Anthony66 wrote: ↑Mon May 01, 2023 3:03 pm
Focusing on the highlighted text, how do we understand this from a PoF perspective? What is the percept here? What is it that our thinking supplies meaning to and is all this thinking, this "inner comprehension", behind the veil, in the realms of higher cognition?
That’s a great question. The polarity perception-intuition is really the fundamental axis of being. Yet it is experienced differently at each level of convolution. It is only in our Earthly stage where perceptions and concepts are experienced in such an orthogonal way. This is what allows us to experience ourselves as a thinking ego that is clearly distinct from the perceptions, except in thinking itself, where the two come together.
In our ordinary Earthly consciousness we’re not yet dealing with the higher spiritual realities, yet moral intuitions are possible in the spirit of PoF. In that case the perceptions are our normal sensory ones. Think for example about the parable of the Good Samaritan. When he sees the injured man he has completely normal perceptions. Against these perceptions he unites the intuition of moral action. Of course, in that particular case the samaritan has probably acted quite instinctively, out of simple good heart but today we can cultivate the conditions for such intuitions by working consciously for greater understanding of reality and ennobling our feelings. Such knowledge is not simply theoretical but aligns us with the flow of reality and our intuition becomes heightened for ideas that are in harmony with it. For this reason, the normal sensory perceptions are seen differently, they evoke different ideas, we see opportunities for different actions.
Things transform when we step into the Imaginative world. In our ordinary consciousness, if we are in the dark or with eyes closed, we can describe our state as an all-encompassing perception of darkness and here and there our own thoughts sparkle, memory images or fantasies flash. These flashes are united with certain intuition. For example, if a random memory image flashes up, it is experienced together with certain meaning, we simply know what we have remembered, there’s often implicit intuitive context about where and when the thing happened. In other words, the intuition of the memory image fits in the overall intuitive landscape of our present life (for example, if only the sensory content of a memory image of ours was to flash in someone else’s consciousness, it would be like a random photo without any context). It is similar with thinking. All these cognitive experiences can be described as fragmentary flashes within the more encompassing volume of soul content.
When we cultivate the proper feelings and ideas (which act as a fertile soil), we can meditate on a single thought-image while leaving in the periphery everything else. With practice, we’re able to support this single flash for prolonged periods of time and if we succeed to relax the geometry of our ego (which otherwise tries to feel as a container of the flash) then the nature of the flash begins to fill our whole consciousness. Our whole inner world becomes of the nature of a thought-image, yet this thought-image has life of its own that feeds back on our activity. Normally we don’t notice this life of a thought. This is easy to understand when for example we try to sing. Then we may find out that the sound that comes out is not exactly what we intend it to be (thus it has some life of its own). It is similar even in our thinking but vastly more difficult to notice because thoughts in general are so tightly coupled with our intuitive intents. Yet thought perceptions are not under our absolute control. As a simplified example, we can try to think white color, to fill our whole inner world with white. Then we find out that we can’t get it quite right. There’s all kinds of noise that pollute the whiteness. What is this noise? In the most general sense, it’s the World Process of which our body is also a part. Whatever that noise is, it tells us something of the World Process and it does that by feeding back on our intuition, it modifies it so to speak. This is true even in materialism. There’s some neural activity which causes the experience of the noise, so in a sense it tells us something of the physical world process. If we could imagine pure white then our whole inner world would be filled also with the pure idea of whiteness. But when that whiteness is resisted, our intuition is modified. It is as if the noise punches holes in our intuitive-substance and we understand: “These holes were supposed to be filled with the laminar intuition of whiteness through and through, yet something works back on me and forces me to experience different intuition against these holes.”
This gives us some idea of Imaginative cognition. Our whole inner world is illuminated with our intense thinking ray, yet the World Process works back and modifies the intuition that we project. Cognition in this state depends on a delicate balance. If we’re too oppressive with our spiritual activity we simply become insensitive to the gentle modifications of our activity. It’s like we have the will to move our hand but no sense of touch that feeds back. On the other hand we can be too passive and allow our soul state to be completely dragged by the World Process. This results in a flow of phenomena but they remain inexplicable, just like a stream of letters remains just perceptions if we don’t try to connect with it the intuition attained by reading.
So instead of having perceptions and forming concepts of them, in the center of our consciousness we place our spiritual activity which supports certain intuition but now all our interest is to experience how this activity is being modified, resisted, amplified, etc. by the World Process. We don’t think about the World Process. All thinking has been concentrated into only one single thought which now fills our entire consciousness. From the perspective of the Imaginative state our thinking ego is completely still, it supports a single expanded thought. Yet the way this expanded thought is being modified in the most various ways, is experienced in our holistic intuition. Gradually we begin to grasp the contours of our body within this expanded thought-substance, starting from the head region. This can be called the experience of the etheric body. It has to be stressed how different this is from simply having some visionary experience to which we decide to attach the concept of an etheric body. That should be considered a hallucination.
So we see how many things have to be considered if we are to understand how this polarity of perception-intuition transforms as we go through the first deconvolution. If the above is grasped it should be clear how we gain consciousness of the World Process in a completely different way compared to what we do in science and philosophy. Yet to come to these experiences we need a specific kind of surrender. We can’t pretend that our inner world is completely our dominion. Through the mentioned balance we have to make our expanded meditative thought the higher sense organ in which we intuit the World Process. In contrast to ordinary sense perception, where our “I” is the only conscious being in our inner world, in this experience of the World Process we’re clearly conscious of the activity of many spiritual beings. That is, these modifications are not simply lifeless mechanical effects that we interpret anthropomorphically but every modification has something to do with complicated interference of spiritual intents of beings.
The experiences in the etheric body reveal entirely new secrets to us. In our physical body we’re just a being that beholds perceptions and thinks, feels and wills. In the etheric body a whole new world emerges. This ‘body’ shouldn’t be imagined simply as some energy body made of electricity and magnetism or whatever. It can only be grasped as thought essence. The etheric body also has temporal structure. In a certain sense, just like a tree has its tree rings which are accumulation of wood through different periods of time, so the etheric body can be metaphorically conceived as stacked shells of our states of being through our life. Our state of fertilized egg, our child state, our adult state are all stacked together. The etheric body is like the telos or time curvature which exists as something whole and within which the physical states unfold.
We can continue in a similar way also for the other deconvolutions, which lead us to the Inspirative and Intuitive stage, yet things get more difficult to describe. Each stage has to be investigated individually. As it should be clear, we can’t simply take the polarity of percept and concept and abstractly extrapolate it to understand the Imaginative state. We have to enter in the concrete experiences, we can’t simply think them out through combinations of abstract concepts. The other direction however, is trivial. It is transparently obvious from the Imaginative state how our Earthly consciousness comes about, since the latter is only a more rigidified Imaginative state, where the flow is polarized into concepts and perceptions in a kind of hysteresis process. So in PoF it is fundamentally true that all existence evolves through this integration of percept and intuition, yet it is not a smooth linear process. It passes through ‘phase-transitions’, so to speak, as the folds of reality are deconvoluted. Hopefully this helps to see that the question ‘what is the percept to which intuition unites’ should be answered differently depending on the stage of consciousness. As a general rule, in our intellectual consciousness we have the most polarized state, where on one side we have concepts, on the other – perceptions of a world that seems completely opaque and has nothing to do with our inner experience. This polarity is brought one step towards integration in the Imaginative state where it is already clear that our ideal activity is being modified by likewise ideal activities, even though we still grasp this through the way the imaginative soul ‘substance’ is being stamped by these activities. In Inspiration and Intuition we live closer and closer with the actual inner activity of the beings, thus there’s no longer an experience of a physical or elemental world where our activities meet.