(Essay) A Phenomenology of Mechanism: The Liminal Spaces of Perception

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Going through my finished text before posting, I feel I should add a disclaimer, to start with. Much of what follows is in the form of statements rather than questions. I’m expressing my current position with some level of resolution, but I am fully aware that it could evolve, as it has happened here some times already. Please don’t read what follows as confrontational, I just don’t want to conceal my thoughts, because I have put my best efforts and goodwill in them.


Amazing introduction on language! I’d love to stay there for hours but I’m nudging myself to the main topic, it will be a long post already. The start is the ambivalent idea of repetitive experience and its potential to become evil when it’s clung to for the purpose of comfort and convenience. I am very much aligned with this idea, but at the same time I feel that something is missing here, or I am missing something here. The intuition is that it must be true, but maybe in some more specific sense. Because for example in music - taking this example since you later use it - the musical meaning is built on repetitive tempo. I know you then distinguish different speeds in the temporal structure, however it's noticeable that whatever the beats per minute, without consistent and lawful repetition there’s just no music. My spontaneous thought at the first reading was, can the amount of beats per minute really make the difference between mechanistic, repetitive music which is “out of season” thus evil on one side, and good, graceful music on the other? And more generally, because repetition is the necessary backbone of musical experience, do you mean that indulging in the pleasure of writing, playing, or listening to music is an ambivalent, problematic activity in itself, or that some music is evil?
Conversely, is all technological development underlain by repetitive experience? In which sense? How does repetition underlie technology differently than it underlies everything else in the perceptual world?


It seems to me that the overindulging in the convenience of technology, which is a problem indeed, does not come from repetition primarily. I think it comes from estrangement from Nature. By the way, what is it meant by technology - is the wheel to be considered a technological development? If not, why not? Beyond the digital tech focus of the essay, do you consider all the developments that came with the first industrial revolution problematic, or maybe only the ones that came more recently, with automation and information technology? Where do you put the threshold?
I would argue that if we look at estrangement from Nature - rather than repetition - as the principle that leads to, or can lead to, excessive convenience and comfort, we can see how it holds true across all the technological temporal spectrum in its broadest sense. The wheel is an elementary means of estrangement from Nature, just as, say, the printing press is, or electricity to a wider extent, or telephone, or, to a major and growing extent, digital technology.
I should clarify here that I personally don’t have any negative orientation to digital technology. I know it’s here to stay and that it’s not to be eliminated, and I am actually immensely grateful for digital technology. I am every day of the week well aware that without digital technology I simply wouldn’t have had access to the vast majority of the knowledge and information I have been able to access. I couldn’t be on this forum without it. I couldn’t do my (main) job without it. I couldn’t communicate with others across space the way I do. I couldn’t have explored and learned even the tenth of what I have been lucky to explore and discover and learn, without digital technology. This being said, I do agree with you and see the risks of a biased orientation towards technology.

It is only in 1937, through the personality of Alan Turing, that the word [computer] is first used in its modern sense of "programmable digital electronic device for performing mathematical or logical operations". One should clearly sense the distancing that is occurring here from the human body-brain and its living cognitive processes.

As I see it, what one should rather sense here is the distancing occurring from the human living cognitive process and Nature, the perceptual world, where we can include the body, and even the brain. It’s an estrangement from Nature. I don’t see how else you intended the body-brain to come in here, and especially the brain? Or maybe you intended it in that same way, and then we agree. As a drawing away from Nature, yes, it is an abstraction, and I find it insightful to inquire “what qualities of living experience we have also forsaken in this abstracting process”, but then you qualify the abstracting process as pertaining to “the modern mechanical age” and here I am not sure. Abstraction seems to me an overarching, maybe the most overarching human trend or process of all, that started way before the “modern mechanical age”. Ancient Greek already has plethora of abstract words!


What I find brilliant and new to me in your exposure is the uncovering of this correlation between abstraction and technology. Your reasoning makes me also realize that it’s been, and it’s being, a drawing away from Nature just as well as a drawing away from ourselves and our livingly experienced cognition. As we over-objectify Nature through abstracting it into transparent concepts, we move in parallel with regard to our “I”. The focus increasingly goes to a glorified object as unsaturated concept, whilst both Nature and the “I” go out of focus, are extracted from the process and parked at Vantage point. Nature and the “I” - or rather the precursor of the “I” - started off in direct connection with each other, but then gradually, the I became the full-fledged I, and with that birth - fully completed at the Plato-Aristotle cross - a tween element arose: Abstraction (let me capitalize it) which has grown into an intermediary link between the thinking I and Nature. Further, Abstraction has become more and more central in this mediated tripartite relation Nature-Abstraction-I, or the mother and her two tween offsprings. And now Abstraction has taken the exact central position in cognition, it’s being the dominant tween in the center, so it is currently eclipsing the light of Nature for the I. I am reminded of another way to say it, from another essay here: thinking is being predominantly engulfed by object, intended here as an epochal trend, rather than as a transient mode of individual thinking. By necessity, the thinking "I" still connects concepts and percepts to create experience, but because it’s not being vigilant on what it's doing, it forgets to press ‘refresh experience’ and lets the resulting mental images dry out, die out, and like helium balloons reach the Abstraction hall of fame.


In this perspective, technology, in its largest sense, seems to be the manifest, tangible face of transparent Abstraction, its control light, its visible suit. What I remain doubtful about is the specific pointing to mechanical, or repetitive technology of the modern age. I don’t see that any tipping point has happened in our cognition as a function of the mechanical-repetitive qualities and the pervasiveness of technology. As I see it, there’s been no real tipping point yet. Instead it’s been a progressive, smooth movement towards more abstraction and more technology. If I had to hazard a future look, I would imagine that the real tipping point is ahead, and will consist not in eliminating or minimizing technology, but in starting dephasing Abstraction, whereof technology is only the suit, changing the articulation of the tripartite axis Nature-Abstraction-I, dislocating it, moving our tween element on the side, giving our stuck thinking habits a bit of a hysteretic shake, so that we can discover the light of Nature again, while being a fully separate I-entity this time. This move also equals moving cognition out of parking lot Vantage, which is sort of our tween’s artificial I, or the core, the attracting heart of Abstraction. So when I read

It is not only our ideas about the world which have taken on a mechanical nature, but our method of forming ideas has been mechanized [in relation to digital media technology]

I think: Yes! But I would prefer to replace ‘mechanical’ with ‘abstract’. I will hopefully clarify this further by means of following your deep dive into “what natural perceptual-cognitive processes do for us” as a way to consider what happens to our perception-cognition when we substitute digital technology for these natural processes.


Here I’m following the idea that the perceptual world is a playground for thinking, where we are invited, or compelled to, jump in with concepts and ideas to try and fit the percepts, so that meaningful experience can arise. Percepts suck in concepts, and as they match, or intersect, knowledge is generated. To illustrate this function of natural perceptions, you take written language as a first example. Here I immediately wonder, why did you choose a double-layered perception such as language as an example, rather than start simple, maybe with a sensory perception? Let me explain. Within your example, there is the case of the perceiver who does not know the alphabet. This perceiver also perceives the interspaces in sentences 2 and 3, and certainly still makes sense of these percepts by matching the perceived graphical forms with concepts, let’s say esthetical concepts. So the suction does operate, although it is very different from the one a literate person would experience. But ok, let’s stay with this literate person now. I find the example in this case confusing in many ways. First, the spaces have meaning as a graphical, visual element, which, yes, facilitates the reading experience, as a convenience, however spacing has no impact on the plane of decoding the symbols and assigning meaning to them, which is what the example was pointing to in the first place. So I would accept the spaces, in the sense they are proposed in the example, only for the illiterate perceiver, who has to remain on the bare visual experiential plane. For the literate one, the process of assigning meaning to the sentence is completely distinct from the process of reading the sentence! It’s a second layer that starts only after the first layer, the visual one, is made possible, no matter how uncomfortable and entangled, or easy and fluid, we make this first layer for the reader. For the illiterate, the example works well, because there is only one process, the visual one, and it’s not a reading process, there is no alphabet-word-syntax decoding here. There is only the evaluation of a form, as one would do with a painting, and spaces then do enter the meaning-making process directly. On the same logic, I don’t understand when you say that

words have no semantic meaning in isolation, but rather that meaning lives in the empty spaces between the letters

The visual appearance of the word is only an artifice to make the reader aware of what is the word (or the sentence) that should be made sense of. Writing m o u s e or m o u s e, may create more or less discomfort for the reader in realizing we are talking about a mouse, but then one still has to discern, in both cases, and through concepts, what that mouse is, and what it is doing in the overall sentence, which is not in any way impacted by how painful it was to get to grips with the code in the first place!


Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.


My current understanding from PoF is that “what natural perceptual-cognitive processes do for us” is way more complex than - and actually also different from - filling spaces between letters, silence between notes or intersected shapes. Thinking creates experience by merging percept with concept, but because percepts get (by thinking) uniquely time-stamped, uniquely characterized with contours, with countless details, and countless interrelations, the match with (universal) concepts is practically never a perfect one. This is what keeps them up as percepts (I would even say, as ‘perceivables’) while an individualized thought-image is clicked and archived as memory for every moment we expose ourselves to the perceptual experience. Curiously, the impression I receive from your examples is that these are over-complicated examples (language and then music, I am coming to music) used to arrive at over-simplified conclusions. In a certain way I am struggling to follow your logic. I see it well in the general purpose and in the direction of the argumentation, I follow it well at that level, but if we zoom in on the details of your reasoning, then I’m lost, I am somehow missing what you are not saying.


About music, the first thing that makes me wonder why you chose music as an example of natural perceptual-conceptual process to use as a bridge to grasp mechanistic processes, is that unless we are playing or listening to live music, the general experience of music we most frequently have is indeed through digital media technology. I am not referring to the experience you suggest here with the 3 samples, because of course you didn’t have any other choice, but to the most common experience of music these days. But ok, let’s imagine live music, say an orchestra, playing Vivaldi’s Summer. We immediately get into complications with this example of musical performance. For instance, there is in reality no silent space between beats, notes and chords here. If we dissect the composition in groups of instruments, then yes, we find some silence, but that’s not the living experience of the performance. More importantly, the musical structure, the rhythm, is not what invites meaning in this percept. It's only one minor element of the meaning. The rhythm is the naked, geometrical, in a way neutral, repetitive framework to which the musical language, the phrase, is appended. The meaning is in the development of the phrase, in melody. This phrase can be long and articulated, or simple, square and repetitive, contrasted or nuanced, surprising or highly predictable… etcetera. It can take thousand different forms and there resides the meaning, not in the tempo and its see-throughs. On the same temporal structure, thousands of pieces of music have been written and thousand more could be written, with completely different meanings! To me, the liminal spaces of understanding music do exist, but are not literal spaces between beats notes and chords. They are not “exemplified by rhythmic thresholds”. They are conceptual liminal spaces, which, yes, develop in temporal form, but cannot be reduced to our grasping of the beat in the music. This is an incredible over-simplification! The liminal spaces are of very changing duration and path, and it's their unfolding that determines the transition between one state of being and the next.
It’s a little bit of the same problem I found in the previous example, with language. It must be no coincidence that music is a language, and the physical spaces that pace it are not the code, but only a framework that supports the unfolding of the code. So here again I feel music is a complex, difficult example from which over-simplified conclusions are drawn.

Getting to the 3 samples, here’s my thoughts. I don’t agree that the liminal spaces appear as a property ‘of the song’ in the form of paced openings in its rhythm that invite meaning. Rather, they arise in the thinking act of making sense of the song, at the conjunction of concept and percept. I see them as qualitative spaces in cognition. While I do have a preference - like you, I prefer Vivaldi’s Summer, the fast and furious of the three, in my opinion - I can make sense of all three songs with equal ‘ease’. I can enter each of these three worlds and understand them. By the way, the metal one with a very fast pace sounds monotone and slow to my ear, because of its somber and heavy vibe. The liminal spaces there - the changes in status that help us approach and grasp the music by probing its character - appear to me in longer spans, in a way that is quite independent from musical tempo. It’s a qualitative understanding that follows the unfolding of the phrase and explores the meaning in there, rather than in a flat geometrical temporal structure that is nearly the same in a thousand other songs!These peculiar, slower liminal spaces don’t make it easier or more difficult to apprehend the song, they only make it less pleasant for me in this case. But this is a matter of feeling, and how it personalizes the process, rather than pure cognition, I would imagine.


Finally, coming to the conclusion about the effect of mechanization, technology, and high-pace repetition on cognition. Unsurprisingly at this point, because I don’t recognize the strict correlation between the presence of comfortable open or silent spaces in perception (visual or temporal see-throughs) and the ease of filling it with meaning, I would confirm my initial thought. I definitely agree that our orientation to technology is over-indulgent and problematic, but in my view the problem with it actually resides in the preponderant role of abstraction, the force that underlies and determines technology, way more than it resides in its repetitive and mechanistic character itself.
Ashvin, I have to admit I am a bit saddened by not being able to concur as much as I would have liked here. Your thoughts in this essay have been very insightful and helpful in guiding my reflection in this matter and I am thankful for that, however I would have preferred to agree with not only the high level direction of the essay, which I do, but also with the detailed reasoning. I hope I am missing points that I’ll get later and that will allow me to better integrate these views.


A side note, on the evolution of language, a topic I’m interested in. This “History in English words” by Barfield seems an extraordinary book with a prodigious purpose! It definitely goes on my list. Having studied the old languages in highschool, all the provided examples of words were known to me, but I definitely want to see where he brings it in the book. If you have other works in mind with specific reference to the evolution of language, please recommend!

:

Frederica,

Thanks for this detailed feedback. I have no problem at all with the 'statement' approach and actually find it very enjoyable to engage with. Although I am not breaking up your response into discrete chunks, I think what is below should address most of the points you raised, but I am happy to revisit any that were missed.

Yes, we should always keep the principle in mind - we make the difference. I think this is mostly what you were objecting to in the essay. Perhaps you felt that I was resting too much of the difference on the perceptual structures themselves, but that was quite the opposite of my intentions. That being said, in the phenomenological approach, we must begin with what the perceptions themselves disclose to our reasoning. That our mode of cognition is really the determining factor in mining their depth of meaning should be the result of evidence and a chain of reasoning which leads to that conclusion. Yet this is also my conclusion, which I think becomes much more clear in the subsequent installments. To be clear, I was not saying the meaning is dwelling in literal 'spaces' and that we can enrich the meaning by simply changing the size or duration of these spaces. Actually, at the ontic level, what lives in the 'spaces' is the ideational activity of other living beings and we come to know the inner meaning of the perceptual world by using our own cognition to resonate with the 'frequencies' of their activity. So our estrangement from Nature is, in that sense, nothing other than the estrangement from their living spiritual activity.

The critical factor in our experience of music, as in the perceptual world in general, is our own cognitive development. The 'rhythmic thresholds' mentioned in the essay, for ex., are only applicable to normal waking cognition - "the threshold at which our normal cognition will fail to notice any significant difference in the musical structure if it were to become any faster". And even this shouldn't be taken too rigidly - I can't claim to have done any in-depth study here, and perhaps the data is somewhat off or has been updated. But the principle is that our cognitive interaction with the temporal structure plays a critical role in how much, or what sort, of meaning we will mine from it. It may be more helpful to imagine one is playing a song on an instrument at various tempos - here our creative thinking is determining the temporal structure. Clearly there are certain tempos at which the act of playing the song will be rather meaningless (way too slow or fast) compared to others at a more tempered speed. I can sense this pretty clearly when I attempt (key word: attempt ) to play various songs on piano. So we shouldn't think of the perceptions - the tempo in this case - as something independent of our cognition. 

Rather, the latter is what structures the former. In our normal intellectual mode, our thinking consciousness simply isn't differentiated enough for us to discern how this is taking place. People simply assume the tempo (and other qualities) is an absolute property of the song which is independent of our cognition. Practically, for all intents and purposes the intellect is concerned with, these qualities are the same for everyone, because we simply don't have the thinking flexibility to discern otherwise. But when we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into the dynamics of the natural and cultural worlds, then we find the 'rhythms' of perceptions will vary greatly depending on our own cognitive engagement with the phenomena. Working with the simple sentences and music clips was only a way to help give people a sense of how (a) their cognitive activity is actually involved in the process of discerning meaning of perceptions (which may sound obvious, but is very often ignored in modern thinking) and (b) they can try to sense a limited amount of differentiation within their own activity. There is only so much that can be done with the intellect, though.

So to summarize, it is our mode of cognition which manifests the mechanistic technology and perceptual world, and the meaning it can disclose to us, not the other way around. Yet within the confines of our normal waking intellect, during this evolutionary stage, it is beginning to matter less and less how we interact with the spatial and temporal perceptions. The intellect gets rapidly diminishing returns from its thinking power at this stage. According to this phenomenology, there will come a time soon when most songs, regardless of their qualities like style and tempo, will fail to provide us with the deep meaning the ancients mined from it. And that is true of all perceptions, generally. Why? Because the Spirit has withdrawn from the outer world and into our inner world. We can trace this withdrawal quite precisely through recent human history, especially using the changes in language (as Barfield does in various writings), but also across all cultural dimensions. Modern language has become very dry and prosaic, consisting in mostly empty husks of meaning.

The brief overview of how the meaning of "computer" has changed was simply to illustrate that fact. A person in the 16th or maybe even 17th century would not comprehend the concept of a "computer" which exists entirely independent of human thinking agency. Even if they could imagine a physical device which is not attached to the human being, it wouldn't occur for them to consider this an entity which performs calculations simply through material processes independent of any human agency. That, of course, has changed dramatically with the descent of consciousness into materialistic thinking. Yet, this 'descent' can also be seen as an ascent from another, more holistic angle. As Barfield remarked, 'repetition' here is at the foundation of our reasoning faculty and therefore human culture. It is practically synonymous with memory - we can lift experiences into the realm of thought and willfully re-experience them.

The problem with our current obsession with mechanistic technology is mostly an unwillingness to use this as a tool for further evolution, rather than an end-in-itself for various materialistic, selfish pursuits. And this problem runs deeper than most would care to admit. Even if we are idealistic and spiritual in our thinking, we get very comfortable and make this into yet another mechanism by only forming concepts about higher worlds with the intellect. We have the greatest difficulty admitting to ourselves that we secretly desire to remain in the comfortable, familiar repetitive loops, instead of venturing with our inner activity into the unfamiliar, unknown territory of the higher worlds. The path to higher cognition makes us much more aware of this tendency within ourselves - the desire to prioritize, at every turn, the material and sensuous, the known and familiar, over the currently supersensible, even when we have the free choice and opportunities to prioritize the latter. 

Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.

I didn't quite follow your objection here. Can you elaborate?

[AshvinP]

Here I immediately wonder, why did you choose a double-layered perception such as language as an example, rather than start simple, maybe with a sensory perception? Let me explain. Within your example, there is the case of the perceiver who does not know the alphabet. This perceiver also perceives the interspaces in sentences 2 and 3, and certainly still makes sense of these percepts by matching the perceived graphical forms with concepts, let’s say esthetical concepts. So the suction does operate, although it is very different from the one a literate person would experience. But ok, let’s stay with this literate person now. I find the example in this case confusing in many ways. First, the spaces have meaning as a graphical, visual element, which, yes, facilitates the reading experience, as a convenience, however spacing has no impact on the plane of decoding the symbols and assigning meaning to them, which is what the example was pointing to in the first place. So I would accept the spaces, in the sense they are proposed in the example, only for the illiterate perceiver, who has to remain on the bare visual experiential plane. For the literate one, the process of assigning meaning to the sentence is completely distinct from the process of reading the sentence! It’s a second layer that starts only after the first layer, the visual one, is made possible, no matter how uncomfortable and entangled, or easy and fluid, we make this first layer for the reader. For the illiterate, the example works well, because there is only one process, the visual one, and it’s not a reading process, there is no alphabet-word-syntax decoding here. There is only the evaluation of a form, as one would do with a painting, and spaces then do enter the meaning-making process directly. On the same logic, I don’t understand when you say that

words have no semantic meaning in isolation, but rather that meaning lives in the empty spaces between the letters

The visual appearance of the word is only an artifice to make the reader aware of what is the word (or the sentence) that should be made sense of. Writing m o u s e or m o u s e, may create more or less discomfort for the reader in realizing we are talking about a mouse, but then one still has to discern, in both cases, and through concepts, what that mouse is, and what it is doing in the overall sentence, which is not in any way impacted by how painful it was to get to grips with the code in the first place!

I meant to address this more directly as well. We don't seem to be on the same page here, where as elsewhere I think it was mostly a different way of stating similar things. Language is used as an example because we are most familiar with how perception intersects with our cognitive activity here, particularly with what we call 'logic'. The rules of 'spacing' in a language, which I take broadly to mean its syntax in general (including spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.), is another way of saying the logic by which it decoheres from meaning and recoheres into meaning (the semantics of language). There are always at least two cognitive agents involved in language - the speaker (or writer) and the hearer (or reader). So with language it becomes more clear what's on the 'other side' of our perceptions - more cognitive activity (which, according to my view, as you know, is true of all perceptions). And it's also very clear that there is an underlying logic to how the perceptions are arranged by one agent and interpreted by another. (this should be really clear with music, too, but unfortunately it isn't for most people)

Here it almost seems as if you are implying the ordering of perceptions is irrelevant to the meaning? That really isn't the case from either the phenomenal or ontological perspective. After all, it's our cognition which is ordering the perceptions. The person who has learned to read gets more meaning precisely because the higher development of cognition allows for certain perception of meaning which otherwise wouldn't be possible. If we think about it more broadly from the evolutionary perspective, speech/language was in fact the bridge between nature and culture-individual, the outer and the inner. For ex., all words we now use for inner "psychological" processes were once used for outer appearances. I probably quoted this before.

The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history. The use of the outer creation is to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation. Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eye-brow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the remote time when language was framed; but the same tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and [archaic men] use only nouns or names of things, which they continually convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.

Barfield also writes at length about this linguistic evolution in various places. As you probably know from our previous discussions, the Divine Word, the Logos, is of the utmost importance in our spiritual evolution. Contemplation of language is a great way for us to discern that we are not only dealing with remote, abstract, Cosmic divinities and creation myths here, but the very process by which we think and communicate. Speech was once much more creatively powerful for common people and will be again. It is only in our modern age, the span of about 500 years so far, in which this knowledge of the inherent power in speech was lost.

[Federica]

Frederica,

Thanks for this detailed feedback. I have no problem at all with the 'statement' approach and actually find it very enjoyable to engage with. Although I am not breaking up your response into discrete chunks, I think what is below should address most of the points you raised, but I am happy to revisit any that were missed.

Yes, we should always keep the principle in mind - we make the difference. I think this is mostly what you were objecting to in the essay. Perhaps you felt that I was resting too much of the difference on the perceptual structures themselves, but that was quite the opposite of my intentions. That being said, in the phenomenological approach, we must begin with what the perceptions themselves disclose to our reasoning. That our mode of cognition is really the determining factor in mining their depth of meaning should be the result of evidence and a chain of reasoning which leads to that conclusion. Yet this is also my conclusion, which I think becomes much more clear in the subsequent installments. To be clear, I was not saying the meaning is dwelling in literal 'spaces' and that we can enrich the meaning by simply changing the size or duration of these spaces. Actually, at the ontic level, what lives in the 'spaces' is the ideational activity of other living beings and we come to know the inner meaning of the perceptual world by using our own cognition to resonate with the 'frequencies' of their activity. So our estrangement from Nature is, in that sense, nothing other than the estrangement from their living spiritual activity.

The critical factor in our experience of music, as in the perceptual world in general, is our own cognitive development. The 'rhythmic thresholds' mentioned in the essay, for ex., are only applicable to normal waking cognition - "the threshold at which our normal cognition will fail to notice any significant difference in the musical structure if it were to become any faster". And even this shouldn't be taken too rigidly - I can't claim to have done any in-depth study here, and perhaps the data is somewhat off or has been updated. But the principle is that our cognitive interaction with the temporal structure plays a critical role in how much, or what sort, of meaning we will mine from it. It may be more helpful to imagine one is playing a song on an instrument at various tempos - here our creative thinking is determining the temporal structure. Clearly there are certain tempos at which the act of playing the song will be rather meaningless (way too slow or fast) compared to others at a more tempered speed. I can sense this pretty clearly when I attempt (key word: attempt ) to play various songs on piano. So we shouldn't think of the perceptions - the tempo in this case - as something independent of our cognition. 

Rather, the latter is what structures the former. In our normal intellectual mode, our thinking consciousness simply isn't differentiated enough for us to discern how this is taking place. People simply assume the tempo (and other qualities) is an absolute property of the song which is independent of our cognition. Practically, for all intents and purposes the intellect is concerned with, these qualities are the same for everyone, because we simply don't have the thinking flexibility to discern otherwise. But when we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into the dynamics of the natural and cultural worlds, then we find the 'rhythms' of perceptions will vary greatly depending on our own cognitive engagement with the phenomena. Working with the simple sentences and music clips was only a way to help give people a sense of how (a) their cognitive activity is actually involved in the process of discerning meaning of perceptions (which may sound obvious, but is very often ignored in modern thinking) and (b) they can try to sense a limited amount of differentiation within their own activity. There is only so much that can be done with the intellect, though.

So to summarize, it is our mode of cognition which manifests the mechanistic technology and perceptual world, and the meaning it can disclose to us, not the other way around. Yet within the confines of our normal waking intellect, during this evolutionary stage, it is beginning to matter less and less how we interact with the spatial and temporal perceptions. The intellect gets rapidly diminishing returns from its thinking power at this stage. According to this phenomenology, there will come a time soon when most songs, regardless of their qualities like style and tempo, will fail to provide us with the deep meaning the ancients mined from it. And that is true of all perceptions, generally. Why? Because the Spirit has withdrawn from the outer world and into our inner world. We can trace this withdrawal quite precisely through recent human history, especially using the changes in language (as Barfield does in various writings), but also across all cultural dimensions. Modern language has become very dry and prosaic, consisting in mostly empty husks of meaning.

The brief overview of how the meaning of "computer" has changed was simply to illustrate that fact. A person in the 16th or maybe even 17th century would not comprehend the concept of a "computer" which exists entirely independent of human thinking agency. Even if they could imagine a physical device which is not attached to the human being, it wouldn't occur for them to consider this an entity which performs calculations simply through material processes independent of any human agency. That, of course, has changed dramatically with the descent of consciousness into materialistic thinking. Yet, this 'descent' can also be seen as an ascent from another, more holistic angle. As Barfield remarked, 'repetition' here is at the foundation of our reasoning faculty and therefore human culture. It is practically synonymous with memory - we can lift experiences into the realm of thought and willfully re-experience them.

The problem with our current obsession with mechanistic technology is mostly an unwillingness to use this as a tool for further evolution, rather than an end-in-itself for various materialistic, selfish pursuits. And this problem runs deeper than most would care to admit. Even if we are idealistic and spiritual in our thinking, we get very comfortable and make this into yet another mechanism by only forming concepts about higher worlds with the intellect. We have the greatest difficulty admitting to ourselves that we secretly desire to remain in the comfortable, familiar repetitive loops, instead of venturing with our inner activity into the unfamiliar, unknown territory of the higher worlds. The path to higher cognition makes us much more aware of this tendency within ourselves - the desire to prioritize, at every turn, the material and sensuous, the known and familiar, over the currently supersensible, even when we have the free choice and opportunities to prioritize the latter. 

Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.

I didn't quite follow your objection here. Can you elaborate?

Ashvin, reading your reply I just thought ‘wow, disclaimers did a wonderful job here!’ Not that they were not sincere... but OK, since you enjoy that, I will omit all disclaimers now and just go directly to the points (if by any chance you find yourself missing them, just let me know I can bring them back).

To be clear, I was not saying the meaning is dwelling in literal 'spaces' and that we can enrich the meaning by simply changing the size or duration of these spaces.

Well, I am glad to read that, however when you write down three sentences, where the only difference is that in the second one you add typographic spaces between words and in the third one you add an additional comma, what you are pointing attention to is very literal, visual, physical spacing. As you say, “these spaces do not automatically bring meaning to the structure”. Absolutely, but then how is this example relevant in exemplifying the liminal spaces of perception?
The spacing barely makes it less painful to access the level where we can start searching for meaning, the level where we will be open to the possibility of liminal spaces. When we have reached there, regardless of how laborious or comfortable it was for our eyes, the typographic spaces and commas are already well behind us! They are gone! And then the search for meaning / recognition of liminal spaces can start. So the spaces that make the difference between the three sentences in your example have zero in common with the liminal spaces of perception!


Similarly, regarding music, I still can’t agree with your analysis:

...the principle is that our cognitive interaction with the temporal structure plays a critical role in how much, or what sort, of meaning we will mine from it. It may be more helpful to imagine one is playing a song on an instrument at various tempos - here our creative thinking is determining the temporal structure. Clearly there are certain tempos at which the act of playing the song will be rather meaningless (way too slow or fast) compared to others at a more tempered speed. I can sense this pretty clearly when I attempt (key word: attempt ) to play various songs on piano. So we shouldn't think of the perceptions - the tempo in this case - as something independent of our cognition.

The tempo is not something completely independent of our cognition, because, yes, if you push it to the extreme where our ear cannot distinguish anything anymore, then of course, tempo will have an effect on cognition, but tempo is quite independent of meaning in the sense that, as you say, it is only a structure to which the meaning is appended. So yes, if you really distort or destroy the structure, then the meaning will fall - as a matter of fact, the perception will fall - but the point is, the nature of the thing that is appended to the structure (the meaning is the thing) is not the same as the nature of the structure itself, which is of a banal nature, functional, only contributing to the meaning as carrier, as container. The liminal spaces will be searched for and recognized in the meaning of the music, not at all in its tempo and its thresholds, although the tempo is necessary to allow the perception, to bring the meaning-making phase into fruition. When you go to your closet and take out a suit to see if it works well to wear today, your evaluation will depend on the suit itself, not on the hanger! Although it’s true that without the hanger you couldn’t even take it out properly, and the suit would be unpresentable and you wouldn’t be able to even start considering it, nevertheless the nature of the hanger is mundane, banal, only functional to the fruition of the suit. The hanger doesn't participate the least in the consideration of the suit's meaning in relation to a certain outfit. When you are exploring the extreme tempos that challenge our bodily auditory thresholds, you are testing removing the hanger and throwing your nice suit in ball shape to the bottom of your closet to collect the dust (be that as it may that there’s dust at the bottom of your closet, which I would guess is inaccurate). Of course, you will then be unable to even consider it as wearable. So of course, if you destroy the tempo, the meaning or the song, including the liminal spaces that it could have evoked in our cognition - meaning that lives in the musical phrase told in the melody - will fall. But how is this an interesting experiment, when we want to explore the esoteric spaces of perception? We should then focus on allowing the phenomenon of that percept to happen in the first place. So let’s not destroy the tempo, otherwise we hardly start any relevant phenomenological approach, let alone mining meaning.


In this same sense, with regard to the sentences’ example, I was saying - and I am still saying - that the example only applies properly to the case of the illiterate person. Because that person will look at the sentences as we look at an abstract painting, and that is the only case where the typographic spaces enter the activity of mining meaning. For everyone else, those spaces are hangers, and it’s not interesting to look at hangers, when we are evaluating what outfit would work best to wear today, or any given day!


What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples, is that you started not from the phenomenon, but from the thesis that mechanism and repetition are crucial elements of distortion of cognition and source of evil. So you looked for examples that could substantiate that initial idea. It is not that you examined some random phenomena and discovered that their mechanistic nature was a problem. No. The idea or intuition (which I don’t recognize) came first. The examples came second, as functional to that idea. Is this accurate? And if so: is this a valid phenomenological approach?

Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.

I didn't quite follow your objection here. Can you elaborate?

Sorry, that was not well written. Let me try to rephrase. In the imaginative example of the thought ‘circle’ I couldn’t find the hexagon to be a helpful element for me, because for me analogizing the differential meaning left to be found after the imperfect match to geometrical shapes is not helpful. It blinds my intuition. If I am suggested a geometrical match, it’s too easy I just cannot resist the thought of completing the ‘operation’ by adding whatever geometry is missing, which I don’t think is the metaphorical bridge the example is meant to offer. I guess it’s my organization that wants that, maybe for someone else the light green spaces are not irresistibly attracting the appropriate wedges that fits those spaces, but for me they do, so I can’t go past the physical puzzle visualization.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, reading your reply I just thought ‘wow, disclaimers did a wonderful job here!’ Not that they were not sincere... but OK, since you enjoy that, I will omit all disclaimers now and just go directly to the points (if by any chance you find yourself missing them, just let me know I can bring them back).

To be clear, I was not saying the meaning is dwelling in literal 'spaces' and that we can enrich the meaning by simply changing the size or duration of these spaces.

Well, I am glad to read that, however when you write down three sentences, where the only difference is that in the second one you add typographic spaces between words and in the third one you add an additional comma, what you are pointing attention to is very literal, visual, physical spacing. As you say, “these spaces do not automatically bring meaning to the structure”. Absolutely, but then how is this example relevant in exemplifying the liminal spaces of perception?
The spacing barely makes it less painful to access the level where we can start searching for meaning, the level where we will be open to the possibility of liminal spaces. When we have reached there, regardless of how laborious or comfortable it was for our eyes, the typographic spaces and commas are already well behind us! They are gone! And then the search for meaning / recognition of liminal spaces can start. So the spaces that make the difference between the three sentences in your example have zero in common with the liminal spaces of perception!


Similarly, regarding music, I still can’t agree with your analysis:

...the principle is that our cognitive interaction with the temporal structure plays a critical role in how much, or what sort, of meaning we will mine from it. It may be more helpful to imagine one is playing a song on an instrument at various tempos - here our creative thinking is determining the temporal structure. Clearly there are certain tempos at which the act of playing the song will be rather meaningless (way too slow or fast) compared to others at a more tempered speed. I can sense this pretty clearly when I attempt (key word: attempt ) to play various songs on piano. So we shouldn't think of the perceptions - the tempo in this case - as something independent of our cognition.

The tempo is not something completely independent of our cognition, because, yes, if you push it to the extreme where our ear cannot distinguish anything anymore, then of course, tempo will have an effect on cognition, but tempo is quite independent of meaning in the sense that, as you say, it is only a structure to which the meaning is appended. So yes, if you really distort or destroy the structure, then the meaning will fall - as a matter of fact, the perception will fall - but the point is, the nature of the thing that is appended to the structure (the meaning is the thing) is not the same as the nature of the structure itself, which is of a banal nature, functional, only contributing to the meaning as carrier, as container. The liminal spaces will be searched for and recognized in the meaning of the music, not at all in its tempo and its thresholds, although the tempo is necessary to allow the perception, to bring the meaning-making phase into fruition. When you go to your closet and take out a suit to see if it works well to wear today, your evaluation will depend on the suit itself, not on the hanger! Although it’s true that without the hanger you couldn’t even take it out properly, and the suit would be unpresentable and you wouldn’t be able to even start considering it, nevertheless the nature of the hanger is mundane, banal, only functional to the fruition of the suit. The hanger doesn't participate the least in the consideration of the suit's meaning in relation to a certain outfit. When you are exploring the extreme tempos that challenge our bodily auditory thresholds, you are testing removing the hanger and throwing your nice suit in ball shape to the bottom of your closet to collect the dust (be that as it may that there’s dust at the bottom of your closet, which I would guess is inaccurate). Of course, you will then be unable to even consider it as wearable. So of course, if you destroy the tempo, the meaning or the song, including the liminal spaces that it could have evoked in our cognition - meaning that lives in the musical phrase told in the melody - will fall. But how is this an interesting experiment, when we want to explore the esoteric spaces of perception? We should then focus on allowing the phenomenon of that percept to happen in the first place. So let’s not destroy the tempo, otherwise we hardly start any relevant phenomenological approach, let alone mining meaning.


In this same sense, with regard to the sentences’ example, I was saying - and I am still saying - that the example only applies properly to the case of the illiterate person. Because that person will look at the sentences as we look at an abstract painting, and that is the only case where the typographic spaces enter the activity of mining meaning. For everyone else, those spaces are hangers, and it’s not interesting to look at hangers, when we are evaluating what outfit would work best to wear today, or any given day!

The key dynamic is the relationship between our cognition and perception, just as it is in PoF. The spacing, or syntax of language in general - the perceptual structuring of the letters, words, sentences, paragraphs - certainly stimulates our cognition in different ways, does it not? That stimulation cannot be divorced from the process of mining meaning. You might call it "uncomfortable" to have all the letters in an unbroken string, or something similar, but we are dealing with the process of mining meaning nonetheless. We have to guard against the over-spiritualizing tendency of discounting the pole of perception.

The evolution of language reflects the development of our inner spiritual activity - our Ego-I which thinks from within and therefore links us to the spiritual worlds. The transformation of written language from glyphs etched in stone to written on papyrus and paper with ink, to now written through digital media, is itself a spiritualization of the world of perceptual appearances. This is happening through our evolving cognitive activity. It is not a one-time thing - we can't say the perceptions stimulate us to start thinking but then lose all relevance. Our cognition is ordering the perceptions and this is a continual, polar rhythmic process.

If we want to mostly skip over the phenomenology, which is really like pre-PoF introductory material, then we can simply recognize that we are always interfacing with another cognitive agent when reading their words. This isn't a spatial interaction but a spiritual one. We are living in the same 'space' of conscious ideas, of meaning, as the writer, but our current decohered condition of consciousness renders this as textual perceptions from the 'past'. How the perceptions are ordered gives us living feedback of the meaningful space thus shared and therefore it is continual interaction, dialogue, between the cognitive agencies and Ideas which overarch that dialogue. It's really a magic thing taking place - a summoning (incarnating) of supersensible ideas on the perceptual plane.

It's interesting how the modern technology which we, as cognitive agents, developed through our ideas, also allows that dialogue to continue over larger timespans. This means we have greater degrees of freedom in how and when we dialogue. You can write a post one day and I can interact with it the next day and respond the day after. It's one very important aspect of our continual evolution towards spiritual freedom and clearly the living feedback between cognitive activity and perceptual structure, precipitated from that activity, is ongoing. Now, where you have a valid point is that this whole thing is only the start, and if we confuse it for a practically final destination, by making it a completely mechanistic intellectual exchange, as is now the case almost everywhere we look, then our evolution is coming to a halt. The whole spiritualization process of perceptions through our thinking has been happening unconsciously or semi-consciously, in a dreamlike way. Now we need to become more conscious of this relationship between our inner cognitive activity and the outer world of appearances, not only language but all cultural and natural forms.

Again, we need to guard against over-spiritualization, especially if we are idealistically or mystically inclined. Here I mean "guard against" as in pay attention to and learn, grow, evolve from, not to try and completely avoid, eliminate, feel shame about, etc. There is a common thread in these discussions, similar to the "we are not them" thought - that the modern estrangement from Nature and meaning through materialistic thinking and technology is some sort of aberration in the World Process, a discontinuity which serves little purpose in our overall ascent to the Divine. In the one case, the perceptions being discounted were that of national streams of feeling, which is practically synonymous with the modern age, since that's when nation-states came to the fore. Here it seems to be perceptual structures more broadly in other aspects of culture like language and music.
We cannot say these structures are of a different nature than meaning - this takes us back to duality and a view of perceptions as mere "representations". The reason concepts like negative images, reflections, shadows, and such are used is to guard against that dualizing tendency.

Perceptual structures are simply meaningful processes viewed from a polarized physical perspective, within normal space-time. Another metaphor is the air bubbles (perceptions) formed in soda water (meaning). There cannot be any rigid separation between these things - they are distinct aspects of the same underlying nature. "Two forces of the same Power", as Coleridge remarked. In general, every detail of perceptual structures will reveal themselves to matter (it's helpful to think of 'matter' as a verb, i.e. matter-ing). This is one place (among many) where spiritual science differs greatly from secular science - in the latter, there are accidents, redundancies, superfluous details floating around in the world of appearances that we can safely ignore. Not so with spiritual science. Every detail points our cognitive attention to its own deeper layers of Being with precision.

If I had been more ambitious with the phenomenology, then I could have included entire paragraphs and tried to highlight how the varying syntax between them relates to differentiation within our cognitive activity. And with music, the tempo/rhythm is very important, as it points to the flowing temporal nature of ideational processes within the perceptual structure (beats, notes, melodies, harmonies, etc.). These are the underlying rhythms which we want to resonate our own cognitive activity with. The human soul was really 'born' in the higher realm of flowing tones, while the Ego-I comes from the even higher realm of Cosmic speech. I realize that I am stating spiritual ontology here, but I am only doing so to make clear the relation between perception and cognition illustrated in the phenomenology has a firm basis and is not something which I would consider to be 'mistaken' in any fundamental sense. There really is a spiritual science of speech, diction, rhetoric, argumentation, etc., not to be found in the prosaic spheres of modern academia, but rather within the depths of our own soul. 

To [understand the author, the pupil] must fall into step with him by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection. The intelligence will later add shades of meaning. But shade and color are nothing without design. Before intellection properly so-called, there is the perception of structure and movement; there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and rhythm.

Now it is in indicating this structure and rhythm, in taking into consideration the temporal relations between the various sentences of the paragraph and the various parts of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culminating point that the art of diction consists.
...
There is a certain analogy, be it said in passing, between the art of reading as I have just described it and the intuition I recommend to the philosopher. On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and rhythm of the composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in sympathy. But I have embarked upon too long a digression; it is time to end it.

- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1946)

What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples, is that you started not from the phenomenon, but from the thesis that mechanism and repetition are crucial elements of distortion of cognition and source of evil. So you looked for examples that could substantiate that initial idea. It is not that you examined some random phenomena and discovered that their mechanistic nature was a problem. No. The idea or intuition (which I don’t recognize) came first. The examples came second, as functional to that idea. Is this accurate? And if so: is this a valid phenomenological approach?

This may be a valid point - I do remember starting out with the idea that mechanism has become a problem (it's not 'evil' in any absolute sense, because such an absolute perspective doesn't exist). I sort of assumed most people reading would agree there is something deeply problematic about it. My intention in these essays was to delve a little deeper into why it's a problem, by relating it to our own state of cognitive development, which, in turn, is deeply rooted in our own individual moral failings (not those of Nature or Culture as such). I do think that's becomes much more clear in the subsequent installments. They weren't great achievements of the phenomenological approach - rather they deviated too much from phenomenology and remained too abstract (especially part 2 and part 3). Perhaps I will update them sometime soon. But the underlying ideas/intuitions are still ones that I have only grown more confidence in as my thinking has evolved, to whatever extent it has since writing them.

Here I should add that even in Cleric’s example of the thought ‘circle’, and although the way the example is expressed is very helpful to understand the void of perception and the act of filling it back with meaning, the conclusion with the hexagon feels less helpful, because it suggests that it’s then only a matter of coming up with six properly shaped pieces, slide them into the six voids, and that would be enough for a perfect match. It prompts the thought that, like in a circle-shaped Tetris, the whole block would then slot together and disappear.

I didn't quite follow your objection here. Can you elaborate?

Sorry, that was not well written. Let me try to rephrase. In the imaginative example of the thought ‘circle’ I couldn’t find the hexagon to be a helpful element for me, because for me analogizing the differential meaning left to be found after the imperfect match to geometrical shapes is not helpful. It blinds my intuition. If I am suggested a geometrical match, it’s too easy I just cannot resist the thought of completing the ‘operation’ by adding whatever geometry is missing, which I don’t think is the metaphorical bridge the example is meant to offer. I guess it’s my organization that wants that, maybe for someone else the light green spaces are not irresistibly attracting the appropriate wedges that fits those spaces, but for me they do, so I can’t go past the physical puzzle visualization.

OK, I understand your preference here. It should be noted, though, that arithmetic and geometry really are reflections of archetypal spiritual forces. The thought-experiment was, after all, starting from a perfectly unified 'Divine' perspective. We just need to recover the inner qualitative dimension of these eternal symbols.

The images seen in dreams, therefore, are a language, but the language of images is still not the absolute language of symbols. The absolute language of symbols is the language of geometrical figures. Geometrical figures are, as it were, the framework or skeleton of reality whereas images still have a little spare flesh on them, a little skin and muscle. The forms seen in dreams still have some clothes on them. We have to learn to see the ‘bare bones’ of pure symbols, and to do this we have to look much further and much higher, to where they are stripped of everything extraneous, to where they have been reduced to pure abstractions: geometrical figures. A symbol is like a human being: it is a skeleton, a framework, to which flesh, nerves, veins and arteries, fat and skin have been added. But when a man dies all this begins to disintegrate and disappear until he is, once again, reduced to the essential: the skeleton.

In the old days, when the initiates drew a vertical or horizontal line, a circle or a dot, and then combined them to form a cross, a triangle, a square, a pentagram, a hexagram or a serpent with its tail in its mouth, they were expressing an eternal science through each one of these figures. The language of symbols, which is the universal language, represents the quintessence, the supreme distillation of wisdom. Images are still on the astral plane whereas geometrical symbols belong to the causal plane. This is why crystals are considered to be symbols of the causal plane: because they are an expression of pure geometry.

Aïvanhov, Omraam Mikhaël (2013-09-14T23:58:59.000). The Symbolic Language of Geometrical Figures (Izvor Collection) . Editions Prosveta. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples, is that you started not from the phenomenon, but from the thesis that mechanism and repetition are crucial elements of distortion of cognition and source of evil. So you looked for examples that could substantiate that initial idea. It is not that you examined some random phenomena and discovered that their mechanistic nature was a problem. No. The idea or intuition (which I don’t recognize) came first. The examples came second, as functional to that idea. Is this accurate? And if so: is this a valid phenomenological approach?

It occurred to me you may also be forgetting what we reaeon through our ideas is just as, if not more, critical to phenomenology as how the perceptions appear or how we 'feel' in relation to them. The latter is simply naive realism if we don't also discern what our inner reasoning reveals. In other words, our thinking and concepts should become objects of our phenomenological inquiry, i.e. PoF method. This is what differentiating liminal spaces between various perceptual structures also helps us do.

[Federica]

What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples, is that you started not from the phenomenon, but from the thesis that mechanism and repetition are crucial elements of distortion of cognition and source of evil. So you looked for examples that could substantiate that initial idea. It is not that you examined some random phenomena and discovered that their mechanistic nature was a problem. No. The idea or intuition (which I don’t recognize) came first. The examples came second, as functional to that idea. Is this accurate? And if so: is this a valid phenomenological approach?

It occurred to me you may also be forgetting what we reaeon through our ideas is just as, if not more, critical to phenomenology as how the perceptions appear or how we 'feel' in relation to them. The latter is simply naive realism if we don't also discern what our inner reasoning reveals. In other words, our thinking and concepts should become objects of our phenomenological inquiry, i.e. PoF method. This is what differentiating liminal spaces between various perceptual structures also helps us do.

Quick reply before I get to your previous posts - True, I was then forgetting the broader spectrum of what a percept can be. Not because I had forgotten it completely (both PoF and your last post on the Whirlpool thread are 'top of my mind'), but because my focus there was to inquire the reasons why you had chosen complex examples of outer perceptions such as languages rather than simpler outer ones, such as for instance sensory ones. Looks like the thoughtful building up of a defense case here [humor] : )

.

[AshvinP]

What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples, is that you started not from the phenomenon, but from the thesis that mechanism and repetition are crucial elements of distortion of cognition and source of evil. So you looked for examples that could substantiate that initial idea. It is not that you examined some random phenomena and discovered that their mechanistic nature was a problem. No. The idea or intuition (which I don’t recognize) came first. The examples came second, as functional to that idea. Is this accurate? And if so: is this a valid phenomenological approach?

It occurred to me you may also be forgetting what we reaeon through our ideas is just as, if not more, critical to phenomenology as how the perceptions appear or how we 'feel' in relation to them. The latter is simply naive realism if we don't also discern what our inner reasoning reveals. In other words, our thinking and concepts should become objects of our phenomenological inquiry, i.e. PoF method. This is what differentiating liminal spaces between various perceptual structures also helps us do.

Quick reply before I get to your previous posts - True, I was then forgetting the broader spectrum of what a percept can be. Not because I had forgotten it completely (both PoF and your last post on the Whirlpool thread are 'top of my mind'), but because my focus there was to inquire the reasons why you had chosen complex examples of outer perceptions such as languages rather than simpler outer ones, such as for instance sensory ones. Looks like the thoughtful building up of a defense case here [humor] : )

.

Feel free to reply to the other posts and I will consider them, but I also want to throw out another approach here. I am getting the sense that most of your criticism revolves around the fact that I made such a quick and dirty attempt at this phenomenology, and while others new to the intuitive thinking path will find it pretty novel and stimulating (that has been the universal response from those who have read it), or these well down the path will find it a decent introduction, you have progressed well beyond the 'novel and stimulating', but not quite yet to discerning how it all fits in with the bigger picture. Much of what I wrote above may even sound like a non-sequitur to what you were critiquing and the examples of the essay.

(As an aside, I'm not sure why language counts as an "outer perception" - it is a direct reflection of our inner spiritual activity and, more importantly, everyone knows that it is without a doubt. Whereas outer sensory perceptions simply don't reveal that connection to us until we reason our way to it from the phenomenology of thinking).

At the end of the day, the phenomenology is simply a tool to also reach an ontology - appearance and reality should spiral together. And if reality is of a thought-nature, then we should be reaching the deeper archetypal layers of our own thinking activity, moving back towards the Center of Deep MAL. If you have already reasoned your way to key aspects of this spiritual ontology, then I see no reason to bicker about my admittedly crude attempts at a phenomenology in these [what seem to me like] dated essays. So let me ask a few questions.

Do you see the connection between these 'liminal spaces' and what we discussed elsewhere in terms of using what doesn't happen to us, especially after we have intuitions, as a tool to penetrate the higher worlds? Just to revive that discussion a bit, let me present a crude metaphor, since you mentioned building a defense case

Let's say I am walking along and find a dead body in a marsh. There are no fingerprints or tracks in the ground anywhere around the body. The most likely suspect is arrested for it and at trial, the defense says to the jury, "there was no evidence anyone else was even at the scene of the crime, so you must acquit!" The prosecutor counters that we can reasonably infer that an intelligent agent covered his/her tracks by observing what is not there. Surely if the victim simply went out to the marsh and died of a heart attack, we would see his tracks on the ground. Since we find no tracks or fingerprints, it's almost certain someone else was out there with him.

Similarly, if I see tracks in the soft ground, I don't assume the ground itself sunk to create those tracks, but that a now 'past' person, vehicle, etc. (intelligent idea) impressed those tracks into the ground (perceptual world). I reason from the 'empty space' i.e. the tracks, to the supra-sensory idea which impressed them.

If you didn't see this connection before, does now discerning it change your assessment at all? Or if you did/do see it, do you think it is just way too tenuous to associate 'what isn't there' to the 'liminal spaces' of sentences and songs? Or, alternatively, do you think none of these examples can be considered sound reasoning of how the perceptual world analogizes to the supra-sensory world through 'what isn't there'?

[Federica]

It occurred to me you may also be forgetting what we reaeon through our ideas is just as, if not more, critical to phenomenology as how the perceptions appear or how we 'feel' in relation to them. The latter is simply naive realism if we don't also discern what our inner reasoning reveals. In other words, our thinking and concepts should become objects of our phenomenological inquiry, i.e. PoF method. This is what differentiating liminal spaces between various perceptual structures also helps us do.

Quick reply before I get to your previous posts - True, I was then forgetting the broader spectrum of what a percept can be. Not because I had forgotten it completely (both PoF and your last post on the Whirlpool thread are 'top of my mind'), but because my focus there was to inquire the reasons why you had chosen complex examples of outer perceptions such as languages rather than simpler outer ones, such as for instance sensory ones. Looks like the thoughtful building up of a defense case here [humor] : )

.

Feel free to reply to the other posts and I will consider them, but I also want to throw out another approach here. I am getting the sense that most of your criticism revolves around the fact that I made such a quick and dirty attempt at this phenomenology, and while others new to the intuitive thinking path will find it pretty novel and stimulating (that has been the universal response from those who have read it), or these well down the path will find it a decent introduction, you have progressed well beyond the 'novel and stimulating', but not quite yet to discerning how it all fits in with the bigger picture. Much of what I wrote above may even sound like a non-sequitur to what you were critiquing and the examples of the essay.

(As an aside, I'm not sure why language counts as an "outer perception" - it is a direct reflection of our inner spiritual activity and, more importantly, everyone knows that it is without a doubt. Whereas outer sensory perceptions simply don't reveal that connection to us until we reason our way to it from the phenomenology of thinking).

At the end of the day, the phenomenology is simply a tool to also reach an ontology - appearance and reality should spiral together. And if reality is of a thought-nature, then we should be reaching the deeper archetypal layers of our own thinking activity, moving back towards the Center of Deep MAL. If you have already reasoned your way to key aspects of this spiritual ontology, then I see no reason to bicker about my admittedly crude attempts at a phenomenology in these [what seem to me like] dated essays. So let me ask a few questions.

Do you see the connection between these 'liminal spaces' and what we discussed elsewhere in terms of using what doesn't happen to us, especially after we have intuitions, as a tool to penetrate the higher worlds? Just to revive that discussion a bit, let me present a crude metaphor, since you mentioned building a defense case

Let's say I am walking along and find a dead body in a marsh. There are no fingerprints or tracks in the ground anywhere around the body. The most likely suspect is arrested for it and at trial, the defense says to the jury, "there was no evidence anyone else was even at the scene of the crime, so you must acquit!" The prosecutor counters that we can reasonably infer that an intelligent agent covered his/her tracks by observing what is not there. Surely if the victim simply went out to the marsh and died of a heart attack, we would see his tracks on the ground. Since we find no tracks or fingerprints, it's almost certain someone else was out there with him.

Similarly, if I see tracks in the soft ground, I don't assume the ground itself sunk to create those tracks, but that a now 'past' person, vehicle, etc. (intelligent idea) impressed those tracks into the ground (perceptual world). I reason from the 'empty space' i.e. the tracks, to the supra-sensory idea which impressed them.

If you didn't see this connection before, does now discerning it change your assessment at all? Or if you did/do see it, do you think it is just way too tenuous to associate 'what isn't there' to the 'liminal spaces' of sentences and songs? Or, alternatively, do you think none of these examples can be considered sound reasoning of how the perceptual world analogizes to the supra-sensory world through 'what isn't there'?

Ashvin…

What has made you go, in the turn of one post, from “I have no problem at all with the 'statement' approach and actually find it very enjoyable to engage with” to “your criticism revolves around the fact that I made such a quick and dirty attempt at this phenomenology”?


With this post I am really not trying to stir up more disputation - I have to confess the temptation has bubbled up, it’s one of my biggest weaknesses, and I hope I am doing an OK job at resisting the 100 ways to do it that pop into my mind - but may I remind you of ‘the disclaimers’ in my initial comment to your essay? As said, although these were later omitted, they still apply, are sincere, and indeed superordinate of the bubbles of disputation. The disclaimers are stronger than the bubbles of disputation.

Much of what I wrote above may even sound like a non-sequitur to what you were critiquing and the examples of the essay.

It doesn’t sound so…

(As an aside, I'm not sure why language counts as an "outer perception" - it is a direct reflection of our inner spiritual activity and, more importantly, everyone knows that it is without a doubt. Whereas outer sensory perceptions simply don't reveal that connection to us until we reason our way to it from the phenomenology of thinking).

For languages in general I am not sure either, however a shared typographic display and/or shared musical sample should count as such?

Do you see the connection between these 'liminal spaces' and what we discussed elsewhere in terms of using what doesn't happen to us, especially after we have intuitions, as a tool to penetrate the higher worlds?

I have already answered this question. There is no status update since three days ago:

Ashvin, thank you. This is at the frontier of what I can make sense of at this stage, hopefully I’m on the right side of it. I’m following, but I can’t say these ‘underlying principles’ are ‘in place’. I have seen them now, but it’s not like I can stay with them. It takes an overwhelming effort to continually counteract the pull of dualism, realism - ‘the absolute spaces of experience’.

---

Similarly, if I see tracks in the soft ground, I don't assume the ground itself sunk to create those tracks, but that a now 'past' person, vehicle, etc. (intelligent idea) impressed those tracks into the ground (perceptual world). I reason from the 'empty space' i.e. the tracks, to the supra-sensory idea which impressed them.

If you didn't see this connection before, does now discerning it change your assessment at all? Or if you did/do see it, do you think it is just way too tenuous to associate 'what isn't there' to the 'liminal spaces' of sentences and songs? Or, alternatively, do you think none of these examples can be considered sound reasoning of how the perceptual world analogizes to the supra-sensory world through 'what isn't there'?

Thank you for this example of liminal spaces in a sensory perception. I do see the connection in it. I have been seeing it - with the above quoted caveat - since three days ago, since the moment you explained it to me in this absolutely limpid, quote-free post: viewtopic.php?p=17994#p17994. I actually wrote a specific thankyou message for that post, that I finally didn’t include in my reply, to avoid heaviness.
I think that with this tracks example you illustrate the connection flawlessly. In my opinion, this example would have been ideal in the essay. I have to add with regret that, in reference to the sentences’ and music examples, I am still caught in the thought that because of the ‘double-layered’ nature, or the 'two-stroke' nature of those language-based precepts, the said connection is impeded, the meaning highway is disarticulated by the existence of the code. We can stay either outside of the code, when we don’t know it, or inside of it, when we know the keys to en- and decoding. It’s either I can read the sentence, or I can’t. It’s as if there is a disjunction on the highway of meaning, where we are forced, if we want to pursue our cognitive journey, out of the highway on a deviation path, where we are channeled on to a different route, to continue the trip. The disjunction is the place/moment when we interpret the code.
It’s not a matter of the link being tenuous or too tenuous, it’s not a matter of degree, it’s a matter of the proposed spaces, voids, things-that-are-not-there in your two examples, belonging to the portion of highway that lays before the understanding of the code (which is different from the understanding of the message).
And I don’t mean that there is no possibility, in these examples, to connect what-does-not-happen to liminal spaces. I am only saying that the cues to that connection are not nested in the spatial or temporal spaces of the language appearance. For example in the case of music samples, I am not saying that there’s nothing to gather from the perception, and from what lacks in it, in terms of recognizing liminal spaces and penetrating the higher worlds. I am only saying that I would not search for these voids, or openings, or things-that-are-not-there, in the tempo. I would search for them in the melody, in the understood melody, and where the melody could have gone but is not going, for instance, or how it could have turned and is not turning. I would focus on the perception of the interpreted language, rather than on the one of the simply auditorily (or visually for the sentences') accessible language, if it makes sense. I would focus on the qualities of the melody and what is not there, rather than on the quantity of the tempo and what is not there.


I never meant that your examples were ‘dirty’ or ‘quick’. I only meant that, because they have this specific ambivalence of being language-based, there are two possible sorts of things-that-are not-there in your examples. One is the voids that lie before the disjunction, and the other is the voids lying after it. You are pointing to the former ones, as if they could give insights into the higher ideas that organize the meaning of the decoded language. And I am still caught in the thought that in order to penetrate that portion of the spiritual landscape, those higher orders, it is necessary to have first decoded the language and to look at what is not there in the interpreted, understood language, after the junction. I hope I have better than before illustrated how my thinking goes, I am not sure…


‘Bicker’ was a new word for me. ’Nastily argue’, as reported. My tone wants to be direct and playful. There is no sprinkle of nastiness in my intention, quite the opposite, and I am distressed that my tone sounds to you ‘nastily arguing’. I am sorry for that. It would be unrealistic for me to imagine I can change it substantially, but I will, if the situation arises, apply myself to remain more restrained.

[AshvinP]

‘Bicker’ was a new word for me. ’Nastily argue’, as reported. My tone wants to be direct and playful. There is no sprinkle of nastiness in my intention, quite the opposite, and I am distressed that my tone sounds to you ‘nastily arguing’. I am sorry for that. It would be unrealistic for me to imagine I can change it substantially, but I will, if the situation arises, apply myself to remain more restrained.

Federica,

You are putting too much stock in the words I am choosing to characterize the situation. Don't worry about your 'tone' with me - if someone is dialoguing about these spiritual issues in good faith, i.e. attempting to reach a shared understanding of them, then I am always encouraged and will not taking anything written personally. Most people won't give these things the time of day or, if they do, only for the purpose of obscuring the issues in bad faith, whether consciously or subconsciously. I know that is 100% not the case with any of your comments.

I know, usually I am pretty careful with my words, but not always. I just meant with 'bickering', there is no point debating the use of the example in one of my old essays if we fundamentally agree on the underlying principle at work, and we also know why the principle is valid. It seems to me we are pretty close to such a shared understanding of the 'liminal spaces'. A couple points:

1) The examples clearly won't work for everybody - a person who doesn't understand English to begin with won't get anything from the sentences example, except the dim 'aesthetic' variation you mentioned. But I don't see this as really having any relevance to the underlying principle at work. Blind people won't get anything from anything that is written down (unless it is read to them), but that doesn't mean there is no principle science to the underlying dynamics of writing.

2) Let's say I put the 'tracks' example in the essay (which is actually from Steiner) and nothing else - that wouldn't be a phenomenology, only a metaphor. The former should also include something which gets the reader to interact with perceptions from their first-person experience, either as actual perceptions (like sentences and music clips) or thought-experiments, which then leads their thinking to the underlying principle which the metaphor is also illustrating. So, on that note, I want to ask - what example would you have used if you were writing it, if not language or music? Perhaps you were already answering that here:

And I don’t mean that there is no possibility, in these examples, to connect what-does-not-happen to liminal spaces. I am only saying that the cues to that connection are not nested in the spatial or temporal spaces of the language appearance. For example in the case of music samples, I am not saying that there’s nothing to gather from the perception, and from what lacks in it, in terms of recognizing liminal spaces and penetrating the higher worlds. I am only saying that I would not search for these voids, or openings, or things-that-are-not-there, in the tempo. I would search for them in the melody, in the understood melody, and where the melody could have gone but is not going, for instance, or how it could have turned and is not turning. I would focus on the perception of the interpreted language, rather than on the one of the simply auditorily (or visually for the sentences') accessible language, if it makes sense. I would focus on the qualities of the melody and what is not there, rather than on the quantity of the tempo and what is not there.

The purpose of this phenomenology was to show, at the most basic level, what we do with our cognitive activity to get meaning from perceptions (and that our cognitive activity is actually involved). I also wanted to show with the quotes how earlier thinkers had reasoned out to the same conclusions about perceptions as negative images of meaning. The quantities and the melodies are the perceptions. It sounds like you prefer to focus directly on the meaning itself, and I am not sure how that would deepen a 'beginner's' understanding of how their own cognitive activity mines the meaning from perceptions. Now if we have already moved on to post-PoF inquiries, as you are at least very close to, then the liminal spaces of qualities (meaning) takes us even further into the realm of exploring higher cognition with our concepts. That's when we get to searching for meaning where the melody could have gone but is not going. Surely you see why that is a much more advanced discussion? It's not going to be one that is easy to follow. This is why I started to feel your criticism had a lot to do with you already progressing past the point where my essay would seem very useful for deepening your own understanding of these dynamics.

But, where we may still disagree, is whether the principle at work is the same for all liminal spaces, including those between words in a sentence and the beats of a song. That is how we characterize the tempo of a song, after all - based on the temporal intervals between the beat-perceptions. I have to reiterate here that there is a deep spiritual science behind why these 'spaces' are important in relation to our own spiritual activity. There is nothing arbitrary about these spaces and there are no spaces which are unimportant. They all simply reflect what is still subconscious in the World Process (WP) for us - the ideal, logical forces which weave together the perceptions. When we become inwardly conscious of them, they are no longer spaces but new perceptions within the WP (but at a higher spiritualized level). Then we move on to the liminal spaces between these new perceptions. What we can't do is simply extrapolate the method of searching within our normal waking spaces to that of all the higher-order spaces - later evolved modes of cognition cannot be derived mechanically from the earlier ones in any linear way. Yet the archetypal principles at work remain the same.

[Federica]

...

Let's say I put the 'tracks' example in the essay (which is actually from Steiner) and nothing else - that wouldn't be a phenomenology, only a metaphor. The former should also include something which gets the reader to interact with perceptions from their first-person experience, either as actual perceptions (like sentences and music clips) or thought-experiments, which then leads their thinking to the underlying principle which the metaphor is also illustrating. So, on that note, I want to ask - what example would you have used if you were writing it, if not language or music?

The example is from Steiner not yours?! : ) That was subtle, I’m glad I ‘passed the test’ : )
I think the ‘tracks’ example alone would have worked well in the essay for the purpose of exemplifying the liminal spaces of perception. But your goal was to ultimately draw some conclusions about mechanism, and the tracks would not support that purpose. In my opinion the tracks would work equally well for the purpose of exemplifying a phenomenology of the liminal spaces of perception. To make the essay about penomeno-logy it’s enough that you offer the logic of the phenomenon. Then readers can always put on their boots if they want, go outside, leave tracks in the mud and perceive them, if they want to experience the phenomenon directly, once they know its phenomeno-logy. The suffix -logy inserts a thinking articulation between the bare phenomenon and the perception you want to offer, so that you are not bound to offer the perception of the phenomenon itself as a direct experience immediately accessible within the essay, but only the logic of its perception, which is its phenomenology.


What other example I would have used: I don’t think I am entitled to seriously answer this question. Commenting on what’s already there as I did is obviously way easier and different than producing standalone conclusive content. This being said, taking the question as an exercise, what comes to mind is the perception of the-things-that-are-not-there that we so commonly intuit in between someone else’s thoughts. We have a perception of someone else’s expressed train of thoughts and from that emerges in our conception a sense that something can be read between those lines. This could probably work as a thought experiment and those spaces would be of the non-typographic sort, found within the interpreted language. This phenomenon happens very commonly, here are two recent examples from this conversation: “I sense that perhaps you feel that I keep externalizing the blame for…” and: “What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples…”

I would say it's not relevant whether or not the inference is confirmed within the perspective of the other person. What could be a liminal creation in this act is that by leveraging the percept, which not only encompasses thoughts, but also feeling and memory, we create, or co-create, or discover a new coherent idea. In retrospective, this opening on feeling makes sense to me, with reference to both the connection you made on the whirlpool side between liminal spaces and the things that are not manifesting, and the related Steiner lecture (that I have now read in full and grasped a little better) where the other world where the dead live, explorable through liminal creation, is also the world where feeling is consciously grounded.

When it comes to music, it should be equally possible to enter its melodic and lyrical meaning hence its spaces, but I admit that finding a specific example of search for liminal spaces within the perception of the interpreted musical language is easier said than done, because the qualitative focus makes it all more elusive, connected to feelings, personal. I have made a ‘quick and dirty’ attempt with the song you have shared on the other thread. By the way thank you for sharing it, I enjoy the song very much, wondering how I never heard before of this apparently popular band. What the song has inspired me in this case is a graphic transposition. All in all, very doubtful that there’s anything remotely liminal in there, let alone usable and convincing in an essay : )

The purpose of this phenomenology was to show, at the most basic level, what we do with our cognitive activity to get meaning from perceptions (and that our cognitive activity is actually involved). I also wanted to show with the quotes how earlier thinkers had reasoned out to the same conclusions about perceptions as negative images of meaning. The quantities and the melodies are the perceptions. It sounds like you prefer to focus directly on the meaning itself, and I am not sure how that would deepen a 'beginner's' understanding of how their own cognitive activity mines the meaning from perceptions. Now if we have already moved on to post-PoF inquiries, as you are at least very close to, then the liminal spaces of qualities (meaning) takes us even further into the realm of exploring higher cognition with our concepts. That's when we get to searching for meaning where the melody could have gone but is not going. Surely you see why that is a much more advanced discussion? It's not going to be one that is easy to follow. This is why I started to feel your criticism had a lot to do with you already progressing past the point where my essay would seem very useful for deepening your own understanding of these dynamics.

Ok, I had not realized this beginner’s focus of the essay. Which in all logic seems to point to only one conclusion : )

But, where we may still disagree, is whether the principle at work is the same for all liminal spaces, including those between words in a sentence and the beats of a song. That is how we characterize the tempo of a song, after all - based on the temporal intervals between the beat-perceptions. I have to reiterate here that there is a deep spiritual science behind why these 'spaces' are important in relation to our own spiritual activity. There is nothing arbitrary about these spaces and there are no spaces which are unimportant. They all simply reflect what is still subconscious in the World Process (WP) for us - the ideal, logical forces which weave together the perceptions. When we become inwardly conscious of them, they are no longer spaces but new perceptions within the WP (but at a higher spiritualized level). Then we move on to the liminal spaces between these new perceptions. What we can't do is simply extrapolate the method of searching within our normal waking spaces to that of all the higher-order spaces - later evolved modes of cognition cannot be derived mechanically from the earlier ones in any linear way. Yet the archetypal principles at work remain the same.

I’ll put it this way: I understand that what you describe here can be understood. By the way I have to admit that the active search for meaning in a complete song made it evident to me that the separation between tempo and melody is in reality softer than I thought, as it’s also intertwined with lyrics along the whole song.