Whirlpool's core/first motion

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I feel that simply saying thank you does not do justice to the value you are constantly bringing with your extensive comments. There is so much in your replies that I could reflect on and use as a starting point for further inquiry, and it cannot be good practice for me to go on asking new random questions, and leave behind so much unprocessed material. Endlessly skiing and skiing downhill, enjoying the beautiful scenes one after the other is pleasant, but the reason to allow myself to be that spoiled is not there. Plus it can be tricky, I know from experience. So I will try to glide less and consider every new opening perspective a little more thoroughly. Reading more and writing less seems a more appropriate way to go. Thank you for every piece of the edifice you are pointing to!
.

No problem, Federica. It's very healthy you are slowing down and resisting the temptation to indulge the intellectual models. As Cleric referenced, quite a few genius level thinkers went insane this way. Nietzsche is a famous example, but one of many. Spiritual reality deals with infinities that the intellect can endlessly chase but never reach. I have this same impulse. We can draw infinite interesting connections from the physical-perceptual to the spiritual, archetypal patterns are literally everywhere, in everything we see, feel, think, and do.

You are probably best off finishing off PoSA, following its logical threads carefully. Of course we can clarify any sections if necessary.

[Cleric K]

Hi Cleric,
Thank you for this last addition. I think the best I can do for now is to refrain from replying and stop aggravating the time balance. That will also gain me some room to try to make sense of your message here, which I have to admit at this moment sounds somewhat chaotic. I have no doubt this depends on my geocentric, intellectual approach (no irony here). If anything, this is the one thing that’s been repeated enough to make it all the way through quite clearly. I realize there is so much I should read and read again in the old posts and beyond, before being able to move along the discussion with some ease and find the red thread, or maybe the yellow and blue thread, in what’s being said..

Hi Federica,

the nice thing about the forum form of communication is that everyone can post when possible so don't hesitate to share your thoughts or questions without worrying about overloading anybody

I know I've addressed this several times already but I would like to pinpoint it once again. The question about geo- and heliocentrism. As you probably feel already, this demands something more than merely reshuffling of the intellect (although this is a first step). For example, to understand the actual geo- and heliocentric theories we need to only shift our spatial perspective. Nothing has really changed about the nature of spacetime itself, about the types of our perceptions and so on. It is different with the heliocentrism that we speak of here. We can certainly approach the conscious perspective asymptotically through rigorous thinking but for things to click into place we need to awaken to a new kind of spiritual activity, of which we were previously unaware. It is precisely this new form of cognition that begins to link everything together - not by supplying new intellectual connections but by direct experience of the fabric that the intellect has been trying to connect mechanically. I would like to add few words about how this experience is approached in practice.

Our ordinary state of consciousness can be compared to a magnetic pendulum like this:



On one hand gravity seeks to bring the pendulum to the center but at the same time the magnet repels it and it circumambulates around. It is similar with the inner life of modern man. We're being constantly thrown around, except that we don't really realize there's something we're unknowingly circumventing. What is this thing at the center that we keep overshooting? It is really death.

Of course, those experienced with the psychedelic 'ego-death' or the mystical state would say that they know what all this is about but there's also another element which can't emerge from the mystical or visionary state - it's resurrection. To resurrect means to continually sacrifice our lower self, the dream character, and make it expression of the higher self, which is dreaming the lower. This is not a one-time awakening. It's an evolutionary process.

So this is the first thing. To enter into the mysteries of existence we should mentally and emotionally prepare that we need to meet death while still on Earth. Of course, in reality death is not an end but resurrecting to higher order existence. This is very plainly stated "For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."

Our particular evolutionary scenario has made it so that we live a dual life. On one hand is the life of the dream character, who is not even aware he's dreaming, while being lured here and there by desires and thrown on the waves of destiny. By dream character it is not implied that it is unreal. It only means it is struggling through the dream labyrinth, without consciousness of the greater structure and laws. Ever since this descent into the dream fragments, the religions of the world have always been given in order to instill healthy habits of thinking, feeling and willing into the growing humanity, such that the souls are not completely lost. On the other hand is the life within the deeper (archetypal) structure of the dream. This we experience between incarnations.

Today we're reaching the level of maturity where we can bridge the higher life with the lower. We need to lose the wandering life in the wilderness in order to find the true and abundant life, which flows through the whole Cosmic depth. It's not about escaping sensory life but about finding also the higher life of beings and archetypes who art the dream flow and rhythms, and begin to take our responsible part in this process.

Let's be clear about one thing: there's hardly anything more disturbing for modern man than the idea that there's deeper lawfulness of the world flow (resulting from the spiritual activity at various levels) and that the knowledge of this depth may present us with possibilities that are inconceivable in our sensory life. The seed is a good metaphor. In our Earthly life we're grinding and eating seeds. It is a matter of deeper knowledge to understand that given the proper conditions these seeds can grow into something which can't be captured by senses and intellect. This gives us a whole new perspective of what life can be about, just like discovering that seeds can grow into plants opens a whole new world of botany and agriculture, with their laws and dynamics, in which we can find meaning that simply doesn't exist at the seed level alone. This meaning is not something ready made which says 'this is the meaning of life'. Not at all. It is up to us find meaning for our own life. Higher knowledge only gives the fuller picture so that we can find greater meaning for ourselves. Understanding that seeds can grow into plants doesn't in itself tell us what to do. But having that understanding allows us to find much greater meaning, compared to simply grinding and eating seeds, for which we have no idea from whence they come. The grinding and eating of seeds is our sensory intellectual life. When our life is limited in this spectrum, we reach at most something like what Jim describes in the other thread - life has evolved such that the grinding and eating of seeds can be perfected. Yet 'the model' never reaches the point to gain consciousness for the world processes from which the seeds come.

I started with the intent to pinpoint how we approach this center of death - which is really the entrance into true life - but I'll leave it for the next post. The point above was simply to hint at the seriousness of the matter. As long as we seek knowledge only in order to optimize our thriving, we still try to save our dream life. We're not yet interested in finding the deeper life of the spiritual Cosmos, simply because we're secretly worried that most of our dream life, that we want to save, is a vanity fair in the face of the deeper world processes.

[Federica]

Hi Federica,

the nice thing about the forum form of communication is that everyone can post when possible so don't hesitate to share your thoughts or questions without worrying about overloading anybody

I know I've addressed this several times already but I would like to pinpoint it once again. The question about geo- and heliocentrism. As you probably feel already, this demands something more than merely reshuffling of the intellect (although this is a first step). For example, to understand the actual geo- and heliocentric theories we need to only shift our spatial perspective. Nothing has really changed about the nature of spacetime itself, about the types of our perceptions and so on. It is different with the heliocentrism that we speak of here. We can certainly approach the conscious perspective asymptotically through rigorous thinking but for things to click into place we need to awaken to a new kind of spiritual activity, of which we were previously unaware. It is precisely this new form of cognition that begins to link everything together - not by supplying new intellectual connections but by direct experience of the fabric that the intellect has been trying to connect mechanically. I would like to add few words about how this experience is approached in practice.

Our ordinary state of consciousness can be compared to a magnetic pendulum like this:



On one hand gravity seeks to bring the pendulum to the center but at the same time the magnet repels it and it circumambulates around. It is similar with the inner life of modern man. We're being constantly thrown around, except that we don't really realize there's something we're unknowingly circumventing. What is this thing at the center that we keep overshooting? It is really death.

Of course, those experienced with the psychedelic 'ego-death' or the mystical state would say that they know what all this is about but there's also another element which can't emerge from the mystical or visionary state - it's resurrection. To resurrect means to continually sacrifice our lower self, the dream character, and make it expression of the higher self, which is dreaming the lower. This is not a one-time awakening. It's an evolutionary process.

So this is the first thing. To enter into the mysteries of existence we should mentally and emotionally prepare that we need to meet death while still on Earth. Of course, in reality death is not an end but resurrecting to higher order existence. This is very plainly stated "For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it."

Our particular evolutionary scenario has made it so that we live a dual life. On one hand is the life of the dream character, who is not even aware he's dreaming, while being lured here and there by desires and thrown on the waves of destiny. By dream character it is not implied that it is unreal. It only means it is struggling through the dream labyrinth, without consciousness of the greater structure and laws. Ever since this descent into the dream fragments, the religions of the world have always been given in order to instill healthy habits of thinking, feeling and willing into the growing humanity, such that the souls are not completely lost. On the other hand is the life within the deeper (archetypal) structure of the dream. This we experience between incarnations.

Today we're reaching the level of maturity where we can bridge the higher life with the lower. We need to lose the wandering life in the wilderness in order to find the true and abundant life, which flows through the whole Cosmic depth. It's not about escaping sensory life but about finding also the higher life of beings and archetypes who art the dream flow and rhythms, and begin to take our responsible part in this process.

Let's be clear about one thing: there's hardly anything more disturbing for modern man than the idea that there's deeper lawfulness of the world flow (resulting from the spiritual activity at various levels) and that the knowledge of this depth may present us with possibilities that are inconceivable in our sensory life. The seed is a good metaphor. In our Earthly life we're grinding and eating seeds. It is a matter of deeper knowledge to understand that given the proper conditions these seeds can grow into something which can't be captured by senses and intellect. This gives us a whole new perspective of what life can be about, just like discovering that seeds can grow into plants opens a whole new world of botany and agriculture, with their laws and dynamics, in which we can find meaning that simply doesn't exist at the seed level alone. This meaning is not something ready made which says 'this is the meaning of life'. Not at all. It is up to us find meaning for our own life. Higher knowledge only gives the fuller picture so that we can find greater meaning for ourselves. Understanding that seeds can grow into plants doesn't in itself tell us what to do. But having that understanding allows us to find much greater meaning, compared to simply grinding and eating seeds, for which we have no idea from whence they come. The grinding and eating of seeds is our sensory intellectual life. When our life is limited in this spectrum, we reach at most something like what Jim describes in the other thread - life has evolved such that the grinding and eating of seeds can be perfected. Yet 'the model' never reaches the point to gain consciousness for the world processes from which the seeds come.

I started with the intent to pinpoint how we approach this center of death - which is really the entrance into true life - but I'll leave it for the next post. The point above was simply to hint at the seriousness of the matter. As long as we seek knowledge only in order to optimize our thriving, we still try to save our dream life. We're not yet interested in finding the deeper life of the spiritual Cosmos, simply because we're secretly worried that most of our dream life, that we want to save, is a vanity fair in the face of the deeper world processes.

Thank you, Cleric, for sending across this inner life vest! Indeed, I have been reflecting on sacrifice - how to think about it, how to go about it... and these indications help, because ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ haven’t entered my scene in that connection yet. My attempt with what follows is to see if I can seize your invitation to some extent, or even just prepare for that, basically echoing what is written using different metaphors, and letting go (tentatively) of the fear of sounding improbable.


How to meet death while still on Earth, how to let the center of death magnetize us, is the question. The first answer that comes as an image is, maybe by letting our faces sink? I am thinking of the faces on the surface of the Deep MAL globe in your essay. It occurs to me that if the faces disappear or dive into the depth of the sphere, while we are still alive and sensing, that would be a death before death. Resurrection would then be a new conscious head forming somewhere within the body of the sphere. And sacrifice would be the fuel for this resurrection, or awakening. The process of deepening, sinking in the sphere would then take the form of ‘death-steps’ through the layers and the sub-layers of the sphere. The process would be a transformation where we provide sacrificial material made of our own egoic flesh, as fuel for the death-steps. As we let those ego-chunks go, the engine of death transforms them, or resurrects them, into openings to higher order existence.


This can nowadays happen, you say, in conjunction with earthly life. This thought plus the word ‘ego-death’ makes me recall the tale of how Swami Vivekananda died, not too long ago - beginning of the XXth century - by reportedly consciously leaving his body, which he couldn’t stand any longer with no ego-chunks left to anchor the body to the sensory world. I know this is far from being your preferred cup of tea. But his life and death are impressive and I am trying to not select the thoughts I am sharing based on how they supposedly make me sound (tentatively, it’s an experiment).
Maybe he had reached right at the center of the sphere, while maybe the bridging of outer and inner life you point to consists of a partial dive into the sphere - That’s the easy, rationalizing wayout I’m tempted to take. Which nonetheless matches the idea of a death engine operating a gradual process, and not a one-time awakening, a process that remains partial across many incarnations.


Are imaginative thinking and ego-death the same thing? Is the subconscious the ugly buffer that keeps our inner life dual between the life as dream character and the life as co-creator of the dream landscape, so that, as we uncover it, life is sucked out of our ego automatically? I don’t know. Well, there must be more than thinking training, for you to call for a mental and emotional preparation for death before death…


Back to the main question. So the attempt to picture the process of preparing for death to see where it leads, has brought me from the pendulum to your curved Deep MAL metaphor. In that visualization, the surface layer is the level of our plain earthly ego-consciousness and the lower life happens higher up, at that surface. So that’s where we need to start fueling death steps with sacrifice. For this reason I think I would like to change the color of this surface layer. I know, I always find myself wanting to tweak your pictures and graphs, it’s ridiculous : ) At the same time you seem to be fine with these supported explorations of ‘inner geometry’ so… I would actually color the surface layer in liquid blue, rather than earthly brown. That’s because our faces aim to sink into the depths of this conscious-subconscious fluid. If it's earthly, the layer is too dense and our faces could get stuck, die already buried and fossilize right there. Speaking of colors, I have to digress again and mention that the other layers after the blue one, seem appropriate to me in deep green, then light violet, then golden yellow, with a white One-Idea dot at the center. There you go if there’s been a doubt about me sounding improbable in this post, at least now it’s spelled out : ) But these colors have come to mind distinctly so I have to include them.


Now, from the blue surface level, our inner face, or ego-consciousness, is free to slowly sink in and take death-steps into the depths of Deep MAL, while its physical counterpart is engaged in sensory earthly life. But the questions is how? From here I have first struggled to continue the metaphor. Then I've tried to imagine the how as living experience, which made me recall the experience of diving, and the world that so appears in plain sight, as compared to the experience of simply swimming in the same waters, and to that of simply walking in shallow ones, close to the shore (yes, a metaphor in the metaphor I am afraid).


Walking in shallow waters would be like living the lower existence, the surface life. Our head is kept well off of any depths and our feet touch the sea bottom. We are concerned with life throwing us around, so we strive for stability by keeping our feet grounded. We are not free to roam wherever we want, because the areas where water is shallow enough are limited and they are also mobile, so we are bound to wander around with them. The wilderness decides for us. To embellish reality, we might say that ‘life is guiding our steps’. Another way we are bound to ground is that we seek a continual reference point in outer life. As you were describing somewhere else (or was it in a Steiner quote Ashvin shared or both, I am not sure) we seek to be virtuous so we can feel virtuous, others can see us as virtuous, and we can get their thumbs up - the vanity fair, coming with its share of assorted stances, identity politics, angst, pronouns, physical procedures of various sorts, just to take a random sample of consequences of putting surviving and thriving as the ultimate life goal.


However, nowadays more and more people are sensing the lack of meaning of such an existence. They reject the sense of quiet desperation that inevitably comes with it, and have started to take some mental and emotional risks. They have quit the sea bottom and have started to swim. They still don’t know about the creative depths of existence, and are subject to all sorts of currents, but they are searching. Swimming styles and practices vary, however by letting go of at least some attachments, they are earning more freedom for themselves. At least they are not bound to shallow waters anymore. I should actually speak in first person here because this is the group I’m in.


From here the challenge is then to change the direction of exploration, from horizontal to vertical. To discover the new underwater world that remains veiled to the swimmer. Or the plant that magically grows out of the seed. Is there anything that I can say about that process? When diving, it's as if we are not dense anymore, density seems to flow out of the body. It’s like our dense body is now all spread out before our eyes on the shelves of the sea bottom and we are left empty and light inside, turned inside-out like a glove, in a sense. All our heaviness comes out there on display. That’s why it’s a silent display. Underwater, the outside has no sound anymore. As density flows out, sound flows into the resonant, empty inner space. It’s the sound of our breath. It’s like the outer side - the fish, the rocks, the plants - tend to match, to contour, or to illustrate, the inner side turned inside-out.


So maybe taking death-steps starts with a similar kind of inversion? Turning our inner life inside-out and matching it with the landscape? Putting on display the secret agreements we once made with ourselves and soon forgot, taking inventory of all the odd scaffolding we once put up and never dismantled. The old arrangements, the consoling beliefs, and how all these originated as landscape adjustments. All this could be viable sacrificial material to fuel the death and resurrection process. Maybe we realize a matching feature, it clicks, and the ego-chunk burns down to fuel a new death-step into a new sublayer… and maybe that’s how we become familiar with the landscape, to the point that we can take some active steps in designing our spiritual trajectory.


Clearly there is nothing of substance, not even any practical how-to findings in all this. It’s just an attempt to take a little more active standpoint than waiting for the next ideas to understand, by reformulating what's written. I will see if it's useful exercise or not. Thanks for the inspiration!

[AshvinP]

From here the challenge is then to change the direction of exploration, from horizontal to vertical. To discover the new underwater world that remains veiled to the swimmer. Or the plant that magically grows out of the seed. Is there anything that I can say about that process? When diving, it's as if we are not dense anymore, density seems to flow out of the body. It’s like our dense body is now all spread out before our eyes on the shelves of the sea bottom and we are left empty and light inside, turned inside-out like a glove, in a sense. All our heaviness comes out there on display. That’s why it’s a silent display. Underwater, the outside has no sound anymore. As density flows out, sound flows into the resonant, empty inner space. It’s the sound of our breath. It’s like the outer side - the fish, the rocks, the plants - tend to match, to contour, or to illustrate, the inner side turned inside-out.


So maybe taking death-steps starts with a similar kind of inversion? Turning our inner life inside-out and matching it with the landscape? Putting on display the secret agreements we once made with ourselves and soon forgot, taking inventory of all the odd scaffolding we once put up and never dismantled. The old arrangements, the consoling beliefs, and how all these originated as landscape adjustments. All this could be viable sacrificial material to fuel the death and resurrection process. Maybe we realize a matching feature, it clicks, and the ego-chunk burns down to fuel a new death-step into a new sublayer… and maybe that’s how we become familiar with the landscape, to the point that we can take some active steps in designing our spiritual trajectory.

Clearly there is nothing of substance, not even any practical how-to findings in all this. It’s just an attempt to take a little more active standpoint than waiting for the next ideas to understand, by reformulating what's written. I will see if it's useful exercise or not. Thanks for the inspiration!

Federica,

I imagine Cleric is getting around to a response on this soon, so I wanted to make a brief comment on something which most likely he is not already writing or planning to write, although maybe I'm wrong about that. It's something that flashed into my mind when reading your post. I was following your metaphorical restatement about the situation and approaching the inversion horizon, or the vertical dive below, and wondered, "what is she doing with her activity in the process of making these connections and wrestling with them?", which are very insightful and accurate connections from my perspective.  

"Even in the womb, Jacob struggled with his brother; when he became a man,he even fought with God. Yes, he wrestled with the angel and won."

We have mentioned the Christ impulse to Self-consciousness a few times recently. It's incredible how powerful this spiritual tool can be even from a strictly conceptual reasoning perspective. Let's take the force of gravity you reference. We have Newtonian mechanics, where mostly we are concerned with how one physical body can influence another upon some direct interaction. Then we discovered more about magnetism and electricity, in which direct physical contact is mostly missing, but we can picture some material exchange going on over relatively short distances to make these force interactions possible. Then we come to gravity, where large masses act on each other at a distance and there is really no material medium to picture whatsoever. We only speak of it in terms of abstract influences or 'curvatures' of spacetime. We even refer to invisible objects, "black holes", which are critical to the functioning of the visible Cosmos.

So there is a process of natural scientists spiritualizing the material interactions going on, but it remains mostly subconscious. We are not only discovering or changing abstract laws which pre-exist our activity 'out there', but actively imbuing natural appearances with spirit through our activity. Then we even come to QM and 'spooky action at a distance', where the interaction seems to defy previously assumed material constraints, like the speed of light, and it became even more explicit our own involvement in the entire process. How many of the scientists stop to reflect on what they are doing with their thought-activity in this way, how they are coming back to laws of spirit, which encompass that very same activity, from apearances and laws of nature? How much more progress towards living knowledge would have been made if they put as much thinking energy into such reflection as they did into toying around with abstract models and applied material pursuits? These are all acts of wrestling with the God of Nature to give birth to the Spirit of Nature, but only if they are fueled by the power of self-consciousness.

Now there are two possible ways of describing a being which is at the same time Spirit and Nature. The one is: I exhibit the laws of nature which are active in Reality. Or, I show how the spirit acts in order to come to these natural laws. One and the same thing guides me in both cases. The one shows me conformity to law as it is active in nature; the other shows me what the spirit does in order to represent to itself this same conformity to law. In the one case I pursue natural science, in the other spiritual science. How these two are connected, Schelling describes in an interesting way. He says: ‘The necessary tendency of all natural science is to ascend from nature to intelligence. This and nothing else underlies the endeavour to bring theory into natural phenomena. The highest perfection of natural science would be the complete spiritualisation of all natural laws into laws of observation and thought. Phenomena (the material) must completely vanish, and laws alone (the formal )remain. Hence it happens that the more conformity to law is brought into nature herself the more the veils vanish, phenomena themselves become more spiritual and finally disappear altogether.

Well the natural scientists aren't the only ones who fail to find their vertical thrust into space, or dive into deep sea, for lack of self-consciousness. I know it still takes effort for me to remember this is the most useful tool when I am contemplating things. There are not only natural phenomena, but cultural and individual soul phenomena. What is the deeper lawful character by which these phenomena transform? What sort of supersensible activities must be responsible for such transformations? What are the dynamics by which these operate? When and how did they come into manifestation? In what places do they manifest? What is my role in their manifestation. We can gain significant vertical thrust simply through these sorts of deeper who, what, when, where, and how. The 'why' questions deal more with the inward meditative path to higher planes of consciousness, yet we can certainly attain to deeper layers of 'why' even with our conceptual activity.

It is very important that we never feel we need to abandon natural science or the spirit of its method. We don't simply want to discover a world of spiritual entities and say, "here are the beings responsible for everything around us and within us", but to scientifically discover how they are responsible, which necessarily involves a holistic survey of human spiritual evolution. We want to self-consciously continue the process of spiritualizing the natural world and its principles in a precise and disciplined way. A critical inversion is when we realize how we have only arrived at the beginning of a genuine science of physics, biology, physiology, anatomy, nutrition, agriculture, education, etc. Instead of looking for a "theory of everything", we are experiencing the fact that we have the reality of almost nothing, yet.  It is not an easy path to pursue, because, while people will tolerate all sorts of talk about higher worlds and spiritual beings, they are not at all tolerant when mainstream scientific consensus and practical methods of dealing with outer phenomena, especially things like medical issues for ex., are questioned. 

We can also apply this shift into a novel direction for aesthetics. I briefly shared Steiner's new method of painting on the other thread. He also developed new methods of dance and architecture. You have probably heard of the Waldorf schools, which impart new methods of teaching based on spiritual understanding of the human being and its modern course of development. He outlines a 'threefold social order' for modern socioeconomic and political systems. There is so much unexplored territory in outer nature and culture, which deepens in proportion with our own spiritual consciousness. Steiner makes clear this isn't something monopolized by his own research, but something which should be expanded upon greatly by future spiritual researchers. So these are all more outward, logical, scientific ways to deepen the dive and reach a certain 'lightness of being'. It is essential we not only delve inwards for the spiritual, but also couple that with contemplation of Nature, Culture, and how spiritual understanding can improve and transfigure our individual and collective interaction with them. 

[Cleric K]

...

Hi Federica, thank you for your thoughts. There're so many things to elaborate here that I'm worried this will turn into another long post.

Maybe he had reached right at the center of the sphere, while maybe the bridging of outer and inner life you point to consists of a partial dive into the sphere - That’s the easy, rationalizing wayout I’m tempted to take. Which nonetheless matches the idea of a death engine operating a gradual process, and not a one-time awakening, a process that remains partial across many incarnations.

Here I'll leave it to you to think about what it could be if one was to go right into the center after death. Could we even conceive of such a state?

Are imaginative thinking and ego-death the same thing? Is the subconscious the ugly buffer that keeps our inner life dual between the life as dream character and the life as co-creator of the dream landscape, so that, as we uncover it, life is sucked out of our ego automatically? I don’t know. Well, there must be more than thinking training, for you to call for a mental and emotional preparation for death before death…

Personally I don't prefer the term ego-death, because it is loaded with a lot of misunderstandings in today's popular spirituality. Probably the worst illusion is for one to imagine that just because they have glimpsed some aspects of their dream character from a higher perspective, then they are no longer an ego (an "I"). The ego never dies. The "I" is experienced differently at different levels. For example, at the highest level presently accessible to us, the "I" is known in Eastern terminology as Atma, in Western terminology it's called the Spirit-Man. There's only one Atma for all humanity. It's the archetypal Man (not to be imagined as Earthly human figure) going through evolutionary development in the Solar environment. So through Initiation the ego doesn't die and disappear. As long as we operate within the sensory spectrum, we always have an Earthly ego. It can be said that the Earthly ego is how the higher self experiences itself when it recognizes its self-image within the bodily complex. In this sense, what must die is not the ego but all the forces which pull the ego off-center. In religious terms this has been known simply as 'sin'. And in this sense, you're quite correct to speak of the ugly buffer.

The main point is that the ego doesn't die but it conceives the possibility to gradually die for its lower life which simply perpetuates the bouncing around, which brings temporary satisfaction when desires are fulfilled but one still remains hollow afterwards. Maybe it will be helpful to remind here that we don't know the "I" as such - as some pure element of reality. We know the "I" through the way it thinks, feels and acts. If one asks "what is the 'I'", we can't point at something and say "That's it". Instead we must take the whole panorama of thoughts, feelings, actions along time, and say "The 'I' is the invisible center of gravity around which all this revolves". Thus the center doesn't die but we can die for certain ways in which the flow swirls and instead cultivate more harmonious, more symphonic flows. When the nature of thoughts, feelings and actions change, then the self-image also changes, the invisible "I" knows itself differently.

Now let's return to the topic of 'how' is this magnetic oscillation tamed and thus aspects of the higher being can be brought to consciousness. The short answer is that all kinds of ascent towards higher orders of being are attained through corresponding forms of concentration of spiritual activity. Here concentration shouldn't be mistaken for immobile stagnation. We can think of it thus: our thinking, feeling are normally in certain rhythmic relationships. As I write this I remembered that years ago the idea of biorhythms was in fashion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorhythm_(pseudoscience) Of course, reality is much more complicated than that, the rhythms are not governed by simple fixed day periods but it's still practically the case that we swing between different proportions, where our will dominate or our thinking, or our feelings. We swing around these like the magnetic pendulum. Concentration doesn't aim to bring these rhythms to a halt. Just as we can't exist on Earth without breathing and circulation, so these rhythms of thinking, feeling and willing are completely natural. Yet through concentration we can find the harmonious center of these oscillations, such that they can alternate musically instead of fighting each other. But there's also another aspect to it, which is more difficult to explain because there isn't anything from our ordinary life directly comparable to it.

Some time ago I made a quick visualization through which I wanted to illustrate what we're here speaking of (if the visualization doesn't work properly - it requires working 3D hardware - this prerendered version can be used).

Clearly, all this should be taken as symbolic and not as picture of the literal experience (which would make it look as if I'm speaking of inducing psychedelic visuals).

The first part of the animation symbolizes our swinging of attention when, for example, we try to meditate. We're thrown around on the waves of memories, hopes, dreams, problems, fears. At our stage of development concentration is an act of thinking. We don't know yet how to concentrate feeling or will. So that's why inner work begins with concentration of the mind. This is symbolized by the gradual spiraling of the spotlight into the center.

Initially this looks like quite boring activity, it's like we have forsaken the richness of inner life for the stagnation of a point. But this is only temporary. When we manage to prolong this state of concentration (the ideal and feeling atmosphere of this concentration are of utmost importance. It's not all the same if we concentrate on just any one thought-image.) something very specific begins to occur. It can be remotely compared with the tingling sensations when a limb goes to sleep, except that here it starts from a point of concentration which we normally feel in the head and gradually expands to encompass the whole head space. Later this experience spreads even further. Yet this sensation is only for an analogy. In reality these tingling sensations are really thought-like.

It's difficult to reach understanding for this simply because it is not something our ordinary life presents us with. But we can try to approach it through analogies. One way to think of it is by picturing that these tingling sensations are like potential thoughts that we can think but it is like we feel intuitively what the meaning of that thought will be even without unpacking it into a verbal sequence. This can probably be roughly compared with the techniques for fast reading. As it is known, the speed of reading is limited mainly by the speed of inner verbalization as we read the text in our mind. The techniques of fast reading are rooted into developing the skill to suppress the inner verbalization. It's a matter of smoothly gliding our gaze through the text - one might say, in slightly defocused manner, without going through the jerky jumps of attention from word to word (usually called 'soft gaze') - and gradually we begin to feel how we simply see the meaning, in a way similar to the way we grasp the meaning of a picture. In a similar (but not identical) manner, through concentration we learn to withhold the inner unpacking of thoughts in linear symbolic sequences and instead we begin to grasp this head thought-volume as pictorial meaning. It's important not to mistake this with intellectual interpretation of inner imagery. That's why I keep saying that the psychedelic state has nothing to do with what is here described. In visionary states we're flooded with imagery that our intellect tries to interpret with its thoughts. Here instead, through our concentration we expand the spotlight of our spiritual activity, so to speak, and discover a thought-organism, of which normally we think only mineral fragments.

For anyone who has made intimate observations of the thinking process, it soon becomes clear that we know the meaning of our thoughts even before we have finished pronouncing them. This is different compared to listening to external speech where we must perceive the sounds in order to connect the corresponding meaning. But when we think it is the other way around. We weave in meaning, we intuitively navigate the ideal space. Our verbal thoughts are only artforms through which we incarnate the meaning into concrete symbols. The goal of concentration is to learn to weave consciously through meaning even without unpacking it in sequences of words.

I'll allow myself to share a personal example here. Most of the time when I'm to write a post here, if I have the chance, I try to start with meditation. Usually I focus on the question and simply contemplate its meaning. Ideally, this question shouldn't be taken as something isolated but as something which emerges from a living soul on the other side. A soul which evolves along a unique path and reaches the position to ponder such questions. This soul feels certain void that must be filled. I try to thoughtfully feel this soul landscape in the mood of prayer, try to feel the meaning which can complement the landscape - in other words, not what I want to say but what the soul needs. Speaking figuratively, if there are concave forms in the landscape they need to be filled with convex meaning. These forms of meaning stream into their complementaries. One such form may need one or several paragraphs to be put into words. With the time on this forum I began to sense approximately how much words I'll have to use to unpack these forms. Usually these forms stream in the matter of seconds but through their felt density I can quickly say to myself "Man, that will be a long post again".

I would like to point out that this process is not something extraordinary. It is actually what happens all the time, that's how everyone unpacks their innate chatter. The difference is that in the course of development we begin to gain consciousness of these processes and even learn how to navigate them.

So the basic point of the animation is that through concentration, once we cease the linear unpacking of thoughts, we begin to feel as flashes paired with meaning, all the things that we may be thinking but that we don't need to verbalize. Gradually these flashes prove to be not random but they follow certain inner geometry, inner soul curvatures. This inner geometry and dynamics is really what higher cognition reveals to us. As a simplified example, we may perceive in this way our desire to go on a vacation but on the other hand we perceive also certain family duties. These two interfere like the two domains of the Mandelbrot set and in their interaction a whole multitude of flashes of possible thoughts are perceived. In our ordinary cognition we're simply experiencing inner conflict of desires and duties and we keep chatting with ourselves about it. In Imagination we perceive this conflict as actual interference of soul processes, that may extend beyond our personal sphere. Yet these processes are not something mechanical. They are pieces of our own being - a being that we barely know from our ordinary life.

Now after this, one may think that the sooner we get rid of verbal thought, the better. But this is incorrect. We should always remember that our life consists of inner rhythms, alternations of states of consciousness. Every state has its proper place. It would be very wrong to imagine that we should all transition to higher cognition ASAP. This is not how it works. This would be like suggesting that everyone should be sleepwalking. Our normal consciousness (perceiving and thinking in concepts) is in its proper place when we interact with the sensory spectrum and it will be so for much more time to come. Delving into the higher forms of consciousness should happen in the proper time, they shouldn't be mixed with our worldly activities, just like we shouldn't be sleepwalking. This however doesn't mean that the normal cognition won't be changing and becoming upright, so to speak. In this sense, we haven't even found the true power of spoken word yet (for this reason it's my personal opinion that techniques as fast reading shouldn't be undertaken as one-sided ideal). As crazy as it may sound, in the future, speech should attain, what from present perspective may seem as, magical powers. Today we're tragically careless in our speech but in the future, rude, ugly words will act like poison in the etheric world and for example plants will wither in these conditions. On the other hands, words that express the good, the harmonious, will act like fertilizer for life processes, flowers will bloom. It is not the sound vibrations themselves that have such effect but the fact that when our thoughts, feelings and will are united, our spiritual activity ripples through all worlds. Actually, the garden that suffers first from our ugly words is our own body. Some of the diseases from which we suffer are caused by the cacophonic waves that we spread in our organism through disorganized thoughts and speech.

I once shared the following metaphor with Ashvin.



Our meditations are like launching these toys. The longer we keep concentrated the more altitude we gain. Then on our way down we begin to unpack the dense meaning into thought sequences. It is important to understand the nature of these dynamics because otherwise, especially in our early explorations, as soon the thought-field begins to expand around our point of concentration, our intellect is like "Wow! That's amazing!" and we're immediately back to our linear cognition. We should learn to speak with ourselves. Our intellect says "But this is so interesting, I want to unpack it!" Then the wiser being in us should respond "Don't worry, you'll unpack it on the way down. As a matter of fact, the longer you stay focused, the more you'll have for unpacking later. So it's in your own best interest to keep concentrated for a while."

Another illustration we could make, can be linked to the faces of Deep MAL. As said, when we pass through the point of concentration, our conscious volume begins to expand again and within this volume we find also our body. Yet this volume is thought-like. So we're not conscious simply of bodily sensations. The face is especially rich part of the body to experience in this way. Most of the time throughout the day we're not very conscious of our mimics, grimaces, smiles and frowns. They are like semi-automatic expressions of our soul life. When we gain the consciousness of the head we also become more conscious of our face and it indeed begins to feel as a mask that portrays our soul life. But these sensations are not merely somatic. The face is experienced from the side of the soul forces which are active through it. It looks like the face is weaved out of flashes of our inner life. It's like it becomes a gallery of our soul life. We begin to grasp traits of our character which run like force lines, like threads and stitch together snapshots of our life.

This is something to keep in mind not only about the face but about higher cognition as a whole. The force currents of our soul are grasped in their temporal dimension. In our ordinary consciousness we think of memory as snapshots of experiences that are, well, in the past. But as soon as we approach Imaginative cognition Time becomes something organic. Think of the growing tip of a plant. In our ordinary consciousness it is like we consider only the tip to be real, while everything else to be only a floating memory of the past. When we pass through the pinhole, Time becomes something different to us. It is like our life is an organic being spread before us. It is very difficult to convey this because it doesn't match the intuitions we have from living in fragmented snapshots of Time. As you said before when we were speaking of Time, ordinary memory feels much like floating imagination. It's only in our thoughts. Only the present state seems substantial. But when consciousness expands through the point of concentration, it is precisely this substantial reality that fills our world. Time becomes a living organism for us. It's roots, stalk, leaves exist simultaneously and no one part seems less real than the others.

Here's another visualization.



It's taken from the Electric Sheep screensaver (here's some video capture of it) which evolves fractal flames.

This may remind you of your teacup carousel metaphor. Our ordinary life metamorphoses through states of being which can be thought of as the focused part in the center. But this part is what it is only because it is embedded as an organ in the Time organism (which seems to be subconscious from our ordinary state). In other words, we can't understand our present state in isolation, just like we can't understand a leaf in isolation. And herein lies the beauty of evolution - to understand ourselves as we are now, we need to set on a journey that will lead us to understand the whole Cosmos - in fact - to become the Cosmos. The human being makes sense only when it's encompassed in the full context of the Time organism. Every momentary state of being is like a specific holographic perspective of the whole Time Being of the Cosmos.

Much like gears, these rhythmic processes are in certain musical ratios. In certain sense, gaining higher cognition consists into attuning the gear ratios, which are currently out of sync. I tried to hint at this with the post to Jim here. Today our thoughts, feelings and actions are quite dissonant with respect to the Music of the Spheres. Imagine being in a noisy café, speaking to a friend. When we focus on the conversation, we live in a meaningful bubble of communication, while everything around us forms background noise. In a similar sense, the consciousness of modern man is like a noisy café, where we understand only our own thoughts, desires, actions. Everything else is background noise. Consciousness expands when we begin to develop interest in living the Divine Life. This demands to attune ourselves to the depth rhythms, to make our Earthly activity self-similar to the Cosmic development.

Here's a picture from a draft for an essay I intended to write.



This presents a hint about the way our understanding about the soul organs (chakras) should transform. The picture of the soul organs as glowing orbs along the spine is fully justified yet it stands as a hinderance for modern man. The reason is that once again we secretly assume the third-person perspective which looks at the human being from the outside. Today the soul organs have to be discovered in their inner reality. The image above is like a third-person view of the funnel from the previous animation. When the soul organs are developed they form this depth axis of our spiritual being. Here 'axis' shouldn't be taken as strictly geometric extension in space. In deeper meditation the soul organs can be experienced like concentric spheres within spheres, which in turn are directly related with the Cosmic Spheres. Through the axis we approach the living understanding that our Spirit springs from the Center of All and manifests through the Time layers. In various occult images we can see man depicted as inverted tree, where his roots are in the Sun, while the branches one Earth. This is really how it feels like when something like the animation above becomes experiential fact. We feel how our spirit dips down through the layers of destiny (the heart world), through the larynx organ where our thinking gestures are formed, into the head organ where everything assumes pictorial form and finally we dip our spiritual activity in our hands, through which we reach into the delaminated Cosmic Imagination. The fact that the hands proceed from spiritual activity may sound strange but it may be helpful to remember that we can think with our hands too. That's what people born deaf are doing, who think in sign language.

That's a lot of material to take in a few paragraphs but I just wanted to trace a general feeling for the depth axis, which is in my opinion probably the most important thing that modern man should begin to gain consciousness of. The takeaway from all this is that concentration of spiritual activity is the means through which the depth layers are brought in harmony. Of course it is not a matter of mere technique. We need to work on all fronts at the same time. We need control over our cognition but we also need work on our moral feelings and our actions. It is pointless to try to concentrate if our inner life is torn apart by conflicting desires. These are the larger gears which through us around.

[Federica]

Are imaginative thinking and ego-death the same thing? Is the subconscious the ugly buffer that keeps our inner life dual between the life as dream character and the life as co-creator of the dream landscape, so that, as we uncover it, life is sucked out of our ego automatically? I don’t know. Well, there must be more than thinking training, for you to call for a mental and emotional preparation for death before death…

Personally I don't prefer the term ego-death, because it is loaded with a lot of misunderstandings in today's popular spirituality. Probably the worst illusion is for one to imagine that just because they have glimpsed some aspects of their dream character from a higher perspective, then they are no longer an ego (an "I"). The ego never dies. The "I" is experienced differently at different levels. For example, at the highest level presently accessible to us, the "I" is known in Eastern terminology as Atma, in Western terminology it's called the Spirit-Man. There's only one Atma for all humanity. It's the archetypal Man (not to be imagined as Earthly human figure) going through evolutionary development in the Solar environment. So through Initiation the ego doesn't die and disappear. As long as we operate within the sensory spectrum, we always have an Earthly ego. It can be said that the Earthly ego is how the higher self experiences itself when it recognizes its self-image within the bodily complex. In this sense, what must die is not the ego but all the forces which pull the ego off-center. In religious terms this has been known simply as 'sin'. And in this sense, you're quite correct to speak of the ugly buffer.

The main point is that the ego doesn't die but it conceives the possibility to gradually die for its lower life which simply perpetuates the bouncing around, which brings temporary satisfaction when desires are fulfilled but one still remains hollow afterwards. Maybe it will be helpful to remind here that we don't know the "I" as such - as some pure element of reality. We know the "I" through the way it thinks, feels and acts. If one asks "what is the 'I'", we can't point at something and say "That's it". Instead we must take the whole panorama of thoughts, feelings, actions along time, and say "The 'I' is the invisible center of gravity around which all this revolves". Thus the center doesn't die but we can die for certain ways in which the flow swirls and instead cultivate more harmonious, more symphonic flows. When the nature of thoughts, feelings and actions change, then the self-image also changes, the invisible "I" knows itself differently.

Now let's return to the topic of 'how' is this magnetic oscillation tamed and thus aspects of the higher being can be brought to consciousness. The short answer is that all kinds of ascent towards higher orders of being are attained through corresponding forms of concentration of spiritual activity. Here concentration shouldn't be mistaken for immobile stagnation. We can think of it thus: our thinking, feeling are normally in certain rhythmic relationships. As I write this I remembered that years ago the idea of biorhythms was in fashion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biorhythm_(pseudoscience) Of course, reality is much more complicated than that, the rhythms are not governed by simple fixed day periods but it's still practically the case that we swing between different proportions, where our will dominate or our thinking, or our feelings. We swing around these like the magnetic pendulum. Concentration doesn't aim to bring these rhythms to a halt. Just as we can't exist on Earth without breathing and circulation, so these rhythms of thinking, feeling and willing are completely natural. Yet through concentration we can find the harmonious center of these oscillations, such that they can alternate musically instead of fighting each other. But there's also another aspect to it, which is more difficult to explain because there isn't anything from our ordinary life directly comparable to it.

Some time ago I made a quick visualization through which I wanted to illustrate what we're here speaking of (if the visualization doesn't work properly - it requires working 3D hardware - this prerendered version can be used).

Clearly, all this should be taken as symbolic and not as picture of the literal experience (which would make it look as if I'm speaking of inducing psychedelic visuals).

The first part of the animation symbolizes our swinging of attention when, for example, we try to meditate. We're thrown around on the waves of memories, hopes, dreams, problems, fears. At our stage of development concentration is an act of thinking. We don't know yet how to concentrate feeling or will. So that's why inner work begins with concentration of the mind. This is symbolized by the gradual spiraling of the spotlight into the center.

Initially this looks like quite boring activity, it's like we have forsaken the richness of inner life for the stagnation of a point. But this is only temporary. When we manage to prolong this state of concentration (the ideal and feeling atmosphere of this concentration are of utmost importance. It's not all the same if we concentrate on just any one thought-image.) something very specific begins to occur. It can be remotely compared with the tingling sensations when a limb goes to sleep, except that here it starts from a point of concentration which we normally feel in the head and gradually expands to encompass the whole head space. Later this experience spreads even further. Yet this sensation is only for an analogy. In reality these tingling sensations are really thought-like.

It's difficult to reach understanding for this simply because it is not something our ordinary life presents us with. But we can try to approach it through analogies. One way to think of it is by picturing that these tingling sensations are like potential thoughts that we can think but it is like we feel intuitively what the meaning of that thought will be even without unpacking it into a verbal sequence. This can probably be roughly compared with the techniques for fast reading. As it is known, the speed of reading is limited mainly by the speed of inner verbalization as we read the text in our mind. The techniques of fast reading are rooted into developing the skill to suppress the inner verbalization. It's a matter of smoothly gliding our gaze through the text - one might say, in slightly defocused manner, without going through the jerky jumps of attention from word to word (usually called 'soft gaze') - and gradually we begin to feel how we simply see the meaning, in a way similar to the way we grasp the meaning of a picture. In a similar (but not identical) manner, through concentration we learn to withhold the inner unpacking of thoughts in linear symbolic sequences and instead we begin to grasp this head thought-volume as pictorial meaning. It's important not to mistake this with intellectual interpretation of inner imagery. That's why I keep saying that the psychedelic state has nothing to do with what is here described. In visionary states we're flooded with imagery that our intellect tries to interpret with its thoughts. Here instead, through our concentration we expand the spotlight of our spiritual activity, so to speak, and discover a thought-organism, of which normally we think only mineral fragments.

For anyone who has made intimate observations of the thinking process, it soon becomes clear that we know the meaning of our thoughts even before we have finished pronouncing them. This is different compared to listening to external speech where we must perceive the sounds in order to connect the corresponding meaning. But when we think it is the other way around. We weave in meaning, we intuitively navigate the ideal space. Our verbal thoughts are only artforms through which we incarnate the meaning into concrete symbols. The goal of concentration is to learn to weave consciously through meaning even without unpacking it in sequences of words.

I'll allow myself to share a personal example here. Most of the time when I'm to write a post here, if I have the chance, I try to start with meditation. Usually I focus on the question and simply contemplate its meaning. Ideally, this question shouldn't be taken as something isolated but as something which emerges from a living soul on the other side. A soul which evolves along a unique path and reaches the position to ponder such questions. This soul feels certain void that must be filled. I try to thoughtfully feel this soul landscape in the mood of prayer, try to feel the meaning which can complement the landscape - in other words, not what I want to say but what the soul needs. Speaking figuratively, if there are concave forms in the landscape they need to be filled with convex meaning. These forms of meaning stream into their complementaries. One such form may need one or several paragraphs to be put into words. With the time on this forum I began to sense approximately how much words I'll have to use to unpack these forms. Usually these forms stream in the matter of seconds but through their felt density I can quickly say to myself "Man, that will be a long post again".

I would like to point out that this process is not something extraordinary. It is actually what happens all the time, that's how everyone unpacks their innate chatter. The difference is that in the course of development we begin to gain consciousness of these processes and even learn how to navigate them.

So the basic point of the animation is that through concentration, once we cease the linear unpacking of thoughts, we begin to feel as flashes paired with meaning, all the things that we may be thinking but that we don't need to verbalize. Gradually these flashes prove to be not random but they follow certain inner geometry, inner soul curvatures. This inner geometry and dynamics is really what higher cognition reveals to us. As a simplified example, we may perceive in this way our desire to go on a vacation but on the other hand we perceive also certain family duties. These two interfere like the two domains of the Mandelbrot set and in their interaction a whole multitude of flashes of possible thoughts are perceived. In our ordinary cognition we're simply experiencing inner conflict of desires and duties and we keep chatting with ourselves about it. In Imagination we perceive this conflict as actual interference of soul processes, that may extend beyond our personal sphere. Yet these processes are not something mechanical. They are pieces of our own being - a being that we barely know from our ordinary life.

Now after this, one may think that the sooner we get rid of verbal thought, the better. But this is incorrect. We should always remember that our life consists of inner rhythms, alternations of states of consciousness. Every state has its proper place. It would be very wrong to imagine that we should all transition to higher cognition ASAP. This is not how it works. This would be like suggesting that everyone should be sleepwalking. Our normal consciousness (perceiving and thinking in concepts) is in its proper place when we interact with the sensory spectrum and it will be so for much more time to come. Delving into the higher forms of consciousness should happen in the proper time, they shouldn't be mixed with our worldly activities, just like we shouldn't be sleepwalking. This however doesn't mean that the normal cognition won't be changing and becoming upright, so to speak. In this sense, we haven't even found the true power of spoken word yet (for this reason it's my personal opinion that techniques as fast reading shouldn't be undertaken as one-sided ideal). As crazy as it may sound, in the future, speech should attain, what from present perspective may seem as, magical powers. Today we're tragically careless in our speech but in the future, rude, ugly words will act like poison in the etheric world and for example plants will wither in these conditions. On the other hands, words that express the good, the harmonious, will act like fertilizer for life processes, flowers will bloom. It is not the sound vibrations themselves that have such effect but the fact that when our thoughts, feelings and will are united, our spiritual activity ripples through all worlds. Actually, the garden that suffers first from our ugly words is our own body. Some of the diseases from which we suffer are caused by the cacophonic waves that we spread in our organism through disorganized thoughts and speech.

I once shared the following metaphor with Ashvin.



Our meditations are like launching these toys. The longer we keep concentrated the more altitude we gain. Then on our way down we begin to unpack the dense meaning into thought sequences. It is important to understand the nature of these dynamics because otherwise, especially in our early explorations, as soon the thought-field begins to expand around our point of concentration, our intellect is like "Wow! That's amazing!" and we're immediately back to our linear cognition. We should learn to speak with ourselves. Our intellect says "But this is so interesting, I want to unpack it!" Then the wiser being in us should respond "Don't worry, you'll unpack it on the way down. As a matter of fact, the longer you stay focused, the more you'll have for unpacking later. So it's in your own best interest to keep concentrated for a while."

Another illustration we could make, can be linked to the faces of Deep MAL. As said, when we pass through the point of concentration, our conscious volume begins to expand again and within this volume we find also our body. Yet this volume is thought-like. So we're not conscious simply of bodily sensations. The face is especially rich part of the body to experience in this way. Most of the time throughout the day we're not very conscious of our mimics, grimaces, smiles and frowns. They are like semi-automatic expressions of our soul life. When we gain the consciousness of the head we also become more conscious of our face and it indeed begins to feel as a mask that portrays our soul life. But these sensations are not merely somatic. The face is experienced from the side of the soul forces which are active through it. It looks like the face is weaved out of flashes of our inner life. It's like it becomes a gallery of our soul life. We begin to grasp traits of our character which run like force lines, like threads and stitch together snapshots of our life.

This is something to keep in mind not only about the face but about higher cognition as a whole. The force currents of our soul are grasped in their temporal dimension. In our ordinary consciousness we think of memory as snapshots of experiences that are, well, in the past. But as soon as we approach Imaginative cognition Time becomes something organic. Think of the growing tip of a plant. In our ordinary consciousness it is like we consider only the tip to be real, while everything else to be only a floating memory of the past. When we pass through the pinhole, Time becomes something different to us. It is like our life is an organic being spread before us. It is very difficult to convey this because it doesn't match the intuitions we have from living in fragmented snapshots of Time. As you said before when we were speaking of Time, ordinary memory feels much like floating imagination. It's only in our thoughts. Only the present state seems substantial. But when consciousness expands through the point of concentration, it is precisely this substantial reality that fills our world. Time becomes a living organism for us. It's roots, stalk, leaves exist simultaneously and no one part seems less real than the others.

Here's another visualization.



It's taken from the Electric Sheep screensaver (here's some video capture of it) which evolves fractal flames.

This may remind you of your teacup carousel metaphor. Our ordinary life metamorphoses through states of being which can be thought of as the focused part in the center. But this part is what it is only because it is embedded as an organ in the Time organism (which seems to be subconscious from our ordinary state). In other words, we can't understand our present state in isolation, just like we can't understand a leaf in isolation. And herein lies the beauty of evolution - to understand ourselves as we are now, we need to set on a journey that will lead us to understand the whole Cosmos - in fact - to become the Cosmos. The human being makes sense only when it's encompassed in the full context of the Time organism. Every momentary state of being is like a specific holographic perspective of the whole Time Being of the Cosmos.

Much like gears, these rhythmic processes are in certain musical ratios. In certain sense, gaining higher cognition consists into attuning the gear ratios, which are currently out of sync. I tried to hint at this with the post to Jim here. Today our thoughts, feelings and actions are quite dissonant with respect to the Music of the Spheres. Imagine being in a noisy café, speaking to a friend. When we focus on the conversation, we live in a meaningful bubble of communication, while everything around us forms background noise. In a similar sense, the consciousness of modern man is like a noisy café, where we understand only our own thoughts, desires, actions. Everything else is background noise. Consciousness expands when we begin to develop interest in living the Divine Life. This demands to attune ourselves to the depth rhythms, to make our Earthly activity self-similar to the Cosmic development.

Here's a picture from a draft for an essay I intended to write.



This presents a hint about the way our understanding about the soul organs (chakras) should transform. The picture of the soul organs as glowing orbs along the spine is fully justified yet it stands as a hinderance for modern man. The reason is that once again we secretly assume the third-person perspective which looks at the human being from the outside. Today the soul organs have to be discovered in their inner reality. The image above is like a third-person view of the funnel from the previous animation. When the soul organs are developed they form this depth axis of our spiritual being. Here 'axis' shouldn't be taken as strictly geometric extension in space. In deeper meditation the soul organs can be experienced like concentric spheres within spheres, which in turn are directly related with the Cosmic Spheres. Through the axis we approach the living understanding that our Spirit springs from the Center of All and manifests through the Time layers. In various occult images we can see man depicted as inverted tree, where his roots are in the Sun, while the branches one Earth. This is really how it feels like when something like the animation above becomes experiential fact. We feel how our spirit dips down through the layers of destiny (the heart world), through the larynx organ where our thinking gestures are formed, into the head organ where everything assumes pictorial form and finally we dip our spiritual activity in our hands, through which we reach into the delaminated Cosmic Imagination. The fact that the hands proceed from spiritual activity may sound strange but it may be helpful to remember that we can think with our hands too. That's what people born deaf are doing, who think in sign language.

That's a lot of material to take in a few paragraphs but I just wanted to trace a general feeling for the depth axis, which is in my opinion probably the most important thing that modern man should begin to gain consciousness of. The takeaway from all this is that concentration of spiritual activity is the means through which the depth layers are brought in harmony. Of course it is not a matter of mere technique. We need to work on all fronts at the same time. We need control over our cognition but we also need work on our moral feelings and our actions. It is pointless to try to concentrate if our inner life is torn apart by conflicting desires. These are the larger gears which through us around.

This is invaluable to me. It's with deep gratitude of heart and mind that I thank you, Cleric.

[Cleric K]

This is invaluable to me. It's with deep gratitude of heart and mind that I thank you, Cleric.

Thank you, Federica, I really appreciate this. And not because I take credit for anything written here.

Of course all the above can only be an indication and shouldn't be taken as a guide. The goal is to simply get a feeling for what it means to be spiritually upright - to know up from down or in from out - not as abstract theory but as inner dimension of our being.

[Cleric K]

And let's take a moment to thank our friend findingblanks who sparked this thread

[Federica]

And let's take a moment to thank our friend findingblanks who sparked this thread

Haha : ) Sorry if it was too much, but this really was a different content for me and I really do feel grateful for it.

[Federica]

This is invaluable to me. It's with deep gratitude of heart and mind that I thank you, Cleric.

Thank you, Federica, I really appreciate this. And not because I take credit for anything written here.

Of course all the above can only be an indication and shouldn't be taken as a guide. The goal is to simply get a feeling for what it means to be spiritually upright - to know up from down or in from out - not as abstract theory but as inner dimension of our being.

I'm seeing only now this before-last post.
Yes, I have taken good note that this is not to be intended literally, I think I have a clear understanding of the way your indications can help.