Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces

[Cleric K]

If it is not yet the time to put our nose into the affairs of the spaces that from behind the scenes bend the geodesics of our human expression (that we colloquially call 'me'), then what is it time for?

Perhaps it's time to be more diligent in our middle-manager duties. Perhaps it's time to revere the CEO. I don't know.

Certainly the picture that is being painted is one that will lead to increased understanding and intuition of the workings of the Cosmos. As Ashvin says, there are some benefits along the way:

The individual implications are pretty clear and relate to better health, more vital energy, less existential anxiety, less swings into depressed states, greater holistic knowledge of the world around us, more creative impulses, greater feeling of communion with the living spiritual atmosphere, more healthy control over and therefore acceptance of one's destiny, and many more similar ones. That is certainly an interesting pursuit.

But where do we actually derive our marching orders from? Who or what determines the telos and where is the strategic plan to be found?

Anthony, Ashvin already covered the essentials. 

Let’s consider once more the fact that we should really try to observe what kind of answers we expect when the questions are asked. These things are just as valid for ordinary things as they are for spiritual. The only reason they may seem different is because most of the things we ordinarily ask about already fit in well known slots of intuition. For example, an adult watching the news very rarely hears something that demands new concepts and new ways of thinking.

Imagine the question: “Where’s Einstein’s curvature of spacetime to be found?” You are familiar with scientific thinking, so imagine that a layman asks you this question. I guess you immediately feel that you’ll have to disappoint the person. You’ll have to begin saying something like “well, you can’t really point at something and say ‘that’s the curvature’. You’ll have to spend some time thinking about these things in order to gain certain intuition about them.”

It’s similar about space too. We don’t have some concrete perception for ‘space’, in the same way we can focus on color or smell. To see where space is to be found, we need to develop certain intuitive orientation within perceptions. Our sense of space is this intuitive grasp of certain lawfulness through which perceptions transform.

We can use the exact same approach when we ask “where’s the telos?” It’s not about pointing at some perception and saying “there it is” but about developing certain intuitive orientation – in this instance not about space but about time.

Imagine that we take symbolic snapshots of our states of be-ing:



Each state symbolizes the full spectrum of inner experience (not only sensory perceptions but also feelings, thoughts, will). When we think, our state transforms. The states are drawn along a dimension but from our perspective we’re always at the center – the state transforms around us, so to speak.

If we think verbally, as the states metamorphose, at any point in time we hear a different verbal word. When we think “I need to take the garbage out”, we’re clearly experiencing sequences of words through time. Yet these words would be just a sequence of random noise if there wasn’t the overarching intuition that is actually being linearized in language. Very little attention is paid to these things today. Even worse than this is that the thoughts themselves usually stream in quite uncontrollable torrents. We jump from thought to thought quite erratically.

It’s important to realize that when we think about the above image this doesn’t yet equate with a real experience of the ‘thickness’ of time. In fact, current scientific views will outright say that such an experience is impossible. Our brain simply feeds our conscious frames one by one. In that sense, the whole image above is only an abstraction. We should take the whole image and imagine that it is experienced as one of the blue circles. That is, the whole image is just a thought in our current state of being.

How can that image turn into a symbol for something real? By trying to gain clearer consciousness of our temporal flow. This immediately tells us that we need to transform something in the way we conduct our spiritual activity. Just doing more and more thinking about these things, still leaves us in the sequential and quite jittery changes of states.

In my experience, the easiest way to approach the real experience (if we're not yet ready for meditative concentration) is by experimenting with smoothing out and slowing down the movement of our spiritual activity.



There are many ways we can do that. For example, we can simply move our gaze smoothly  and slowly among our surroundings, with all our thinking attention being fully invested in the movement itself. We’ll find that our gaze has the tendency to snap to objects, which breaks the smooth flow. We can alleviate this by defocusing our eyes and avoiding focusing on the object themselves but only on the movement.

Then we can do that also in our imagination. We can move our ray of attention in ∞ figure around our eyes (like a pair of glasses). Once again the goal is to do this slowly and smoothly, without interruptions, without ‘lifting the pen’, so to speak.

As a whole, it is by cultivating this feeling of flow that our temporal intuition begins to expand. Another interesting experience is to move our hands as if we conduct an orchestra. The movements have to be gentle, as if we try to cause the least disturbance of the air or we want to impress only smooth harmonious waves in it. When we do exercises with our will however (as it is with hand movements), we have to be more vigilant that our thinking focus must be completely coinciding with our will. Our movements are normally so habitual that we do one thing but think of something else.

All such exercises are only preparations, of course. These smooth streamlines of our spiritual activity through time are nevertheless still shaped in some ways. In other words, there’s telos. The simplest thing to notice is the fact that our whole exercise is performed within the overarching intuition of the exercise itself. For example, the idea of moving our focus in ∞ shape is the overarching intuition that guides the actual streamline through time.

To gain even deeper intuition of the telos of our flow of metamorphosis, we have to seek sensitivity for our inner life of sympathies, antipathies, desires. For example, the desire to have a glass of wine is part of that telos, isn’t it? It curves the way our states of being metamorphose towards a certain direction.

I’m not using the wine example as some kind of personal criticism. I’m not saying that if one forces himself to stop alcohol, they’ll do any better. Transforming such habits can only happen in a healthy way when we develop love for something far more valuable.

In this sense, I’m only mentioning the wine example as something that can speak to you in a more concrete manner. Our inner life is weaved of such forces that externally steer the streamline of our becoming (depicted as ‘lateral’ forces in the image). Through concentration of our spiritual activity we can resist these forces and as a result we become conscious of them and corresponding new degrees of freedom. This is at the basis of one of the exercises in HTKHW, where we have to deny to ourselves some small desire. For example, next time I feel like having a glass of wine and see myself reaching for the bottle, I can say “I’ll skip this time.” The goal here is not to deprive ourselves and be miserable but to find the experience of us differentiating from the desire. In this way it becomes an objective force in our soul life, that we are ordinarily completely merged with and flow along. By differentiating we come to know another ‘me’ which has the inner strength to steer the streamline in novel ways. Please note that when the desire is known in this way, it is not simply some abstract idea, as it could be in Freudian psychology. We indeed feel how this force tries to curve our streamline in a certain direction. Even though the force is not something that we can see as some perception in space, we nevertheless have clear intuition of it, much like in this classic illusion where there are no edges of the white triangle, but we nevertheless ‘see’ it.

Through experiences like these, we begin to discover how our whole inner life is criss-crossed by such forces that continually give shape to our streamline (even though most of the time it is not even a streamline but hectic jumping from state to state). If this is grasped it should be clear that the spiritual telos can only be known realistically in such a way. Everything else remains as the blue circles within our frames of existence. This doesn’t mean that we can’t understand many things at that level. But you seem to be at a point where you are leading an inner battle.

It’s important to recognize a very specific blocker at this stage. On one hand we understand that no matter how detailed, a blue circle (that is, an abstract model of reality) will always remain just that – a mental image in our spatial consciousness. On some level we know that true understanding demands certain inner transformations. Yet the intellect demands hard proof that such efforts won’t be in vain. For example, (once again, nothing personal here) we can say “How can I be really certain that by cutting wine I won’t simply be missing one of the few small pleasures I have in life? What if all this is just a hoax and I give up wine for nothing?”

Alas, there’s no simple resolution to this stage because in itself it is a self-reinforcing cycle. It’s about what we really value in the spiritual experience we call life. If we simply want to have a pleasant end-user experience in this life, then certain subconscious forces are already in place and they bend our streamlines in a specific way that ensures we won’t end up anywhere near to the essentials. On the other hand, if we deeply yearn to grow into the Cosmic mystery, then secret forces begin to bend the streamlines such that we converge in that direction. Then we’ll also find the inner strength to overcome certain tendencies. We simply have to loosen our sense of immutability. We have to identify less with our present desires. As a child, it would be heartbreaking if we’re told that one day we’ll have to give up our toys. Yet as we grow up our interests naturally transform. Then we see that we have already extracted all the lessons from our toys and continue on a different level. It’s quite the same with other adult habits. If we don’t transform some of them, death will certainly take them away anyway. So if we’re open to the fact that no matter how old we are and how much life experience we have gained, we’re still on a continuous journey of self-transformation, then we’ll even be happy about the fact that some of the desires which currently guide our telos from behind the scenes, will become objectively known forces that we can navigate through with new degrees of freedom.

Desires, sympathies and antipathies are only the most immediate layer of the telos, yet we can’t skip it. Beyond this quite personal telos we begin to know lateral forces that have much more archetypal character. At this stage we very clearly begin to see how our personal spiritual journey resembles the story of the Old and New Testament. We seek the Promised Land, we go through the Wilderness (where many of the seeking souls wander presently) and so on. All these correspond to stages of soul transformation. Deeper than that we have the even more general archetypal forces of all life, or the Cosmic rhythms and so on. But I repeat that all this will remain just an abstract blue circle unless we try to seek its reality first in the most immediate sphere of our personal life. And conversely – if we find some of that reality in the way our personal streamline curves, then we’ll have much clearer intuition how this scales up in the Macrocosm.

[Güney27]

The thing is, Newton was a gifted individual and only those who proceed to university maths/physics will ever understand his work. Sure, the rest of humanity has benefited from his efforts, e.g. the satellites that give us our GPS. But the masses have no idea about the details or even the fundamentals of gravitational theory or calculus.

As I said, SS would appear to be for the select few, the harbingers whoever they are, at least in this age. Perhaps we can view things a bit like standard evolutionary where a small number of individuals receive a beneficial mutation which one day might become fixed in the population. Similarly, those in our current time who make spiritual progress can confer blessings upon the larger human race.

(I began writing this reply – which turned into almost an essay – before new year but had very limited time to finish it. Now I see that Ashvin has already addressed the main points but I’ll nevertheless supplement it with yet another angle. I’m replying in this thread because I think it fits the topic better.)

Anthony, your example with Newton is right – that in today’s science and technology someone has to do the heavy lifting, while others only reap the benefits. But it will be very misleading if we imagine that spiritual science has to develop similar tools and appliances that others will simply add to their households (metaphorically speaking). There’s an important distinction here and to make it clearer we’ll have to make a wide detour.

In our age, even the simplest modern man lives in Newton-like consciousness. Even without studying physics, one lives in instinctive intuition of a physical world where inanimate objects move about. So the ghost, which was still there for the ancients, has been driven out of the machine, so to speak. For man of today this ghost has been driven out of the appearances of the Cosmos and is to be found only in his own inner life, where however, it is not sense perceptible. It is shadowy and elusive to the extent that it’s customary to call it an illusion, while the universal machine that presses into the senses is felt to be self-evident reality. To know the ghost we have to make it perceptible and this we can start doing in thinking. Our thinking-forms are the means through which we begin to know the imperceptible ghost, its degrees of freedom and spaces of possibilities.

What is current science doing? It takes the ghost and tries to reintroduce it into the world. Yet it does so in a peculiar way – it takes the ghost of our thinking and tries to fill the world with it, it tries to animate the inanimate with intellectual thoughts. Of course, we say that all this happens only in the brain, it’s just a mental model spread over the sensory picture of the world but it’s still effectively doing exactly that – we’re trying to understand the world by mimicking its inanimate appearances through the intellectual (mostly mathematical) movements of our ghost.

For a long time already it has been clear that thinking in the channels of Newtonian mechanics doesn’t mimic Nature’s appearances perfectly. Even General Relativity has its problems. But still, these thinking frameworks have allowed for GPS satellites and home appliances. Yet as you say, very few need to actually understand the details. Most of us simply reap the benefits.

To understand how spiritual evolution differs in this, we have to first grasp very well the following distinction. Average Joe operates in the same conscious space as the scientist. The difference is that the former thinks about an iPhone, a sports car, a spaceship while the latter fills these perceptions with much more thoughts. When the average person looks at the phone they can think of communication, games, apps and so on. When the engineer looks at it, he sees there his whole professional life, the mathematics of physics, electronics, the circuits, the CPU, the memory, the software, OS, drivers and so on. Yet the cognitive space has similar ‘geometry’ in both cases, it’s just that the scientist fills it much more thoroughly with thoughts. Now consider what was explained in the lecture:



If the whole lecture hasn’t been seen I recommend at least looking at these two chapters: 55:48 to 59:00

As I wrote in the first post, it is very interesting to contemplate how scientists gradually have to recognize this ‘verticality’ of reality. Our mainstream understanding of biology is still based on 17th century thinking. Things are as flattened as they were for Descartes (as far as the mode of cognition is concerned). Today this is one of the greatest impediments for gaining deeper insight into reality.

What the above image depicts, can be found in different forms here and there in scientific works but it’s still very rare. The general idea is that the laws of reality do not exist only at the particle level but every scale-level introduces something unique which is not reducible to another level. For our goals it’s very important that we understand very well what this implies.

An example where things exist only on a single level is cellular automata like Conway’s game of life (CGOL). This is a very simple system consisting of a rectangular grid of cells (pixels) that can be on or off (alive or dead). Then a single frame of the system is transformed into the next by following these simple rules, applied for each cell:



Here’s a typical unfoldment when the rules are run over random initial conditions (noise of alive and dead pixels).



Usually things evolve in a chaotic manner until they finally settle into a quasi-stable pattern. Yet through careful preparation of the initial conditions it is possible to achieve practically any level of algorithmically describable behavior. For example, here’s a working computer:



CGOL is a Turing-complete system. This means that its rules are general enough that it can simulate the behavior of any conceivable computational system. Anything that can be described with an algorithm can be implemented in CGOL.

Here we come to an important point. One would say that the computer above is an emergent system. But we should be crystal clear that as far as the CGOL system is concerned, it is completely irrelevant whether the pixels are arranged in the shape of a computer or as random noise. The rules are completely the same. We can run the rules on our own device (like here – use the pencil tool to draw your own shapes and then use the ‘play’ button to see them transform) or we can use paper and pencil and run the rules ourselves by hand. We don’t need to understand that the pixels are arranged in a particular way, we don’t need to understand how the simulated CGOL computer works. We can be completely myopic and go through the cells one by one, apply the rules and produce the next frame. The CGOL computer will run just fine.

This is the mainstream way in which biological life is seen today – as emerging from purely physical interactions. The laws of physics are considered to be exactly the same in the biological cell and the stone. Nature is completely myopic, it doesn’t ‘know’ that its particle-pixels are arranged in the shape of an organism. It simply runs the rules that transform them from frame to frame. Consider the following unicellular life forms:



In reductionism it is all the same whether the particles are arranged in the shape of these organisms or they are simply a homogeneous soup of chemicals. Life doesn’t exist as some ‘thing’ from the reductionistic perspective. It’s just a name that we, conscious beings, give to certain patterns of pixels.

The question why we should experience such holistic patterns as consciousness is hard enough but it should be clear that even the simplest unicellular life is only assumed to be nothing but the dynamics of the physical pixels. There’s currently no scientific experiment which can tell if the laws of physics are enough. All our physical science and its remarkable mathematical precision, is entirely a science of what is dead. We can’t study the behavior of an electron unless we devise specific experiments where this electron is isolated in a very controlled system. The same holds for our study of the molecular dynamics in the biological cell. Our microscopes can’t see at the scale where molecules react. We can only study the chemical reactions of molecules that have been extracted from the living cell. Thus most of the fine details about molecular biology are conceptually patched together from our understanding of the separate steps of the chemical reactions. For example, videos such as the following are presently impossible to film directly. They represent our understanding of the separate chemical reactions and how they would fit together through time.



Watching animations like these leaves one wondering how could it be that molecules which are supposed to wiggle in their statistical Brownian dynamics, exhibit such orchestrated behavior. And indeed, the idea that the laws of physics, as we know them when studying isolated particles in highly controlled (constrained) experiments, are enough to explain the complicated dynamics of biological chemistry, is entirely an assumption. Presently, our computers are not powerful enough to fully simulate a simple macromolecule (such as folding of a protein), let alone a whole cell. But hopefully, if such simulations become possible and we load the blocks of biology, and begin to simulate their transformations frame by frame, it will be seen that we can only simulate a dying cell. The molecules will wiggle in their Brownian motions and soon everything falls apart into chaos.

We should make no mistake and believe that this will convince scientists that there’s something wrong in the reductionist approach. A motivated painter would never say that something is impossible to draw. He’ll simply go on to refine the techniques, the brushes, the paints and so on. Such is the case in science. Failure won’t demotivate scientists. Most of them will continue to refine the CGOL rules of physics, patching them in the most varied ways in order to replicate the appearances of living cells. Very few will consider that there might be something insufficient in the mode of cognition they exercise.

Needless to say, patching the rules in this way will produce a more and more bizarre system that makes less and less intuitive sense. Interestingly, we already see signs of this with the advent of machine learning. The latter is just a fancy name for optimization of a mathematical function. The training process adjusts the parameters of the function until it produces results that we desire (think of the function as a box with thousands of potentiometers which need to be adjusted in order to produce the desired output when presented with specific input). Such approaches already give plausible results in areas like protein folding and gravitational systems. It’s clear that in this we no longer seek the ‘laws of physics’ but we simply devise a ‘painting’ algorithm that when run, replicates certain dynamics. There will be more and more scientists who will readily admit that this is all we can ever do. The search for the laws of Nature will be seen as a kind of superstition, a confused form of idealism that has come to believe that human mathematical thinking has something to do with the foundations of reality, instead of being only intellectual mimicking of appearances. Note that all this proceeds solely because the intellect desires to have a flat system of rules, where everything can be seen as patterns of pixels, just like the computer inside CGOL (here ‘flat’ doesn’t mean 2D. We can have n-dimensional cellular automata if we like. It is flat in the sense that we have a clear two-tier system of elements and the rules of their transformations – nouns and verbs).

Now if all this is understood, it will be clear what people like Michael Levin (ML) explore – that there are levels of lawfulness in Nature. The higher levels bend the space of possibilities for the lower levels. If we measure the behavior of the particles in a dead cell we would find statistical randomness, just like we find in Brownian motion. If we could measure the behavior of molecules in a living cell it would be discovered that each molecule moves according to slightly modified statistics. This is the higher order lawfulness which bends the configuration space of the lower. And of course, the lower works back on the higher.

Let’s try to get a good feel for what all this means. Think of what today’s science consists of. It practically all comes down to the Principle of Least Action.



Whether it is classical mechanics or quantum mechanics, or general relativity, the question is always to find the correct path through configuration space, which minimizes a certain quantity called the action (for more information this video may be useful). In general relativity this path is called the geodesic – light takes the shortest path in curved spacetime (more technically, the path that minimizes the proper time).



Now what is configuration space? I won’t go into technical details but let’s approach this in the context of our needs. As a crude analogy consider the typical organization structure:



Here we can say that each level operates in a different configuration space, which represents the corresponding goals and the means of attaining them. The CEO operates with global goals. He says “I want to double the profits over the next year.” From his point of view he’s following a geodesic through corporate goal space. He’s at point A with profits X and wants to move towards point B where the profits are 2X. The geodesic is the shortest path between A and B in that goal space. This bends the configuration space of the middle level management. Now they have certain constraints within which they operate. They also have their own geodesics, their mid-level goals. These in turn bend the configuration space of the low level management.

In the configuration space of the CEO, reality looks like traversing a space of high level goals. These are the elements of reality at that level – merging of companies, new branches, new product lines and so on. This is the landscape through which the CEO’s geodesic streams. It’s a level where the details of the mid and low level management are abstracted. This doesn’t mean that this level is an absolute master control over the lower. If the CEO sets unrealistic goals, the lower level will face certain impossibilities and will respectively bend his own morphic space where his geodesic will deviate from the intended goal.

At the same time, the CEO’s space itself is being bent by higher order spaces. For example, national and global economics, politics, legislation. The CEO’s space is influenced by both the lower and higher, and at the same time he works upon the lower (by issuing orders) or even the higher (for example by lobbying).

It is natural that man of today feels certain antipathy towards such hierarchical structures because they are indeed not exactly natural. They mimic nature in a mechanical way but they are not exactly how Nature does it. Thus we should keep in mind that the corporate hierarchy is only an analogy. To get a feel for the natural spaces consider another example. You reach and take a cup of tea from the table. From your perspective your frames of existence transform through a clear configuration space and you’re following a smooth geodesic in it. You move from state A where your hand is retracted, towards state B where you have grabbed the cup. Things are quite different for your physical organism however. An astounding complexity is involved in the movement of your arm. Consider this animation:



We can see that what from our intellectual perspective is a smooth path through the configuration space of our bodily conscious states, actually bends the configuration space of our tissues and cells in a very complicated manner, which are within the context of our thinking intent.

Or consider what we do when we try to tell a story or explain some knowledge. At some level we experience the intuition of the whole story. This intuition has a certain unique identity, a fingerprint. We can tell apart our intuition of the story of our going to Paris from that of going to New York. This intuition bends the space of our pictorial imagination. We can go through the perceptual frames of the story as in a movie. Of all the possible things that we can imagine, we’re moving through images that fit the curvature of the intuition of the whole story. Then these images can bend our linguistic space. From all the words that we may use, only those remain which fit the stream of images. Our everyday consciousness is so habitual that we’re rarely aware of this gradient. Instead we instinctively spit out the words of the story, without paying attention to the spaces of memory-intuition and images.

Please note that there’s a great difference here with Bernardo’s idea that the body is what consciousness looks like from the outside. Here we don’t pretend that our hand is what the willing of its movement looks like. It’s rather that the physical spaces have quite independent existence, yet through our willing activity we partake in their curvature.

Hopefully these examples already hint at what people like ML investigate. It is the realization that a single level of rules (like CGOL or fundamental physics) cannot account for the higher order dynamics. Instead, there’s a musical orchestration between levels which operate at different levels of abstraction, so to speak. The key thing to understand is that at each level of abstraction there’s simplicity. The transformations at each level simply try to follow the shortest path in morphic space. When we want to take the cup of tea we don’t have to be aware of the incredible complexity of the lower levels – we simply will our transformation directly toward the future state B where we hold the cup.

Now one can say that we’re stating obvious things. We have known for centuries that our conscious life operates at a higher level of abstraction. So what’s new? That we question the floating assumption that this level has to be reduced to some other level(s). It is indeed an assumption. Nothing in our given experience forces us to make this assumption. In fact, the moment we make such an assumption we immediately create an irresolvable hard problem. So why then we’re so obsessed with reductionism? The deep reasons for this would take us too far but let’s just point out that it’s almost like we’re magnetically repelled from taking our human-level intellectual activity as something real, that can’t be reduced to other levels. Please understand this rightly – this is not to say that our intellectual morphic space is something complete in itself that can be understood in isolation. No level exists as something in itself. Every level exists only in relation to all other levels. Yet each level represents a unique intuitive space which is pivoted along geodesics and which correspondingly bends other spaces.

We need to take a moment and appreciate how deeply embedded this impulse for reductionism really is in our scientific and philosophical habits. To grasp this we need to understand that reductionism doesn’t necessarily imply only small things, like pixel-particles. ML only hints at this. His concrete biological studies don’t allow him to speculate about it but as he follows the integration of configuration spaces, after moving from the space of cells and organs he says “...and who knows what other spaces there are, linguistic and maybe many others”. If we follow the logical thread we come to the conclusion that our human-scale linguistic space is itself being bent by higher order spaces (like the CEO’s space being bent by national and global economics). Following the thread to the end naturally leads us to what mystical traditions have always known – that everything resides within an all-encompassing configuration space. One could say for example, that at a much higher level there’s the smooth geodesic of the rhythmic outbreath and inbreath of Brahma. The curvature of this space bends the whole hierarchy of more specific spaces. The thing however, is that when this is taken intellectually it becomes another form of reductionism, except that it reduces not to many things but to one thing. We say “Only the highest unitary configuration space is real, our human-level intuitive space is an illusion.”

We need to really understand what’s at stake here. It’s about the refusal that there’s such a thing as causality at the human-level of integration. We’re in the middle and there are two extremes. One extreme says “All the causes lie at the lowest level. These are where the CGOL rules manifest. It would be foolish to say that the parts of the simulated CGOL computer have any causal function. We say ‘signals travel from here to there, they are processed in the CPU, then they activate the display unit’ but this is all only a manner of speaking. In reality there’s no signal, there’s no display unit, there’s no activation. All there is are the simple CGOL rules applied to each pixel from frame to frame. In the same sense it would be foolish to imagine that our thinking and will have any causal role in the flow of reality. These are simply levels of abstraction, they are only patterns of the fundamental transformation of pixels, which don’t know or care about their higher order shapes.” The other extreme says “The only cause lies in the highest level. It’s foolish to imagine that our thinking and will have any causal reality. It’s all simply a shadow of the one real cause at the level of unity. Thus we attain to reality when we stop pretending that we’re doing something at our human scale and instead seek mystical union with the highest unity.”

Understanding these two extremes and the middle point holds one of the greatest secrets of our present stage of evolution. We need to appreciate how we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. We can’t get out of bed without this. We continually transform our states of being through these intuitive configuration spaces at our human level of abstraction. Yet at the moment we begin to philosophize about this activity, we’re immediately thrown into one of the two extremes. This has already been thoroughly examined in the Central Topic and the hysteresis process. At the moment we begin philosophizing, we completely denounce any creative responsibility. We immediately reduce our human-scale geodesic flow to be nothing but a pattern of either the lowest or the highest level. We do that because we’re unaware of our thinking process. We immediately forget that we’re engaged in philosophizing. We’re unaware that we’re treading the intuitive space of philosophical meaning and what we philosophize about is only an objectified memory image of our past human-scale states.

This is something that we must understand with crystal clarity. Unless we recognize how we steer our thinking, feeling and willing configuration spaces all the time, yet we completely push them away as soon as we start philosophizing (being completely blind about the fact that we’re still pivoting through thinking space of philosophical intuition), we simply have no chance to grasp the fact that causality exists on all levels and is experienced in unique forms of intuition.

My experience in this forum and in general, shows that without exception, those who are firmly enmeshed into either materialistic or mystical reductionism, are certain to show great antipathy towards any deeper spiritual understanding. And this is only natural, since spiritual investigation begins with the recognition that each level is a unique space of intuitive spiritual activity and we only understand reality when we can grasp how these levels work into each other in a musical gradient. We can’t make even the first step into reality if we’re unwilling to experience our thinking as steering through, say, linguistic space, that can’t be reduced to some other space. This is not to say that our thinking is absolutely free – this is simply not the case – our flow is heavily constrained by both higher and lower spaces, yet there’s something in the bending of our own thinking space which can never be attributed to anything else. The palette of our vocabulary, our ideas and so on are a much wider field than what we experience at any given moment as a single thought. Thus our thoughts are certainly dependent on that invisible landscape. That’s why we use the term ‘steering’ or ‘space bending’. Nevertheless, in the steering activity we’re one and the same with the first-person causal activity of the Cosmos. We are the first-person experience of what a causal law of nature is. We reach a point where if we’re to seek another cause of our living steering spiritual activity, we need to put that same spiritual activity in the blind spot in order to philosophize with it about some other imagined abstract causes.

Let’s try to summarize all this by borrowing ML’s images:



Imagine this as clearly as possible. As a thinking being we’re steering in thinking intuitive space. When we think about matter and biology we project our thinking in that direction. Please note – in our intellectual life we don’t experience the full nature of the lower and higher spaces. They only act as constraints to our human-scale flow. Our consciousness spans through all spaces but we are clearly self-conscious only in the steering of thinking space. Other spaces mysteriously impress into our thinking space as various conscious phenomena.

Even though for clarity the spaces are depicted as something separate, we should imagine that they are all one within the others – every space is being bent by all others and it bends all others. So when we say that we’re self-conscious in thinking space this doesn’t mean that other spaces are separated from our consciousness through some membranes. It’s only that our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics.

In our intellect we’re like the CEO. We don’t have immediate experience of the ground floor workers (our biological cells) yet steering through mental images in intuitive space can extend into the lower spaces as willing. Conversely, the workings of the lower spaces impress as perceptions and feelings which can be grasped intuitively as a flow of images at the level of our intellectual topology.

When we consider the higher order spaces, we need a kind of inverted form of spiritual activity. Humanity has been preparing for this kind of activity through the practice of prayer. Through prayer we radiate our thinking intents into higher order spaces and we also try to perceive their curvature through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in order to know how we can musically harmonize our human-level flow with the higher order flow.

Notice that although we speak of ‘spaces’ these implicitly contain also time. For example, when we reach for the tea cup, our intuition spans the temporal transformation along the geodesic. We live in the intuitive knowing of where our hand is going because we ourselves steer the transformation through that space. Similarly, higher order spaces’ geodesics can encompass even greater temporal spans. In the lecture, ML depicts that with the enlargement of the light cones and the fact that higher order minds have goals that span much greater timespans.

Now when we think in the lines of ML, we imagine that at each level of space there’s some unique lawfulness which can’t be reduced to any other space. The shortest path between two states in one space is not the same as that in others. In one space two states lie on a smooth geodesic but in lower spaces, the way they are being bent looks like higher intelligence is active in their ordering. The molecules in the cell seem to be orchestrated by higher intelligence, even though in life space there’s simply following of the shortest path between two states.

Notice that we always steer through thinking space (even though quite instinctively most of the time) and experience mental images representing other spaces. This happens when we think of physics, biology, psychology and so on. Yet the lawfulness of these spaces remains abstract to us. We imagine that biological space bends the flow of physical molecules but this bending activity is only an abstract mental picture for us, no different than the way we picture electricity and magnetism.

Things however, become interesting when we consider thinking space itself. Then the steering through that space turns upon itself. This is the only place where we have the chance to find the space-bending activity in a completely different way – as the experience of our first-person causal will. In other words, unlike the abstract mental pictures of the supposed causal activity in other spaces, now our mental images tightly reflect our livingly experienced steering activity. This we can experience, for example, with the “I think these words” or the vowels exercises.

This is really the beginning of meditation in the modern sense. It starts with the experience of space-bending of thinking space itself. Through concentration on that activity we reach the point of feeling ourselves to be smoothly steering through a geodesic in that space. From here we can gradually follow how other spaces bend thinking space and how in turn our intuitive spiritual activity can harmonize the musical nesting of all spaces, as far as we can bend them. This is no longer a matter of abstract arrangement of mental images but of actual expansion of consciousness and new forms of steering.

* * *

Now we’re more or less in a position to return to the original inquiry. In our age we wouldn’t say that we’re less human if we don’t understand how GPS satellites work. There are many things that can make us a worthy human being, without having to enter into the technicalities of science and engineering. In fact, many people consider precisely scientists to be cold intellectuals that miss something of their essential humanity.

It’s enough that some human beings have entered into these technicalities, such that others can reap the benefits. This however is not the case with spiritual knowledge. In evolutionary terms we can’t become human in the full sense of the word unless we understand things such as those we’re investigating here. This doesn’t mean that we have to use technical terms such as configuration spaces, geodesics and so on. These are nothing but symbolic expressions borrowed from our modern scientific vocabulary. Yet in one way or another, at one time or another, everyone will come to understand the essence of these things.

Here ‘understanding’ doesn’t mean to simply fill our head with some concepts and recite them at sermons. These concepts have to be found as concrete intuitions of the full spectrum of reality. The abstract concepts are only a scaffold. To come to reality we have to find what they are triangulating. The picture of nested morphic spaces that bend each other will remain just an abstract image unless we try to move to reality. Few ways were already presented. If we can recognize in a fully introspective way the relation of our general intuition of a story, its pictorial experience and its linguistic verbalization, we already have something concrete from our inner life, for which the concepts are symbolic expressions.

Evolutionary spiritual development consists of such an expansion of consciousness, where we come to know the inner side of the morphic spaces and the way they work into each other. In one way or another we have to come to consciousness of our soul space, where our sympathies and antipathies bend our linguistic space. We have to become more conscious of our bodily space, where we begin to recognize how our inner life of thoughts and feelings distorts the morphic space of our organs and tissues. These will be found to be within the context of even higher order spaces, where our incarnational transformations are seen as following a smooth rhythmic geodesic, which in turn are embedded into the evolutionary space of the whole of humanity, which also follows a rhythmic geodesic there and so on.

The role of spiritual science today is that it tries to spread awareness of these morphic spaces and how our spiritual activity fits in them. It is indeed true that there’re always some souls who approach things earlier than others. But this holds true for anything. Today only those who have developed a certain inner strength of individuality can enter into these depths of reality. There are many souls who lack such strength. They will always feel a need for the support of a group consciousness, which gives them form. Such people would say “I’ll consider these things only when I see those around me taking a step”. Of course, all the others say the exact same thing, so they are all stuck, everyone expects others to make the first step. This doesn’t mean that they won’t transform. It’s simply that such transformation is always more painful because it is forced by the transforming environment, while the beings struggle to remain as they are. We find our fully conscious stance within these transformations when we recognize that our personal soul life is embedded within the higher and lower morphic spaces. Then we don’t pretend that we’ll always remain the same but we try to musically attune to the flows, such that our consciousness expands and we can steer through our human-scale space with the greatest freedom. Ignorance is not freedom. A dog on a leash which doesn’t recognize its constraints (and thus believes it is free), can’t override them either.

Those on a forum like this, already feel themselves to be at least a little unfitting in the general group consciousness. Some see this only as a kind of spare time hobby, others feel that something much deeper is at stake. In no way should this cause any pride in us like in saying “Look at me, I’m no part of the herd.” Such an attitude has catastrophic consequences. It can only be balanced by the understanding that any degree of freedom we win for ourselves immediately becomes a responsibility. Thus anyone who approaches these new evolutionary currents has to understand how great of a responsibility we bear in order to lead these currents into the general life.

Of course, there will also be those who say “Well, it’s true that I’m currently constrained but I’ll be free after death. My morphic space is completely independent of the Cosmos, so I’ll take it with me and do whatever I want on the other side. There’s no need to learn anything about the nested constraints here on Earth. These are just temporary conditions. It’s curious to see how they work but this is completely optional. As long as I focus on my own independence, I’ll be free after death and all these optional constraints will be left behind.” Well, this attitude has been gone through so many times. In the end it remains a Cosmic bet. One simply holds on to the belief that the nested morphic spaces have significance only in the Earthly state even though they have no idea what the other state would be like. Thus – the dualism between ‘this’ and the ‘other’ world. If one insists on taking such a gamble, instead of exploring the full spectrum of reality that is available to us here and now (and which any serious monism/non-dualism should consider to be the spectrum of reality), then trying to logically show what the odds are, will barely be considered.

With all this said, it should be clear that spiritual knowledge is something living. It’s like finding new limbs that we didn’t know existed. It’s about finding new ways in which consciousness can flow, new degrees of freedom that musically attune the nested morphic spaces into a holistic symphony. This is a science of living. It simply makes no sense that some spiritual scientists will take the trouble to develop tools and appliances which others will simply use to make their eating and drinking more pleasurable. Our days of ‘end-user experience’ of life are running out. Today we’re called upon to enter into the living organism of existence, to see what we and the Cosmos are ‘made of’. This necessarily changes our whole experience of what we are as spiritual beings, what reality is and how we’re placed in the living Cosmos.

* * *

The transformation of our thinking activity from intellectual arrangement of mental images about reality, into living steering along the geodesics of intuitive space, is at the heart of PoF. Even though it’s well more than a century since this essential step in the cognitive evolution of humanity has been outlined, it is bewildering to contemplate how far removed from it are the leading thinkers of our age. It seems like the polarization into materialistic and mystical reductionism, instead of being reconciled, grows even stronger. People still have this strong antipathy towards finding the creative causal activity within thinking, from whence the musical integration of the morphic spaces begins. There’s still this strong addiction to projecting the cause of thinking to something else, belonging to some other level of reality. In other words, thinking still wants to polarize itself into blind spot activity, which builds a mental model of itself and imagines that the ‘true’ causes of thinking lie somewhere out there, where the model points at.

Both kinds of reductionism are dead ends in evolution. So is apathy towards our spiritual activity. Ideas such as those presented by ML can be taken as a kind of compromise between completely flat intellectual modeling and the living experience of steering and integration of intuitive spaces. For those who are incapable of thinking without the help of an abstract model, this can be taken as a transitional stage. The only way to overcome the reductionistic flattening of cognition into one of the two extremes is by looking for the unique causal activity at each level.

What makes this approach suitable for transition? The fact that if followed logically, such ideas inevitably lead us to consider the pivoting of our thinking, feeling and willing spaces as something real which can’t be reduced to other levels. This logically faces us with the question “what do those causes feel like in the case of thinking space?” Here we arrive at a real test for our own ideas. If we’re true to our ideas we would have to find in thinking space something which is irreducible to other spaces. If we’re not true to our ideas, we’ll twist, we’ll move our thinking in the blind spot by secretly imagining that we stand outside reality and go on speculating about thinking space as something separate, having nothing to do with our actual real-time philosophical activity.

For this reason, the intellectual models which try to envision some form of scale-dependent lawfulness of spacetime, are the only direction that has the potential to rescue the intellect from the two extremes of reductionism. Such models are indeed rare but can be seen here and there. ML’s is one of the more well formed. There have been several attempts to introduce scale-relativity in physics. One example is Fractal Space-Time And Microphysics: Towards A Theory Of Scale Relativity. Another more general investigation is A Fractal Topology of Time: Implications for Consciousness and Cosmology. 

Even though these models are still very abstract, when the intellect moves through these ideas it gradually becomes conscious of dynamics unlike anything that can be experienced through flattened reductionism. Such models are the only way through which the intellect (linguistic space) can encounter its own causal nature as something that has to be taken as an irreducible law of nature. Without such scale-relativity of causation, the intellect always projects its cause into the materialistic or the mystical extremes.

This doesn’t mean that such models will by themselves transform thinking into living steering of intuitive space. But they can at least lead us to the very edge where the intellect twists and turns upon itself. Such twisting and turning can be contemplated in works like Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid or I Am a Strange Loop, yet there the intellect still hopelessly projects its cause into the CGOL level of materialistic reductionism and the strange loop is nothing but a pixel pattern, just like the simulated computer in CGOL. But still, for those deeply enmeshed in abstract thinking, only such scale-relative ideas are capable of ‘tricking’ the intellect to approach the point where it can unite with its own spiritual reality. This union is at the core of PoF. Only from this point true science can begin, which investigates and harmonizes from the inner perspective, the musical interaction of causal intuitive spaces at different scales.

The fact that we have called this kind of intellectual modeling ‘transitional’ doesn’t mean that it is a smooth and easy transition. As said, it’s much more of a compromise. We have to invest a lot of energy for moving our intellect through these models and in the end, they are only a quite imperfect scaffold that will have to be dismantled. It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.

This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires. As said before, as exciting as ML’s ideas are, they hold a great danger for humanity. In proper evolution we would start from the central thinking space and expand into the inner reality of lower and higher morphic spaces. This, as explained, leads to the attunement of our soul life which results in a deeper and balanced life of thinking, feeling and willing, centered not only around our individuality but concentric and harmonized with the higher order spaces. This in turn leads to attunement of life space and then the conditions for many of the most deadly diseases of our age are rendered nonexistent. Out spirit has the potential of becoming a formative and regenerative force for the bodily spaces. If such self-knowledge is denied to the soul, human passions continue to work from the subconscious regions of the psyche. Then the intellect extends its mechanical tentacles into other morphic spaces, trying to manipulate their curvature indirectly. Things like regeneration of organs and body modeling will indeed become possible, through such indirect manipulation of the corresponding formative spaces. All this however, will happen not as a result of spiritual development that musically integrates the physical, life, soul, thinking and higher order spaces, but as means for satisfaction of certain unconscious egoistic tendencies that bend our thinking space from the dark spiritual background of our existence. Needless to say, when this happens, the devastation that will become possible will be in magnitudes greater than what we can cause to ourselves today with allopathic drugs and surgery – not only in bodily sense but for the structure of the soul itself.

Hopefully, these tendencies will be counterbalanced by enough souls who will recognize that true freedom and everything that humanity has cherished as the highest values of Truth, Love and Wisdom, is to be achieved not by following blind passions but by expanding consciousness into the nested morphic spaces, where we become fully conscious participants in the artful unfolding of the Cosmos.

To summarize:
1. Abstract models of scale-relative causal laws of reality are the only way the scientific intellect can be pointed away from the two reductionistic extremes.
2. If the logic of these ideas is followed to the ultimate conclusions, the thinking that thinks these ideas will have to recognize its own causal space-bending nature as something directly experienceable and not only abstractly modeled through arrangements of mental images. Now the living space-bending (steering) of intuitive space is recognized as the actual first-person experience of the Process of reality. This is at the heart of PoF. Thus abstract scale-relative models have some potential to lead the intellect to the threshold of spiritual reality.
3. Once our inner experience of existence is transformed into steering/bending through nested intuitive spaces, true science begins. Now evolution becomes a process in which we take fully conscious participation by exploring the curvature of higher order spaces and harmonizing it with the lower.

Hello Cleric,
I would like to comment on your posts more often, but I can't find anything to add, the only thing I can do is learn from them and try to understand them as best as possible. Even if I have an opinion, it would be irrelevant if I can't understand why that opinion arises in me.


Today I read your post again and thought how nice it would be if you wrote a book on this topic.
When I first started out new to this forum I felt overwhelmed when I saw how many posts you made. Now I always notice how you talk about the one thing, dressed in different words and topics.
I've also noticed that I can browse through this forum for hours, I won't get more than a slightly better intellectual understanding. By that I don't mean that it is unimportant to understand what was written.
It is very important from my perspective to understand what to do and why. That stops me. The most important thing I've understood intellectually through Cleric and Ashvin's contributions is that I have to give up the perspective of standing above reality and being able to put everything into logical-sounding thoughts, or grow out of it.


I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's a stage of knowledge that we have to grow out of at this point in evolution in order to grow into the next.
I wish that I and everyone else create in this forum. No reading in the world will change anything unless we start meditating and gain living knowledge of what is being spoken. That's also the point I'm at right now.
I must devote more time to practicing, for example, cleric thought meditation, in a disciplined, daily, and rhythmic manner. I think the fruits will only come with time. I always rush myself too much and end up breaking off what I just started.
To my understanding of what has been said so far, you are saying that if we focus on our thinking as in your exercises, over time we will find that certain forces are affecting our thinking. I do not understand these forces as separate from us, i.e. in the sense of acting from outside, such as a stone being thrown onto the water from outside to cause waves, but as something that makes up our being, which builds our constellation . I can imagine it like a pullover sewn from different types of wool, some of the fabrics are very inferior in quality, while others are of very high quality in terms of their texture.


This is of course a dead analogy, because a pullover is a finished and fixed product.
by concentrating our own thought activity,
we become more and more aware of these substances as they make up our being and we gain more freedom because we understand why certain things come to the surface so often. For me, these things are analogies that help me to understand what is at stake. I'm still a long way from a living understanding.
Your posts are often difficult for me to understand. I think it's partly because you often use very scientific analogies, and I'm not as educated and well-read as most here.

I also feel an affinity for scientific thinking, I don't know why. I prefer poetic use of language, but that's just personal preference and doesn't play a role in this forum. Currently I find it interesting to learn more about the esoteric history of mankind. I noticed that many initiates, from different religions, tell very similar things to Steiner, just in a different context.


For example, hierarchies, Nachiel, spiritual leaders, imagination and many other things were perceived and recognized earlier.
I've been reading a lot about Evil Forces lately due to my occupation and thinking what caused anxiety in me. A lot of people have been talking about these kinds of things strangely often lately. I wanted to ask you if there is anything you can do to protect yourself from these things?


I also wanted to say that I find it very nice that more and more meditation is being talked about in this forum.
It seems to me that the contributions are more and more related to the practical side. Unfortunately, many people have also left this forum because the content did not meet their expectations.
But that is also the case with me. I often reject a lot of things because I don't like them, but I have to work on that, otherwise I'll continue to be pulled back and forth unconsciously, by subconscious things.

Thank you to everyone who keeps this forum alive!

[Cleric K]

Today I read your post again and thought how nice it would be if you wrote a book on this topic.

Hello Güney,

I’m a long way from writing a book Before that I have much to learn.

I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's a stage of knowledge that we have to grow out of at this point in evolution in order to grow into the next.
I wish that I and everyone else create in this forum. No reading in the world will change anything unless we start meditating and gain living knowledge of what is being spoken. That's also the point I'm at right now.
I must devote more time to practicing, for example, cleric thought meditation, in a disciplined, daily, and rhythmic manner. I think the fruits will only come with time. I always rush myself too much and end up breaking off what I just started.
To my understanding of what has been said so far, you are saying that if we focus on our thinking as in your exercises, over time we will find that certain forces are affecting our thinking. I do not understand these forces as separate from us, i.e. in the sense of acting from outside, such as a stone being thrown onto the water from outside to cause waves, but as something that makes up our being, which builds our constellation . I can imagine it like a pullover sewn from different types of wool, some of the fabrics are very inferior in quality, while others are of very high quality in terms of their texture.

I’m glad that you are drawing value from our exchanges here. Don’t worry, all these things take shape only gradually. And we make an important step when we embrace this fact. Then we begin to be grateful for every stage that we currently go through. It is true that we always need to have an ideal for the future but we’ll always feel dissatisfied if we can’t unite with our present state and instead always live in the fleeting mental pictures of future expectations.

For example, now you may believe that your thinking is not living enough. And it is quite true that it will become more and more living as you persist with your efforts. But it’s not necessary to draw a hard boundary and imagine that your current thinking is dead, while you continue to live in anticipation for the supposed future living thinking. You can find living thinking even in this moment. Even without special meditation. You only need to look with fresh eyes on your thinking as it is now. We demean that thinking only because we take it for granted. But you can look at it with the eyes of a child, as if it is the first time you become aware of it. Think some words, make some thought-movements, remember something. Appreciate how amazing all this is. Play with your thoughts. In our present culture, as we grow older, thinking becomes dim and prosaic. It’s only a shadowy commentary to our sensory life and feelings. If you try, you’ll see how incredible it is that we can think. Take a momentary break from trying to fit your thoughts into philosophical and scientific slots. Then you can appreciate the simple joy of the plasticity of thoughts. You can even imagine plasticine forms and play with them, stretch them, squish them, roll them in a ball, flatten them in a pancake.

This, of course, is only one side of things. By itself it is nothing but fantasy. Yet it is precisely there that you can find this child-like amazement. Imagine an animal-like life, where you’re mute, there's no such thing as understanding, you are only drawn dimly by pleasant sensations and repelled by painful ones. Try to feel how wondrous it is that on top of this foundation you awaken to the possibility to plastically play with mental images. A whole world of imagination opens up!

If you can find this pure joy of weaving in thoughts – even if completely ordinary thoughts – then you already have something significant. Your future development will grow out of this amazement of thought-life, which will gradually penetrate all strata of reality.

For example, hierarchies, Nachiel, spiritual leaders, imagination and many other things were perceived and recognized earlier.
I've been reading a lot about Evil Forces lately due to my occupation and thinking what caused anxiety in me. A lot of people have been talking about these kinds of things strangely often lately. I wanted to ask you if there is anything you can do to protect yourself from these things?

I would say, don’t delve too much on the question of evil. It’s OK to have certain orientation about these questions but the true protection doesn’t come from technical knowledge. The protection comes from your allies. To use your own example with the pullover, you have to work on the Divine strings. Invite the luminous beings from all directions of the Cosmos to weave into the pullover. If you want to know the dark beings you don't need to seek them out. The only thing you need to do is start striving for the Light, then the opposition will come even if you don't want it. This is very important. Don't seek to plunge into the darkness in order to understand how you can protect yourself. It will simply consume you. Instead, move towards the Light and whether you want it or not, you'll learn everything that's needed about the darkness as it drags against you.

When you dial a telephone number, only one of millions and millions of people answers – the person with this number. The relationships between all beings in the universe obey this law. Just as a person answers when you dial their number, so does a specific entity communicate with you because you have emitted a thought that vibrates in unison with it; a connection is established between you and the being or place on which your thought is focused. All those whose thoughts are always chaotic and conflicting are bound to have unfortunate encounters because they come into contact with entities that correspond to these thoughts. This is why it is very important to fill your mind with a heavenly idea, for that idea will magically attract all the beings and elements capable of contributing to its realization. A sublime idea in one’s mind is like a warning sign to the spirits of darkness – ‘Beware of the dog’, ‘Occupied’, ‘Keep out’ – and they dare not enter; but it leaves the door wide open to all the spirits of light.

[AshvinP]

I also feel an affinity for scientific thinking, I don't know why. I prefer poetic use of language, but that's just personal preference and doesn't play a role in this forum. Currently I find it interesting to learn more about the esoteric history of mankind. I noticed that many initiates, from different religions, tell very similar things to Steiner, just in a different context.

Hey Guney,

Just briefly on this, and in connection with Cleric's response, have you come across RW Emerson and his essays on Nature? If you like poetic idealist philosophy, and inspirational writing, I am sure you would appreciate them. Coleridge also has some great philosophy, but it's somewhat harder to parse. Then of course there is Goethe, who was a big influence on Steiner. You can't go wrong with Faust or his fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design. Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature?
...
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says,—he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.
...
Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered
as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

[AshvinP]

The following could practically go anywhere on recent threads, but I thought it could fit in nicely here as another helpful angle on this:

Now one can say that we’re stating obvious things. We have known for centuries that our conscious life operates at a higher level of abstraction. So what’s new? That we question the floating assumption that this level has to be reduced to some other level(s). It is indeed an assumption. Nothing in our given experience forces us to make this assumption. In fact, the moment we make such an assumption we immediately create an irresolvable hard problem. So why then we’re so obsessed with reductionism? The deep reasons for this would take us too far but let’s just point out that it’s almost like we’re magnetically repelled from taking our human-level intellectual activity as something real, that can’t be reduced to other levels. Please understand this rightly – this is not to say that our intellectual morphic space is something complete in itself that can be understood in isolation. No level exists as something in itself. Every level exists only in relation to all other levels. Yet each level represents a unique intuitive space which is pivoted along geodesics and which correspondingly bends other spaces.

It also helps to continually revisit this monumental theme of resisting reductionism. Specifically what follows relates to the physical (mineral), life (organic), emotional (soul/social), and thinking (spiritual) spaces. Tomberg presents the unique intuitive spaces as metamorphoses of logical axioms which relate the part to the whole, i.e. the poles of matter and spirit, which result in material or mystical reductionism when experienced/understood one-sidedly. He also provides a practical application of these principles in the context of Steiner's proposed threefold social order (which unfortunately did not take root). I find that these are some of the most important ideas to work through and internalize in our spiritual striving, as they really open a portal to understanding our first-person thinking stream of becoming within the scale-relative domains of experience, i.e. the fourfold convolutions illustrated in various places, in a flexible and mobile way. They can significantly prepare the soil of our intellectual reasoning for higher cognitive experience.

THE MINERAL WORLD is the region where the logical axiom, ‘a part is less than the whole’, has full and unlimited validity, for in this region everything can be expressed in numbers having quantitative significance. It is the realm of the quantitative per se. In the case of anything that is regarded quantitatively (that is, in its most material aspect) it is true that the whole is greater than its parts. A brick is more than the piece of a brick, and one million votes in favor of the socialists is more than a single vote. However, when we move from the mineral to the realm of life, the organic, the validity of this axiom becomes significantly weaker.

Here we find the functional added to the quantitative. An organism is a unity of functions, of living forces. These forces make up not only a unity, but still more a union because an organism is a system of functions. In this union it is no longer right to speak of ‘lesser’ or ‘greater’, but rather of the significance of individual forces for the whole. But the significance of individual forces in the organism can be very different. Thus the axiom ‘the part is less than the whole’, used not in relation to the quantitative, but now applied in relation to the significance of function (that is, the qualitative), is unable to retain its full validity. It should here be expressed more like this: ‘The significance of the part can be less than, or equal to, the whole.’

Let us take a step further and proceed to the sphere of soul-morality, without losing sight of the axiom relating part to whole. Here we meet with a radical metamorphosis of this axiom. In order that this metamorphosis not become too abstractly characterized, we must approach it with the help of an example. The ideologists of the group who seized power through the Bolshevist revolution justify (and this argument applies more or less to every revolution) the necessity for their atrocities with the axiom: ‘the benefit of the whole demands the annihilation of a part.’ ‘Chop wood and the chips will fly’—this Russian proverb was heard innumerable times by the present author as an excuse for the terror. The whole method of Lenin’s social thinking was consistent with the proverb ‘chop wood and the chips will fly.’ Now it must be frankly admitted that this mode of thinking (and the mode of action arising from it) would be entirely correct if the axiom ‘the part is less than the whole’ were valid also within the realm of human social life. If this axiom were valid where soul meets soul, then two people would have the full right to put a third forcibly out of the way if that person was a hindrance to the intention of the other two. When this axiom is applied to the realm of soul, there springs from it inhuman, anti-soul or sub-soul cruelty; that is, an element comes in that is of a nature foreign to the soul as such. Therefore this axiom is not fitting to the soul realm, where it is invalid, false. The soul has its own logic, and this logic of the heart knows no calculation. For it, the pain and joy of one person are of equal value with the pain and joy of thousands. To the logic of the heart every single soul is of equal value. Never will the heart admit that it is right to stamp on one soul for the benefit of others; never will it be in harmony with true heart-sense to recognize the right to violence. For the true logic of the soul is compassion. And for this logic, the axiom we are considering should be formulated: the part is equal to the whole. The attitude of mind that demands the sacrifice of a part for the benefit of the whole is just as fundamentally false in the soul realm as ‘a part is greater than the whole’ would be false in the material realm.

By establishing this point, we have not yet exhausted the metamorphosis of our logical axiom. We have merely ascended from root to stem and from stem to leaf—the fruit formation in the blossom we have not yet pursued. This however does take place. The logical axiom of part and whole is subject to a further metamorphosis, and rises thereby into the realm of the beauty of blossoming. We now approach the task of considering the application of our axiom in the sphere that extends up beyond the human—the sphere of spirit. We now have to picture to ourselves an axiom of divine logic in the same way as we have tried to imagine axioms of human and sub-human logic. This axiom of divine logic already had been characterized thousands of years ago—not, indeed, as a thought formulation, but in a picture. The description of the axiom of part and whole as it lives when lifted up into the divine, we find in the Gospels. What is found there is the parable of the Good Shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep behind to go in search of one lost sheep. And when he had found it, there was more joy among the angels in heaven than there was over the ninety-nine. In this picture the axiom is shown in relation to ‘the angels in heaven’; that is, as an axiom of divine logic. This logic is oriented toward the individual. Human beings live within the individual; with effort they learn to cognize the whole. Their cognition is oriented toward the whole. The gods live within the whole—their vision is directed toward the individual. Schematically, we could show the difference as follows: Actually, the same is expressed more beautifully by Rudolf Steiner: ‘The gods are the religion of human beings; human beings are the religion of the gods.’ The gods look down from the cosmic whole upon the wonder of the free personality who has the choice between good and evil. And this personality is a part of the cosmic whole. Yet the gods orient the activity of the whole cosmos toward this part. For that is the nature of their logic, the logic of divine love. For divine logic, the part is greater than the whole.

Thus we can summarize the process of the metamorphosis of the logical axiom concerning the relation of the part to the whole as follows:

The part is less than the whole—logic of the material realm.
The part is less than or equal to the whole—logic of the living realm.
The part is equal to the whole—logic of the soul realm.
The part is greater than the whole—logic of the spirit realm.

In developing the above thoughts we have overcome formal logic (merely formal thinking) and have moved on into living, mobile thinking. In other words, we have proceeded with our thoughts out of the sphere of activity of the Spirits of Form into that of the Spirits of Movement. In order to be able to go a further step, to rise into the realm of the Spirits of Wisdom (that is, to enable the wisdom of these concepts that have been made mobile to emerge), we have to be able to apply them. Only thus can we come to an inner conviction that they contain objectively active wisdom; that is, truth borne by the Spirits of Wisdom—and not just the truth of the Spirits of Form and Movement. So we put the question: in what realm of life does the above sequence of metamorphoses of the axiom relating the part to the whole prove itself? The realm of life where the most mobile and realistic thinking is essential is the social realm. Here the above must either prove true or fail. For this reason we will choose this realm, and try freely to apply the above to it.

Social life is—as is the life of the human organism—threefold. It is an interaction of economic life, rights (political) life, and true cultural (spiritual) life. (Why this is so, and what is meant exactly by these designations, can be learned from some works of Rudolf Steiner—for instance, Towards Social Renewal.† Here it can only be our task to think further along the lines of what is conveyed there.) Each of these three life realms of the social organism has its own laws. One ought not to think about cultural life in the same terms as about the economic life. Each of these realms requires a different kind of thinking. One ought not, for instance, to think juristically about religion, or economically about rights. In the sphere of economic life, the relation of the part to the whole is of a kind that the part must be ‘subservient’ to the whole. Here the principle of equally valid claims holds good, and the sum of the equally valid claimants is greater than a part. The whole must be the determining factor. The interests of the whole, not of the individual, are here decisive. A healthy economic life is run according to the principle a part is less than the whole. If we were to apply the same principle to the life of rights, we would meet with absurdities. If, for instance, in legal proceedings the majority were always in the right as opposed to the minority, then no justice would exist at all. The meaning of justice is equality before the law, regardless of number or power. For the life of rights, the part is equal to the whole. The life of rights is only true to itself when the rights of the individual, even when in opposition to a whole nation, can be recognized. In the cultural life it is different again. There everything depends on the individual, the one who is ‘productive’. In the realm of the purely ‘productive’, for example in the realm of art, the ‘producer’ is everything. The creative personality is the very basis of all cultural life. Therefore, the axiom valid for the cultural life is: the part is greater than the whole. Only that culture has spiritual stature, which makes possible the existence and work of great personalities. Only that state is a just one, where the rights of the individual are secured against all others by the law. Only that nation is economically sound, not where there are multi-millionaires, but where there are no beggars.

The part is less than the whole—economic life. The part is equal to the whole—life of rights. The part is greater than the whole—cultural life.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

These are fantastic insights from Tomberg, thanks! They bring yet another perspective on the fabric of reality from within. In synergy with the theme of this thread, they help shape a multidimensional cognitive environment in which our orientation can grow and stabilize itself.

In order to be able to go a further step, to rise into the realm of the Spirits of Wisdom (that is, to enable the wisdom of these concepts that have been made mobile to emerge), we have to be able to apply them.

As an application of the logic of the soul, for example, described above in these terms:
"The soul has its own logic, and this logic of the heart knows no calculation. For it, the pain and joy of one person are of equal value with the pain and joy of thousands. (...) For the true logic of the soul is compassion. And for this logic, the axiom we are considering should be formulated: the part is equal to the whole."


...I was thinking of the following example. I have always found disgraceful that journalists and various commentators often seem to find a tragedy that killed 10 to be about 10 times more sorely than one that only killed one, and approximately double as tragic as an event that killed five. As if loss and personal tragedy could be added and subtracted like potatoes. The number of victims, as it were, is typically the most important driver of the intensity of compassion and grief appropriate to express in the face of such events. Now within the context of the logic of the soul, this feeling becomes perfectly logic and understandable, and maybe this example could clarify even more Tomberg's idea of metamorphosis of logic across the realms of reality.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

These are fantastic insights from Tomberg, thanks! They bring yet another perspective on the fabric of reality from within. In synergy with the theme of this thread, they help shape a multidimensional cognitive environment in which our orientation can grow and stabilize itself.

In order to be able to go a further step, to rise into the realm of the Spirits of Wisdom (that is, to enable the wisdom of these concepts that have been made mobile to emerge), we have to be able to apply them.

As an application of the logic of the soul, for example, described above in these terms:
"The soul has its own logic, and this logic of the heart knows no calculation. For it, the pain and joy of one person are of equal value with the pain and joy of thousands. (...) For the true logic of the soul is compassion. And for this logic, the axiom we are considering should be formulated: the part is equal to the whole."


...I was thinking of the following example. I have always found disgraceful that journalists and various commentators often seem to find a tragedy that killed 10 to be about 10 times more sorely than one that only killed one, and approximately double as tragic as an event that killed five. As if loss and personal tragedy could be added and subtracted like potatoes. The number of victims, as it were, is typically the most important driver of the intensity of compassion and grief appropriate to express in the face of such events. Now within the context of the logic of the soul, this feeling becomes perfectly logic and understandable, and maybe this example could clarify even more Tomberg's idea of metamorphosis of logic across the realms of reality.

Yes, I think that's clearly indicative of the fact that physical logic has come to spread itself through practically all domains of cultural life. It has all become a numbers game for the most part. Not only does physical logic dictate the way of feeling or thinking about an issue, but it also leads people to pretend to feel or think some way because that is the most profitable for their industry. It is sad how the entire soul-life can become an expression of quantitative logic, the latter acting as a mostly unconscious puppetmaster for the former. I think that was hardly conceivable for the average person 50-100 years ago, but now it seems like the rule more than the exception with the rise of mass media and the corresponding profit incentives.

[Anthony66]

...

Watching animations like these leaves one wondering how could it be that molecules which are supposed to wiggle in their statistical Brownian dynamics, exhibit such orchestrated behavior. And indeed, the idea that the laws of physics, as we know them when studying isolated particles in highly controlled (constrained) experiments, are enough to explain the complicated dynamics of biological chemistry, is entirely an assumption. Presently, our computers are not powerful enough to fully simulate a simple macromolecule (such as folding of a protein), let alone a whole cell. But hopefully, if such simulations become possible and we load the blocks of biology, and begin to simulate their transformations frame by frame, it will be seen that we can only simulate a dying cell. The molecules will wiggle in their Brownian motions and soon everything falls apart into chaos.

...

Cleric,

Does the following article and associated journal paper suggest you need to reassess your assertion I have bolded? Personally I'm unsure as I don't have the biological training to fully understand what the researchers actually achieved. But on the face of it, it seems like they were able to reproduce many of the features of a living cell.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/01/2 ... imulation/

A question I've been pondering is if one could hypothetically recreate the physical state of a living biological system, say the brain or even a living cell, without the influence of the higher level morphological space (e.g. through some future nano-robot), would we at least get a flickering of life activity before it start dissolving outside of the influence of the higher spaces? I'm guessing yes in the case of a cell but I don't think the brain would produce qualia or a thought given what we understand about thinking.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

Does the following article and associated journal paper suggest you need to reassess your assertion I have bolded? Personally I'm unsure as I don't have the biological training to fully understand what the researchers actually achieved. But on the face of it, it seems like they were able to reproduce many of the features of a living cell.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/01/2 ... imulation/

Thanks Anthony, I'll look at the full paper more closely. But of course, I'm always ready to revise what I have said in the face of the facts.

A question I've been pondering is if one could hypothetically recreate the physical state of a living biological system, say the brain or even a living cell, without the influence of the higher level morphological space (e.g. through some future nano-robot), would we at least get a flickering of life activity before it start dissolving outside of the influence of the higher spaces? I'm guessing yes in the case of a cell but I don't think the brain would produce qualia or a thought given what we understand about thinking.

I think that the biological cell is an almost perfect mechanical automata, so if the parts are in place I imagine that it can keep functioning for some time, "by inertia" as it were. But there should be something which attracts the evolution of the cell's state towards the spaces compatible with life. Just like a factory that suddenly loses it's management will likely continue to function just fine for a few more days but then it eventually turns into chaos.

I'm really looking forward towards more of these simulations. I think we'll be able to get some insights from that direction. Right now I haven't yet read the full paper so I'm unsure what exactly their results are but from the article it seems they have simulated 20 minutes worth of time. I would have guessed that a cell would have fallen apart far more quickly without higher coherence but maybe the molecular mechanism are indeed very finely tuned.

It's interesting also at what level of abstraction these simulations run. From what I see it is at the particle level. That's interesting because AFAIK protein folding is still unfeasible through direct simulation of molecular dynamics. That's why the greatest success so far is based on machine learning (AlphaFold2) trained on large databases of known mappings between amino acid sequences and geometry. The folding problem has been 'solved' by making a predictor function that simply guesses the geometry based on the training over the database. There is no simulation of forces and so on.

Thus it is quite interesting how this works in the cell simulation. To simulate a cell, among all things, you need to simulate DNA translation and protein synthesis. The latter obviously would already be a solution to the folding problem. After all, if we can simulate a whole minimal cell where thousands of proteins are synthesized and folded completely naturally (that is, we simply simulate its actual synthesis and examine the resultant folded structure), why hasn't the folding problem been solved in this way years ago, with much less computational needs? We don't need to simulate a whole cell, only a single ribosome and bunch of tRNAs with amino acids attached.

For this reason I'm still puzzled how could protein folding still be computationally unfeasible through simulation of molecular dynamics, while a whole cell can now be simulated, where protein folding is only a small part of the whole process. I hope the full paper will throw more light on this. Thanks for bringing this article to attention!

[Anthony66]

Cleric,

Does the following article and associated journal paper suggest you need to reassess your assertion I have bolded? Personally I'm unsure as I don't have the biological training to fully understand what the researchers actually achieved. But on the face of it, it seems like they were able to reproduce many of the features of a living cell.
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/01/2 ... imulation/

Thanks Anthony, I'll look at the full paper more closely. But of course, I'm always ready to revise what I have said in the face of the facts.

A question I've been pondering is if one could hypothetically recreate the physical state of a living biological system, say the brain or even a living cell, without the influence of the higher level morphological space (e.g. through some future nano-robot), would we at least get a flickering of life activity before it start dissolving outside of the influence of the higher spaces? I'm guessing yes in the case of a cell but I don't think the brain would produce qualia or a thought given what we understand about thinking.

I think that the biological cell is an almost perfect mechanical automata, so if the parts are in place I imagine that it can keep functioning for some time, "by inertia" as it were. But there should be something which attracts the evolution of the cell's state towards the spaces compatible with life. Just like a factory that suddenly loses it's management will likely continue to function just fine for a few more days but then it eventually turns into chaos.

I'm really looking forward towards more of these simulations. I think we'll be able to get some insights from that direction. Right now I haven't yet read the full paper so I'm unsure what exactly their results are but from the article it seems they have simulated 20 minutes worth of time. I would have guessed that a cell would have fallen apart far more quickly without higher coherence but maybe the molecular mechanism are indeed very finely tuned.

It's interesting also at what level of abstraction these simulations run. From what I see it is at the particle level. That's interesting because AFAIK protein folding is still unfeasible through direct simulation of molecular dynamics. That's why the greatest success so far is based on machine learning (AlphaFold2) trained on large databases of known mappings between amino acid sequences and geometry. The folding problem has been 'solved' by making a predictor function that simply guesses the geometry based on the training over the database. There is no simulation of forces and so on.

Thus it is quite interesting how this works in the cell simulation. To simulate a cell, among all things, you need to simulate DNA translation and protein synthesis. The latter obviously would already be a solution to the folding problem. After all, if we can simulate a whole minimal cell where thousands of proteins are synthesized and folded completely naturally (that is, we simply simulate its actual synthesis and examine the resultant folded structure), why hasn't the folding problem been solved in this way years ago, with much less computational needs? We don't need to simulate a whole cell, only a single ribosome and bunch of tRNAs with amino acids attached.

For this reason I'm still puzzled how could protein folding still be computationally unfeasible through simulation of molecular dynamics, while a whole cell can now be simulated, where protein folding is only a small part of the whole process. I hope the full paper will throw more light on this. Thanks for bringing this article to attention!

And what do you think about constructing a brain? Could it generate qualia?