinking in order to recognize it as the most 'in focus' part of the flow of reality. Anyone with healthy brain can do this and you are no exception.

In other words, the direct experience is available to you, the question is if you're willing to step into it.

[Martin_]

This is really confusing me.
Ashvin, are you stating that the fact that Eugene claims that he engages in Imaginative Thinking during work and hobby-time shows that he does not understand the nature of Imaginative Thinking?

If not, I lost you there.

[Eugene I.]

It's not the same, Eugene. There are things which are indeed function of karmic circumstances, like being born as the king's son or being born blind but what we speak of is really the ability to deepen our experience of thinking in order to recognize it as the most 'in focus' part of the flow of reality. Anyone with healthy brain can do this and you are no exception.

In other words, the direct experience is available to you, the question is if you're willing to step into it.

See, whatever we discuss here, be it meditative or non-dual or other mystical experiences, or philosophical discourse, or NDE accounts, you always refute them saying "no-no, that's all the products of your low-order cognition of individual egoic minds and abstract thinking, but I'm talking about high-order cognition on the level of high-order beings".

But I can tell you this: with my years of meditative, mystical, scientific, musical and philosophical explorations, I explored all capacities of my consciousness, and I'm still progressing in those directions into the deeper and higher levels. I do believe that all people have access to higher-order knowledge and realities through our intuitive and spiritual capacities. But nothing of my experience resembles the experiences you are talking about. Many other people on this forum also made similar affirmations. But I also know from my experiences how the subconscious mind can trick itself by producing some "mystical", imaginative or subtle-cognitive states and then convince and self-delude itself into believing that they come from God or "higher planes" and bear some higher truth in them. This is what all sorts of channellers, charismatic Chiristians and patients of psychiatric wards often do. And when it is done in groups sharing the same religious beliefs and spiritual practices, it often becomes a shared delusory experience (good example of it is Pentecostals). Healthy spiritual traditions usually have certain "spiritual safety" practices and precautions to distinguish the trustable experiences from self-delusions, and I don't see any of them in SS. On the spiritual path a great deal of skepticism and cautious mindset is needed. Also, as I mentioned before, we discovered many examples of Steiner being wrong with his knowledge that he claimed to get by exercising his higher-order cognition capacities, and I still haven't seen any noticeable new scientific info or discoveries in his writings, most of them were just astrological and amateur-level biology mumbo-jumbo, which is a strong evidence that it was simply a result of self-delusion. He convinced himself to have extra-sensory abilities of higher-cognition and made himself believe in all that he imagined with his "Imaginative Cognition" to be the higher-order truths. And I'm afraid you are simply following his footsteps.

[AshvinP]

This is really confusing me.
Ashvin, are you stating that the fact that Eugene claims that he engages in Imaginative Thinking during work and hobby-time shows that he does not understand the nature of Imaginative Thinking?

If not, I lost you there.

Martin,

Yes, but I'm afraid that's only one of a million things Eugene doesn't understand here. His misunderstanding of IC is not the problem, but his refusal to be open to the possibility that he misunderstands any aspect of our position and our meaning. He feels that he has perfectly comprehended what is being said - that it's all laid bare in front of him within his mind-container of intellectual philosophical concepts - and now he can pass judgment on the entire thing fairly. This was his attitude when I first joined the forum and has remained his attitude for the last few years. His misrepresentations and 'arguments' in response have remained the exact same, word for word, after hundreds of posts trying to point him in the right direction to actually reach some shared understanding.

The main problem is the modern delusion that we are mostly complete beings, in this year 2022. Despite all the horrors of the world which also live in our own soul, the intellectual ego manages to convince itself that almost every idea which can be known - imagined, inspired, and intuited - has already been done so, or it's right within arm's reach, and it's only a matter of refining its understanding around the edges. It manages to convince itself that all virtues and ideals of human existence are pretty much understood or even manifested within the current atomized ego-personality. We should be clear that neither Cleric nor myself are claiming any such thing for ourselves. We aren't even getting into any details of esoteric spirituality beyond the most basic first steps on how to start thinking differently about our own spiritual activity.

So we should notice this major difference - Eugene feels that he has reached the very end of the path to understanding these deep issues of human existence, and is now tinkering around the edges with his meditative practice, his work, his hobbies, etc., while we are trying to convey how most of us are at the very beginning or haven't even entered onto the path, because we don't know the path exists. Eugene doesn't know the path exists and for one simple reason - his anti-'hierarchical' prejudices will not allow him to become aware of it. Whenever his sound logic and reasoning brings him close to awareness, the unexamined desires and feelings take over. That is perfectly evident in his comments like the last one. Why won't he simply respond to Cleric's last questions in a straightforward way, like Cleric does for his and everyone else's questions on this forum? Because he doesn't know how to answer without admitting some significant lack of understanding, so he defaults to the old Gish gallop.

Anyway, there is little point hashing out the nature of Imaginative cognition (which Cleric has done in many previous posts) until the most basic steps of understanding TCT have been taken, which is why it was written along with the subsequent installments.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Ah yes, certainty ...

That most comforting of cradles

that lulls one into the suckling's sleep

[Martin_]

Imagine that they all disappear in a snap. We put aside the fact that very soon there will be cacophony all over. Let's focus on the almost instantaneous moment after their disappearance. Do you imagine this will have any impact on the way your consciousness works, on the way you experience your thoughts, feelings, will? On the structure of Nature and the way you perceive her?

I imagine there would be quite a bit of tumbling involved.
Of what, is harder to tell.

[Cleric K]

See, whatever we discuss here, be it meditative or non-dual or other mystical experiences, or philosophical discourse, or NDE accounts, you always refute them saying "no-no, that's all the products of your low-order cognition of individual egoic minds and abstract thinking, but I'm talking about high-order cognition on the level of high-order beings".

But I can tell you this: with my years of meditative, mystical, scientific, musical and philosophical explorations, I explored all capacities of my consciousness, and I'm still progressing in those directions into the deeper and higher levels. I do believe that all people have access to higher-order knowledge and realities through our intuitive and spiritual capacities. But nothing of my experience resembles the experiences you are talking about. Many other people on this forum also made similar affirmations.

What you say can be pictured like a dialog between two persons:
- I've been experimenting with my will for ages but I've never had that house building experience you keep talking about. Many others affirm the same thing.
- Well, have you actually tried to build the house?
- Of course not, everyone knows that there's no doer, that would be completely illusionary. I let go and give myself to experiencing.

As simple as this is, it really portrays the situation. You may spend 100 more years meditating and still not have these experiences. The reason is very simple. These experiences are approached by taking control of our inner voice, by focusing as a laser all our spiritual energy into an image of our own making in order to gain deeper knowledge of what we are as an active spiritual being. As someone who has gone through the Oriental methods popularized today, I'm fully aware how completely upside-down this sounds. It's like the complete inverse of the mystical ideal. People meditating today under the influence of Oriental teachings do the opposite - they try to dissociate from the inner voice and only experience because they've been led to believe that in this way they behold reality as it is, untainted by the illusionary ego. Focusing one's meaningful spiritual activity into a thought-image sounds too low-level to them. They've outgrown such childish games. Everyone knows that the ego is an illusion, it doesn't exist, so any feeling of being responsible for a thought is the rookie mistake of the mystic.

So let's at least be clear on that one. You're not having these experiences simply because you're innerly opposed to the steps needed to approach them.

And herein lies also the great difference between the old and the new. What unfolds in the evolutionary process builds upon and metamorphoses the old. For this reason the modern Initiate doesn't need to reject the Oriental methods on empty grounds. He only upgrades them according to the new demands of the developing Spirit. The Spirit is what is creative, it is what experiences itself as the first-person force that expresses through the inner voice. It is for this reason that modern meditation starts by focusing this force. It's like getting hold on the outlet of a tiny stream. By getting to know the outlet intimately, we can also grow into the higher world which speaks through the tiny human voice. This the mystic does not. The old can't do otherwise than simply reject the new. Not because he knows it intimately but simply because it seems that the direction of the new goes into an illusion. The new knows both the old and the new. It goes through the old and continues building towards the new. The old knows only itself. It can't do otherwise than simply declare the new to be an illusion because it accepts by definition that if it tries to experiment with the new and it finds these experiences, then it will simply have fallen in the same trap as the others.

So, Eugene, it will be a great win for you if you at least identify within yourself that direction that you fear to be an illusion. There's no need to say "Steiner, Ashvin, Cleric are all deluded!" Don't project the problem outside. Find the door that we speak of within yourself and recognize that you simply don't want to cross that door because you have accepted that by definition whatever that experience is, it must necessarily be illusionary, and once you have it you'll lose your mind and will become deluded too.

This seems as unsolvable paradox. The deluded ones speak of merging with the force that speaks through the inner voice. Then they describe that this inner voice is only a tiny image of a World Process which speaks the Cosmos. Then they bring forward explanations for the most varied phenomena. On the other hand, the conservatives are worried that merging with the inner voice is the greatest illusion of all. That voice should be placed on a petri dish and observed objectively, as we observe bacteria under the microscope. The feeling of being creatively responsible for it is the ultimate illusion. There's no thinker, no doer. But at the same time this leaves the conservative without any understanding of reality, since all he has is only nebulous experiences, dance of uncaused perceptions.

So what's better, to stay sane, even without any understanding of reality (expected only after death) or step into the experiences which lead to meaningful reality but then be deluded as all the others? My deluded self will have lost all sense of what is real, I'll be certain that I took the right decision because everything will seem to fit, all phenomena will gradually click together, but that will be exactly the illusion!

So is there's a solution to this? No and yes, depending and what we consider to be a solution. No, because there's no such intellectual path which we can follow and as its final output we would have the truth. We never lose our degree of freedom to doubt. People imagine the proof of the truth as such a state were it is no longer possible to experience doubt. But if we can't doubt we've lost a degree of freedom, thus we live in more limited reality. Yes, because we can still follow the harmony of the facts and see what gives us not only theoretical understanding but also real wisdom and strength to face life's challenges. I said this to Anthony too. No one demands that we throw a coin and simply choose what to believe. It's enough to give the opportunity to both sides to speak in us on equal grounds. If we only take one side and expect the other to convince us, we'll never move. Instead, we should argue with ourselves. We should be able to take both sides alternatively and argue from each perspective. In this process we'll also get a better feeling about which standpoint harmonizes better with the totality of the facts.

[Federica]

Well, the only anthroposophist I met so far is Cleric and Ashvin, and I can see that they are quite dogmatic and I haven't seen them so far admitting that they or Steiner are or have ever been wrong in anything.

As I've stated elsewhere, I have no affiliations with the anthroposophical society. Before I knew anything about Steiner, through various life circumstances I've already had encountered certain inner direction within consciousness for which one can ask in the fullest sense "How deep the rabbit hole goes". I found in the works of spiritual science what spoke precisely about what I had encountered in very fragmentary way.

I won't speak here of what is found down the rabbit hole. I just want to speak about the direction where the hole is to be found.

Almost all my posts here have always been focused on one single topic. Those who are able to grasp these things will see that I've been talking about the same thing from many different angles. I don't do that because I pretend to be the first to know of such things but because I realize the urgency of the times and how time slips through our fingers while we serve centuries old mental habits. Let me make one more attempt to point attention to that central theme.

Ever since ancient Greece, humanity entered the epoch of its evolution where the world content was seen not only as perceptions imbued with instinctive spiritual meaning (read spirits/gods behind phenomena) but was seen more and more through the prism of thoughts. It is as if meaning of the religious and mythological images began to decohere, to break down into thought-fragments. Now man began to investigate the relations of these fragments of meaning in their own right, which in the most general sense we can call logic. Where the ancients saw spirits within phenomena, modern man sees thoughts - laws of nature. The spirits gradually mineralized into thought-laws of nature. This is not some esoteric speculation, it's the natural conclusion of history and anthropology. I'm not even arguing if the spirits were real or not. It's the simple conclusion that the intellect gradually emerged from the spirits-imbued nature to the nature imbued with thoughts - thoughts which reflect the supposed laws of nature.

Especially in the last 500 years the intellect (the "I" operating in the thought-fragments) really picked up speed. Today it is quite obvious for those who have a unprejudiced eye for these things, that the intellect has already exhausted its headroom. We should understand this rightly. Consider this image:



This is something to which every modern person should have no problem to relate. Within the intellectual state we feel more or less as mind-container and within this container we experience the thoughts, perceptions, essentially - the contents of consciousness. We feel certain singularity within this consciousness which is the reason we can speak of an "I" or ego. Essentially all conscious phenomena are relatable to that singularity. Different people can give different names to that singularity. For some it's simply the human ego, for others its transpersonal One Consciousness but in all cases there's this one container of experience. This is symbolized on the figure as the apex of the cone. It's the vantage point which embraces conscious phenomena. We feel this apex as the top-level observation tower below which everything happens - everything which we're conscious of happens before the eye of consciousness. What's outside this consciousness cone (the thing-in-itself) is another story.

Practically all branches of modern human life utilize this mode of cognition which really consists of ordering thoughts in logical arrangements. Ever since the exploration of propositional logic, formal systems, universal computation (Turing machines, Lambda calculus, etc.) and things like that, the intellect has reached it's grounds so to speak. From this point onwards anything that may be discovered can be immediately shown to be equivalent to some of the axiomatic systems of thinking. For this reason, as far as the logical grounds of the intellect are concerned, the ceiling has been hit, so to speak. From now on it's all about refinement and filtration of the correct intellectual thoughts which supposedly should represent the laws of Nature. The state of philosophy is even more sorry because it is completely lost in abstractions which can hardly be related to anything of practical significance.

Ever since I began writing here I tried to point attention to one thing only - a direction, a degree of freedom, in which our thinking can move into. It can be illustrated thus:



The whole point is that instead of feeling as a top-level authority in the mind and all thought-fragments to be below us (in front our our mind's eye), we can understand our thinking activity to be in the middle and to be embedded within processes in which it flows. I used many different metaphors to speak of the same thing: We can say that there's a wave function of meaning within which our thoughts decohere (QM metaphor). It can be said that there's curvature of meaning within the 'geodesics' of which the thought-fragments flow (GR metaphor). It can be said that there's frequency domain of meaning and space domain of thought-perceptions (Fourier metaphor). All of these have one single goal: to point attention to this cognitive time-flow within which our thoughts are perceived.

Now here comes the hardest part. Today's thinking simply doesn't want to give up its top-authority perspective. Everything described in the paragraph above, for most people is conceived as thought-fragments entirely in the way of the first figure. All those metaphors, curvature of meaning, wave function, flow and so on, remain completely abstract thought-fragments within the top-down perspective of the mind.

In order for these metaphors to be seen as speaking of something real, we must try to enter livingly into them. Not to fantasize some abstract thinking flow forces (which effectively will be again figure 1) but to try and feel our own thinking and the way it flows. This is the absolutely critical point.

The whole idea is actually extremely simple. All these scientific metaphors actually make it look much more complicated that it really is. Yet we need some words to point attention. All our scientific and philosophical thinking in the last 500 years has been entirely as in figure 1. We have been the mind at the apex point and we've been trying to build arrangement of thoughts for which to say "This is the truth, this is what reality is and how it operates". Clearly the thoughts themselves are not the reality itself, they are only mental model of it. When we think about the wave function in QM, we imagine it through thought-fragments. We imagine the wave and how it decoheres into particles. What figure 2 represents is a change of perspective. Instead of imagining both the wave and its particles within the mind cone, we try to observe our thoughts as the actual particles that decohere. Not to fantasize them as particles or waves but simply to be conscious of them in the way they are. Then we can start to investigate how these thoughts come to be what they are. Not through theorizing in the cone but by in vivo investigation. For example, everyone in the other thread about Steiner, shared their opinions. The same can be tried by observing closely how the words we form are being shaped. How our ideas, sympathies, antipathies, beliefs, all serve as the living time-context within which our thinking forms the thoughts. Let's say that Eugene didn't feel antipathy towards SS. Then he would have expressed different thoughts. So in a way the feeling of antipathy serves as a wave function, or curvature of meaning within which our thoughts glide. The point is that we shouldn't work with abstract models in the mind-cone but make the living process of thoughtful becoming, the actual World Process which science tries to investigate.

The critical thing to realize is that this way of looking on the World Process requires very specific alteration in our scientific attitude. We can no longer pretend that we're above all reality and we can fit it in our thought-fragments. On the contrary, we must realize our thinking as if being midway between that which is below us, which we can grasp as perceptions (including thought-perceptions) and that which is above or behind our mind, which we grasp as meaning, which elucidates the perceptions. This meaning is not abstract but concrete. When we realize that we're thinking about something we dislike, our antipathy is something completely concrete. Our thoughts are flowing within the guides of it. So when we become conscious of this fact we don't simply have some psychological theory but we have meaningful observation. The meaning of this observation in itself elucidates what the connection between our thoughts and the feeling of antipathy is. Our thought about the feeling is below us but we can't say that while our thinking process is influenced by the antipathy, it is above it. We're submerged in it, it pulls us around. It is in this sense that we should realize that there are processes of which we can be conscious but which nevertheless are larger than us. We can't simply think them on and off, but instead our thinking flows in them. This ability to recognize both what is below us and also that within which we flow, is the hallmark of the scientific attitude in question. Please try to feel how one-sided all our scientific and philosophical endeavors have been in this respect. Everything - our inner life or the Cosmos - become only thought-tokens in our mind cone and we think about them from the top-down perspective.

Everything that I've tried to write about, practically has this single goal in mind. To bring to attention the extreme one-sidedness of the modern intellectual consciousness. This is the dualism that Ashvin speaks about - we recede quietly at the apex which turns into our blind spot and from there, as some God-like authority we rearrange our mental representations. This one-sidedness is overcome when we awaken to the fact that with our thinking we're inserted midway in the spectrum of reality. That not only we can scientifically work with mental content but we can be fully conscious also of the living time-context within which our thinking unfolds. The most important characteristic of this time-context is that it is concrete. It's not about fantasizing some hypothetical mind and its hypothetical time-context. All of this snaps back to the old habits and we arrange thoughts in the mind cone. Instead, we must seek our current time-context. This means that we must make our current thinking the object of investigation. This is the current World Process and not some imagined mental representation of supposed world process.

It's really very simple. Even a materialist would agree that our thinking brain is part of the World Process. Of course he imagines that this process somehow produces pixels of consciousness which can be at most representations of that very process. But undoubtedly we can make this thinking world process the object of itself. It is a completely arbitrary assumption that what we thus experience is only a representation of the real world process. For what we know, the world process that we experience in thinking is the only process that we ever know. So if this is the world process to which we have access, it's completely arbitrary decision to consider as significant only the mental representations below us and disregard the living time-context, which we can also be conscious of, even though through polar scientific attitude.

Clearly all this is not very easy in practice. One part of the difficulty is that average man of today is barely in control of his thoughts. Thoughts just seem to stream out as torrents, decohering from the wave function in whatever way it may be. It really requires some effort in concentration if we are to think and at the same time observe how thoughts are formed.

The second part is more deeper and was already mentioned above - it is our feeling life. Practically, people think what attracts them. We can be attracted both by pleasurable things (we think about things which we like) or by things that don't give us peace - fears, insults, etc.

These factors produce several levels (mis)understanding.
1/ Some people don't even understand what they are being spoken of. They hear only words and can't comprehend that these words refer to something real, something experiential. The words remain as purely abstract floating fragments, completely disconnected from reality (entirely figure 1).
2/ Others partially understand what is being spoken of but shudder in horror when they realize what this direction implies. It practically threatens to bring to light all that which the person has considered holy of holies - the most intimate and secret parts of the psyche - the kitchen were our thoughts are being cooked in the flames of desires. After this, thinking quickly reverts to its top-down authoritarian mentality in order to avoid confronting its gory details.
3/ Some understand that this inner depth is there but assume that it can be approached only through (aesthetic) feeling. This saves the thinking "I" from the disturbing possibility that the gory depths can be experienced fully consciously as meaningful dynamics.
4/ In other cases the depths are followed up to an extent but ultimately hit a brick wall. This wall is the moment when thinking which has become used to identify with the bodily perspective of a single human being, has to step beyond that perspective. Materialism simply declared that this is impossible because the depth can't go beyond the physical brain. Idealists postulate their own versions of the brick wall - dissociation boundaries, opaque bubbles of consciousness, etc.

My hope here is to pinpoint with maximum precision something fundamental. Note that none of this requires anything preconceived. It doesn't require spiritual science nor Steiner, nor anything else. It requires only our unprejudiced living thinking. The goal is elucidate the one-sided mental tendency which has hegemonized intellectual life in the past several centuries.

I'm interested first and foremost to hear if everyone understands what is here being talked about. Not if it's agreed with but simply if it is clearly understood about what direction I'm talking of. All talks that involve anything related to spiritual science are bound to succumb into chaos unless this central point is understood. I repeat that this point can be understood completely independently of any philosophical school. It's a matter of direct observation of our thinking process, of which every healthy mind is capable of.

I understand (I hope) the point as illustrated here. It is about seeing the apex of the cone from the inside, which equals calling it out, and so getting ready to overcome it. Ok. Now I have a question.

Striving to own the first-person perspective also requires that we consider this path from inside our own curiosity for, or aversion to it, and from inside whatever other personal thinking bottlenecks or highways we might find ourselves abiding to… correct?
I mean if the pointing is toward bringing thinking fully into the equation, this has to happen immediately, rather than after we have first understood the path.

Trying now to do this for myself (and I don’t know if there is a way, doing that here, to avoid looking like going to therapy, but anyway) I find myself for example in between an impatience, a wish that ground could be covered 10 times faster than it does in the thread, and a need to slow down, to really find and probe the contours of this TCT understanding. So these intents, and surely many more, are woven into my understanding of what I’m reading, right?

In this process, when thinking tries to filter itself, not to hide behind any vantage points, thinking seems to be bound to frantically explore left right and center to find its own jagged contours at the same time. But how can critical abilities be maintained and expressed in that effort, or what is their new meaning? In other words, how to see if this is not just a path that ‘I like’?

It seems like an infinity mirror situation, where the invitation is to open up to a path that is claimed to be (obviously) the truthful one, but the path prompts you to evaluate the world content from inside your individual thinking quality...
Maybe the I-like criterion is inevitable ad infinitum, or is there a ‘recognition’ stage to expect down the road…
What pieces am I missing here…

[Cleric K]

I understand (I hope) the point as illustrated here. It is about seeing the apex of the cone from the inside, which equals calling it out, and so getting ready to overcome it. Ok. Now I have a question.

Striving to own the first-person perspective also requires that we consider this path from inside our own curiosity for, or aversion to it, and from inside whatever other personal thinking bottlenecks or highways we might find ourselves abiding to… correct?
I mean if the pointing is toward bringing thinking fully into the equation, this has to happen immediately, rather than after we have first understood the path.

Trying now to do this for myself (and I don’t know if there is a way, doing that here, to avoid looking like going to therapy, but anyway) I find myself for example in between an impatience, a wish that ground could be covered 10 times faster than it does in the thread, and a need to slow down, to really find and probe the contours of this TCT understanding. So these intents, and surely many more, are woven into my understanding of what I’m reading, right?

In this process, when thinking tries to filter itself, not to hide behind any vantage points, thinking seems to be bound to frantically explore left right and center to find its own jagged contours at the same time. But how can critical abilities be maintained and expressed in that effort, or what is their new meaning? In other words, how to see if this is not just a path that ‘I like’?

It seems like an infinity mirror situation, where the invitation is to open up to a path that is claimed to be (obviously) the truthful one, but the path prompts you to evaluate the world content from inside your individual thinking quality...
Maybe the I-like criterion is inevitable ad infinitum, or is there a ‘recognition’ stage to expect down the road…
What pieces am I missing here…

Hi Federica,
I have a draft for reply to your last post in the other thread but I haven't finished it yet. I'll write something here first.

What you're asking about now really borders on the question of higher cognition. It's completely natural that you observe things in the way you describe them. The intellect spiraling into itself can go only so far - bouncing left and right. It's like standing before a mirror and saying "Alright, I get it, what I think is what I perceive in the mirror. I will a thinking gesture and the thought-perception flashes before me. But now what?" And indeed, we come here to a certain horizon beyond which we obviously can't go by simply doing more thinking (in the sense of linear arrangements of concepts). This is like drawing 2D figures with ruler and compass on flat paper and realizing that even if we keep doing that infinitely, our pencil will still move in the same plane. There's no such clever algorithm of drawing lines and arcs on the plane that will somehow lead the pencil to draw in the Z direction.

Yet this is exactly what must happen if we are to approach higher cognition. The first thing is that we should approach these things with child-like openness. Openness shouldn't be mistaken for blind belief. It's not about accepting dogmatically anything but about being open that there are aspects of be-ing that we might not yet know. This is actually much more of a challenge than it looks. And it is even more difficult, the more one considers themselves to be very learned and that they practically know what life is. Of course they will admit that they don't know everything, but the knowledge they speak of is more like data, information. They don't know the height of every peak in the world, the birth dates of all famous people, etc. In other words, there's a lot of missing information but it all fits in already formed slots. The last thing such people would even consider is that there might be such kind of experiential knowledge, which is not simply a new word or number but a real shift in the way we experience what we are and what the world is.

It is this kind of openness that is critically needed. To be open that in terms of the school of life we may not yet be even in kindergarten. I know that hearing such things can be very aggravating and even insulting but we should simply realize that we're always midway in evolution. This is the same cone and the apex from the essay. When we decide that we've reached the ceiling and that whatever is left to discover is simply some trivial missing data below us, we immediately foreclose any possibility to outgrow ourselves. That's what we need to keep from the child in us - the openness that there's always where to grow.

Understanding the direction into which the intellect can grow is not easy. The intellect says "I've looked front, back, left, right, top, bottom - I've looked everywhere - and I didn't see any holes, any trap doors, anything which hints that I can move in another direction. And this is natural. It is actually not the intellect which should transpose itself at another level, it's the "I" which awakens to hitherto unknown part of itself, which even though completely novel, yet seems strangely familiar. That is because that part has always been there dimly dreaming. That part dreams the intellectual self. In esoteric science this is called second birth (see also John 3:3-7). Analogy with lucid dreaming can be useful but is limited. When we awaken in the dream, we realize that our dream character with which we were fully identified so far, is really dim acting of our waking self, which normally lives in another world. This is where the analogy ends, however, because in our case, the higher self is not of the exact same nature as the intellectual self. The dream self can potentially understand the waking self. It can say "It's the same as me but instead of flowing through dream imagery, it flows through imagery which is much more constrained, rigid and consistent." We can't say the same for higher cognition. We don't attain to higher strata by simply exchanging one kind of dream perceptions for another, while still confronting them with the same intellectual self, which thinks about the perceptions from left and right.

As said, these things can be approached only gradually and patiently. I'll try to give an illustration, that can help build some intuition about this new direction, orthogonal to everything the intellect knows, but let's be clear that this should not be taken for direct advice for spiritual training. There are many things that have to be gone through the 'ground school' if we are to approach the higher being in a safe way.

Let's continue your own metaphor with the infinite mirrors. Let's say that these mirrors are actually pieces of a more monolithic mirror which has been shattered.



Our intellectual self lives in sequential arrangements of such pieces. Like in the image above, these pieces are too small to reflect in themselves something meaningful. Instead they look like colored glass. This is analogy, which can take us very far if we take it seriously in meditation. In our intellect we're actually preoccupied with the relations of pieces and we hardly care about the pieces themselves. This will be very well understood by those who have been fiddling with abstract algebra, Turing machines, etc. For example, it doesn't really matter if a computer is made of marbles, electronic or simulated by hand with pen and paper. In even simpler terms. it doesn't matter if we count apples or stones. These are only the carriers for our intellectual meaning - the abstract numbers.

Now the same can be said for our thoughts too. When we think, we live in words, symbols, etc. yet they are only the carriers of invisible meaning. We care for the relations of these perceptual phenomena and not so much about their essential nature. We can easily see this. We think about metaphysics and speak thoughts in our mind. Yet we don't really care about the living experience of the words themselves. It's their meaningful arrangements that we care about. For example, we can think the same meaning in another language. The sounds will be different but they will be carriers of the same meaning. Now even if we become curious about the actual living experience of our inner voice, this quickly turns into a recursion because the voice quickly spawns even more words and habitually begins to live in their relations. It feels we're stuck. Anytime we try to reach for the essence, we're thrown back and forced to live only within relations of the essence.

With our metaphor we can see that there's actually a way out. It is through concentration of thought. Imagine that we form within our mind a thought-image and begin to focus on it. If we manage to prolong this state, gradually all other mirror pieces recede more to the periphery and our central piece begins to fill our consciousness. Now imagine how if you take a small piece of mirror and look at it from afar it reflects only a very narrow solid angle of the whole environment. But if we place that small piece very close to our eye we can actually begin to see much more of the reflected world. It is somewhat similar when we meditate in this way by concentrating on properly prepared thought-image. Gradually we come to a point when we begin to sense in a new way that there has always been living world of soul and spirit weaving in our ordinary thoughts. It's only because of our preoccupation with the relations between the pieces, that we don't notice that the pieces themselves are reflection of a higher order reality.

I remind that this is only a metaphor and we shouldn't fall into believing that we can build the higher world by intellectually imagining mirror pieces. No, the actual ascent to higher cognition goes through the mentioned concentration, all juggling with mirror pieces ceases. If this is understood it will also be understood how to answer your question: "In other words, how to see if this is not just a path that ‘I like’?" This would be valid question if we were talking simply about very self-aware juggling with mirror pieces. In that case it would be fully justified to ask "Who is to say if one arrangement is better than another?" But we're speaking of something else. If we return to the lucid dream example, one can say "All dream images are alike. Anyone can have their belief about what the nature of that dream is. It's a matter of personal taste." But when we become lucid in a dream it's not really simply some tweaking of dream imagery. Our whole mode of consciousness changes. We become a being that lives on two levels. This is not something the we intellectually fantasize (even though the reality checks of the intellect can trigger the awakening) but we simply know as a given fact of existence. We know that we normally live in a body and perceive what we call the sensory world. Now in addition to that we know that we're the same that waking person but dreaming. It's not really a matter of likes and dislikes. It's simply the structure of our consciousness which gives us this direct intuitive understanding. It is similar with the higher orders of consciousness. It is not simply to behold some more shiny psychedelic visuals with our ordinary intellectual self and speculate whether they are brain activity or impressions of MAL. It's about being born at a new level of lucidity which now sees through our waking cognition from the perspective of a more fundamental world.

All this really throws light also on your question from the other thread about my opinion on no-thought traditions. We can illustrate that with the lucid dream metaphor. The modern mystic is like a dream character who attains to the idea that he's dreaming and then goes on to simply push away all dream imagery and dream activity. Then the mystic says he lives in true reality. But evolution continues and in the last two thousand years it became possible not only to realize that the broken pieces are not the full reality but to actually awaken within a higher being which is consciously active within a more fundamental stratum of reality. This the mystic does not. And the reason is that he considers the thinking self an illusion and tries to push it away. But this at the same time forecloses any possibility to awaken to the higher self who dreams within the intellectual self! The intellectual self doesn't disappear but we realize that it is only a more limited aspect of a higher self. If we don't want to merge with the thinking of the dream self, we can never become lucid for the thinking of our waking self, since they are concentric, one within the other. Our intellectual thinking is the point of overlap with the activity of the higher self. If we reject that, we won't be able to find the higher self anywhere else. It's that simple.

This is a vast topic, it's a whole science, so anything written in few paragraphs can be only quite rudimentary. Hopefully it at least helps to gain some sense of how the jumping left and right of thinking is overcome through concentration and how eventually this leads us towards the second birth. I would only like to add one more detail. The higher level of self into which we awaken, doesn't become our possession. In certain sense the higher self is an independent being - we simply can't fit it into our intellectual consciousness, which is our lawful stage of evolution at the moment. We'll feel that we are that higher level of self only much later in evolution.

[Eugene I.]

The intellectual self doesn't disappear but we realize that it is only a more limited aspect of a higher self. If we don't want to merge with the thinking of the dream self, we can never become lucid for the thinking of our waking self, since they are concentric, one within the other. Our intellectual thinking is the point of overlap with the activity of the higher self. If we reject that, we won't be able to find the higher self anywhere else. It's that simple.

This is a vast topic, it's a whole science, so anything written in few paragraphs can be only quite rudimentary. Hopefully it at least helps to gain some sense of how the jumping left and right of thinking is overcome through concentration and how eventually this leads us towards the second birth. I would only like to add one more detail. The higher level of self into which we awaken, doesn't become our possession. In certain sense the higher self is an independent being - we simply can't fit it into our intellectual consciousness, which is our lawful stage of evolution at the moment. We'll feel that we are that higher level of self only much later in evolution.

The question is, if we look at it from the higher-self perspective: if the higher self already has all the higher-level powers and knowledge, then what is the purpose of its human incarnations and individuation into intellectual sovereign lover-selves? Does the higher self learn anything new or acquire any new perspectives or skills by going through this individuation-incarnation process? Does it further evolve?