Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[Federica]

Thank you so much, Ashvin and Cleric, for the wealth of insights and help in this thread. I just want to say that if I am slower with comments it's not that I'm less engaged. It's only because of external circumstances. I do count on reading, reflecting, meditating and replying to everything you wrote as soon as I can!

[Federica]

Thank you so much, Ashvin and Cleric, for the wealth of insights and help in this thread. I just want to say that if I am slower with comments it's not that I'm less engaged. It's only because of external circumstances. I do count on reading, reflecting, meditating and replying to everything you wrote as soon as I can!

…although I would agree that in a sense no circumstances are external...
Anyway, here I come with a few comments, after pondering some more the post on the slower and faster rhythms. Hopefully the comments will be good examples of typical ways any upcoming essay could be (mis)understood. I can say that, after some more effort, the illustrations no longer feel as separate as they did when I wrote my previous note. I have made slight progress. For example it has occurred to me now that the picture with the round-shaped fractal and the superposed triangle fractal is an alternative visualization of the Deep M@L sphere. This being said, if I had to put my ‘discomfort’ in a metaphor, I’d say, grasping this post is as if I was asked to hold ten apples in the palm of one hand. I would have to grow much longer fingers before I can do it, which I can somehow picture in my mind’s eye, but first person experience is a different thing


In other words, while I can more or less follow the steps, I have greater difficulties at the junctions between steps, and the main struggle is to holistically hold the one big picture. Another issue I recognize (it probably prompted my first reaction) is implicit resistance. The descriptions are so realistic, they stick to the first person so well, that a readiness is required, a real one, to let go of everything that we normally think of as I. Even thinking itself has to be given up! This I had not realized before. Perceptions, desires… ok… feelings and viewpoints… it's tougher but... ok, one can see why they have to be sacrificed. But that one has to relinquish thinking itself! This is practically inimaginable and I recognize I am not done with accepting such new version of I, there is an uncompleted grieving process there. I know that, with more understanding, less grieving will be necessary, but for now this is a stumbling block. It sounds like such a sad perspective. Of course I also know there will not be feelings available anyway, but never mind, for now, I am sad. I imagine from a higher viewpoint this may resonate as disrespectful. In my defense, I do realize my unevolved perspective is the only cause of the feeling.
More specifically, here come some examples of moments I haven’t clearly understood along the post:

if we have worked to unite with the “I am” impulse

It sounds already like a stupid question, but I have to ask: what is the “I am” impulse? Otherwise I am following. One needs to picture a state where all the familiar layers of self are stripped, including thought-images, and the sense of self only persists in that intention of moving along the intuitive process. Then, Imaginative cognition is given as an intermediary stage to Intuitive cognition. Here, with the mathematical example of a triangle as frozen intuition, I get confused.

The difference is that we’re expressing intuition that is frozen. It is as a fixed standing wave in an ideal world. Mathematical intuition is timeless.

Doesn’t that mean that the frozen intuition of a triangle is the same as the concept triangle? Are all concepts not frozen intuitions in that sense? Beyond that, I can't grasp why the frozen/timeless nature of an intuition leaves us alone in our imaginative apprehension of it. Don’t we still need time to apprehend it, as we need time to count from 1 to 3?

when we move through mathematical ideas we simply experience their timeless relations in the meaning of our thoughts

I get that, but that move we take in the frozen kingdom, along the mathematical relations seems to be a serializing? We are deciding to navigate along the relational path (willful becoming), so why can we not conceive of other spiritual beings’ apprehension of that intuitive flow to become manifest to us in that process?

So when we think ‘triangle’, this is normally convoluted in several layers of inner life – the perception, the image, the thinking gesture – yet our sense of being is actually identical with the intuition of a triangle that we currently think.

This I understand. As I recall from Knowledge of the higher worlds, Steiner makes clear that in the spiritual world there cannot be distinction between inner and outer anymore. Hence I understand that the sense of self has to be anchored to something, and what else if not to Ideas/Intuitions. By logic I understand it, but of course not as an experience, which also makes me wonder: how does the sense of self identical to an intuition relate to the consciousness of willful becoming through time? It seems like they should be the same? Maybe it is so that our spiritual being lives entirely in and through sequences of ‘full scale’ intuitions to which the I adjusts, timeless in themselves, but connected in sequence through our intention to create/explore the sequence? Of these metamorphoses it is also said that they are lawful. Can they be lawful and willful? And where does the famous individual perspective come in?


To this point it’s not too bad. I have doubts, but overall I am following. Then, at the point of the clock animation, things get harder. One pendulum arm of incomprehension is added so to speak And the less I understand, the more I feel a resistance growing, including to that particular clock animation that should picture eternity, but feels oppressing to me (I know this is precisely what one needs to become free from). I don’t want to give way to the resistance, but it’s there, and it tells me: How can spirit equal mathematics - at the beginning it is spoken of a mathematical example, but now the example has taken all the place? How is this all account reflected in the spiritual journey as outlined in Knowledge of the higher worlds? I hope I am not romanticizing Steiner’s account of the higher worlds (though I probably do), but this one reads different. I follow the integration of moments of existence as memory, giving continuity, hence sense of self, to the experiencer, but then what does willful becoming mean in a world of lawful metamorphosis through self-similar states? Not only self-similar, but in fact indistinguishable from each other? Is it that the metamorphosis is not a sequence from one intuition to the next, but an expansion, aiming at holding all intuitions at once? In which case, I understand the indistinguishable moments of existence. But how are time, space, and self altogether preserved in such a stretch? Then I read: “These moments of existence (not necessarily only past) that we feel to have integrated within our present, are what archetypally corresponds to….” …time, right? No, it’s space… and on, and on.


I notice that everything is wisely and carefully explained, still the junctions often remain opaque to my understanding. I lose track of the willful becoming more than once along the way. Same for the pulsating spiritual life: sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s frozen, but the mechanisms escape me. Time as a landscape (and its spiraling with the space-like states) also escapes me. Which I really regret, because I do notice how finely and uniquely it is described. But it remains abstract. Another difficult junction is the evolutionary one. It feels vertiginous. It becomes too much way before the fourth eon is reached. And abstract. How does reincarnation and the dead fit across the eons? How are the dead evolving in the intuitive space, at their various levels of awareness?


In all these ways, the complete meaning of this post feels overwhelming to me. I do see that everything is contained in it, in essence, I realize how invaluable this is, and I am glad Ashvin can fully benefit from it. But in my case the big picture remains too big to be grasped holistically.

[Anthony66]

To this point it’s not too bad. I have doubts, but overall I am following. Then, at the point of the clock animation, things get harder.

That is my experience exactly! Things really head south for me with the introduction of self-similar intuitive states. Surely this is an artifact of the spiraling clock illustration rather than of reality itself. This concept has been traversed a number of times on this forum and for the life of me, I can't get any form of foothold onto it. The encouragement to focus on the first person perspective sounds like an encouragement to enter a never-ending Groundhog Day. Are we never going anywhere as we integrate more and more intuitive states? Have we already reached an asymptotic terminus where there is no more novel integration to be done?

[AshvinP]

In other words, while I can more or less follow the steps, I have greater difficulties at the junctions between steps, and the main struggle is to holistically hold the one big picture. Another issue I recognize (it probably prompted my first reaction) is implicit resistance. The descriptions are so realistic, they stick to the first person so well, that a readiness is required, a real one, to let go of everything that we normally think of as I. Even thinking itself has to be given up! This I had not realized before. Perceptions, desires… ok… feelings and viewpoints… it's tougher but... ok, one can see why they have to be sacrificed. But that one has to relinquish thinking itself! This is practically inimaginable and I recognize I am not done with accepting such new version of I, there is an uncompleted grieving process there. I know that, with more understanding, less grieving will be necessary, but for now this is a stumbling block. It sounds like such a sad perspective. Of course I also know there will not be feelings available anyway, but never mind, for now, I am sad. I imagine from a higher viewpoint this may resonate as disrespectful. In my defense, I do realize my unevolved perspective is the only cause of the feeling.

Federica,

Just to briefly comment on this, I wouldn't say its disrespectful at all. It shows you are really grasping what's at stake here. What you wrote basically sums up the essence of all obstacles we will meet when entering on the path of growing our intimate spiritual activity, in the spheres of purifying our willing and vitalizing our thinking. People may not feel that inner sacrifice is comparable to outer sacrifices, like that of risking one's life, but it can certainly become just as intense and intensely resisted. I imagine many Christian martyrs would have said that the inner sacrifice of the lower self was the real hardship, but once attained, was so powerfully transformative as to easily motivate the outer sacrifice of their lives for the faith. As Cleric reminded before, it is really the prayerful disposition in heart and mind that summons the enthusiasm and courage for us to overcome our own resistance.

"Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."

[Federica]

Federica, Ashvin, thank you for your feedback. I'm really probing the ground. I'm still working on the series of essays and I was thinking about a chapter that goes more deeply in the four-fold convolution but it seems that it is very difficult to make this sound reasonable in few paragraphs. There are so many things that have to be taken into account if we're to triangulate the right cognitive perspective from which it all makes sense. I was going to write some more things but I'll save it for now. Maybe just one:

When Federica gave the example with transformation in space and the airplane, I thought about what I wrote: that what is space-like is really intuitively encompassed time. I guess this sounds utterly abstract. After all, our understanding of space couldn't be more orthogonal to that of time. Yet it is possible to bring them closer together.

Federica, it might to of interest to you to check out also this older post: viewtopic.php?t=795 which is similar to what I'll write here.

We need a more living experience for what space is - not as some abstract idea in itself but for what it is to our spiritual activity. We don't pay much attention to such things but space is meaningful to us because we have the intuition about the ways we can employ our will against perceptions. For example, as we sit now, we can try to touch everything with our imaginary hands. All the objects on the table, the furniture, the walls and so on. We can also imagine that we move to any point in the room and look in some other direction. We have intuition for the way our perceptions will transform. The more we do such experiments, the more we feel as if we superimpose all these imagined gestures and we get a kind of intuitive totality of the possible degrees of freedom. Every imagined touch, every imagined vantage point, are potential moments of existence that normally have to be experienced sequentially through time. When we see things in this way, it becomes more comprehensible that our understanding of space is really the holistic intuition of the degrees of freedom of our will-imagination. Without such intuition our changing perceptions would be like what destiny is for man of today: perceptions of places, people, objects, events, with all the associated concepts and feelings, metamorphose in our soul life but we have quite limited intuition about these transformations, except for the more elementary things like day and night, seasons and so on.

So the key is to avoid thinking about space as an abstract framework within which our existence is placed but to take all perceptions as the mysterious constraints against which we feel the palette of potential moments of existence. This is the important thing: the sense of space doesn't come from the perceptions themselves but as the growing holistic intuition of how our spiritual activity can utilize its degrees of freedom, such that the changes in perceptions make sense.

The same holds true also when we grow into Imaginative cognition. Instead of living in a semi-random flow of thoughts, we begin to sense the possible moments of existence that extend the intuition of space in new ways. For example, we know that when we see someone walking with their gaze down in the ground, they are most probably burdened by something. They are moving through sticky regions of their thoughts and feelings - the rent, the job, the inflation and so on. The spirit looks down on its Earthly existence, it sees through its bodily suit and its complicated relations with the environment. When we begin to gain intuition of the extended space, we begin to sense these domains of spiritual activity within ourselves. It might not be strictly correlated with our head position (although in many cases it is) but we begin to distinguish the different qualities of our soul life in one case and another. Then we begin to feel how these different qualities are like domains of our soul life. In time we begin to feel intuitive orientation within these domains, just like we feel orientation in our room. Then changing our mood or the area of thought, becomes similar to employing higher degrees of freedom to modulate the constellation of our soul organs. We don't have total control over these constellations because they are indeed connected with macrocosmic rotations of time, yet it is always possible to utilize them in a better way.

Here I remind that prayer is the universal tool through which we can seek these harmonious configurations. Even if we have grasped the intuition of this inner space in meditation, it will still be the case that in our daily life we're much dissipated in the slots of our suit. But we can always hold an ideal in our heart and mind. Even few simple thoughts like "Lord, be with me in every step. Inspire my thoughts with the luminous ideas that can lead me to the green pastures and still waters. Fill my heart with the warmth of your Love. Empower my will with your strength." can be tremendously effective. In time our faith is strengthened that there's always a potential way to employ our spiritual activity in the most beneficial way for all, even if we don't immediately see that way as part of our familiar palette. It's all a matter of rising our ideal and always seeking that potential, to breathe it in and manifest it.

Thank you for your patience, Cleric, this is all very helpful!

In particular, that we have to stop seeing space within the perceptual sphere, objectified. Before, I used to reason: “My first person perspective of space, as I apprehend it in the world out there”, not in the inner world, because I thought that space anyway pertains more than anything else to the perceptual sphere. From the times I first read about “space as intellectualized time”, etc. I had the implicit understanding that space is what’s wrong with the veil, space is the diversion of Maya, it’s what we need to see through, while time is 'the real thing’, the real mystery. Now I see how such a view only can come from a wobbly perspective, well stuck in the perceptual experience, and not sufficiently grounded in the first person inner (all throughout inner) experience. I also see the growing degrees of freedom this experience of spatial imagination gives access to.


And for the prayer also, thank you. Now I have reached a point where I do appreciate how helpful it is, on all planes. Not that I didn’t already know its power. In fact, I believe I owe the incredible opportunities made available to me, entirely to the wishes, thoughts, or prayers, could I say, I sent to the universe in the past (although, while I was having them, they didn’t occur to me in that guise of prayer I’ve never been familiar with). Thinking back, it feels now like a little miracle… Today when things are getting harder, I see that prayer can’t consist of spontaneous, extempore outpours from the heart, anymore. Rather, it’s needed as a joint movement of the head, the heart, the whole of the self...


Thank you Ashvin, as well. Your comments and generous attempts to unpack things in so many ways are all encouraging!

[Federica]

I wanted to mention that one reason I get immense value from Cleric's illustrative posts here is because they bring a new life to that which I come across conceptually in other texts, including many on Steiner's archive. Below I am presenting excerpts from a chapter of Scaligero's book on the nature of space and time. Previously I felt the book to be extremely abstract and hard to penetrate, but now it has become more clear that the abstractness of it all resided in my inability to situate the thought-progression within my own first-person intuitive experience. That's is what Cleric's posts have assisted with beyond measure. The excerpts below are not exact correspondences to the content, and of course are not as illustrative and detailed as the post, but overall I think they track pretty well (and there is much more content in the full book). Hopefully this more philosophical-conceptual angle from Scaligero will also help situate and illuminate some of that post for others who may have had difficulty following its progression.

Ashvin,

I'm really impressed that you put together such an original exercise, thank you! To this point, it's working for me only in a limited way, because I lack the necessary agility to be able to benefit from switching from one voice, to another, and another, in search of correspondences. Not only the agility, my foundation is not solid yet, and I think this is more of a consolidation type of exercise, that will come in handy as I make myself more established in the space-time dynamics and hopefully extend my current sense-making time spans. There is some small progress, but I am still at the stage where I am banging my head against the paragraphs, trying to make them fit. So I'll stick to Steiner, Cleric's posts and yours on the topic for the time being, hoping I'll soon be able to afford the counterevidence approach you suggest here, which I like a lot by the way.


The other day I dreamt that a luminous idea had come to me. Thanks to the idea, time was finally falling into place (good wording, right?) I only remember that it involved a semicircular cross-section in an inclined or undulated plane
The idea evaporated away before I could collect it and pin it down, which didn't even upset me in the dream. I know in reality there's nothing to pin down, but it's just to say that I am really absorbed in the question and I feel I have enough patience to keep working on it as much as necessary. I am confident the sure way is, as you describe, to inhabit as directly as possible the metamorphoses of moments as illustrated in this thread. As you say, there's new life brought by Cleric's take on processes already known conceptually, from Steiner and others, I see that. The landscape is redrawn and highlighted in a more realistic way. I noticed that when trying to fall back to Knowledge of the higher worlds, from the time-rhythms post, even amidst doubts and resistance. And I am glad to notice that it's active material in literal sense. I feel that my comment from yesterday would be different, if I had to write it again now.

[AshvinP]

I wanted to mention that one reason I get immense value from Cleric's illustrative posts here is because they bring a new life to that which I come across conceptually in other texts, including many on Steiner's archive. Below I am presenting excerpts from a chapter of Scaligero's book on the nature of space and time. Previously I felt the book to be extremely abstract and hard to penetrate, but now it has become more clear that the abstractness of it all resided in my inability to situate the thought-progression within my own first-person intuitive experience. That's is what Cleric's posts have assisted with beyond measure. The excerpts below are not exact correspondences to the content, and of course are not as illustrative and detailed as the post, but overall I think they track pretty well (and there is much more content in the full book). Hopefully this more philosophical-conceptual angle from Scaligero will also help situate and illuminate some of that post for others who may have had difficulty following its progression.

Ashvin,

I'm really impressed that you put together such an original exercise, thank you! To this point, it's working for me only in a limited way, because I lack the necessary agility to be able to benefit from switching from one voice, to another, and another, in search of correspondences. Not only the agility, my foundation is not solid yet, and I think this is more of a consolidation type of exercise, that will come in handy as I make myself more established in the space-time dynamics and hopefully extend my current sense-making time spans. There is some small progress, but I am still at the stage where I am banging my head against the paragraphs, trying to make them fit. So I'll stick to Steiner, Cleric's posts and yours on the topic for the time being, hoping I'll soon be able to afford the counterevidence approach you suggest here, which I like a lot by the way.


The other day I dreamt that a luminous idea had come to me. Thanks to the idea, time was finally falling into place (good wording, right?) I only remember that it involved a semicircular cross-section in an inclined or undulated plane
The idea evaporated away before I could collect it and pin it down, which didn't even upset me in the dream. I know in reality there's nothing to pin down, but it's just to say that I am really absorbed in the question and I feel I have enough patience to keep working on it as much as necessary. I am confident the sure way is, as you describe, to inhabit as directly as possible the metamorphoses of moments as illustrated in this thread. As you say, there's new life brought by Cleric's take on processes already known conceptually, from Steiner and others, I see that. The landscape is redrawn and highlighted in a more realistic way. I noticed that when trying to fall back to Knowledge of the higher worlds, from the time-rhythms post, even amidst doubts and resistance. And I am glad to notice that it's active material in literal sense. I feel that my comment from yesterday would be different, if I had to write it again now.

That's great that the sustained efforts are paying off, Federica.

I also think it might be helpful to lower our expectations in terms of first-person experience of these higher space-time dynamics. To a certain extent, these things will remain quite dim as first-person thinking experience until we have intellectually circumambulated the foundational principles at work. That goes to the point which Cleric often makes, that 'seeing' (in either spiritual or physical sense) is not only perceiving shapes, colors, images, etc., but having the background intuition which makes it into holistic understanding. We can work on that intuitive background by learning the foundational principles at work in the science of the body-soul-spirit. For ex., we could read the following from Steiner and see how it associates with the delaminations/convolutions which Cleric illustrated. The 1st Kingdom associated with the 1st convolution experienced through Intuition, 2nd is 2nd experienced through Inspiration, 3rd through Imagination, and 4th is normal waking consciousness for man today. All of these are pure intuitions which have decohered through the convolutions, allowing for the pure Subject to objectify its intuitional environment in a space-like manner and thereby attain new forms of spiritual activity and degrees of freedom for the spiritual activity of individuated beings, who work from within the constraints back towards more holistic intuitive constellations.

If we consider in the mineral kingdom any kind of stone — what we see there is a space with definite boundaries, a definite form. Of the mineral kingdom as such we see absolutely nothing, but we see only the reflected light. The rays of the sun are reflected in a certain form. If we strike a bell we hear a sound: an effect of a bell goes into our ear. All that we perceive in the world as mineral kingdom is a whole compressed together to a spatial form. If one takes away the colour of an object, the sound, the taste, nothing remains. It is due to the mineral kingdom that light and sound appear through such forms. Let us think of a world in which only the qualities of perception stream through space and are not perceived in connection with definite forms. Let us think of coloured clouds floating through the world, sounds resounding through the world, all our sense impressions filling space without being bound to a form; then we have the Third Elemental Kingdom. These are the elements light and fire, permeating space. Man himself in the Astral Kingdom is a coloured cloud.

We will now take a further step forward. When we see a thought form, it is such a coloured cloud, a movement vibrating in itself. If one wishes to conjure up a thought, one must draw the figure in question into astral space. On this depends the conjurings of magicians. They draw the forms into space and then surround them with astral substance. They direct astral substance along these figures. The Third Elemental Kingdom is not arbitrary, but a flying hither and thither in interpenetrating lines: everything expressing beautiful forms having the power of light within themselves. They are like bodies of light flying hither and thither in space, shining from within.

The tones that resound through space are ordered according to numbers. What one must specially bear in mind is that from the outset things stand in a definite relationship to one another. One figure could work upon another in such a way that it did no harm, or so that it was utterly destroyed. This was called the measure of things. Everything was ordered according to measure, number, form. It is possible to think away the qualities induced by the senses and the world filled with such thought-figures. This would then be the Second Elementary Kingdom which underlies the Third. Here we only have forms woven by thoughts, the World-Ether-Thoughts.

The first Elementary Kingdom is difficult to describe. Let us assume for example that we conceive the thought of such a figure as a spiral, then the thought of a lemniscate. We now transfer ourselves into the intention before the form has actually arisen, thus first into the intention of a spiral and then into the intention of a lemniscate. One imagines a world filled with such thought-seeds. This formless world is the First Elementary Kingdom.

The Fourth Elementary Kingdom is the mineral kingdom which reflects what it receives from outside. The plant kingdom not only reflects sense-qualities, but these reflections are inwardly endowed with life. The Second Elementary Kingdom is the formative element of the Third Elementary Kingdom. The mineral kingdom is condensed out of qualities belonging to the Third Elementary Kingdom. The plant reflects the form of the Second Elementary Kingdom and thus develops the form out of itself. The animal kingdom also reflects the intentions which lie in the First Elementary Kingdom.

Now the risk is always that we imagine this as abstract externalized planes of activity which little relation to what we are experiencing right now in our thinking-perception movements, and then it inevitably becomes a jumbled mess of exotic terminology that, even if we feel to have penetrated it with insight for a little while, we forget it a few days or a few hours later. So that is where Cleric's posts have been immensely helpful for me. They help illustrate how all these kingdoms are still present in our current experience, playing into all our acts of cognition-perception. We start to see how we can only make sense of why we need to cognize and perceive the world the way we do, in rigid spatio-temporal movements which we must endure to accomplish our intuitive intents (like in the ex. that we can only get from "2" to "7" by going up 3 and down 2), if these convolutions are present and conditioning the depth structure of our psycho-physical organization (ego, astral, etheric, physical).

If we can internalize some of these principles through our continued studies, then the first-person orientation is sure to follow as we continue to prayerfully pursue the path of self-knowledge. To be clear, when I first read Cleric's latest post, I was also pretty lost for a while. It only began to click together when I could somewhat lucidly relate what was being illustrated to the overall spiritual evolutionary principles at work, which unfold at all self-similar scales of the temporal depth structure (humanity as a whole, specific epochs of human culture, individual lifetimes, annual/seasonal/daily progressions of our soul life). At the daily level, these nested kingdoms are still present in our experience of comatose deep sleep, dreaming, and waking which are simply ways of characterizing our consciousness with respect to the depths of our willing, feeling, and thinking activity. That also relates to the spiraling clock image. Consider the following:

Today we shall speak about the Fourth Earth Round. In the course of our whole evolution we have seven Planetary conditions: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan; and in connection with each Planet we must consider seven Rounds. The passing through a Round may also be called a Kingdom, and the Fourth Round on the Earth we call the Mineral Kingdom. We are now on the Fourth Planet, in the Fourth Round and within this Round in the Fourth Condition of Form or Globe. The Fourth Round is always physical.

Thus we stand exactly in the middle of our Earthly evolution. This is frequently felt to be something extraordinarily important for man. We have behind us three Planets, three Rounds, three Globes and the same number still lie before us. But if we were standing on the Old Moon, we should see yet another Planetary condition before Saturn; if we were standing on future Jupiter we should no longer see Saturn, but in its place a Planet beyond Vulcan.

Of course we don't need to get too obsessed with the names right now or what they mean exactly. It's only to notice that, no matter where we stand in evolutionary development, we feel to be at the Center of the ceaseless rhythms of involution-evolution. We can only speak of a single or absolute Center if we stand aside from the 3rd person view, which of course doesn't exist. So all these conceptual considerations can also complement our attempts to orient something like the spiraling clock image from the first-person intuitive perspective. That process of orienting through rhythmic alternation between the supra-sensory intuitive and the perceptible-conceptual modes of cognition is itself a first-person experience of the Time-rhythmic depth structure which is being illustrated through the posts.

[Cleric K]

Federica, Anthony, thank you for your feedback! Everything I receive is very valuable to me. I don’t have much time right now, I just would like to remind that in the end we’re looking for a deeper cognitive perspective. Our attempt to hold ten apples in our hand is really the intellect’s attempt to build the Cosmos within its arrangement of thoughts. This is not to say that these attempts are wasted. In fact we do need them. But we should also find the proper attitude. We can stretch fingers one by one in different directions. Then we feel frustrated that we can’t grasp all directions simultaneously. But the whole hand is found in a different way, not by mechanically patching together the momentary experiences of the individual stretched fingers. This is an interesting exercise to try out. We can spread our hand and hold visual and kinesthetic focus on the tips of individual fingers. We hold focus for some time and switch to another finger. Now what if we want to feel all fingers simultaneously? If we know nothing else, we may try to switch our focus faster and faster between fingers as if to blur together their sensations. This however doesn’t feel satisfactory. The natural way is to focus and feel our whole hand. Notice that this is not simply the mechanical sum of the sensations of the individual fingers. The feeling of a hand is a unique sensation in itself, yet the kinesthetic feeling of the fingers seem to be embedded in it.

In a similar way, many of the things that we understand in the course of inner development are the result of actual changes in our inner organization. Some descriptions may seem logical but they can’t be grasped as a whole. Blurring them together by thinking them faster and faster in sequence doesn’t help. Our thinking organ has to grow a ‘hand’. Then we say “now I see!”

Now the big question is how do we grow that hand? Obviously, by just keeping counting the fingers, we get nowhere. Here’s where we need the science of thinking and becoming in general. Our culture leads us to a point where we feel more or less complete beings. We accept in humility that we know very little fingers, there are far smarter people who know many more fingers than us, but the idea that we may need to know also a hand simply makes no sense to the average person of our age. This leads us to believe that if we don’t know something, it is enough to perceive the corresponding finger in order to add it to our knowledge.

When things such as the ones we speak of in this forum are presented, people see many fingers but soon become frustrated and say “This is simply a hierarchy of fantasies! There’s nothing holding these fingers together except your fantasy.” And in truth, the hand that unites the fingers can’t be found as some additional perception on top of them. This unity can only grow as a new organ of our thinking organism.

This of course sounds as nothing but the next level of fantasy in the hierarchy. Yet this is so only because we’re searching for that unity on our intellectual plane. The moment we hear ‘organ of our thinking organism’ this immediately becomes the next floating puzzle-piece on our intellectual desktop.

We can only leave this infernal loop if we take seriously that to understand these things, something must be transformed in the way our thinking organ works. And by transformation it is not meant adopting some other axiomatic basis, other ontological primes, some new kind of non-Aristotelian logic and so on. All these things still arrange puzzle-pieces on the intellectual desktop, no matter how ingeniously we recombine them.

Here’s where our present mindset becomes conflicted. We believe that the solution is in front of us, within the puzzle pieces and we simply need more time to experiment with their combinations until we find the one that clicks. To grow the hand, however, we need more of a different kind of time. Here it is really a problem with our present civilization and we’re all affected.

The missing understanding is directly contained in the intuition that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Yet we’re not clear how the whole comes about. In truth, this whole continually incarnates in us. Think about it. Even one minute from now, you’ll be a being that knows a tiny bit more than what you know now – even if this knowledge is merely the fact that you have existed for one more minute. In this sense, our thinking should be seen as a two-fold process. On one hand we exert ourselves to focus on the fingers one by one. Yet no matter how fast we switch, we can’t get a feeling for the hand. So we need the second part – to realize that our thinking of the fingers really prepares the body into which the whole hand can incarnate.

So many mysteries become clear to us if we at least consider that we’re not a static soul sphere that simply accumulates images in its interior. We can instead imagine that our soul is largely outside our consciousness and continually incarnates. In every thought that we think, something of our soul incarnates and precipitates as a thought-image. So our deeper being lives a double life so to speak. On one hand it has a certain higher order structure but on the other it is self-conscious of it only within the unity of the ego. Higher development consists in taking conscious stance within this continual incarnation. We understand that through our thinking, feeling and willing at the surface, we either prepare the soil within which our not yet incarnated being awakens or we obstruct the path. This doesn’t mean that our being doesn’t incarnate, it still does – time flows. But it is as if it enters into a bodily environment with certain amount of alcohol in the bloodstream. Our being tries to act but thinking, feeling and willing swing wildly as a three-arm pendulum. Thus our whole thinking life can be considered as only one half of the work – the preparation of the soil. The wholeness of the hand can only incarnate through the flow of time, as something new, which for the first time awakens within our bodily complex. If we understand this, then a lot of the frustration is eliminated. That frustration comes primarily because we believe that we’re already a complete being and understanding something amounts to contemplating some arrangement of puzzle-pieces on the desktop. I’m serious about this: coming to experience time as the continual incarnation of our being is one of the most transformative experiences that we’re ripe to have in our epoch. I think Ashvin will agree with that.

What happens when our being is fully incarnated? Very simple – we die. Our being fills our bodily complex as water fills a bottle. This water is time and the accumulation is memory. When the bottle is full (or broken) the water overflows into the environment and we experience an overflow of consciousness. Then we begin to grasp also the environment as fabric of the same nature as our memory being. Normally we take our sensory environment for something independent, going forward in time while we only think and worry about it. At the moment of death we see that our environment has been accumulating in the same way that our memory body has. We simply have been too much sucked into the sensory organs to notice that. Then gradually our memory body spreads out and becomes embedded into the memory body of the environment and now we can no longer see our past life as something that can be considered in isolation. Everything begins to emerge in its living connections.

For many people of our age, the being that incarnates is ripe to overflow a little from the slots of our sensory suit. Initially this overflow happens only in the form of thought-images. Even by thinking livingly about what is described here, our flow of time incarnates into thought-forms that don’t fit the ordinary slots, they overflow. If we’re not allowing for this leeway, thoughts incarnate in the sensory slots – they appear like just another sensory perception on the desktop and we ask “The things you speak of don’t make any sense. I arranged the thought-images as you describe, they click together but just sit there as any other metaphysical combination of puzzle-pieces.” Yes, you arranged them but you didn’t allow them to overflow the slots.

The overflow is not a quality of the thought-image itself. It doesn’t make sense to ask: “How do I recognize thought images that overflow from those that don’t?” The difference is not in the image. The overflow is in our thinking activity. It’s not in what the thought-image is but in what we can do with it. We feel this strange wiggle, we begin to jiggle the thought-images, as if gaining unsuspected finer control before they are stamped on the screen.

This is how our being incarnates its fingers. In thinking, our being begins to wiggle its thoughts and says “Yo, I can feel my thinking-fingers now”. From this point onwards it’s all a matter of patience and persistence. If we want our being to incarnate its whole hand, it is up to us to prepare the soil. We continue to exercise the wiggles of the fingers, even if we get frustrated that we can’t build the hand out of the fingers, no matter how fast we switch focus between them. We have to wait for time to enter and incarnate the hand. We wait as we wait for our beloved one at the train station. We have prepared the room, cooked dinner, lit the candles and now we’re waiting for the embrace. This is what happens in every instance of our life. Every thought is an embrace that we meet at the train station called ‘now’. Sending the Love letters to negotiate the arrival is prayer.

Now people may say “But this is nonsense! It flies in the face of non-dualism! We lose our oneness, split and fantasize some other being that incarnates in us – that’s dualism!” If one calls living in a single frame of existence, oneness – then OK. Because this is what modern non-dualism leads to. Time, as we speak of it, not as an abstract philosophical concept but as the living flow of being, simply doesn’t exist there.

When the hand incarnates, then will the elbow, the shoulder, the head and then the whole being. This corresponds to the loosening of the whole life body, which provides the leeway in which our higher being can overflow and gain self-consciousness. Now we already begin to bridge the worlds. We have overflown something which for most people overflows only after death. Now we grasp the accumulation of our incarnating being – our memory body. When we look at a plant we see its temporal existence as a space-picture. The trunk is the past, the growing tips are the now. Our life/memory body feels in a similar way. It can’t be drawn because it is not a sensory impression. It is known by filling it with our fluid imaginative thinking. It feels as a seed that has grown and accumulated layers as tree rings. Now we understand that when we normally try to remember something, we’re really browsing like through a cardfile for the layer we need. When remembering in our ordinary consciousness, we live only in the fingertips that touch the files and grasp from there whatever can fit our present slots. Needless to say, these layers are only metaphors. They are not spatially separated but are like living and interpenetrating snapshots of our inner life, which however, can be grasped as something holistic.

…

I would like to share an exercise that I've been experimenting with lately. It really came as an extension of the clutch disc metaphor.

In engineering, physics and so on, it’s always important to ‘reset the zero’. We have to adjust the origin of the coordinate system, to calibrate the tools and so on. Our inner investigations also benefit from such a reset. It’s always good to have a stable origin of the coordinate system before departing.

The first thing has been mentioned many times. These are the linear springs through which we find our center of imagination, the area in the head. In this way we find the origin in space.

To find the origin in time we have to go in three steps.


1. We take the clock dial of thinking. We begin to rotate left and right. We think about what we did few minutes ago, we think about we’ll be doing few minutes from now. We think about yesterday, about tomorrow, about birth, about death, about the beginning of the world, about its end. We can fly through time effortlessly in thought. As we feel the spring tension to left and right, past and future, we gradually feel the neutral now.
2. We take the dial of feeling. When we turn to the past, in the broadest sense we have positive and negative feelings. We feel nostalgia for what was good or regret for what went bad. For the future we feel either joyful anticipation – the things that we ‘can’t wait’ to come – or anxiety and fear. When we release the tension of the springs to the center, we find gratitude. This may sound strange at first but I hope everything said above gives proper context. We are grateful for the flow of time, for everything that continually incarnates in us and resurrects us to richer life. The dial of feelings is more inert to move.
3. Then we take the dial of bodily will. Here we don’t have much to do because we can’t really will in the future and past. This dial is very heavy. All we need is simply bring to consciousness our present bodily life. I’m not conclusive about this but so far it seems that I can very easily center in the present bodily state if I focus on the sense of weight. Just feel how our body presses against whatever we’re sitting, how our organs themselves press into each other down. It’s very interesting that it’s almost impossible to have memory of weight. If we try to remember that bench press in the fitness, we can see the image, we can feel the exertion but in a certain sense we live as a movie actor that lifts phony weights. In a way we have to pretend in our memory that we’re lifting a heavy weight. We can very easily modify the imagination and lift the weight with one hand, then throw it around, balance it on our finger. The true drag of gravity we feel only in the present. Other senses seem to me more similar to the corresponding memory images. So an easy way to find the origin of our bodily will is to simply feel our weight and how with our will we have to overcome it.


Once we have found the spatial center and the three temporal centers, we try to put them on the same axis passing through the center of space and try to keep things stable while time flows. The dials have their natural rotations in time and they spin with different ratios but we have to bring them to a musical chord. Most of the time they rotate wildly in all directions. These rotations are connected in mysterious ways, just like the three arrows of a clock are related through the gears. We swing one disc, all others move in unintended directions, we try to correct them, the first moves again and so on. It’s a wild three-arm pendulum and that’s how, alas, the inner life of modern man looks like.

This exercise is not the end, it is only the beginning. When we have the origin and can sustain centered space and musical rotation of time, we begin to grasp much more clearly the incarnating flow of our being. We begin to sense peripheral discs of time that we haven’t suspected could exist.

Here’s an image I’ve just found. I haven’t investigated it in depth but in a general sense I think it fits our topic. A spiral of this kind becomes a real Imaginative experience. We can indeed feel our central seed around which time has inflown. We can also feel that which is yet to flow and grow in our thinking and for which we prepare the soil.

[AshvinP]

Thanks, Cleric, I am looking forward to trying this latest exercise! I really like the image as well.

I’m serious about this: coming to experience time as the continual incarnation of our being is one of the most transformative experiences that we’re ripe to have in our epoch. I think Ashvin will agree with that.

Yes, and I find it helpful to flesh out that all we normally think of occurring 'within time' is the same principle of our T-F-W activity incarnating, dying, and reincarnating within the constraints of our intellectual life, our feeling-desire life, and our bodily life. A touchstone of spiritual science is the observation that our astral-ego complex attenuates from our physical-etheric bodies and then reincarnates within those bodies in a certain rhythmic alternation, which we then call falling asleep and waking up. Of course these are major temporal demarcations of our daily experience. Surely this will sound really abstract to someone who first approaches the observation, perhaps like a complete intellectual fantasy that sounds nice and interesting, but was constructed to fit some overarching spiritual theory. So this is a good example where a living experiential orientation can bring new life into what will normally remain as abstract fingers which we try to combine into a hand.

Similarly we can observe that, at a higher integrated level of consciousness (in which ours is nested), the Spirit of the Sun incarnates into and departs from its Earth body in a certain rhythmic cycle, which we know as Fall-Winter and Spring-Summer. The Earth 'goes to sleep' in the latter and gives itself up to the impulses of the Cosmic environment, like we do when asleep (or in death), and its archetypal living forms flourish, like our archetypal thought-forms flourish during sleep. The Earth soul then reawakens in Winter and works on what it has received so as to return the fruits back to the Cosmos as spiritual forces. Once the Earth has completed its task of working over all the metamorphic experiences, through humanity, it will 'die' and be reborn as Jupiter. Of course there are many other temporal demarcations between our daily moment to moment, sleeping-waking, and the Earth's dying-reincarnation, and the same principle applies to all of them.

So we are dealing with nested rhythms which only appear as temporal demarcations, experienced as increasingly dim from the 'now' state 'backwards and forwards', until not at all, because the current normal thinking perspective only has the conceptual-sensory slots for a limited incarnational flow of Spirit. We can also get an idea of the space-like experience of these superimposed rhythms by considering that the Earth also sleeps and awakens in a spatial sense - when it is asleep in the Northern hemisphere, it is awake in the Southern hemisphere, and vice versa. When we become conscious of what we experience in our higher members, we too can consciously experience the temporal rhythms as space-like (we already do with normal spatial experience, but the nested temporal character isn't conscious). That is indicated by the panoramic 'life review' which people often speak of with NDEs, which occurs when the higher members depart the physical body, but through spiritual training can be experienced before physical death.

This is how our being incarnates its fingers. In thinking, our being begins to wiggle its thoughts and says “Yo, I can feel my thinking-fingers now”. From this point onwards it’s all a matter of patience and persistence. If we want our being to incarnate its whole hand, it is up to us to prepare the soil. We continue to exercise the wiggles of the fingers, even if we get frustrated that we can’t build the hand out of the fingers, no matter how fast we switch focus between them. We have to wait for time to enter and incarnate the hand. We wait as we wait for our beloved one at the train station. We have prepared the room, cooked dinner, lit the candles and now we’re waiting for the embrace. This is what happens in every instance of our life. Every thought is an embrace that we meet at the train station called ‘now’. Sending the Love letters to negotiate the arrival is prayer.

I recently ordered Klocek's book, Seeking Spirit Vision, and I want to share a relevant passage:

The experimental method, which leads the thinker up to the wall of light but no further, supports and fosters abstract systems of thought that depend upon memory and personal knowledge. The force of personality is present in the subtly subjective choice of experiment once a hypothesis is experienced, and the experiment is designed to prove the validity of one line of reasoning as it is revealed by the experience of the hypothesis. By contrast, in supersensible perception each hypothesis is a gift of grace that is given by a being who stands behind the concepts which the intellect arranges. The intellect forms a vessel into which the archetypal being pours the wine of insight, and once the Inspiration has been received by the consciousness, the spiritual scientist works meditatively to return the insight back into the spiritual world.
...
This is developed when in humility the human intellect addresses a higher being than itself. In meditative states the currents of the intellect are turned away from the construction of theories and into the reception of experiences. The mode of communication is transformed from speaking to listening. One uses shoes to walk to the wall but then leaves the shoes at the door to enter the house. The intellect becomes the witness. The witness observes intently but forms no conclusions, building images out of concepts but then forgetting both in order simply to be present coherently on the other side of the wall of light... Through meditation, a certain thixcipience, a receptivity to spiritual touch, is developed in the intellectual soul. This receptivity transforms the abstractions of the intellect into questions of reason which can then approach numinous Idea experiences... Then the goal is not to develop an airtight theory but to expand the consciousness to be able to receive the diversity of touch experience available above the level of waking consciousness.

[Federica]

Yes... well at this point the surest way to take control over the intellectualizing tendencies and the horrible third person view, seems to be to stop writing, stop reading all these third person accounts (that as long as not inhabited are true just as much as their opposite), and pray and exercise instead. No way around, because the way around is the panoramic third person view. Reading a post is kind of the definition of third person! It's looking at someone else's thoughts. I can try to make them mine, but if I don't get what's meant (mandatory third person) and if I don't know how to imitate them (I have a habit of exercise) it's hopeless…