Thank you, Ashvin, Cleric, for your latest explanations. I have been pondering them for a few days now. They are both of great help, and I feel I still haven’t fully extracted everything that is there to realize.
I believe I’ve been lacking a holistic view of things recently, remaining bound to a compartmentalized approach. In some cases/times the approach incorporates mutual causality between levels, in other cases it doesn't, because the intuition of continuous interaction between perceptual and spiritual worlds stops flowing for me when it bumps into some ingrained thinking habits. I thought I would pinpoint how I think the discontinuity happens, in case it speaks to someone else.
For example, when referring to the ‘perceptual world’, I often lapse into thinking of sensory perception only. Yet, I know clearly that there is much more to perception than the impressions our senses can impress/express.
Another example: I know that all spectrums of reality emerge as complex interactions between various hierarchies of beings driven by diverse intentions. Yet, because this is an abstract knowledge - it makes sense, but I don’t have any clear and direct awareness of these beings - I often lapse into thinking of the archetypal and elemental rhythms simplistically, as a sort of BK-style M@L, I am afraid. It’s not that I actively think of it as such, but the presence of the idea standing in the background of whatever else I am reasoning out, can be of the sort of impersonal, blind M@L.
Similarly, in the first example, when I directly address the question of perceiving and conceiving, no problem: I have a grasp of how thinking merges the two. Yet, when the perceptual world is seen ‘out of the corner of the eye’, as background for some other reasoning, it surreptitiously morphs back to standard mode, which in this case is perception=senses. It’s an imperfect plasticity of thought. As soon as it can, it will default back to the previously ingrained modes.
So there are shortcuts that have not been erased. As in the common experience of driving to a known place in complete ‘unconsciousness’, absorbed in thoughts that have nothing to do with the driving directions, I might embark on these familiar thinking tracks sometimes, without realizing it. Then I might reemerge above the surface of unconsciousness, somewhere down the road, maybe prompted by a comment. As a consequence, I would typically try to sew together elements of the old and new thinking paths, to bridge the discontinuity with a half logic, half stubborn sewing thread. Obviously the result cannot be smooth and flawless.
The lesson I’m learning from that experience is that just because something has been understood, grasped, or intuited once, including in a living way, it doesn't mean it's now acquired knowledge, reliably available to be leveraged for further progression. It's rather like a daily live performance we need to make happen, when we have to wholeheartedly invest ourselves and play out the whole piece every single time (living thinking). It's not possible to record it bit by bit and then patch together the best snips in post-production (dead intellectual thinking). Therefore, a number of rehearsals might be needed.
I should add that the Demiurge thread and its thinking rehearsals are instructive for me in this instance, as I think Eugene and I share some of the mind traps.
