Fairy Tales for the Spirit

[AshvinP]

I would like to share a brief fairy tale from Steiner, and his elaboration on it, which I found very helpful for my own understanding, and also motivating and inspiring for my striving towards the Spirit. It helps to livingly elucidate what we have also been discussing here much more abstractly or theoretically in terms of working through the ego-consciousness, or the reasoning intellect, to unleash the higher spiritual forces which animate it. I have also referred to this in terms of allowing concepts to permeate our life of archetypal Feeling, so they become more intimate to our first-person experience and more fluid within our ideal constellations which help us make sense of that experience. 

As we can see from the forum itself, there is a certain wall the intellect always bumps up against when trying to consider this path of higher development too abstractly. The abstract tendency can clothe itself in many forms - it can be in the language of materialism, mysticism/spiritualism, or even that of spiritual science. It can start speaking of 'working through the latent spiritual potential which animates the intellect' without actually inhabiting the inner meaning of such a phrase, or confusing that inner meaning for something it is already familiar with, something it already expects to find within its current inner volume of concepts-feelings-perceptions-experiences. Then it positively convinces itself that its current path must in some way already encompass what is being pointed to.

The reason for why this theoretical tendency continually asserts itself is something transpersonal yet also intimate to every individual soul, in the sense that the latter must look hard at its own context of opinions, interests, preferences, etc. and see whether there is something which always repels it from immersing itself in a fairy tale such as the one below with amazement and reverence, and sacrificially allowing it to work within the soul as something completely fresh, new, and unsuspected. Is there something which constantly tells us that it's not worth the time or effort to follow Steiner's elaboration below with devoted attention to simply discern whether it harmonizes with our innate and fluid power of reasoning, which is entirely dispassionate and disinterested at the personal level? Every individual soul should consider such questions for themselves in contemplative solitude and freedom. 

PS - I encourage people to share or reference their favorite fairy tales, which undoubtedly will have a spiritual theme.

*** (Steiner)

It seems to me that the mood of fairy tale is altogether something that mediates between the outer world and everything that human beings once perceived in worlds of spirit in ancient, original clairvoyant vision, and which they can still perceive today if they raise themselves to these worlds of spirit, either through particular, abnormal capacities or through properly schooled clairvoyance. The world of the fairy tale is perhaps the most wholly justified intermediary between this latter world and the world of outer reality, and that of reason and the senses. It seems to me necessary to find a certain explanation for this whole place of the fairy tale and the mood of the fairy tale between these different worlds. Now it is extraordinarily difficult to build a bridge between these two realms. But then it occurred to me that this could be done in the form of a fairy tale itself. A very simple fairy tale does indeed seem to me more apt here than all theoretical explanations. Such a fairy tale might run as follows: 

"Once upon a time there was a poor lad who had a clever cat. And this clever cat helped the poor lad—who owned nothing apart from himself—to a great fortune. This is what she did: she persuaded the king that the poor lad owned a great, wondrous and remarkable estate, which the king himself would do well to see. And the clever cat succeeded in getting the king to set off on a journey to see it, and to travel through many, very remarkable regions. Wherever he went, the clever cat arranged for the king to be told that the great estate of this poor lad possessed great fields and meadows and all kinds of wonderful buildings. Finally the king arrived at a great and magical castle. But he arrived a little late, in the terms of a fairy tale, since it was already the time when the great giant or troll returned home from his travels through the universe and wished to enter his palace again. The king was inside the palace and wished to see all its magical wonders. The clever cat stretched out therefore in front of the gateway so that the king should not notice that all this actually belonged to the giant, the troll. When the giant returned home towards morning, the cat began to tell the giant a story, persuading him that he must listen to it. At great length she told him how the farmer ploughs his fields, how he manures it, how he must plough in the manure, how he fetches the seed that he wishes to sow, and then how he sows it. She told him such a long story that morning came and the sun rose. And then the clever cat told the giant, who had never seen this sight, to stay and look upon the golden virgin in the East, the sun. But there’s a law to which giants are subject, and when he turned round to look at the sun, he burst asunder. And so, by delaying the giant in this way, the palace became the poor lad’s property. He no longer had his estate by hearsay only, by the cat’s machinations, but he now did truly own the giant’s palace and everything that belonged to it."

This little, seemingly insignificant fairy tale is actually very central to what we can call the world history of the fairy-tale mood in our time. You see, if we consider human beings in their earthly evolution, most of them—as they have evolved on earth, passing through all incarnations, in all their current incarnations—are now comparable to the poor lad. Today, by comparison to other eras, we really are like the poor lad and possess nothing but a clever cat. But the clever cat is something we certainly possess, for this is our reason, our intellect. And what we possess through our senses today, what we have by virtue of our reason nowadays, which is bound up with the brain, is something very impoverished compared to the whole world of the cosmos, compared to everything we passed through in the conditions of Saturn, Sun and Moon. We are all, really, this poor lad, possessing only our power of reasoning which can set about ascribing to us an imaginary estate. In our present situation we are this poor lad. We are this in terms of our consciousness. But our I is rooted in hidden depths of soul life. These hidden depths of soul life are connected with countless worlds and countless cosmic occurrences, all of which play into human life. But the modern human being has become a poor lad and knows nothing of all this any more, can only at most, through the clever cat, through philosophy, explain all sorts of things about the meaning of what he sees with his eyes or perceives through his other senses. And when modern people wish after all to speak of something that surpasses the world of the senses, if they wish to acquire something that goes beyond the sense world, then they do so—and have been doing so for many centuries now—in art and poetry. 

But our time especially—a remarkable time of transition in many respects—shows us very clearly that people do not get very far beyond this ‘poor lad’ sense of things even if they are able to integrate poetry and art into the world of senses as it currently surrounds us. In our era, you see, people have reached towards naturalism through a kind of lack of belief in higher art, higher poetry—a purely external reflection and representation of the outer world. It surely cannot be denied that our epoch has something of a mood of loss and regret, that, despite the inventiveness with which art and poetry represent reality, our age has an underlying sense that all this is illusory, and not truth. This mood does prevail in our time. The king within, who originates in the world of spirit, is in great need of persuasion by the clever cat, by the power of reason that we possess today, to accept that what imagination awakens in art, and endows it with, is indeed in some sense a true human possession. The human being, the king within, is persuaded initially. But this is not worth much, only convinces for a little while. Eventually—and we live at the beginning of such a time—people experience the need to gain access again to the higher, spiritual world, the actual world of spirit. People feel an urge—and this is becoming apparent everywhere today—to re-ascend into spheres of the world of spirit.

A certain transition has to arrive. And this transition can scarcely be better or more easily effected than by re-enlivening the mood of fairy tale. This atmosphere of fairy tales, to put this in purely outward terms, really has the capacity to prepare people’s souls for experiencing occurrences that shine in upon us from higher, supersensible worlds. The very way in which a fairy tale presents itself to us without claiming in any way to represent outer reality, the way in which it simply and pluckily lifts itself beyond all laws of outer reality, enables the fairy tale to prepare our mood of soul to receive the higher world of spirit once again. The rough-and-ready faith achieved in olden times through primitive clairvoyance, has to burst asunder like the troll giant when faced by outward reality. He is subdued by the clever cat’s questions, through the cat’s narratives that are spun far and wide over outward reality. Certainly, we can spin such cat narratives for a long time, showing how reality now and then necessitates us taking refuge in spiritual explanations. We can expound in lengthy philosophical treatises how this or that question can be answered by referring to the world of spirit. In doing so we retain something like a reminiscence of olden times. We can hold the giant’s attention for a while by relating things from the olden days. But faced by the clear language of reality, what has been salvaged in this way from olden times will not stand the test and will explode like the giant when he sees the sun rising. And this mood, the exploding giant, is something we need to know about. Here we touch on something that can in some degree illumine the psychology of the fairy tale. I cannot expound on these things theoretically—I can only discuss the psychology of the fairy tale in terms of inner observation, and I’d like to say the following about this. 

Let us say that various aspects of the forms and configurations of the world of spirit—as we have described in brief in the lectures on pneumatosophy75—stand before someone in living imagination. Within anthroposophy, of course, we do relate many things concerning spiritual worlds. This must first stand in living fashion before a person’s soul. But in terms of outer description or depiction not much would result if we were only to describe what unfolds there before a particular soul, even before the clairvoyant soul. A curious disharmony arises in the soul if we try to invest the grim web of modern thinking with truths, such as we expounded here in the last three sessions, about Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions.76 We feel constricted everywhere in relation to the things that then stand before our soul. And the part of us that must capture mysteries of the higher worlds appears to us actually as very trolllike. We become clumping great troll-giants when we try to encompass the forms of the world of spirit. And of course in a sense we have to voluntarily let these forms of spirit explode in the sunlight of day to adapt them to the mood of the modern world; have to let their clairvoyance blow up when they encounter outer reality. And yet we can still retain something. We can retain what the poor lad retains. What we can come to possess in the immediacy of our modern souls is the transformation—but the sober and appropriate transformation—of the gigantic content of the imaginative world in the many layers of meaning of a fairy tale. Then such a human soul will indeed feel like a king who is led to what does not initially belong to this soul at all, what does not belong at all to the soul of the poor lad. The soul comes to possess this, when the gigantic troll bursts asunder, by relinquishing the imaginative world in the face of reality and introducing it into the palace that imagination can build. Whereas, in olden times, human imagination—the imagination of the poor lad—was nourished by the imaginative world, this is no longer possible for souls at our modern evolutionary stage. And yet, even if we first have to relinquish the whole imaginative world, and press it all into the multi-layered mood and meanings of fairy-tale, which does not adhere to external reality, then something that is a deep, deep truth can remain to us in the world of fairy-tale imagination. In other words, the poor lad, who has nothing really apart from the cat, the clever faculty of reason, can possess in the mood of fairy tale something he needs in modern life so that the soul can be educated to enter the worlds of spirit in a new fashion.

Steiner, Rudolf. The Mission of the New Spirit Revelation (p. 161). Rudolf Steiner Press. Kindle Edition. 

[Stranger]

The whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness, and yet it is perceived as an objective reality when experienced from our individuated subjective perspectives which are the first-person individuated perspectives of the same Consciousness.

[AshvinP]

The whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness, and yet it is perceived as an objective reality when experienced from our individuated subjective perspectives which are the first-person individuated perspectives of the same Consciousness.

Eugene,

I wonder if you notice any of the "abstract tendency" mentioned in the OP, in this comment?

Or, put another way, in what way does such a thought further our striving towards the Ideal of concretely experiencing more Oneness with "these hidden depths of soul life... connected with countless worlds and countless cosmic occurrences, all of which play into human life."?

[Stranger]

The whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness, and yet it is perceived as an objective reality when experienced from our individuated subjective perspectives which are the first-person individuated perspectives of the same Consciousness.

Eugene,
I wonder if you notice any of the "abstract tendency" mentioned in the OP, in this comment?

Or, put another way, in what way does such a thought further our striving towards the Ideal of concretely experiencing more Oneness with "these hidden depths of soul life... connected with countless worlds and countless cosmic occurrences, all of which play into human life."?

"Who hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt.13)

[AshvinP]

The whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness, and yet it is perceived as an objective reality when experienced from our individuated subjective perspectives which are the first-person individuated perspectives of the same Consciousness.

Eugene,
I wonder if you notice any of the "abstract tendency" mentioned in the OP, in this comment?

Or, put another way, in what way does such a thought further our striving towards the Ideal of concretely experiencing more Oneness with "these hidden depths of soul life... connected with countless worlds and countless cosmic occurrences, all of which play into human life."?

"Who hath ears to hear, let him hear" (Matt.13)

Ok, well, it seems that whenever any attempt is made on this forum to loosen the intellectual mask over the latent Divine forces which animate our thinking, your reaction is to invoke abstract metaphysics which only serves to further tighten the mask. I think you know the thought, "the whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness", isn't going to help anyone here enliven their own thinking and gain any insight into the World Process. There is a lot of talk/complaining about 'dualistic cognition-perception' and its intellectual grip on modern man during Earthly life. It's no wonder that such a state persists when, any time something comes into our aperture of thinking experience which threatens to loosen that grip, we latch onto it ever more forcefully.

[Stranger]

Ok, well, it seems that whenever any attempt is made on this forum to loosen the intellectual mask over the latent Divine forces which animate our thinking, your reaction is to invoke abstract metaphysics which only serves to further tighten the mask. I think you know the thought, "the whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness", isn't going to help anyone here enliven their own thinking and gain any insight into the World Process. There is a lot of talk/complaining about 'dualistic cognition-perception' and its intellectual grip on modern man during Earthly life. It's no wonder that such a state persists when, any time something comes into our aperture of thinking experience which threatens to loosen that grip, we latch onto it ever more forcefully.

Here is another abstract thought for your consideration:

"Since the oblivion came into existence because the Father was not known, then if the Father comes to be known, oblivion will not exist from that moment on.
Since the deficiency came into existence because the Father was not known, then if the Father comes to be known, deficiency will not exist from that moment on.
It is with Unity that each one will attain himself; within knowledge (gnosis) he will purify himself from multiplicity into Unity, consuming matter within himself like fire, and darkness by light, death by life"
The Gospel of Truth

[lorenzop]

Ok, well, it seems that whenever any attempt is made on this forum to loosen the intellectual mask over the latent Divine forces which animate our thinking, your reaction is to invoke abstract metaphysics which only serves to further tighten the mask. I think you know the thought, "the whole World is a fairy tale imagined by Consciousness", isn't going to help anyone here enliven their own thinking and gain any insight into the World Process. There is a lot of talk/complaining about 'dualistic cognition-perception' and its intellectual grip on modern man during Earthly life. It's no wonder that such a state persists when, any time something comes into our aperture of thinking experience which threatens to loosen that grip, we latch onto it ever more forcefully.

The knowledge we seek is less of a thinking, less of a method of thinking or thinking about, and more of an incite, aha moment, or perhaps a remembering.
In this regard, any image or thought can trigger this incite.
Some words\ideas are famous for their effect (Mahavakyas) - but any can work.
LOOK, the grass is green.

[Federica]

Great idea for a new thread, Ashvin!
In my culture there’s a popular book for kids, called Stories of Greece and the Barbarians. It’s a collection of selected tales based on the myths of ancient Greece. Not sure they can be considered fairy tales, and what spiritual themes can be identified, but children have been told these stories as ‘fairy tales’ for generations. I can report the one that made the biggest impression on me, and remained the most memorable. It’s the story of the family of Menelaus. It goes as follows. In very ancient times, in a very ancient country, there were two brothers, one called Thyestes, and the other, who had married the daughter of a king, was called Atreus. Atreus and Thyestes hated each other to death. Thyestes had stolen king Atreus’ wife and Atreus had chased his traitorous brother away. Thyestes was roaming around without home and without family. But this was not enough for Atreus. He was consumed by hatred, he wanted a cruel revenge. The three children of Thyestes were living in Atreus’ palace, peacefully growing up with Atreus’ own children, Agamennon and Menelaus, and unaware of all the hatred. One day, seeing the five kids playing together, Atreus had a ferocious thought. The thought stayed with him. He wanted Thyestes to eat the flesh of his own children. He had two of them killed by a guard and had his brother called back to the palace, with the message that the king wanted to finally make peace with him. Thyestes believed it. In the meantime, Atreus cut into pieces the children’s bodies and set up a banquet. At the head of the table, he was cutting and serving the human flesh to the many guests. Thyestes was eating like everyone else, glad that peace had been finally made. Then, suddenly, he looked at his brother’s face and saw an atrocious smile. His blood freezed in his veins. He understood everything. He threw himself to the ground, spitting, hurling terrible cries. Then he stood up, still screaming, quit the palace, quit town, and wandered and wandered around, hating his brother to death. Atreus, however, was unsatisfied and miserable. The invisible fire of hatred that grows with revenge, and that only love can extinguish, was consuming him. So he captured and imprisoned his brother. He waited until the only one of Thyestes' sons whom he hadn’t killed, Egystus, was strong and vigorous enough. Egystus didn't know who his father was. Atreus called him and asked him to kill the imprisoned Thyestes, and to report back to him at the temple upon accomplishment of the mission. So Egystus picked up his most beautiful sword, a gift from his mother, and went to the prison. There he found Thyestes chained, crouched in a corner, his eyes burning with rage. But as soon as he saw the sword, Thyestes' eyes changed and the rage vanished. He asked: “Who are you? What is this sword?” Egystus answered: ”My mother gave me this sword. It’s a good sword, you will see!” “And who gave her the sword?” “My father did, whom I have never met.” “This is my sword, I am your father! Look at the hilt, a pomegranate flower is engraved there. Atreus wants you to kill your father, and he will then kill you too! Come to me Egystus, my son, let me look at you, let me touch you, and let us find out an appropriate revenge!” In that moment Egystus understood many things. He liberated his father, grabbed the sword, ran to the temple, came close to Atreus as if he was about to speak, amd thrust the sword into his heart and killed him. He then looked for his cousins, Agamennon and Menelaus, to kill them too, but he couldn’t find them. They were hiding, with the help of a guard who loved the two princes, and so they survived.

[Federica]

Ok, well, it seems that whenever any attempt is made on this forum to loosen the intellectual mask over the latent Divine forces which animate our thinking, your reaction is to invoke abstract metaphysics which only serves to further tighten the mask.

Here is another abstract thought for your consideration:

Speaking of abstract thoughts and the limits of our intellectual wingspan, I have come across this post by Cleric, where a very useful analogy illustrates the nature of that constraint in relation to the idea of Time. Eugene, you probably read it back then, and might even remember it, but maybe you relate differently to those ideas today? It would be interesting to know if the different way you write today (this is so clear reading the old posts in general) corresponds to an equally different reading of posts like this one?

As a bit of warning, we must gradually get in the habit of discerning what we're trying to do with our intellect. I'm saying this from my own experience too. For quite some time my intellect used to want to build better and better mental picture of the Time being. This can quickly lead to mental exhaustion. Actually it can become even worse. People here are probably familiar with the documentary "Dangerous Knowledge". It's about the mental breakdowns of several prominent mathematicians and scientist who struggled with infinities. And if we try to grasp spiritual reality entirely with out intellect we face nothing but infinities! This is also connected with Nietzsche's breakdown.

When we think about the Time rhythms entirely with intellectual concepts, it's like we're trying to build a picture of Lego blocks. It's tempting to imagine that the more of these pieces that we stack, the more comprehensive and complete the picture will become. But as we do that, we quickly become crushed by the weight of our own concepts. It is well known that our working memory can hold only about seven discrete things at a time. Higher cognition is not attained by increasing the amount of things we can juggle with our intellect. The more Lego pieces we try to carry, the more overwhelming it becomes, since they must be mechanically kept together by our own effort.

I can use an analogy for this. The most widespread type of RAM (random access memory) used today in computers, phones, etc., is of the type DRAM (Dynamic RAM). What is characteristic to it is that the bit-cells (usually a transistor-capacitor pair) quickly leak their charge. For this reason a continuous procedure is needed called 'memory refresh'. Many times a second the cells are continuously recharged. If this process stops the cells will quickly lose their states. It's somewhat similar with out intellect when we try to build complicated mental panoramas. Our thinking must continuously walk over all the elements of our intellectual imagination and 'refresh' them. The moment we stop, the images quickly fade away. This is an overwhelming task. Not only that in the end run it is not proper higher cognition (the mechanically stitched sum total of the intellectual cells is less than the higher order curvature within which the cells flow), but if we stubbornly insist on creating reality out of intellectual cells we face a very real danger for our mental health.

The key to this is simple. The higher Time order is not something that we can build out of intellectual cells. Instead we must first find it in the (T) experience (as in the Central Topic). We simply must embark on thinking contemplation and follow the flow of our ordinary thinking. It's not what we think but simply being conscious of the time-extended stream of thinking and how we're actively shaping it. Probably Ashvin's example with Beat Saber from his VR essay can be used as an illustration.

Another illustration can be the visualization that I recently posted here. Here we can see from another angle the difference in Time experience. Our DRAM analogy can be likened to the first phase of the visualization where our thinking moves erratically from cell to cell. The naive conception would be that this refreshing must become so fast that it can light up our whole field of consciousness, not unlike a cathode-ray tube (CRT). This is also the vision of the super intellect which is principally the same as the ordinary but becomes faster and faster. We know how the electron ray in CRT TV/monitors, energizes only a tiny patch of phosphorescent elements. As the ray moves further the previous patch already starts to fade out. It's only because of the inertia of our retina response that the after image of the illuminated pixels stays long enough until the ray visits them again. Without this inertial effect of our eye, CRT displays would look like this.

So we should not imagine that we can attain to the higher order time cognition by making our intellect incredibly fast, such that we can keep refreshing all the cells of our field of consciousness. Instead, as presented in the visualization, it is really that we do the opposite - we center our thought on a single image and gradually the Imaginative world grows from there. There's no longer movement of our thinking-cathode ray in the intellectual sense. Instead it is like the cathode ray expands from a ray into a cone and energizes the whole panorama all at once. Now once again there's movement and dynamics but they are not that of the intellectual cathode ray - the latter is completely expanded and monolithic. Yet the monolithic flow itself has a deeper texture which is in constant metamorphosis. Initially we must learn to simply behold the panorama, even though it seems quite incomprehensible. But gradually we find new degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity, which are normally hidden behind the movement of our ordinary thinking cathode ray. I can approximately describe this as a kind of spiritual steering. Higher cognition is in a sense technically simpler than the intellectual, even though meaningfully richer. We don't need to hold elements in our working memory and manipulate them. Instead, our working memory has expanded as an Imaginative panorama which is simply there, there's no need to support it mechanically through refreshing. We only need to support our centered, expanded and monolithic thought-ray (that is, avoid reverting to the cathode ray erratic movement of the intellect) and smoothly steer within the higher order landscape.

This landscape is not simply visual - it is weaved of the (T) experiences which give us immediate consciousness of the lawfulness through which things are flowing. It is here, for example, that we can clearly observe how the cathode ray of the intellect is flowing within the meaningful curvature of desire, interests, beliefs, prejudices. Not simply as Freudian psychoanalytical model (which is still jumping of the thinking ray) but as actual contemplation of the soul.

The question about the feeling of the speed of passage of time is tricky. It's one that can easily become lost in its own recursions. So far I can't find a way to address it properly. It's difficult because when we think about it intellectually we always anchor ourselves within a relative coordinate system so to speak. Just as in special relativity, if we anchor ourselves in a different coordinate system we can speak quite differently. This in part explains why there's no agreement on the passage of time. Some say that when they were engaged with something interesting they hardly noticed how the whole day has gone by. Others report that a single day has been so rich that it felt like a week worth of experiences. So it's really a complicated interplay between thinking, feeling, willing. To simplify it, we can say that we'll have one experience if we anchor ourselves in feeling and experience how thinking goes by, or if we anchor ourselves in thinking and experience how feeling goes by. This is quite vaguely put but it hints about the complexity of the topic and the importance of not simply trying to have absolute opinion on the flow of time but livingly experience the contextual way our spiritual activity works.

[Stranger]

Speaking of abstract thoughts and the limits of our intellectual wingspan, I have come across this post by Cleric, where a very useful analogy illustrates the nature of that constraint in relation to the idea of Time. Eugene, you probably read it back then, and might even remember it, but maybe you relate differently to those ideas today? It would be interesting to know if the different way you write today (this is so clear reading the old posts in general) corresponds to an equally different reading of posts like this one?

There's no longer movement of our thinking-cathode ray in the intellectual sense. Instead it is like the cathode ray expands from a ray into a cone and energizes the whole panorama all at once. Now once again there's movement and dynamics but they are not that of the intellectual cathode ray - the latter is completely expanded and monolithic. Yet the monolithic flow itself has a deeper texture which is in constant metamorphosis. Initially we must learn to simply behold the panorama, even though it seems quite incomprehensible. But gradually we find new degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity, which are normally hidden behind the movement of our ordinary thinking cathode ray. I can approximately describe this as a kind of spiritual steering. Higher cognition is in a sense technically simpler than the intellectual, even though meaningfully richer. We don't need to hold elements in our working memory and manipulate them. Instead, our working memory has expanded as an Imaginative panorama which is simply there, there's no need to support it mechanically through refreshing. We only need to support our centered, expanded and monolithic thought-ray (that is, avoid reverting to the cathode ray erratic movement of the intellect) and smoothly steer within the higher order landscape.

Yes, this is a good analogy of how intuitive cognition functions and grasps the wholeness at once with all its constant metamorphosis and structure, as opposed to intellectual cognition that breaks the world into pieces and, like a moving ray, "scans" it one piece at a time. That is why it is only the intuitive cognition (once it becomes sufficiently developed) that can reach to oneness.