AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2024 7:04 pm
it is very relieving to pause the intellectual commentary as much as possible and weave in more supersensible currents of meaning. It is indeed magical how, a short time ago, this degree of freedom for using our spiritual activity to structure our perceptual flow would be completely unsuspected, mere dormant potential.
Because of the self-imposed 'ban on all thinking',
people go about feeling like many things simply happen to them spontaneously, randomly, etc., without realizing simple exercises such as these [pictorial thinking exercises]
can invert that feeling and give a profound sense of creative responsibility within the perceptual flow.
I wanted to circle back to this idea in blue. It’s easy to imagine a common reaction to it. It would be something like:
You can try and picture your future as much as you want, feel as creative as you want, but it will make no difference on the external constraints, the laws of nature, the random events that can affect us, etcetera. They are there regardless of our pictorial thinking.
This thought could come from a physicalist, an analytic idealist, and from anyone else who considers reality monolithically external to oneself. It may sound like a common-sense objection at first, but on the way to a living understanding of reality, one comes to realize how we may get misled to thoughts of this sort. This may have to do with sneaky mind habits present in our environment. If we don’t pay attention, they influence our thoughts, even in opposition with one’s own idealist conception. Based on my personal
slow-pace journey of understanding, I have imagined a
slow-pace reply to the objection. Boring and incomplete, for sure, but possibly interesting for those who find some of the higher-level posts difficult to decipher (everyone else would get bored).
***
IS IT POSSIBLE TO GAIN SOME SENSE OF THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL REALITY?
Surely there are potential constraints to our experiential flow to be anticipated. If we are not proactive, they will constrain us in dissonant ways, for example if we conduct our life as if we could count on the ability to pass through metal bars,
like the T1000. However, it’s not all as obvious as it seems, since this anticipation of constraints is understandable in different ways. Definitely, if I see metal bars, I should anticipate that I won’t be able to pass through them. The constraint is there. I can picture myself moving through them at will, it won’t help. But this is not the same as the objection above. It’s important to remain vigilant and ask: is the objection arising from the seamless postulate that the self is confronted by a separate external world?
We know that careful phenomenological inquiry leads to the realization that such a dualistic worldview is illusory - it only arises when inquiry goes no further than the shallow layer of sensory perceptions, ignoring our
very normal sense-free experiences (thinking, feeling). There, in the sensory world, perceptions are heavily impoverished (aliased) since they only wrestle with seemingly isolated small tips of the iceberg of reality - the physical part - missing reality’s profound
interconnectedness at the level of its idea-made foundations. These interconnected foundations are perceptible, but not
sense-perceptible through our physical eyes and ears. Our organ of perception for these interconnected foundations is thinking. Everyone can immediately see that thinking provides sense-free perceptions (our thoughts) but perceiving the interconnectedness of reality is not as immediate. It requires some training of this sense-free organ, just like the organ of physical sight requires some training at birth - a few years of training - before it can see physical reality meaningfully. And this is the whole difficulty: giving birth to our sense-free being and his organ of sense-free perception (thinking) by engaging the necessary training,
before one is able to perceive the interconnectedness. While training of the physical eyes and ears happens for us automatically, it's taken care of by the physical-etheric forces themselves, training of the sense-free eyes and ears doesn’t. That training is ‘next level’. It won’t happen by itself. We need to want it, and we need to make it happen. It's a
free decision.
Freedom becomes the big differentiator of the one human race. Those who seek freedom will sooner or later train their sense-free organs, and those who don’t will let themselves go with the flow - the flow of what’s in excess in the human being once freedom is removed: animal-like instincts and feelings served by a brain that has become very efficient in the physical,
and forgetful (in our epoch) of the interconnectedness at the same time. This is the worst combination ever!
Man without freedom is just that: the most evolved animal, led by animal-like desires and instincts but much more efficient than animals in following through, which leads to the dramatic state of the world we witness today. No doubt, we have heard all this before. But is it possible to slowly navigate toward this realization of interconnectedness
before the sense-free sight is developed?
INNER AND OUTER EXPERIENTIAL FLOWS OF ALL BEINGS
We can start from the first-person perspective of the one who navigates everyday experience. Our everyday experience is the ever-present
inner and outer all-inclusive perceptual flow that conscious experience is made of. The crucial caveat here is: it’s really, really crucial to continuously remind ourselves that our everyday flow of experience is not limited to outer perceptions, but includes all perceptions: we perceive our own thoughts and feelings as well! These perceptions are mixed into the sensory ones, in
one seamless experiential flow - flow of becoming, in Clerics words. Defaulting back to ‘outer mode’ is so easy and ‘natural’, because we are so conditioned to do it, but also totally unfavorable to true understanding. So I will add this visual cue
(credit Cleric and Ashvin) to recall that we want to make sure we’re in inner+outer mode. We don’t want to filter out our thought-perceptions (the fact that our thoughts are an integral part of our conscious experience).
From this stance of full-spectrum experiential awareness, the goal will be to come to notice that any perceived eventline in our flow (for example the series of events that leads us from the perception of feeling thirsty to the one of being drinking a glass of water) manifests in our perceptions, not randomly, out of the 'landscape' of all potential eventlines, but in compliance with certain
high-level lines of force that have shapes, and form patterns. These lines of force are
the experiential flows of higher beings. One difference between our individual flow and the flows of higher beings (beside the enormous and mysterious difference in creative power) is that ours is perceived as strongly individualized (
I am drinking this glass of water, that
I have decided to drink, because
I felt thirsty, and
I ’m not aware of anyone else intruding in this eventline) while the higher beings’ flows are much more operating within each other, in fluid movements. Their thinking, feeling and will activity is perceived as co-operated, in concert with other beings.
There is one thing their flows have in common with our human perceptual flows: they also have an outer-inner character. These non-human intelligences may lack a space-specific physical extension - with a brain in a head, two arms and hands, etcetera, like we have - but they still take part in the physical world. Not that a being’s physical body is a given mountain, or color, or law of nature, but the latter are condensed physical ‘bodies’, or manifestations, resulting on the
outer plane from some
inner cooperation of higher beings. So for them there’s no one-to-one correspondence, like we experience, between our experiential flow
and a clearly defined physical body. In our case, the conscious flow that we
are is experienced as centered in a clearly defined physical body, but not for them! And just as our eventlines are continuously unfolding in our flow, the higher-level eventlines are also continuously unfolding, at a variety of paces, and they unfold both innerly and outwardly, as well. These inner+outer eventlines created by the interconnected activity of higher beings are the big lines of force that our flows (inner+outer!) comply with. So the eventline of me feeling thirsty and drinking water, flows in the specific way it flows because it complies with bigger eventlines shaped at a higher level. These lines manifest across the whole spectrum of the perceptual flow - thinking, feeling, and happenings in the physical - and guide my sensations of thirst, my thoughts about water, my physical gestures of pouring water, etcetera.
Here’s a metaphor. We can imagine that we are one individual cloud in the sky, among other clouds, within an entire natural ecosystem. Like raindrops falling from that cloud on a hilly landscape accumulate and flow downhill in compliance with the trenches and the cracks in the soil, and not in random patterns, or along the hills’ ridgeline - that would be surreal
- so our flow of experience
is continually constrained/oriented towards the future (downhill), by the interconnected high-level lines of force. And just like the cloud can’t decide that its raindrops will flow on the ridgeline, so we can’t decide to pour the water outside the glass.
However - even if it may be counterintuitive - these higher lines of force are not static, not even in their physical repercussions, just like the cracks in the soil are not static, but evolve in patterns, out of their own and many other’s intents.
And another crucial feature to consider is: just like even a few raindrops have an ever so slight impact on the landscape, so our human flow of experience
also creates some more or less impactful difference in the totality of the interconnected inner+outer experiential flows of all beings. We could call this totality our inner+outer experiential ecosystem. This ecosystem continually takes in and adjusts to the activity we experience, creatively or not, in our flow. If we are mostly intentional about shaping our flowing eventlines in the direction of our goals (let’s say that, as clouds, we exert our will and send down heavy-rain drops) we could call our perceptual flow a navigation. Otherwise, if we are extreme in taking life one day at a time, letting uncontrolled thinking rule our consciousness, then our gestures are more instinctive. Then we are more like clouds melting into a shower of small drops that drift away in the air and finally dissolve into some cracks. We don't try to bring any ever so slight change in the soil patterns.
So there is inner and outer interconnectedness of experiential flows for all beings. It's a dynamic of continual reciprocal influence. For our part, we might not perceive it (if we haven’t developed the necessary organ), but we still have the freedom to decide how much intention we want to put in our flow, trying to influence the experiential ecosystem (other beings' actions, thoughts and feelings, including our fellow humans’) in the direction of our goals. Our impact may be small, but if we join forces with others and strive together to orient our eventlines towards shared moral goals, our small results may add up. Similarly, a few heavy raindrops from one cloud won’t change the landscape so much, but a larger rainfront probably would.
When we consider reality as a dynamic experiential ecosystem of ever-interacting inner and outer flows of countless beings, we also may start to decondition from primary identification with our physical extension (body) as the center of our outer eventlines. We decondition from that one-to-one correspondence between our experiential flow and our physical body. We may realize that we are not so much a physical body owning a purely individual flow of experience, but more like an inner + outer percpetual flow that we’re only partially conscious of as yet. This flow that we
are, includes the experience of a clearly individualized material body.
HIGHER-LEVEL LINES OF FORCE ARE NOT THERE REGARDLESS OF OUR ACTIVITY
If I picture myself pouring water in a glass and drinking it (this is a thought-perception in my experiential flow) the moment I transform the picture into action, the higher intelligences who rule the behaviors of solids, fluids and gasses (who have their physical presence expressed in those forms and principles) will characterize the way water, glass and air physically interact, as I pour the water. Then, those who ideate the digestive system direct the drinking event. If I change my mind and decide to water a plant with that water, I will expect a different eventline to manifest, along different high-level lines of force. Are these static constraints? I may feel confident that I can bring that watering intention into manifestation as I want, since my intention is formed (perceived), and I have precise expectations on how the concerned intelligences may canalize/constrain my action through fixed laws of nature, as I go and water the plant. However, this sense-perceptible part of my eventline is always only made of isolated tips of the one interconnected iceberg. Some unknown movements of inner interconnectedness could be ongoing in the non-sense-perceptible spheres of reality, operated through the activity of many intentions (beings), and perhaps what I correspondingly witness, as a result in my outer flow, is that - say - someone calls me unexpectedly at that exact moment, and I completely forget about watering the plant, thereby making those
seemingly pre-existing constraints that I was expecting along the eventline “plant watering”
inexistent in the manifested flow that I am. In terms of the rain metaphor: as a small cloud in the sky, I may decide to target a particular area, where the cracks in the soil seem to lead to a desired spot downhill, but by the time the raindrops reach the soil, the patterns in the landscape may have changed, so the drops may end up flowing in a different future direction. My anticipation of constrained flow didn’t really play out as I expected. My drops of intention have merged with the bigger intentional interconnectedness in a way that has mysteriously resulted in inner and outer transformation of various flows, including mine.
So, the anticipated constraints, even the laws of nature, are not monolithic: they may become relevant for my eventline, in combination with many other experiences, but otherwise, they are simply inexistent. They only have a reality in dynamic interaction with many other intentions. Their existence in isolation, as immutable constants, is only real in the abstract reasoning of human beings. And like the deepest trenches in the soil, these laws of nature evolve too. If we don’t see how, it’s because the rhythms of their flow extend well beyond our mindspan. Even more incredibly, they evolve in the context of the interconnectedness with all other experiential flows, including ours!
WE CAN FREELY DECIDE TO IMPRINT INTENTIONS IN OUR ACTIVITY
Hopefully the truly creative power of pictorial thinking is getting clearer. I can decide to align how I think, feel and act with my goals, and that will have some influence on mine and other beings’ perceptual flows, even though the most powerful lines of force are the interconnected experiential flows of higher beings. Karma, for example, is one of those flows.
Again, these flows/lines of force are only indirectly detectable by the physical senses and their amplifications (measuring instruments and other tech). Our physical senses only detect the outer, physical repercussions of endlessly ‘recalculated’ patterns of interaction of the countless flows. However, they are detectable by our sense-free organs, to the extent that we develop them.
More examples: going back to the picture of my glass of water, another co-creative eventline is engaged if I decide to meditate on that picture, instead of drinking the water, and yet another one if I create a thought of me pouring the water and passing the glass to someone else, whose body is located in another region of the world. In this case, the eventline I picture will be dealt with, or filtered, through the intelligent laws of nature. Physically, the person would arguably receive no glass of water, and my physical perception of the glass would flow along different lines of force in the landscape of physical potential available to me (I may end up watering that plant, after all) but at the same time, we can’t forget that I created that thought-picture of passing the glass across geographical distance. The picture is now an
experienced reality I am throwing into the collective, interconnected perceptual flow. It doesn’t matter that it’s not physical, it’s still reality (a conscious experience) and as such it enters the co-creation process. It’s a raindrop released in the experiential ecosystem. It will surely have some effects on the reality experienced by some other beings, even if I don’t yet understand how this works. The important thing is to decondition from continually defaulting back to a vision of reality as physical reality only. Especially if one calls oneself an idealist.
My picture of passing the glass across geographical distance is not affected by laws of matter. As a living reality, it will be facilitated/constrained by the higher intelligences in other mysterious ways. Maybe the picture enters that person’s flow, thereby becoming a shared reality and perceptual experience. Now the person has to deal with it. They may ignore it, or they may notice some kind of relatedness, a coincidence with their contextual flow. Maybe some meaning that goes beyond the picture of the glass is so revealed. Maybe some unknown deeper crack in the landscape of potential eventlines ("structured potential" as Ashvin calls it) has attracted the drops of intention of both our thinking activities and so the picture has become real in both flows. Even if we don’t get what the higher intentions undelying our flow may be, clearly it doesn’t make sense to search for their measurements or descriptions on the purely physical plane, it doesn’t make sense to monolithically anticipate external constraints to our flow either, but it makes complete sense to strive to use our thinking and will proactively, in harmony with the experiential ecosystem, so as to express our freedom, and take part in the pursuit of moral goals.
In metaphorical terms: while it would be ridiculous to imagine that we can make the raindrops of our intentions fall along our privately formed system of trenches (hopefully we don’t feel like megalomaniac bubbles…) we can surely influence to some extent the 'hydrological' lines of force, especially if we join forces with others, human and non human. Choosing to use this freedom is even more crucial and differentiating when we realize that negative and immoral intentions are also at work in the experietial ecosystem.
PICTORIAL THINKING IS CREATIVE FREEDOM
If we don’t try and picture/create our flow with certain desired eventlines in sight, starting from the part that we believe and hope we can effectively influence, then we are
leaving on the table our creative freedom, since it’s only by engaging in the future-picturing ideational activity that we can continuously evaluate
as we go the extent of what’s possible and desirable, at the best of our abilities. Our ever-evolving degrees of freedom can only progressively open as we navigate, and the more we push our attempts into more and more elevated goals and timeframes, the more influence we may expect to contribute, because extending the timeframe of our grasp means to go deeper into the causal relations that are shaping the tranches, including the possible ramification of influences ‘backward and forward’. In terms of the water example, we could end up understanding what vein of meaning attracted our thoughts about a glass of water, rather than just discovering them as data points, or constraints, in our respective flows.
MORE METAPHORS?
Another simple metaphor for the need to energetically picture the future and become an active ‘stakeholder’ in the interconnected ecosystem, is the work of entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and project managers, who pin down their vision on a
vision board, or illustrate their projects in form of
visual roadmaps. They try to meaningfully encompass a long enough future time-frame with their visual roadmaps, and often that works well to increase impact on their projects’ eventline (except they might do it as if “with dolls”, telling an external story, rather than enlivening it in first-person imagination).
Similar to wise ‘project managers’, we have to ‘feed-forward’ our goals (our “high ideals”) into our eventlines, filling the way ahead with thought-pictures and actions that fit both our goals and our understanding of the evolving constraints. And we have to continually reassess our route, as we become more aware of the patterns of interconnectedness, in which we also want to continually factor the reverberated reactions generated in the ecosystem by our goal-oriented picturing. Yes, it sounds twisted!
The words certainly are twisted, which is why Cleric and Ashvin have often provided eloquent visual animations for this willed interconnectedness, like the ‘donut’ that rolls inside-out and outside-in at the same time.
Since we’re not in a dissociated bubble, but in perpetually evolving interconnection in the fluid of the collective activity of countless intelligences, we have to be proactive, and continually probe the possible eventlines. If we simply are ready to take in whatever may happen and never try to expand our now-vision into the more meaningful timelines, we succumb to the manifesting reality without contributing any intent. Then we can’t share any ideals, but are bound to mere reactivity, past-oriented and instinctive.
Hopefully this consolidates the idea that the environmental constraints are not really pre-existent, but only arise from the choreography we chose to dance on the evolving stage of the landscape of potential. Some constraints, like the laws of nature, may seem particularly deep and inescapable ‘trenches’, and they are in a sense, but our experience around them can be continually transformed by our intentional efforts to influence our eventlines. Some have used the expression “
surfing reality” which seems a telling metaphor to me. Or we could think of a 007 car chase: unsuspected ways-out continually open up, as a result of an energetic flow of thinking and will efforts. It’s very clear: the moment 007 would stop ideating new eventlines, there would be no escape from the constraints, but as long as he applies clear intention, “pre-existing” laws of nature are continuously skipped and become irrelevant, non applicable. And the precipitating car-chase eventline (the one that continually happens) is obviously a co-creation. The first-person picturing, the other humans’, the higher level lines of force - they all continuously feed-forward into each other, to give rise to the perceived reality-surfing effect, in which there are no
absolute constraints, but only the constraints that we picture-experience.
ALL COMES DOWN TO OWNING THE IDEA OF THE IDEAL NATURE OF REALITY
To intuit all the above, we have to strive to bring ‘idealism’ into our every reasoning. More and more people state that the nature of reality is ‘mind’, but as long as they don’t try to review their thought-patterns accordingly, idealism remains a theoretical statement ‘explained’ in terms of philosophical speculations, but with no connection with either the inner or the outer life. It won’t change anything of relevance in the reality of our experience, that is, in our understanding.
We really have to connect with the ideal nature of reality, from the first person perspective, and be on the lookout for the
primordial role of ideational activity in it, in our every picture. Idea is the ever-present origin. Reality emerges as such, before it precipitates in physical form. If we let our field of attention endlessly shrink down to the mere physical flow, we are, as a matter of fact,
behind reality at any given moment. No real impact is possible. On the contrary, if we get ahead of sense perceptions, if we try to enter their process of manifestation in inner terms first, we can expect to carve out some degrees of freedom and co-create the future, working harmoniously with the powerful lines of force. And at the end of the (eternal) day, becoming an expression of the Good depends on carving out those degrees of freedom. It’s necessary to be constantly present in the perceptual flow, responsible for our part, holding a flexible view of what eventlines seem the best ones to navigate, otherwise we don’t notice the degrees of freedom that we
could experience and maybe expand on, once we get the hang of what orientation better supports fruitful co-creation in every moment.
Windows continually open in front of us for intentional integration, and we have to contribute our future pictures. Otherwise the chance and task to exert freedom in service of moral intentions is continually missed, and we become passive, instinctive bystanders, easy prey for the environmental negative forces.