Before we enter the main topic of this series of essays, it would be useful for the reader to approach the perspective from which everything will be communicated. Since everyone arrives from different backgrounds and has different concepts at their disposal, some preliminary synchronization is needed to get on the same ‘wavelength’. When reading scientific or philosophical works we already need a certain foundation within which we can fit the communicated concepts. For example, consider the sentence “The temperature at the center of the Sun is very high.” To understand this we need to know what temperature is, what the Sun is, what center is. But even with this preparation, one can still say “How do we know that? No one has ever stuck a thermometer in the center of the Sun.” And indeed, many of the thoughts we deal with are hypotheses and logical inferences. Compare this with the sentence “I feel hot.” Now if we imagine that we ourselves report our inner sense of warmth in this way, then we have a quite different mode of expression. Our words now are testimonies for inner perceptions. Note that we’re speaking of the reported experience. A thermometer may or may not indicate change in our bodily temperature.Note: this essay was originally intended as part one of a series of essays. For various reasons this series is not ready to be shared yet. Yet I'll post this first part because it can more or less stand on its own and it could be of interest to somebody. There's nothing new here, it's still PoF 101 but maybe the examples and metaphors provided will give additional points of attack for those who still struggle with the original PoF text.
So the first step here is to feel the difference between thoughts that express our inner experiences and those that build upon them through further logical inferences. We’re not saying that the more abstract reasoning (that is, thinking in concepts detached from immediate perceptions) has no value. It’s only that we need to get a feeling for what is immediately given to our experience and what has been further inferred by thinking about the given.
A simple example for this is our understanding of the physical world that we live in. We feel quite certain that we operate through our bodily organization within such a spatial world. But we also feel in such a way every night while dreaming. We move through a flow of dream imagery and understand it as an external world with objects, people, animals and so on. Yet when we wake up in the morning we say “It was just a dream.” So what has really changed? Our perceptions are more or less similar – we move through color perceptions of a world, we hear things, we touch them, think about them. One might say “It’s hard to say what exactly is different but I feel more awake, more lucid. Things in the dream can morph and change without me being struck by this but in waking life the flow of perceptions is much more rigidly lawful. This lawfulness seems to be completely independent of the states of my feelings and imagination. Thus it’s my belief that there’s an objective world which impresses its processes in my subjective state through the sense organs.”
Now the goal here is not to undermine our fully justified observations of the rigidly lawful way our perceptions unfold in the waking state. We have no reason to say that reality is a mere dream picture, as we can hear in various idealistic and spiritual philosophies. What we’re here trying to cultivate is a certain gradation of immediacy of our conscious experience. Whether we’re dreaming or awake, we can say “I experience color, sound, smell.” In this statement we’re fully within the given. These are direct observations which will remain valid even if we wake up and it turns out we’ve been dreaming. Similarly when we recognize the rigid lawfulness of our waking state, we’re still within the given. No matter what the nature of this lawfulness is, it is a fact of experience. Actually, postulating some metaphysical explanation of this lawfulness proves to be quite fruitless as far as practical human affairs are concerned. This even slowly becomes the predominant mood in science, exemplified by a phrase like “Shut up and calculate.” This is a testimony for our intellect’s inability to penetrate into the essence of reality – if there’s such a thing – and instead has no choice but to build a mathematical model of our perceptions (and their technological extensions). As far as the dynamics of our mathematical thoughts mimic the dynamics of our perceptual content, we feel we have gained understanding of reality. Whatever we may speculate the true nature of reality is – spacetime and energy or a dream, or a computer simulation – this in no way alters our immediate perceptions and the lawfulness of their metamorphoses. The mathematical models will work perfectly the same, they are completely agnostic to the true essence of reality because from the ground up they have been developed to mimic the quantitative relations of whatever is available to us as perceptions.
With this said, we will try to step back from the centuries old accumulations of metaphysical beliefs and focus on the parts of existence that are invariant of whatever abstract thoughts we lay upon them. For this reason, in our discussion we’ll begin by identifying the immediate phenomena of our experience. In philosophical terms, such an approach to the mystery of existence is known as phenomenology. So what is at the grounds of our experience? One aspect has already been addressed and can be collectively called perceptions. Here we completely disregard the question “Perceptions of what?”, which immediately suggests a duality of an inner subjective and outer objective world. Of these we have direct experience only of the former. The latter exists for us only as an idea conceived in thinking. It has to be repeated that this is not meant to suggest that our immediate experience is all there is to reality. We’re only looking for a starting point that is free of any assumptions and postulates. Thus we shall focus entirely on our inner experience of color, sound, taste and so on. In addition to the familiar five senses we also include any other conscious phenomena that we can identify – sense of balance, sense of warmth, feelings, pain, pleasure, will, thoughts and so on. Practically anything that can draw our attention and can be thought about is to be considered perception in our context. Initially, these perceptions should be taken at face value without any judgment. We simply identify them as inner phenomena. This means that hallucinations and illusions are also just as valid perceptions. Differentiating between objective and illusionary perceptions becomes possible only later after they are worked upon by thinking.
Phenomenology is not investigation of the obvious
When speaking of phenomenology this shouldn’t be mistaken for investigation of only what is obvious. There are many examples of experiential phenomena that can only be beheld after certain conditions are met. For example, pure mathematics can be considered a form of phenomenology. What we are investigating are the patterns of our own mathematical thinking. Yet for someone who has never attempted to approach such a kind of thinking, these cognitive phenomena will not at all be obvious. It would be similar with a person who lacks some sensory organ and doesn’t find the experience of phenomena that others talk about. So the reader shouldn’t immediately dismiss what we’ll be discussing here, just because it may not be immediately obvious. All care will be taken to provide descriptions of the steps needed to approach non-obvious phenomena but the reader will need to apply certain inner effort to follow these steps. Here some may be worried that they might be deceived in this way and will simply believe what they are being told. But if what was written above is understood, such fears should be seen as completely groundless. This would be as someone worrying to hear something of mathematics because they may be led to fantasize the existence of mathematical thinking. For one to support such an objection, they have to hold an absurd position such as “Mathematical thinking is an illusion. You don’t think mathematically, you only think (fantasize) that you think mathematically.” For anyone who has at least some confidence in their cognition, it should be completely transparent if we’re thinking about perceptions (including the perceptions of thinking itself) or we’re only exercising abstract thinking with no corresponding perceptions (besides those of the abstract thoughts themselves).
All this had to be stated because any phenomenological writing can be approached only in a mood of inner participation. As long as we expect to read only about things that are already obvious, we’ll very quickly lose the track of investigation as soon as the first non-obvious description is encountered. Then the reader will say that the writer has strayed into abstract speculation, while in fact the reader refused to participate in the journey as soon as the first tiny obstacle was encountered.
Encompassing perceptions
The totality of perceptual phenomena is relatively easy to grasp. Here’s a simple exercise to exemplify this. We can observe the way we move our focus through the forms in our visual field. But we can also try to ‘zoom out’ from any particular form and try to expand our focus and include as much as possible also of our peripheral vision, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Now we can try to zoom even further out, while trying to include all other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth and so on. Then we can also include our emotional state and finally we can include even the awareness that we’re doing this particular exercise. This is an easy and pleasant exercise and with little practice we’ll become so familiar with this expanded state of attention that we'll be able to move into it in one go, without having to build it up gradually.
Meaning
Besides the totality of perceptual phenomena, there’s another aspect of our conscious experience which is much more elusive. Here elusive doesn’t mean that we’re barely conscious of it. In fact, we’re very clearly conscious of it all the time but it’s simply that in the normal course of our life we don’t try to make it an object of our investigation. What we’re talking about can be called in the most general sense: meaning.
The difficulty with meaning is that we can’t find it as something concrete within our field of perceptions. Instead, it is the knowing aspect of our conscious experience. And even thus stated it is already misleading because as soon as we say that meaning is something, habitually we try to find that something in our perceptual world. In reality there’s nothing difficult in grasping the knowing dimension of our conscious experience, it is only that in our day and culture it is almost a cognitive reflex to seek answers of the ‘what is’ question as some perceptual configuration. For this reason we’ll have to only gradually approach this aspect. It will be useful if the reader keeps in mind that we’re not so much trying to explain what meaning and knowing are but rather to unlearn this tic-like reflex which continually catapults us towards the elements of our perceptual field, where we can never find meaning as some thing.
One approach is to consider a word, for example ‘dog’. This isn’t simply an arrangement of letters or phonemes but evokes in us certain idea – that of the animal ‘dog’. Now let’s look at the same word in different languages – perro, Hund, cane, собака and so on. We can try to focus on each of these words. We can focus either on the written words (visual perception) or their sounds. We can also take a sketch or photo of a dog. All these perceptions are very different, yet there’s something common in all cases. It is precisely this meaning, the idea of the animal dog, which elucidates the different perceptions with common knowing experience. This already tells us that we can’t find the knowing aspect of our experience as some concrete perception ‘in front of us’. We can order the words and pictures of a dog side by side but the meaning can’t be found as yet another perception that can be added to the sequence. Instead, it is the imperceptible but known experience of our conscious life which invisibly but undoubtedly unites different phenomena in meaningfully distinguishable unities. In our conscious experience there’s some unifying, we may say – invisibly known quality, – which makes all the words, pictures, memories of a dog, to be indeed felt as belonging together. Normally we can recognize this common meaningful quality and can call it a concept.
The meaning (concept) associated with the various objects of our perception – like dog, table, house, joy, pain, etc. – still feels somewhat attached to the perceptions. One can say that these concepts become recognizable only when we think about the unifying quality of different perceptions, thus it is customary for man of today to consider that concepts exist only in the mind. But we can see that the meaningful dimension of our existence is much more pervading than we usually recognize.
The intuitive context
Take a look at your current environment. If you are in a room, there will be many perceptions that you can focus your sight on – furniture, things on the desk, the computer screen, keyboard and so on. Try to find something in your visual field that you don’t know what it is. Not that easy, is it? Almost everything we perceive in our room, even if we don’t specifically think about it, even by just glancing over it, feels as something familiar. Try moving your gaze sequentially through several objects in your room. Try to resist thinking about them, don’t even search for their words. If we are observant, we’ll notice that even though we don’t seek the clearcut concept for the object, it still feels as if we know what we’re looking at. Then if needed we can focus on the concept, for example by anchoring its meaning to the word for the object. But would we say that the perception felt as some mysterious unknown up until we pronounced its word? Or is it rather that at the moment our gaze falls on the perception, on some more ‘blurry’ cognitive level we already have some general awareness of what we’re seeing, and bringing up the concept and word for the perception is similar to concentrating that general awareness into focus?
We usually don’t pay attention to our inner life in such details because most of it unfolds quite automatically. To get an idea of how much we really take for granted, consider the following image:
Imagine you are told that this is a photograph of a dwelling of some alien life form. Do you know what you are seeing? Of course, there are forms and colors that can be compared with forms and colors we know from our Earthly life. But even these are not readily comprehensible. Imagine that you have to describe what you see over the phone. How would you go about it? Do you think that after ten or twenty words, the person on the other side will have a proper picture of what you’re seeing? But forms and colors are only the most superficial aspect of this perceptual panorama. What are these forms? Are they organic, are they mechanically manufactured? What if you’re told that the alien life form itself is present in the photo too? What are the structures in that dwelling? Are they kind of furniture? Home appliances? Computer interfaces?
And even this comprehension of what we’re seeing is only one aspect. Imagine that you find yourself in that dwelling. What would you do next? You may try to touch and feel the objects, to see if they have moving parts and so on. But what if some of these parts are analogous to exposed electrical wires? Or they are organic substances that are poisonous to our human biology? If we try to livingly imagine this situation, most of us will feel, at least initially, a kind of inner paralysis. We behold an inexplicable sensory panorama and we’re filled with a sense of complete uncertainty about how to proceed.
When we compare this with the kind of experience we have in our own room we realize that our knowing of what we see does not consist only in the names of perceived objects. Instead, every perception is also associated with temporal knowing, which is our understanding of how things function and how they are used. For example, when we see a chair, we don’t simply have static awareness of what a chair is but within that awareness we also have the potential for interaction with the object. We know that we can move towards the chair and sit on it. In this way our perceptual field is also a kind of palette for the possible actions we can undertake. If that knowing is absent, even if we have words for the static perceptions, we would feel as in the alien dwelling, where we have no idea how to interact with the environment.
Hopefully, through these examples we have gained deeper appreciation for how much we really take for granted in our everyday life. At all points of our existence we live in something akin to a background of knowing awareness. We can compare this to a general sense of orientation – we feel oriented in what we see, we also feel oriented in how we can navigate through the perceptual environment. Let’s call this ever present sense of meaningful orientation – intuition. We should immediately clarify that this in no way presupposes some fantastic power of knowing. Neither is it the vague feeling that something must be right – we’re not speaking about the popular notion of intuition as some mysterious faculty that is always correct. Remember that we’re doing an entirely phenomenological investigation. Intuition is simply the label we put to the purely experiential aspect of our conscious life. It is the ever present meaningful context of our existence. Optical illusions are a good example where we have certain visual perceptions and corresponding intuition, which however turn out to be something else when we expand our field of investigation.
Developing intuition
Clearly, this intuitive context is not something that is simply bestowed to us readymade. The color perceptions of our vision are bestowed to us as far as we have a functioning eye. But we surely live in very different intuitive contexts when we contemplate our room or the alien dwelling. The difference, of course, is that in the former case, since we were born, we have been slowly building up that intuition by exploring the Earthly perceptions and their dynamics. Were we not to do this exploration, our intuitive context when contemplating our room would be no different than that of the alien dwelling. Just consider how our modern home will be perceived by a caveman. Look around and see what of our household objects would make any sense to someone who knows only images of the natural world? Each one of us starts our life as a ‘caveman’ that only gradually gains intuitive orientation within the perceptual environment. And this does not necessarily imply that we need to have clear concepts and words for everything. When a child learns that it can press a button on the TV remote and colorful pictures appear on the screen, it doesn’t need to have clear concepts and words for TV, screen, remote, button. Instead, the child lives in a perceptual image of its environment and when it sees the remote it also has the intuitive awareness (based on previous experience) that it can interact with it such that the colorful pictures will appear. Conceptual knowledge begins when this general intuitive background is ‘distilled’ and intuitive ‘concentrates’ are extracted from it.
This leads us to the last step in our preliminary phenomenological investigation. First we recognized the totality of our perceptual world, which we’ve seen we can get a better grasp of by rhythmically ‘zooming’ in and out our attention between concrete perceptions and the totality. Next we saw that these perceptions are always perceived within an invisible intuitive context, the meaningful background of our existence which we can compare to an intuitive sense of orientation. As we saw, this context is not something readymade but builds up throughout our life. On one hand the perceptual world (remember that this includes all conscious phenomena, and not simply our conception of an outer physical world) impresses into our conscious life – like the perceptions of the alien dwelling do. On the other, our intuition develops through everything we do in relation to it. Everything we have seen, smelled, touched, done, felt, thought about, has contributed to the richness of our present intuitive context. This we can call our spiritual activity – perceiving, thinking, feeling, willing. We call it ‘spiritual’ not in order to suggest something supernatural but to emphasize that we’re interested entirely in the phenomenological experience of this inner activity and not abstract theories. As far as our direct experience is concerned, our activity is a purely spiritual (inner) phenomenon – there are no perceptions of neurons, informational energies and so on. If we feel thirsty and want to get a glass of water, what do we do? Do we manipulate fundamental forces, activate neurons? Or we perform spiritual acts of thinking and willing. If we are to start from the givens of our experience we have to temporarily put aside whatever theory we may hold about perception and inner activity. Before we can have any theory or quench our thirst, we need to think and will. In another age than ours, it would have been completely unnecessary to point such things out but today one almost as a reflex imagines brains, energies, information and what not, when they hear for example ‘thinking’. For this reason we have to stress that we’re speaking of the immediate inner experience of our activity and not its theoretical explanations.
The place of thinking
Of these forms of spiritual activity, thinking has a central place for our present human condition. Why is that? For one, we wouldn’t even be speaking of willing and feeling without thinking. We know willing and feeling only as far as they are permeated with cognition. We can easily imagine that our whole will (body) is paralyzed, that we feel nothing but we can’t easily picture a state of being where, for example, we live only in will without any cognition. This realization led Schopenhauer to see the will as the blind (unconscious) instinctive force on top of which our world of mental representations is grafted.
Things are seen similarly also by our contemporary neuroscience. Investigators would say that a life of pure will would be analogous to the reptilian stage of development:
Here we can barely speak of any consciousness. Instead we have instinctual responses to stimuli. A perception of danger would trigger a corresponding response with iron necessity. If we try to conceive what intuitive background such a stage could have, we need to picture that it is completely fused with the perceptions. There’s no intuitive activity that can ‘lift its head’ from the flow of phenomena. From our cognitive perspective, we can’t picture such a state as being conscious in our present sense.
With the development of the feeling stage, it is as if some leeway of inner experience is introduced. Now it’s possible that a stimulus might not immediately trigger a reflexive act of will but instead the action may be withheld and instead felt only as impetus within this leeway, say, as a feeling of fear. Thus a part of our intuitive being differentiates from the flow of necessity and now it is as if this differentiated being can dimly choose how to respond to the feeling of fear.
Finally, at the stage of thinking, we have another differentiation, where our intuitive being extricates itself even from feelings and now lives in mental representations. The thing to notice here is how every stage of development results from such differentiation, where part of the intuitive spiritual activity is liberated from the flow of perceptions and the opened leeway allows greater degree of consciousness to be attained. Our mammalian consciousness is attained thanks to the fact that our intuitive activity can now ‘wiggle’ in relation to the flow of necessity. Now instead of reflexive will, feelings are perceived, to which we can respond in more than one way. This leads to dreamy consciousness of sympathies and antipathies, pain and pleasure, fear and courage. When our intuitive activity wins for itself even more ‘wiggle room’, it is able to liberate itself even from the pushes and pulls of feelings, and live in mental pictures.
Now the reader may object that with the above we have strayed away from firm phenomenology. And it is correct that what we have described as the lower stages of development can be pictured only asymptotically. It can’t be otherwise because in order to do phenomenology of pure will and feeling, we would have to extinguish thinking. But then it becomes impossible to make any meaningful observations – we need cognition for that. So at this point it is not clear how and if this is possible. We’ll return to this later in our studies. The above was given only to present a wider context for our investigation and the reader is not expected to simply accept it on faith.
The question of freedom
When speaking of spiritual activity, this inevitably raises the question of whether intentionality is something real or is simply the passive observation of the unfoldment of universal laws. Fortunately for us, in a phenomenological investigation we don’t need to pass abstract judgment over this question. We’re interested in the immediate experience and there intentionality is an inner fact. Philosophizing about the ‘true’ nature of this fact only comes after we have encountered it as immediate reality. One of the reasons ‘intentionality as an illusion’ is so appealing, is that our practical life has taught us not to judge things at face value. For this reason philosophers say that man is simply being naive by taking the apparent existence of intentionality as something real. But the thing is that even if we declare our experience of being spiritually active to be an illusion, this has absolutely no consequences for our practical life. Even the greatest determinist wouldn’t wake up in the morning and say “There’s no need to exert any effort to get up, go to work and earn my living. It is all predetermined, so I can just let go and whatever has to happen will happen.” So we shouldn’t simply abstractly discard that which we can’t recover in any other way. It’s not about absolutizing the role of intentionality. We don’t at all postulate it to be some absolutely free and original activity. Yet there’s also no justification to simply abstractly declare it an illusion, since we can’t even get out of the bed without it. This leads to nothing more but something akin to a fast-switching ‘bipolar disorder’, where on one hand we secretly use our intentionality to philosophize about how intentionality is an illusion, on the other we utilize that intentionality to live a functional life.
When we speak of the experience of being spiritually active, this doesn’t require any postulates of some metaphysical soul entity. As long as we simply investigate the facts of our given experience, we don’t need to postulate abstract metaphysical forces and entities, to ‘explain’ our experience. We let the experience speak for itself and follow its threads.
What is thinking?
So we have recognized that the richness of our intuitive background has been attained in the course of life through the intercourse of the perceptual world and our spiritual activity. Since at our human stage thinking permeates every aspect of our inner life it deserves to ask the question: what is thinking? Habitually, we may attempt to answer this question in the way science and philosophy do – namely, by arranging thoughts in complicated constellations. Yet these thoughts are the fruits of the thinking process, while the latter can be likened to the life of the tree from which they come forth. This is the first distinction we need to make: the perceptions of thoughts (the words of our inner voice, symbols, etc.) are the final manifestation of thinking, but thinking itself is a living spiritual activity. We can sense this when we try to solve a mathematical problem, even if it is as simple as adding together a couple of two-digit numbers. Then we can appreciate that we’re struggling to reach certain arrangement of mathematical thoughts. It is quite clear that the numbers won’t just add by themselves, we need to do something. This imperceptible but intuitively known mental struggling is the living first-person spiritual activity. If we ignore this living activity we come to the predominant mode of cognition in contemporary philosophy and science. The thinking struggle is still there but only as a dim instinctive activity. Then all focus is within the fruits of thinking and their arrangements. Then thinking is explained as taking a lot of apples and arranging them in the shape of a tree – that is, we make a model of a tree, made of apples.
Then we reason: so this is how apples bounce around and as a result apples appear in our consciousness. Just as little as apples arranged in the shape of a tree are the real tree, so little too an arrangement of thought-perceptions is the living thinking process. It is critically important that this is grasped in its full significance, otherwise nothing of our forthcoming investigation will make sense. In a phenomenological approach we cannot afford to ignore the experience of the living thinking process (by putting it in the blind spot of consciousness so to speak) and instead focus only on the arrangements of its fruits.
The major difficulty in the above is that modern man has been led to believe that only that which can be perceived – through the senses or their technological extensions – informs us about reality. For this reason one readily dismisses the living experience of the thinking process and instead seeks its explanation in arrangements of thoughts about brains, energies, information and so on, which however, never lead back to the real spiritual activity that gives birth to the thoughts. So our thinking process is not perceived as we can perceive a steam engine in motion but is nevertheless innerly known in direct intuition. Imagine that our hand is imperceptible but we can still willfully intend its movements. To have any perception of these movements they have to interact with the environment – for example, we may see scribbles appearing on sand. The scribbles are in themselves neither the imperceptible arm, nor the willing intent, but they reflect something about the intuition that we imply in the will. Now we can translate this analogy to our thinking, where our imperceptible intuitive activity impresses itself into imaginative scribbles – sounds (verbal thought), symbols and so on. When we see things in this way, we no longer use thinking to create apple-models of thinking but instead, our words are direct phenomenological testimonies for our living cognitive flow. Our thoughts no longer lead away from the living process that births them (and becomes lost in their arrangements) but reflect back its living intuitive nature.
Thinking as focusing intuition
By turning attention to the livingly experienced thinking process we can speak of thinking in ways which are inconceivable as long as we focus only on the final arrangements of thought-apples. Of course, this demands some new cognitive skills, which are resisted by deeply ingrained thinking habits but with little effort anyone can make these living observations. Clearly, since the thinking process itself is not perceived (but intuitively lived), when thinking and speaking about it, we can only do that through analogies, images and metaphors. We already did that with the metaphor of the apple tree. If we close our eyes and try to add two numbers together, while trying to notice what we’re innerly doing, we won’t see some tree from which the numeric thoughts grow and separate. But at the same time we’re intuitively aware that we’re willing our mental activity, we’re weaving in an invisible process which feels causally involved in the thought-perceptions. This intuition we can represent as the tree metaphor and as long as we’re aware how that metaphor is produced, there’s no danger that we will confuse it for literal reality. Instead, it becomes a pointer for us. When we hear ‘thinking-tree’ we don’t fantasize some tree-entity producing thoughts but we point attention to our living thinking process, in the way we can experience it when we do mathematical operations in our mind. Or stated through a different analogy, our activity is like the intuitive will of the invisible wind, which recognizes its effects in the ripples on the lake of imagination.
Another metaphor can be presented in the following way. Our thinking process can be compared to the refraction and focusing of light by an optical system. We can picture our intuitive context as a mixture, a blurry atmosphere, which is the experience of our general intuitive orientation within our conscious life – the implicit holistic sense of who we are, where we are, what we’re doing and thinking. The thinking process is like the act of prisms and lenses that differentiate different intuition-colors from the general mixture, which can then be focused and experienced individually.
Let’s try for a moment to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout our life. Think about the different periods of our life and how each has contributed to what we are now. Think about all the physical and mental skills that have been developed, all that has been read, seen, learned. We can feel this only in a very nebulous way, only as background potential. Now let’s encompass the room we’re in with our sight. Notice how of the innumerable things that we know about everything, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, all the places we have been, the knowing that we now experience has a completely specific timbre, we recognize it as we recognize the voice of a friend. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room, is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms (including alien dwellings). Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition and we now know what the object is. This is not to say that the intuition of the room is ‘made of’ the sum total intuitions of objects. Both the intuition of the room and that of the object are focused from the general intuitive context, which in psychological terms we can call our subconsciousness.
The irreducibility of concepts
Here we should be very careful: we can intuit relations between concepts but we can never produce concepts through their mechanical combinations. We can arrange biological cells in the shape of a plant but we can’t produce the concept of ‘plant’ from the mechanical sum of multiplied concepts of ‘cell’.
In a similar way we know that mixing red and green light produces yellow. Let’s say that we have never seen yellow in our life. We have the concept of red and the concept of green. We have certain overarching intuition which is common when we perceive cherries, strawberries, tomatoes, etc. This common intuition we focus into the concept of redness. We do the same with green. Now however, no matter how we mix these two concepts, we never reach the intuition of yellow. That must be found independently when we perceive the corresponding color quality.
This holds true even in mathematics. Let’s take something simple as 2 = 1 + 1. Superficially we may think that the concept of two is produced by fusing a pair of concepts of one together. But if we introspect carefully our cognitive process, we’ll see that such a mechanical transformation of concepts is nowhere to be found. The qualities of oneness and two-foldness, we discover independently, much like we discover the concepts of colors. A pair of objects would remain simply a confusing multiplicity unless, in a flash of insight, we attain to the idea of two-foldness, which applies to all things that come in pairs – two stones, two eyes, two hands.
The peculiar thing about mathematics is that we can continue gaining new insights even in the absence of sensory perceptions. Imagine that we only recognize the intuition of oneness and two-foldness, we have no concept of three. Then if we’re imagining apples and we accidentally put them in a triplet, we can gain the insight of three-foldness. This already shows how we can gain new intuitions by investigating the dynamics of our cognitive process, because mathematics is really the investigation of thinking constrained in a certain way.
This is the critical distinction to make: we can combine mental images in our imagination but any new concept is still discovered as an unique focused form of intuition.
Memory images, fantasy, creative thinking
Thinking about immediately present sense perceptions is one aspect but we can also do something else. As we have seen with the imagined apples above, even after the perceptions are no longer present, we can still evoke memory images of them. In fact, if we introspect carefully we’ll see that there’s something in common between thinking and remembering. For example, if we have to remember what we had for breakfast, we instinctively try to produce certain images of how our meal looked like, how it tasted and so on. Where do we draw these images from? It’s hard to tell because we don’t perceive the remembering process in the way we can see a book being taken off the library shelf. It’s simply something that lives in our intuitive orientation and we can distill it into concrete memory-thoughts.
If we have to explain to someone how to use a web browser, we also draw upon our intuitive orientation. This knowledge is not something that can be expressed into a single word or memory image. A vast amount of our own experiences have been integrated into our overall intuitive context. Communicating that knowledge to the person is like distilling a conceptual extract of this intuitive background. We don’t have to describe to the person every experience we ourselves had while learning to use a browser but instead, we distill a summary of our years-long experiences. Like the mixed colors, we have to use our thinking prism to produce clearcut colors that capture specific aspects of our holistic intuition.
Let’s look more closely at our ability to remember things. Bring back again the memory image of your breakfast. Try to picture livingly the food on your plate and how you eat it, as if it is happening now. Now try to do the same but replace the food with something that you didn’t have. Keep switching back and forth between the two images to get a good feel for them. Then ask yourself what is different in one case and the other? How do you know that one image corresponds to the actual food you had, while the other is imagined?
If we introspect carefully, we’ll have to admit that the difference doesn’t lie in the perceptual qualities of the mental images. In general, the vividness with which we can remember something, is quite the same as the vividness with which we can imagine the food that we didn’t have. So the difference lies elsewhere. In both cases we do something with our spiritual activity in order to arrive at the images. When we remember things we not only summon a picture but we do so by instinctively seeking certain intuitive lawfulness. It’s not just any picture, it’s one that in a mysterious way feels to have some objective validity. On the other hand, when we summon pictures without any such concerns for validity, we call that simply fantasy. So we have something akin to two poles, two extremes of our imaginative activity. In fantasy we allow our images to flow in a completely unrestrained way. In remembering it is precisely the intuitive constraints that we care about. We don’t want to imagine just any picture, we seek the picture that fits harmoniously in our intuitive context.
This doesn’t guarantee that just because an image intuitively feels right, it corresponds to the facts. We know that sometimes we can misremember things. This further shows us that we’re not dealing with two completely distinct forms of our spiritual activity – infallible remembering and completely unrestrained fantasy – but it’s much rather one imaginative activity that moves along a gradient. Towards one pole we seek imagination that feels itself to be objectively constrained within the intuitive context. Towards the other pole we completely disregard how the images fit in our intuitive context. This doesn’t mean that these images are some absolutely free creations of our imagination. Obviously they still emerge within certain intuitive constraints. The fact that we don’t consciously enforce any constraints to our fantasy, doesn’t mean that the images aren’t constrained in other ways, such as by desires or the richness of our imaginative ‘vocabulary’.
The dynamic balancing between pure fantasy and fully constrained remembering can be seen as creative thinking. On one hand we’re interested in novel images and corresponding novel intuitions. But at the same time we want these images and intuitions to be ‘compatible’ with our intuitive context. Thus in creative thinking we’re always seeking that delicate balance, just like we constantly correct the steering wheel when we drive. If we go too far in one direction we begin to only reiterate rigidified intuitions accumulated in the course of our life. If we go too far in the other direction we lose ourselves in images which would conflict with our wider intuitive context if we try to integrate them there. So in creative thinking we have this iterative process where our imaginative activity continually corrects itself by seeking harmony with the intuitive context, which in turn is expanded with new intuitions. Creative thinking receives its worth when it remains not only in the domain of mental images but when they are further integrated with our feelings, will and perceptions.
Self-consciousness
Let’s try to form a picture of our precognitive life. Clearly, we can’t remember too much from that stage but for our goals we only need to approach it approximately. It could be said that at that stage we live in an amalgamation of perceptions evoking different feelings. In the widest sense we can differentiate them into sympathies and antipathies. We live in dim intuitive orientation and with our spiritual activity we instinctively try to attract sensations which feel pleasurable and desirable, and repel those that feel fearful and painful. Here ‘attract’ and ‘repel’ should not be understood in a spatial sense. At this stage we can’t speak of any cognitive differentiation between inner and outer world. We should picture a holistic soul experience and instinctive will which, guided by feelings and dim intuition, tries to intensify or diminish certain sensations. We can’t speak of memory and time either. When we say that there’s no memory at that stage, it’s meant in the following sense. The life experiences surely accumulate in the overall intuitive orientation. Consider the following example: let’s say we can play piano. When we sit and play we don’t need to keep in mind the long years of training that have led to our present state. Our cumulative intuition in the present moment is what allows us to express musical ideas in actions. Similarly, when we speak we don’t need to remember the whole process of language acquisition. Instead, we live in the present intuitive palette of our vocabulary and language skills through which we express our inner life. Development of skills shouldn’t be confused with the ability to remember. So in the precognitive life we live in continuous becoming and instinctive activity in response to our feeling life, guided by dim intuition. Perceptions are like a holistic but indefinite panorama which evokes certain feelings.
Cognitive life begins when it becomes possible to differentiate memory images from the general intuitive background. These are of more ephemeral nature compared to other perceptions, yet produce an additional layer of our inner life where afterimages of our inner states are lifted. Only now we can begin to speak of memory in our present sense. The possibility to behold present perceptions together with memory afterimages, leads to a new kind of overarching intuition that unites them in a meaningful unity. This leads to the feeling of continuity and ultimately – time. Note that in ‘images’ we include any perceptual content that can be remembered, for example sound, feelings and so on.
The remarkable thing is that this lifting of memory images is simultaneously associated with new degrees of freedom of spiritual activity. In the precognitive stage our activity is like a force of attraction or repulsion of desirable or undesirable states. When the afterimages of our inner life begin to differentiate, together with this our spiritual activity differentiates. New degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity develop (as if we find a way to move new limbs that previously we didn’t know exist), through which we can attract and repel the images themselves. This practically opens the space of imagination. The ability to behold images together, allows the experience of new kinds of intuitions that unite them. As the forces of attraction and repulsion of images are refined further, they begin to resemble what we know as thinking.
We now see that cognition grows as more and more refined manipulation of images. Gradually however, these images begin to be moved in novel ways, driven by intuition that has not been extracted from previous sensory experience. Probably the best example for this is again mathematical thinking, whose images are extracted from the perceptual world by counting and measuring, but those who go further gradually get a sense of orientation within quantitative relations, which is generally known as mathematical intuition.
Through this refinement of cognitive skills we reach a point where we discover a remarkable intuition. The attractions and repulsions of thought images become so precise that they can be experienced as reflections of spiritual activity. This is the point where the thinking spiritual activity recognizes its own intuitively known movements in the images. Until this moment spiritual activity has been instinctively striving towards perceptual states that bring satisfaction. Even instinctive thinking is drawn by the pleasure brought by this or that thought-image arrangement (such as in fantasy). But now thinking stumbles upon its own contribution to the perceptual panorama. Only now thinking can express this intuitive meaning with the words “I think”. When we can think these words not mechanically but as vivid reflection of the activity that utters them into existence, we can say that we have attained self-consciousness. With this, a new phase of spiritual life begins, where our thinking being no longer only seeks to attract that which fulfills it but also realizes that it continually distills thoughts, feelings and actions from its intuitive background and embeds them in the perceptual world. This immediately raises the question of what is the place of our being within reality and in what direction we shall direct our spiritual activity. We can answer these questions only by deepening our knowledge of ourselves and the world.
Conclusion
Even with such rudimentary overview, we already see how our inner life can become a living field of investigation. As it should be clear already, what was presented here cannot serve its purpose if taken as another metaphysical theory of consciousness. This would be just another arrangement of apples. It’s like the difference between only hearing the description of swimming and actually getting in the water and swim. To enter the living experience of our inner life we can’t remain with its description. We need to swim with our thinking. We have to feel our will fully engaged, how every thought we utter is like a swimming stroke bringing to focus something of our intuitive context. We only understand in the real sense what was written so far, if we engage in this thought-swimming and can produce thoughts that are like pictorial testimonies of what we’re experiencing.
To be sure, this requires certain effort, mainly to overcome existing thinking habits and emotional attachments. In ordinary science and philosophy we think a mental picture, a representation of the supposed reality. If we think of our thinking self, we think about a mental model of ourselves while the actual thinking which arranges the model remains unnoticed. The primary direction that we describe here is that thinking itself should be livingly grasped as the wavefront of the process of reality, so to speak. To think, in this sense, means to artistically explicate the hidden nature of the intuitive context. What we can thus articulate depends on the way our state has evolved through time so far. In this sense, explicating the intuitive context doesn’t aim to simply build a static artistic form of some independent and well-formed intuitive background but continually feeds into our state in order to transform it. Hopefully this would make it more orderly such that even greater intuitive depth can be experienced, and so on in a rhythmic unfolding.
An important point here is that we shouldn’t arbitrarily limit the intuitive context to something that lives only in our personal head. We should maintain an open stance and be prepared that this intuitive context may coincide with the Cosmos itself and thus contain concealed within itself also the meaningful currents that give direction and shape of the dreamscape at large.
