Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

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AshvinP
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Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

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In Part I, we laid out some broad principled foundations of the instinctively developed mental, emotional, and physical spaces of life and started to discuss the principles of spiritually retracing these spaces. To start this section, let’s first be clear that exploring this foundation is not entirely separate from the retracing itself. We are at the same time building our spirit’s sensitivity to the inner gestures it may encounter across the threshold of its sense-bound conceptual life. What resides across this threshold is not some separate world from the one we are accustomed to perceiving and thinking about, rather it is the normally invisible dimension of that same world. The situation here is not essentially different than when we intuit certain meaning but cannot find the appropriate words to express it, perhaps because we are trying to express the meaning outside our native language. Eventually, our intuition ‘clicks’ into place with the verbal intellect and the appropriate words are condensed. Except here we are going in the inverse direction – we have the verbal concepts and are seeking the corresponding intuitive gestures that are so far unfamiliar.

For this inverse movement, our verbal concepts should be understood as testimonies to more mysterious ‘curvatures’ that constrain them and along which they stream. When we see a stranger who is walking down the street, we know that the quantitative properties of the arm and leg movements, the walking direction, the speed, and so on, do not exhaust the meaning of the activity – we know the person is also driven by some invisible feelings and desires; walking for some imperceptible purpose. The outer perceptions testify to this invisible inner life. Likewise, our conceptual explorations here can also testify to the shared inner life that animates their movements so long as we keep this nexus in view and approach the descriptions vividly and from the most varied angles. Then we are engaged in spiritual triangulation – we use the ideal relations between unfamiliar intuition, on one hand, and familiar conceptual and sensory experiences, on the other, to triangulate the vicinity in which the former is to be sought. We should remain humbly open to the possibility that our conceptual movements are also structured for more mysterious purposes, like the physical movements of a stranger on the street.

Throughout this process, we should vividly experiment with the examples, illustrations, and imaginations offered to get a more concrete feel for the principles they serve and more deeply internalize those principles. It is in this way that we not only learn new facts, but creatively participate with the structure of the inner spaces. Imagine that I told you the following – stand up, walk a step forward (F), turn right (R), F, R, F, R, F, R, F, and now you will be back in your starting position. If you simply believe these thoughts, they remain highly abstract and are of no use to you. But if you actively think these thoughts, i.e. experiment with them physically or in your imagination, then you will know their truth inwardly. This simple illustration is both an example of the vivid experimentation principle and an opportunity to practice it. Consider it a warm-up for the sorts of imaginative gestures that we should continue making throughout the discussion that follows. Like any new skill, we will need to return to the same material many times to practice with it and reveal its deeper meaning.

Many of the ideas presented will remain abstract at first, which is how it should be. We would expect a small child who hears its parents talking about global economics to only understand the concepts abstractly until it gets a job and begins managing its own finances. Likewise, the unfamiliar spiritual gestures are higher-order Cosmic processes that we are approaching as small children; that we are just beginning to learn with hopefully the same level of curiosity and wonder. But with these imaginative experimentations, over time what we have thus explored abstractly will begin attracting the corresponding experiences which provide the flesh over the bare conceptual bones. In fact, the spiritual retracing process is synonymous with ceaselessly making what must start out as abstract ideas more and more experientially concrete. No matter where we stand in spiritual development, there are always unfamiliar higher-order processes that we are just beginning to learn.

To begin with, we should seek a sense of how there is much more to our conceptual life than we are normally aware of. Few people stop to wonder how exactly the inner voice, through which they constantly think, precipitates into their experience. That inner voice is simply taken for granted and used to speculate on all manner of topics, while people believe they are expressing their own original and unadulterated thoughts. The reality, however, is not so flattering. Try for a moment to fill your inner space with the meaning of pure whiteness, through and through. You will soon notice that there are ‘disturbances’ in this meaning of whiteness, as if something is continually punching holes into it. If we were in complete control of our imagination, the pure whiteness should be easy to maintain. That it is not so easy helps us notice there are mysterious forces playing into our imaginative space and modulating our thoughts at all times. What are these forces?

Let’s imagine the consciousness of an animal, an infant, or a primitive man. This consciousness does not live in clear-cut verbal concepts, but in pictures. These pictures are similar to the ones we experience during dreams, except they are not pure fantasy driven by personal feelings and wishes but are constrained and streamlined through the objective sensory environment. At first, these pictures are fleeting and have little continuity, but for humans, they gradually become more stable and remain as ‘after-images’. That provides the basis for the faculty of memory and, through this memory faculty, the life of thinking emerges. At first, this thinking still unfolds entirely in mental pictures rather than verbal concepts. The pictures reflect objective relations in the environment which bring pleasure or pain, which attract the soul through sympathy or repel it through antipathy.

The young pre-verbal child who desires a toy, for example, will live in pictures of this toy and where it may be located in the house, let’s say the toy room. These memory pictures can then steer the child’s instinctive will to transform its state such that it coincides with the toy room and the toy that brings it pleasure. Yet the child may also have pictures reflecting the experience of being scolded when it took toys without a parent’s permission. That experience was painful so these pictures interfere with the previous pleasurable pictures of taking the toy. They create a tension within the imagistic soul space that can lead to an instinctive form of creativity to resolve the tension – the child learns to wait until the parents are not around before going to take the toy. Here we already have thinking in its most rudimentary form, as the interference of soul pictures that leads to instinctively sought creative solutions.

These superimposed soul pictures don’t simply disappear when we develop verbal thinking in later life, but rather the latter emerges as a specific encoding of the imagistic space. It is as if our encoded thoughts are commentaries on these pictures throughout the course of daily life. For example, if we are thinking about what to eat for dinner, our activity lives in superimposed memory pictures of all the options that align with our mood, preferences, etc. and then it encodes these as the inner voice that comments, “Maybe I will try the new Thai restaurant tonight because I have grown tired of Italian.” We shouldn’t imagine that the meaning of the pictures is transparent to us, however, or that it is only limited to our personal soul life – our moods, for example, are not transparent to normal consciousness and there are many transpersonal influences playing into them. The verbal thoughts are like overtones modulated on the mysterious sub-harmonics of the soul life. We can get a more intimate feel for this with an illustration.




I have chosen a simple song to highlight two aspects - the harmony or chord progression (left hand spikes) and the melody (right hand spikes). We should try to sense how the chords provide an imaginative feeling context, akin to the imagistic space, on which the notes of the melody are modulated, akin to our verbal thoughts. The spectrum at the bottom of the video also helps us visualize the varying pitches of the melody (spikes on the right), corresponding to the sheer diversity of thoughts we experience, as well as the inner depth flow from which the thoughts condense. We can even move our hands or hum along with the melody to heighten our sensitivity. After all, we can think with our hands through sign language, and we hum with the same inner voice with which we think. Clearly, these are melodic thoughts embedded within a solemn yet inspiring context. Although the melody and chords are unique domains of spiritual activity, irreducible to one another, they are still intimately related as the overtones (thoughts) to the subharmonics (imaginative feeling life); as sequential thoughts which precipitate from within a more holistic feeling context.

Most people would not be thrilled to discover that their ‘informed’ and impassioned thinking about politics, economics, world events, and so on, is simply an unconscious commentary on the pictures which have filled their soul space throughout the course of life. We could say it is a space of thought-potential from which linear sequences of verbal thoughts collapse, according to how images interfere with one another based on unexamined sympathies and antipathies, likes and dislikes, feelings of pleasure and pain. To be clear, we have no reason to say these images from which our verbal thoughts are encoded are unreal or unreliable, and in fact they are the living essence of our memory faculty. It is only that we are not normally conscious of them beyond dim memory pictures or of what they signify in the flow of reality. We don’t know exactly why they lead us to think in one way and not others, to pay attention to certain ideas and not others, to hold certain opinions and not others, etc. As uncomfortable as it may be to confront this aspect of our conceptual life, becoming more conscious of these relations is the path to spiritual freedom.

In that same vein, we should also be clear that there are critical aims attained by this encoding of the imagistic potential. For one, the abstraction from images related to our personal interests into clear-cut concepts provides the basis for establishing a vertical hierarchy of ideas that relate to the interests of broader spheres of beings; to moral virtues like charity, generosity, forgiveness, and so on. As long as we flow along with images related only to what brings pleasure or pain, to what we have sympathy or antipathy for, we cannot expand our personal interests to encompass those of our fellow beings with whom we need to live harmoniously. Try to imagine the meaning of a virtue like forgiveness using only a picture – it won’t be possible with a single picture but will require a complex unfolding scene of pictures, something like a mini legend or fairy tale. We simply couldn’t manage our ethical life if we had to do this pictorial reenactment whenever we wanted to ensoul or embody the virtuous meaning. With the abstracted verbal concept, something of the essential meaning is encoded into a manageable unit that can be accessed more easily.

Secondly, without the conceptual encoding, we couldn’t gain cognitive distance from the pictorial flow and therefore decide what images to allow in and motivate our will in freedom. There would be no ‘circuit break’ between the flow of sensual images, on the one hand, and the stimulation of our will, on the other – one would flow continuously into the other and vice versa. It is interesting to observe how sensory impressions, like a loud noise or a strong smell, immediately stimulate the whole body of a cat or dog, for example. When my cat sees a bird on the balcony, her whole rear end shakes. Our encoded conceptual life acts as a circuit breaker in this charged flow and allows us to assess our sensations, instincts, and passions more calmly before acting on them. More importantly, our spirit finds its reflection in these concepts and begins to know itself as an independent agency that has some control over its activity in the face of environmental stimuli.

Yet these encoded concepts, although providing the basis for taming our passions, free agency, and moral development, now lack the more encompassing, more fluid, and more organic qualities of the imagistic space. They encode the temporal flow of soul movements into fixed spatial boundaries between discrete objects that must act on each other ‘at a distance’. Returning to my cat – she will often hear a noise from one direction and start looking in a completely different direction. That is because her sensory consciousness is more spread out, more intermingled with her environment, less channeled into sharp ‘rays’ of visual or audial sensations. There is not such a sharp distinction between a sound coming from the ‘north’ or from the ‘south’, or more generally between her inner life and the sensory environment around her. The task now is not to revert back to our egoistically driven and blurred together imagistic life, but to integrate the latter with the ethically driven and lucid conceptual life.

For that integration, our conceptual activity needs to expand its sphere of sensitivity to inner experience, back into the space of imaginative gestures which are less spatial and more temporal in nature. Just as our conceptual life raised us a level higher than the pictorial life so the latter could be somewhat understood and therefore tamed, the next higher level should help us understand and better organize the conceptual life. Yet as we discussed in Part I, something old always needs to be renounced for something new to be born. “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved.” Understanding more intimately how our conceptual activity works also naturally points us toward what aspects need to be renounced for the subharmonic imaginative life to shine through.

Normally our conceptual activity is firmly anchored within a limited domain of spatial lawfulness – we travel from home to work, to the gym, to meet friends, to attend social events, and back home. We move from the bedroom to the bathroom to the living room, and so on. We think about politics, sports, religious topics, and such things, but even our thoughts about those topics are also deeply tied to the intuition we have gained from spatial life. Even when we think about God, for example, we tend to imagine a more encompassing, more powerful bubble of consciousness like the ones we are used to meeting in sensory life, which somehow inflated another bubble known as ‘the Universe’ in primordial times. It is a cognitive life where rigid boundaries between objects/processes and linear chains of cause-effect hold sway.

Most of that routine life can possibly be plotted on a GPS map as such:

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Even if we are globetrotters, however, the meaningful spatial orientation we gain from normal cognitive life will be much the same – most rural areas, towns, and cities around the World are self-similar to all others in terms of the meaningful sensory constellations they offer. After all, the fixed spatial nature of these impressions is the result of human conceptual activity. In that sense, we carry our limited cognition with us wherever we go. These spatial paths of experience originally instilled an intuitive sense of how sensory impressions transform in response to our activity, i.e. how they provide continuous feedback of lawful consequences in response to our bodily will or its technological extensions. Most of that orientation was learned instinctively in childhood and, as adults, we simply make use of what we instinctively learned and take it for granted, as something that we can ‘just do’ without thinking about it. This intuitive orientation to sensory life is critical not only for a safe and reliable existence, but for developing our logical thinking forces as well.

Through many sensory perceptual impacts, the spirit attains an intuitive sense for how things fit or don’t fit together, how they relate or clash, what is possible or not possible in relation to its own activity. When this intuitive orientation is raised from the unconscious physical life and the dreamy psychic life into the wakeful mental life, we get logical thinking. Imagine that you are trying to fit a square peg perfectly into a round hole. Even if we do this only in our imagination, we sense a characteristic dissonance between the mental images. That intuition for how shapes fit together has been instinctively learned through many perceptual encounters. Now try to make sense of the following – “All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is immortal.” We should experience a very similar dissonance with this illogical proposition. This reveals that our logical thinking is a means of probing the ideal landscape and perceiving consonances and dissonances within its topology, just as our senses perceive such consonances and dissonances within the physical landscape.

Yet this sort of logical thinking is still trained on a limited sensory database, or mathematical constructs that mostly imitate sensory dynamics, and therefore its logical forces are constricted. It is as if we are extracting tiny thought-shards from the meaningful topology which can only reflect the fixed and fragmented nature of sensory impressions. Our intuitive spirit can only find its reflection in these shards. Thus, even if we are cognitively exploring the secrets of the Universe, only that meaning which can be captured by our thought-fragments will make it to conscious awareness. The rest will remain obscured entirely or, at best, will appear as a nebulous context in which our thoughts, feelings, moral ideals, and the inner life of many other beings, are felt to exist (commonly referred to as the ‘subconscious’). We are then tempted to project our own assumptions and preferences into this black box such that reality is remade in our current self-image, rather than unveiling its depth of objective relations.

Image

How often do we simply assume what other people think and feel is either similar to what we think and feel or in opposition to it, based on our own mysterious sympathy and antipathy for them? We make these projective assumptions because we seem to have no other choice in the course of normal sensory life; our conceptual activity simply cannot penetrate into the inner depths of outer appearances. Most of these appearances are increasingly meeting us as a Rorschach test into which our conceptual activity projects its subconscious assumptions, beliefs, tastes, and preferences to reach firm conclusions about ‘what they are’. How many of our intellectual opinions about the ‘state of the world’ say more about our own current state of being? To be clear, the projected thoughts and feelings are not completely arbitrary – they have some relation to the inner depths, just as the overtones are related to the subharmonics, which in turn are both related to the underlying rhythms of a musical composition.

Nevertheless, our conceptual judgments can only become more and more superficial, more and more attenuated from the inner relations, the longer we rely on them as crutches. The habitual use of conceptual activity for making conclusive judgments and building theoretical models comes at the expense of our imaginative thinking muscles. These could potentially penetrate deeper into the meaningful context of outer appearances but have now been left dormant for very long and have atrophied. What can we do to exercise and rehabilitate those muscles? To start, we can do exactly what we are doing now. By symbolically exploring where the deeper imaginative life fits into the flow of our living experience, how it relates to our normal conceptual activity and sensory experience, we are stimulating those muscles and condensing more of their potential into our thought life.

We can use the metaphor of iterated function systems (IFS) to get a better sense how our normal thoughts relate to the objective depth of inner reality:

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Our thinking about sensory experience and the ‘nature of reality’ is always probing a living ideal structure - the space of imagistic soul currents and even deeper spaces that structure inner experience - but normally it is like a random sampling of ‘points’ within this structure. We take some points from natural science, some from philosophical inquiry, some from religious traditions, etc. and patch them together into something that feels logical and coherent, and then we stop and rest satisfied. We not only expect these conceptual frameworks to give us an understanding of the ‘nature of reality’, but also to tell us how we should conduct our lives. Yet we fail to perceive the living structure which our point-like thoughts comprise and therefore fail to realize we have been probing our own ‘soul geometry’, where our thoughts encode holistic feeling images which, in turn, reflect an objective inner environment and its manifold fractal relations.

Another way to understand these thought-fragments in relation to the holistic inner topology is as conceptual points of balance, which is another angle on the imagistic encoding discussed previously:

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For example, through many inner experiences and logical explorations we have arrived at the idea of “origin of the Universe”. This idea was not always there – in very ancient times, the Universe was not even understood in terms of temporal development, there was no conceptual thinking and thus no desire to ask about the ‘age’ of the Universe. Later, it was felt that the Universe must be eternal and progressing according to merely cyclical rhythms (a notable exception is Biblical cosmology), which was conceived through a mythical image-based thinking. It was only when thinking became exclusively tied to the course of spatial sensory events in the modern era that certain inferences could be drawn from their lawful relations and extrapolated backward in time, such as the movement of galaxies away from the Earth and the discovery of ‘cosmic microwave background’. We should imagine all of the intuitions, technological developments, research, and reasoning that went into these discoveries, formalized in the theory of the ‘Big Bang’. Now all of these ideal relations are balanced on the convenient concept of ‘universal origin’ or ‘big bang’.

This conceptual balancing point provides our spirit with a place of rest, a specific center of gravity into which it can focus its intuition of all the complicated and morphing ideal relations. In further exploration of the nature of the Universe, people can employ this concept as a symbol that captures an essential lawfulness suggested by all the various sensory facts and inferences developed over many years. In this way, the concept allows us to condense conceptual states of being that were explored over many years into a shorter duration; to collapse them into a portable conceptual briefcase, so to speak, that we can carry with us wherever we go. Yet what has happened in the modern age is that we began working only with the concepts and forgot the totality of meaningful ideal relations from which they were extracted. That is the source of modern abstract thinking – it is ‘abstract’ precisely because its concepts have lost sight of their living experiential foundations.

That abstraction must take place if we are building a theoretical model of reality, since the whole purpose is to ‘explain’ away the totality of relations by letting the concepts substitute for them. But if we are interested in a more profound inner understanding, it is exactly the wider totality of relations that must be kept in sight at all times, at least as an explicit context of our inquiries, of which the concepts are only symbolic points of balance. Our thinking must learn to continuously probe the ideal relations without ever reducing them to our fixed concepts, trying to derive some concepts from other concepts (like ‘mind’ from ‘matter’ or vice versa). Our thinking has been habituated to feel, for example, that if we add the concept of ‘red’ to another concept of ‘blue’, we get the concept of ‘purple’. Yet living experience reveals that is not the case – the concept of ‘purple’ only appears as a flash of insight from mysterious depths when we encounter the corresponding perception. Neither can the concept of ‘two’ be reduced to two concepts of ‘one’, but must arise a flash of insight with respect to all things which come in pairs.

When we lose sight of the mysterious and irreducible context which our concepts uniquely encode, we become satisfied with the final products of the sense-based inferences, combining them together in various ways to build ‘reality’, and fail to follow the logical thread any further into the inner life which made the inferences possible. Most of the deep meaning embedded within our conceptual thinking is then ‘aliased’ from perception. The Big Bang theory could only be conceptualized because of this aliasing effect, but it comes at the expense of deeper penetration into what the intuition of ‘universal origin’ really signifies for our existence. The effect of this aliasing of meaning from our normal cognitive perception is the modern mechanistic understanding of the Universe. It is not the sensory relations themselves that dictate this understanding but the idolizing of our conceptual points of balance for those relations – we conflate the latter with the whole meaningful story.

That part of the story where desires and intents are to be found – the soul and spiritual life – is left out of account because it is no longer perceived. As long as the spirit remains constricted within the sense-based content of its intellectual movements, without concrete awareness of the more expansive ideal relations of the ‘inverted cone’, it is observing the World structure from the outside-in and reducing its qualities to their lowest common denominator. For that reason, the intellect only grasps the transformations of the mineral domain where forces of decay and death hold sway, while the organic domain of life forces remains veiled to it, as reflected in the ‘problem of abiogenesis’, as well as the sentient domain of soul forces, as reflected in the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The life forces and soul forces have been flattened onto the sensory-conceptual screen where they are confused for their mineral reflections in the body and brain.

Moreover, every all-encompassing theory of reality is nevertheless understood from a specific conceptual perspective which, in turn, is modulated by the whole subconscious life of soul. This is why conceptual agreement between the various encompassing ontologies of our time – materialism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism, etc. - can never be arrived at, in principle. The internal logical coherence of these worldviews hardly matters. What is missing is the self-knowledge which reveals deeper soul factors that steer a thinker into one logical framework or another, for one purpose or another, within complicated streams of personal and transpersonal destiny. These factors have been merged into the background of the thinking perspective and therefore remain in the blind spot of consciousness. They are used to perceive and think about reality, but they themselves remain unperceived and unknown.


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Each world outlook can be understood as a specific pair of colored glasses that the spirit puts on to engage usefully with a certain spectrum of inner experiences, acquiring unique intuitions from that engagement. When it engages with sensory phenomena, it uses the red-colored lenses, with soul phenomena, the green lenses, with mental phenomena, the blue lenses, and so on. Only the frames are usually so merged with the thinking perspective that the spirit forgets it is wearing glasses, sees its materialistic or idealistic thoughts and says, “These thoughts I perceive are the true reality!” The same goes for all the other aspects of psychic and physical life that the spirit is normally merged with and which condition its understanding of experience, such as its character and temperament, its native language and culture, its gender, its epoch of existence, and so on. These are all tools for acquiring various constellations of life experiences and integrating the corresponding intuitions such that the spirit can know its core agency and tasks from diverse angles.

The problems start when the spirit identifies with some or all of these tools, such as its thoughts about reality, and therefore leaves itself no way to investigate the colored lenses further. It is very much the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where the latter is the intuitive ‘shape’ of our own being. We are not describing a merely pragmatic alternative in these essays, but pointing out that the very capacity for the spirit to act pragmatically speaks to a deeper living structure that can be known. At the core, everything we experience, whether through thoughts linked to the sensory, emotional, intellectual, imaginative, or even more lucid spaces, is aimed at expanding intuition of our own living structure and our concrete role and responsibilities within that structure. That is true even if we ourselves remain unaware of that aim. It’s only that the intuition developed through the lower spaces is at such a low resolution and takes such a long time to unfold that we hardly notice it and cannot rely on it for penetrating insights into the patterns of our experiential flow.

For example, modern scientists are secretly exploring the deeper soul strata through their conceptual theories without knowing it. The scientists experimenting within the domain of quantum mechanics, to pick one of many instances, are unconsciously investigating their own deeper soul movements, hence their findings make great analogies for characteristic aspects of inner activity. Their experiments are carefully constructed opportunities to conceptually probe the inner soul geometry, the ‘wavefunctions’ of the living IFS structure, and collapse fragmented insights. By asking new sorts of imaginative questions, the spirit happens upon new sorts of opportunities for unveiling its deeper nature. Only these insights remain hopelessly externalized as long as this whole process we are discussing remains unconscious. Then there is no basis to connect the insights back with the living structure from which they were extracted; to find the various ‘glasses’ that our thinking perspective is actually wearing.

That leads to a negative feedback spiral because, when the insights feel unrelated to one’s own inner life and activity, there is no motivation to further investigate that inner life or strengthen its faculties. Every answer to life’s fundamental questions and problems is sought further and further away from the inner movements where they are to be found. Is it not obvious now that the reasons for political, economic, ecological, and social instabilities are to be found in the inner depths which animate the thoughts, emotions, desires, and intents of human beings? That is quite obvious but, because of what has been discussed above, it is felt there is no possible way to penetrate beyond the threshold of conceptual life with lucid thinking. Not only that, but the question of whether and how it is possible is not even entertained. The normal course of sensory and intellectual life simply presents no opportunities to even ask such questions.

Psychedelics, trance states, mystical ‘no-thought’ meditations, and similar methods can lead us beyond the spatial constrictions of normal conceptual life, but only from there into an abyss of knowledge – they fail to trace any of the deeper spiritual influences we have been discussing. Since the substances force the spirit into the inner spaces without cognitive preparation, any higher-order processes perceived must be once again reduced to sense-like phenomena and interpreted by the aliased intellect, albeit accompanied by profound feelings. The mystical approaches, on the other hand, repel any opportunity to be spiritually active within inner spaces and therefore leave the spirit as a passive witness of ‘dependent co-arisings’. The reason all of these approaches often denigrate conceptual activity is precisely because they cannot discern the continuities between that activity and spiritual activity which reflects its intuitive existence at higher ‘states of aggregation’. As we have already seen, however, our conceptual activity is simply a more aliased form of these higher states.

The spiritual retracing technique is to become more conscious of this reality by delaminating the merged layers of the thinking perspective. Our normal psychic life is felt as a homogenous soup, but in reality it is patched together by the most varied inner flows and eddies, just as a swarm of insects may look like a brownish blob until we approach it. To get a sense for this, we can try a simple exercise. We inhale and furrow the brow or tighten the eyes, and upon exhaling we try to release all the tension. We can repeat this a few times. Most people will probably feel that they can’t release it all but rather there is residual tension left after the exhale, as if bumping up against a limit to how relaxed the facial muscles can become. Perhaps they never noticed how much facial tension there is in their forehead or around their eyes. An exercise such as this simply makes us a little more sensitive to the facial tension that is always there but that we are normally merged with. By conducting our activity in an unfamiliar direction, we create the opportunity for ‘new’ phenomena to reveal themselves.

A similar principle applies when we begin delaminating the soul layers merged with our thinking perspective. In fact, our bodily tensions are generally a result of these soul layers as well. Yet we can only trace these relationships through our conceptual life, by first growing inwardly sensitive to how the latter is ‘tensed’ by its varied assumptions, beliefs, preferences, etc. These mental factors act as thought-molds into which our conceptual activity is forced to flow as long as we remain unconscious of them and therefore entirely merged with them. They prevent our activity from becoming relaxed and open to new unsuspected thinking experiences; from conducting itself in unfamiliar directions of mental experience. Many of the most problematic encrusted habits of thinking are what we have been illustrating so far above. As always, by knowing them more intimately we also gain the opportunity to creatively manage their expressions in our life. Let’s conclude this part with a brief recap of these thinking habits that we are trying to gain cognitive distance from (which is not an exhaustive list):

• Simply believing or memorizing thoughts without actually thinking them.
• Only seriously exploring the domain of spatial-sensory lawfulness with our thoughts, ignoring the inner temporal domain.
• Projecting subconscious soul factors into intellectual judgments about the ‘World’, including other human souls.
• Failing to realize that we are probing our own inner ‘geometry’ through conceptual activity.
• Idolizing conceptual points of balance for the totality of ideal relations from which they were extracted.
• Forgetting the spirit’s psychic and physical ‘clothing’, such as world outlooks, are tools for it to integrate intuition of its concrete roles and responsibilities within the experiential flow of reality.
• Introducing a hard split between conceptual activity and potential higher forms of spiritual activity.

So, as we see, spiritual retracing is not about escaping from conceptual activity. We only cleanse the slippery patina of unexamined habits layered over that activity which obscure the deeper spiritual gestures. Just as a flower does not know the beauty experienced by the human being when beholding it, the formulator of a philosophical framework, the discoverer of a scientific fact, or the developer of a theory does not need to know the insights that are nonetheless contained within it and which we, as spiritual seekers, can inwardly retrace, thereby redeeming them from their isolated, externalized, and, therefore, selfish existence. Nothing that was conceptually developed in prior years of our individual or collective lives is forsaken, only repurposed and elaborated through the more holistic story that is unveiled to cognitive perception. In the next part, we will explore what it means for the intuitive spirit to find its lucid reflection not only in the spatial relations of sensory impressions, or the quantitative relations of mathematical constructs, but also in the temporal and qualitative relations of ideas, emotions, and intents.
"A secret law contrives,
To give time symmetry:
There is, within our lives,
An exact mystery."
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Güney27
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

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AshvinP wrote: Sun May 05, 2024 4:12 pm In Part I, we laid out some broad principled foundations of the instinctively developed mental, emotional, and physical spaces of life and started to discuss the principles of spiritually retracing these spaces. To start this section, let’s first be clear that exploring this foundation is not entirely separate from the retracing itself. We are at the same time building our spirit’s sensitivity to the inner gestures it may encounter across the threshold of its sense-bound conceptual life. What resides across this threshold is not some separate world from the one we are accustomed to perceiving and thinking about, rather it is the normally invisible dimension of that same world. The situation here is not essentially different than when we intuit certain meaning but cannot find the appropriate words to express it, perhaps because we are trying to express the meaning outside our native language. Eventually, our intuition ‘clicks’ into place with the verbal intellect and the appropriate words are condensed. Except here we are going in the inverse direction – we have the verbal concepts and are seeking the corresponding intuitive gestures that are so far unfamiliar.

For this inverse movement, our verbal concepts should be understood as testimonies to more mysterious ‘curvatures’ that constrain them and along which they stream. When we see a stranger who is walking down the street, we know that the quantitative properties of the arm and leg movements, the walking direction, the speed, and so on, do not exhaust the meaning of the activity – we know the person is also driven by some invisible feelings and desires; walking for some imperceptible purpose. The outer perceptions testify to this invisible inner life. Likewise, our conceptual explorations here can also testify to the shared inner life that animates their movements so long as we keep this nexus in view and approach the descriptions vividly and from the most varied angles. Then we are engaged in spiritual triangulation – we use the ideal relations between unfamiliar intuition, on one hand, and familiar conceptual and sensory experiences, on the other, to triangulate the vicinity in which the former is to be sought. We should remain humbly open to the possibility that our conceptual movements are also structured for more mysterious purposes, like the physical movements of a stranger on the street.

Throughout this process, we should vividly experiment with the examples, illustrations, and imaginations offered to get a more concrete feel for the principles they serve and more deeply internalize those principles. It is in this way that we not only learn new facts, but creatively participate with the structure of the inner spaces. Imagine that I told you the following – stand up, walk a step forward (F), turn right (R), F, R, F, R, F, R, F, and now you will be back in your starting position. If you simply believe these thoughts, they remain highly abstract and are of no use to you. But if you actively think these thoughts, i.e. experiment with them physically or in your imagination, then you will know their truth inwardly. This simple illustration is both an example of the vivid experimentation principle and an opportunity to practice it. Consider it a warm-up for the sorts of imaginative gestures that we should continue making throughout the discussion that follows. Like any new skill, we will need to return to the same material many times to practice with it and reveal its deeper meaning.

Many of the ideas presented will remain abstract at first, which is how it should be. We would expect a small child who hears its parents talking about global economics to only understand the concepts abstractly until it gets a job and begins managing its own finances. Likewise, the unfamiliar spiritual gestures are higher-order Cosmic processes that we are approaching as small children; that we are just beginning to learn with hopefully the same level of curiosity and wonder. But with these imaginative experimentations, over time what we have thus explored abstractly will begin attracting the corresponding experiences which provide the flesh over the bare conceptual bones. In fact, the spiritual retracing process is synonymous with ceaselessly making what must start out as abstract ideas more and more experientially concrete. No matter where we stand in spiritual development, there are always unfamiliar higher-order processes that we are just beginning to learn.

To begin with, we should seek a sense of how there is much more to our conceptual life than we are normally aware of. Few people stop to wonder how exactly the inner voice, through which they constantly think, precipitates into their experience. That inner voice is simply taken for granted and used to speculate on all manner of topics, while people believe they are expressing their own original and unadulterated thoughts. The reality, however, is not so flattering. Try for a moment to fill your inner space with the meaning of pure whiteness, through and through. You will soon notice that there are ‘disturbances’ in this meaning of whiteness, as if something is continually punching holes into it. If we were in complete control of our imagination, the pure whiteness should be easy to maintain. That it is not so easy helps us notice there are mysterious forces playing into our imaginative space and modulating our thoughts at all times. What are these forces?

Let’s imagine the consciousness of an animal, an infant, or a primitive man. This consciousness does not live in clear-cut verbal concepts, but in pictures. These pictures are similar to the ones we experience during dreams, except they are not pure fantasy driven by personal feelings and wishes but are constrained and streamlined through the objective sensory environment. At first, these pictures are fleeting and have little continuity, but for humans, they gradually become more stable and remain as ‘after-images’. That provides the basis for the faculty of memory and, through this memory faculty, the life of thinking emerges. At first, this thinking still unfolds entirely in mental pictures rather than verbal concepts. The pictures reflect objective relations in the environment which bring pleasure or pain, which attract the soul through sympathy or repel it through antipathy.

The young pre-verbal child who desires a toy, for example, will live in pictures of this toy and where it may be located in the house, let’s say the toy room. These memory pictures can then steer the child’s instinctive will to transform its state such that it coincides with the toy room and the toy that brings it pleasure. Yet the child may also have pictures reflecting the experience of being scolded when it took toys without a parent’s permission. That experience was painful so these pictures interfere with the previous pleasurable pictures of taking the toy. They create a tension within the imagistic soul space that can lead to an instinctive form of creativity to resolve the tension – the child learns to wait until the parents are not around before going to take the toy. Here we already have thinking in its most rudimentary form, as the interference of soul pictures that leads to instinctively sought creative solutions.

These superimposed soul pictures don’t simply disappear when we develop verbal thinking in later life, but rather the latter emerges as a specific encoding of the imagistic space. It is as if our encoded thoughts are commentaries on these pictures throughout the course of daily life. For example, if we are thinking about what to eat for dinner, our activity lives in superimposed memory pictures of all the options that align with our mood, preferences, etc. and then it encodes these as the inner voice that comments, “Maybe I will try the new Thai restaurant tonight because I have grown tired of Italian.” We shouldn’t imagine that the meaning of the pictures is transparent to us, however, or that it is only limited to our personal soul life – our moods, for example, are not transparent to normal consciousness and there are many transpersonal influences playing into them. The verbal thoughts are like overtones modulated on the mysterious sub-harmonics of the soul life. We can get a more intimate feel for this with an illustration.




I have chosen a simple song to highlight two aspects - the harmony or chord progression (left hand spikes) and the melody (right hand spikes). We should try to sense how the chords provide an imaginative feeling context, akin to the imagistic space, on which the notes of the melody are modulated, akin to our verbal thoughts. The spectrum at the bottom of the video also helps us visualize the varying pitches of the melody (spikes on the right), corresponding to the sheer diversity of thoughts we experience, as well as the inner depth flow from which the thoughts condense. We can even move our hands or hum along with the melody to heighten our sensitivity. After all, we can think with our hands through sign language, and we hum with the same inner voice with which we think. Clearly, these are melodic thoughts embedded within a solemn yet inspiring context. Although the melody and chords are unique domains of spiritual activity, irreducible to one another, they are still intimately related as the overtones (thoughts) to the subharmonics (imaginative feeling life); as sequential thoughts which precipitate from within a more holistic feeling context.

Most people would not be thrilled to discover that their ‘informed’ and impassioned thinking about politics, economics, world events, and so on, is simply an unconscious commentary on the pictures which have filled their soul space throughout the course of life. We could say it is a space of thought-potential from which linear sequences of verbal thoughts collapse, according to how images interfere with one another based on unexamined sympathies and antipathies, likes and dislikes, feelings of pleasure and pain. To be clear, we have no reason to say these images from which our verbal thoughts are encoded are unreal or unreliable, and in fact they are the living essence of our memory faculty. It is only that we are not normally conscious of them beyond dim memory pictures or of what they signify in the flow of reality. We don’t know exactly why they lead us to think in one way and not others, to pay attention to certain ideas and not others, to hold certain opinions and not others, etc. As uncomfortable as it may be to confront this aspect of our conceptual life, becoming more conscious of these relations is the path to spiritual freedom.

In that same vein, we should also be clear that there are critical aims attained by this encoding of the imagistic potential. For one, the abstraction from images related to our personal interests into clear-cut concepts provides the basis for establishing a vertical hierarchy of ideas that relate to the interests of broader spheres of beings; to moral virtues like charity, generosity, forgiveness, and so on. As long as we flow along with images related only to what brings pleasure or pain, to what we have sympathy or antipathy for, we cannot expand our personal interests to encompass those of our fellow beings with whom we need to live harmoniously. Try to imagine the meaning of a virtue like forgiveness using only a picture – it won’t be possible with a single picture but will require a complex unfolding scene of pictures, something like a mini legend or fairy tale. We simply couldn’t manage our ethical life if we had to do this pictorial reenactment whenever we wanted to ensoul or embody the virtuous meaning. With the abstracted verbal concept, something of the essential meaning is encoded into a manageable unit that can be accessed more easily.

Secondly, without the conceptual encoding, we couldn’t gain cognitive distance from the pictorial flow and therefore decide what images to allow in and motivate our will in freedom. There would be no ‘circuit break’ between the flow of sensual images, on the one hand, and the stimulation of our will, on the other – one would flow continuously into the other and vice versa. It is interesting to observe how sensory impressions, like a loud noise or a strong smell, immediately stimulate the whole body of a cat or dog, for example. When my cat sees a bird on the balcony, her whole rear end shakes. Our encoded conceptual life acts as a circuit breaker in this charged flow and allows us to assess our sensations, instincts, and passions more calmly before acting on them. More importantly, our spirit finds its reflection in these concepts and begins to know itself as an independent agency that has some control over its activity in the face of environmental stimuli.

Yet these encoded concepts, although providing the basis for taming our passions, free agency, and moral development, now lack the more encompassing, more fluid, and more organic qualities of the imagistic space. They encode the temporal flow of soul movements into fixed spatial boundaries between discrete objects that must act on each other ‘at a distance’. Returning to my cat – she will often hear a noise from one direction and start looking in a completely different direction. That is because her sensory consciousness is more spread out, more intermingled with her environment, less channeled into sharp ‘rays’ of visual or audial sensations. There is not such a sharp distinction between a sound coming from the ‘north’ or from the ‘south’, or more generally between her inner life and the sensory environment around her. The task now is not to revert back to our egoistically driven and blurred together imagistic life, but to integrate the latter with the ethically driven and lucid conceptual life.

For that integration, our conceptual activity needs to expand its sphere of sensitivity to inner experience, back into the space of imaginative gestures which are less spatial and more temporal in nature. Just as our conceptual life raised us a level higher than the pictorial life so the latter could be somewhat understood and therefore tamed, the next higher level should help us understand and better organize the conceptual life. Yet as we discussed in Part I, something old always needs to be renounced for something new to be born. “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved.” Understanding more intimately how our conceptual activity works also naturally points us toward what aspects need to be renounced for the subharmonic imaginative life to shine through.

Normally our conceptual activity is firmly anchored within a limited domain of spatial lawfulness – we travel from home to work, to the gym, to meet friends, to attend social events, and back home. We move from the bedroom to the bathroom to the living room, and so on. We think about politics, sports, religious topics, and such things, but even our thoughts about those topics are also deeply tied to the intuition we have gained from spatial life. Even when we think about God, for example, we tend to imagine a more encompassing, more powerful bubble of consciousness like the ones we are used to meeting in sensory life, which somehow inflated another bubble known as ‘the Universe’ in primordial times. It is a cognitive life where rigid boundaries between objects/processes and linear chains of cause-effect hold sway.

Most of that routine life can possibly be plotted on a GPS map as such:

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Even if we are globetrotters, however, the meaningful spatial orientation we gain from normal cognitive life will be much the same – most rural areas, towns, and cities around the World are self-similar to all others in terms of the meaningful sensory constellations they offer. After all, the fixed spatial nature of these impressions is the result of human conceptual activity. In that sense, we carry our limited cognition with us wherever we go. These spatial paths of experience originally instilled an intuitive sense of how sensory impressions transform in response to our activity, i.e. how they provide continuous feedback of lawful consequences in response to our bodily will or its technological extensions. Most of that orientation was learned instinctively in childhood and, as adults, we simply make use of what we instinctively learned and take it for granted, as something that we can ‘just do’ without thinking about it. This intuitive orientation to sensory life is critical not only for a safe and reliable existence, but for developing our logical thinking forces as well.

Through many sensory perceptual impacts, the spirit attains an intuitive sense for how things fit or don’t fit together, how they relate or clash, what is possible or not possible in relation to its own activity. When this intuitive orientation is raised from the unconscious physical life and the dreamy psychic life into the wakeful mental life, we get logical thinking. Imagine that you are trying to fit a square peg perfectly into a round hole. Even if we do this only in our imagination, we sense a characteristic dissonance between the mental images. That intuition for how shapes fit together has been instinctively learned through many perceptual encounters. Now try to make sense of the following – “All men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is immortal.” We should experience a very similar dissonance with this illogical proposition. This reveals that our logical thinking is a means of probing the ideal landscape and perceiving consonances and dissonances within its topology, just as our senses perceive such consonances and dissonances within the physical landscape.

Yet this sort of logical thinking is still trained on a limited sensory database, or mathematical constructs that mostly imitate sensory dynamics, and therefore its logical forces are constricted. It is as if we are extracting tiny thought-shards from the meaningful topology which can only reflect the fixed and fragmented nature of sensory impressions. Our intuitive spirit can only find its reflection in these shards. Thus, even if we are cognitively exploring the secrets of the Universe, only that meaning which can be captured by our thought-fragments will make it to conscious awareness. The rest will remain obscured entirely or, at best, will appear as a nebulous context in which our thoughts, feelings, moral ideals, and the inner life of many other beings, are felt to exist (commonly referred to as the ‘subconscious’). We are then tempted to project our own assumptions and preferences into this black box such that reality is remade in our current self-image, rather than unveiling its depth of objective relations.

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How often do we simply assume what other people think and feel is either similar to what we think and feel or in opposition to it, based on our own mysterious sympathy and antipathy for them? We make these projective assumptions because we seem to have no other choice in the course of normal sensory life; our conceptual activity simply cannot penetrate into the inner depths of outer appearances. Most of these appearances are increasingly meeting us as a Rorschach test into which our conceptual activity projects its subconscious assumptions, beliefs, tastes, and preferences to reach firm conclusions about ‘what they are’. How many of our intellectual opinions about the ‘state of the world’ say more about our own current state of being? To be clear, the projected thoughts and feelings are not completely arbitrary – they have some relation to the inner depths, just as the overtones are related to the subharmonics, which in turn are both related to the underlying rhythms of a musical composition.

Nevertheless, our conceptual judgments can only become more and more superficial, more and more attenuated from the inner relations, the longer we rely on them as crutches. The habitual use of conceptual activity for making conclusive judgments and building theoretical models comes at the expense of our imaginative thinking muscles. These could potentially penetrate deeper into the meaningful context of outer appearances but have now been left dormant for very long and have atrophied. What can we do to exercise and rehabilitate those muscles? To start, we can do exactly what we are doing now. By symbolically exploring where the deeper imaginative life fits into the flow of our living experience, how it relates to our normal conceptual activity and sensory experience, we are stimulating those muscles and condensing more of their potential into our thought life.

We can use the metaphor of iterated function systems (IFS) to get a better sense how our normal thoughts relate to the objective depth of inner reality:

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Our thinking about sensory experience and the ‘nature of reality’ is always probing a living ideal structure - the space of imagistic soul currents and even deeper spaces that structure inner experience - but normally it is like a random sampling of ‘points’ within this structure. We take some points from natural science, some from philosophical inquiry, some from religious traditions, etc. and patch them together into something that feels logical and coherent, and then we stop and rest satisfied. We not only expect these conceptual frameworks to give us an understanding of the ‘nature of reality’, but also to tell us how we should conduct our lives. Yet we fail to perceive the living structure which our point-like thoughts comprise and therefore fail to realize we have been probing our own ‘soul geometry’, where our thoughts encode holistic feeling images which, in turn, reflect an objective inner environment and its manifold fractal relations.

Another way to understand these thought-fragments in relation to the holistic inner topology is as conceptual points of balance, which is another angle on the imagistic encoding discussed previously:

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For example, through many inner experiences and logical explorations we have arrived at the idea of “origin of the Universe”. This idea was not always there – in very ancient times, the Universe was not even understood in terms of temporal development, there was no conceptual thinking and thus no desire to ask about the ‘age’ of the Universe. Later, it was felt that the Universe must be eternal and progressing according to merely cyclical rhythms (a notable exception is Biblical cosmology), which was conceived through a mythical image-based thinking. It was only when thinking became exclusively tied to the course of spatial sensory events in the modern era that certain inferences could be drawn from their lawful relations and extrapolated backward in time, such as the movement of galaxies away from the Earth and the discovery of ‘cosmic microwave background’. We should imagine all of the intuitions, technological developments, research, and reasoning that went into these discoveries, formalized in the theory of the ‘Big Bang’. Now all of these ideal relations are balanced on the convenient concept of ‘universal origin’ or ‘big bang’.

This conceptual balancing point provides our spirit with a place of rest, a specific center of gravity into which it can focus its intuition of all the complicated and morphing ideal relations. In further exploration of the nature of the Universe, people can employ this concept as a symbol that captures an essential lawfulness suggested by all the various sensory facts and inferences developed over many years. In this way, the concept allows us to condense conceptual states of being that were explored over many years into a shorter duration; to collapse them into a portable conceptual briefcase, so to speak, that we can carry with us wherever we go. Yet what has happened in the modern age is that we began working only with the concepts and forgot the totality of meaningful ideal relations from which they were extracted. That is the source of modern abstract thinking – it is ‘abstract’ precisely because its concepts have lost sight of their living experiential foundations.

That abstraction must take place if we are building a theoretical model of reality, since the whole purpose is to ‘explain’ away the totality of relations by letting the concepts substitute for them. But if we are interested in a more profound inner understanding, it is exactly the wider totality of relations that must be kept in sight at all times, at least as an explicit context of our inquiries, of which the concepts are only symbolic points of balance. Our thinking must learn to continuously probe the ideal relations without ever reducing them to our fixed concepts, trying to derive some concepts from other concepts (like ‘mind’ from ‘matter’ or vice versa). Our thinking has been habituated to feel, for example, that if we add the concept of ‘red’ to another concept of ‘blue’, we get the concept of ‘purple’. Yet living experience reveals that is not the case – the concept of ‘purple’ only appears as a flash of insight from mysterious depths when we encounter the corresponding perception. Neither can the concept of ‘two’ be reduced to two concepts of ‘one’, but must arise a flash of insight with respect to all things which come in pairs.

When we lose sight of the mysterious and irreducible context which our concepts uniquely encode, we become satisfied with the final products of the sense-based inferences, combining them together in various ways to build ‘reality’, and fail to follow the logical thread any further into the inner life which made the inferences possible. Most of the deep meaning embedded within our conceptual thinking is then ‘aliased’ from perception. The Big Bang theory could only be conceptualized because of this aliasing effect, but it comes at the expense of deeper penetration into what the intuition of ‘universal origin’ really signifies for our existence. The effect of this aliasing of meaning from our normal cognitive perception is the modern mechanistic understanding of the Universe. It is not the sensory relations themselves that dictate this understanding but the idolizing of our conceptual points of balance for those relations – we conflate the latter with the whole meaningful story.

That part of the story where desires and intents are to be found – the soul and spiritual life – is left out of account because it is no longer perceived. As long as the spirit remains constricted within the sense-based content of its intellectual movements, without concrete awareness of the more expansive ideal relations of the ‘inverted cone’, it is observing the World structure from the outside-in and reducing its qualities to their lowest common denominator. For that reason, the intellect only grasps the transformations of the mineral domain where forces of decay and death hold sway, while the organic domain of life forces remains veiled to it, as reflected in the ‘problem of abiogenesis’, as well as the sentient domain of soul forces, as reflected in the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The life forces and soul forces have been flattened onto the sensory-conceptual screen where they are confused for their mineral reflections in the body and brain.

Moreover, every all-encompassing theory of reality is nevertheless understood from a specific conceptual perspective which, in turn, is modulated by the whole subconscious life of soul. This is why conceptual agreement between the various encompassing ontologies of our time – materialism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism, etc. - can never be arrived at, in principle. The internal logical coherence of these worldviews hardly matters. What is missing is the self-knowledge which reveals deeper soul factors that steer a thinker into one logical framework or another, for one purpose or another, within complicated streams of personal and transpersonal destiny. These factors have been merged into the background of the thinking perspective and therefore remain in the blind spot of consciousness. They are used to perceive and think about reality, but they themselves remain unperceived and unknown.


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Each world outlook can be understood as a specific pair of colored glasses that the spirit puts on to engage usefully with a certain spectrum of inner experiences, acquiring unique intuitions from that engagement. When it engages with sensory phenomena, it uses the red-colored lenses, with soul phenomena, the green lenses, with mental phenomena, the blue lenses, and so on. Only the frames are usually so merged with the thinking perspective that the spirit forgets it is wearing glasses, sees its materialistic or idealistic thoughts and says, “These thoughts I perceive are the true reality!” The same goes for all the other aspects of psychic and physical life that the spirit is normally merged with and which condition its understanding of experience, such as its character and temperament, its native language and culture, its gender, its epoch of existence, and so on. These are all tools for acquiring various constellations of life experiences and integrating the corresponding intuitions such that the spirit can know its core agency and tasks from diverse angles.

The problems start when the spirit identifies with some or all of these tools, such as its thoughts about reality, and therefore leaves itself no way to investigate the colored lenses further. It is very much the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where the latter is the intuitive ‘shape’ of our own being. We are not describing a merely pragmatic alternative in these essays, but pointing out that the very capacity for the spirit to act pragmatically speaks to a deeper living structure that can be known. At the core, everything we experience, whether through thoughts linked to the sensory, emotional, intellectual, imaginative, or even more lucid spaces, is aimed at expanding intuition of our own living structure and our concrete role and responsibilities within that structure. That is true even if we ourselves remain unaware of that aim. It’s only that the intuition developed through the lower spaces is at such a low resolution and takes such a long time to unfold that we hardly notice it and cannot rely on it for penetrating insights into the patterns of our experiential flow.

For example, modern scientists are secretly exploring the deeper soul strata through their conceptual theories without knowing it. The scientists experimenting within the domain of quantum mechanics, to pick one of many instances, are unconsciously investigating their own deeper soul movements, hence their findings make great analogies for characteristic aspects of inner activity. Their experiments are carefully constructed opportunities to conceptually probe the inner soul geometry, the ‘wavefunctions’ of the living IFS structure, and collapse fragmented insights. By asking new sorts of imaginative questions, the spirit happens upon new sorts of opportunities for unveiling its deeper nature. Only these insights remain hopelessly externalized as long as this whole process we are discussing remains unconscious. Then there is no basis to connect the insights back with the living structure from which they were extracted; to find the various ‘glasses’ that our thinking perspective is actually wearing.

That leads to a negative feedback spiral because, when the insights feel unrelated to one’s own inner life and activity, there is no motivation to further investigate that inner life or strengthen its faculties. Every answer to life’s fundamental questions and problems is sought further and further away from the inner movements where they are to be found. Is it not obvious now that the reasons for political, economic, ecological, and social instabilities are to be found in the inner depths which animate the thoughts, emotions, desires, and intents of human beings? That is quite obvious but, because of what has been discussed above, it is felt there is no possible way to penetrate beyond the threshold of conceptual life with lucid thinking. Not only that, but the question of whether and how it is possible is not even entertained. The normal course of sensory and intellectual life simply presents no opportunities to even ask such questions.

Psychedelics, trance states, mystical ‘no-thought’ meditations, and similar methods can lead us beyond the spatial constrictions of normal conceptual life, but only from there into an abyss of knowledge – they fail to trace any of the deeper spiritual influences we have been discussing. Since the substances force the spirit into the inner spaces without cognitive preparation, any higher-order processes perceived must be once again reduced to sense-like phenomena and interpreted by the aliased intellect, albeit accompanied by profound feelings. The mystical approaches, on the other hand, repel any opportunity to be spiritually active within inner spaces and therefore leave the spirit as a passive witness of ‘dependent co-arisings’. The reason all of these approaches often denigrate conceptual activity is precisely because they cannot discern the continuities between that activity and spiritual activity which reflects its intuitive existence at higher ‘states of aggregation’. As we have already seen, however, our conceptual activity is simply a more aliased form of these higher states.

The spiritual retracing technique is to become more conscious of this reality by delaminating the merged layers of the thinking perspective. Our normal psychic life is felt as a homogenous soup, but in reality it is patched together by the most varied inner flows and eddies, just as a swarm of insects may look like a brownish blob until we approach it. To get a sense for this, we can try a simple exercise. We inhale and furrow the brow or tighten the eyes, and upon exhaling we try to release all the tension. We can repeat this a few times. Most people will probably feel that they can’t release it all but rather there is residual tension left after the exhale, as if bumping up against a limit to how relaxed the facial muscles can become. Perhaps they never noticed how much facial tension there is in their forehead or around their eyes. An exercise such as this simply makes us a little more sensitive to the facial tension that is always there but that we are normally merged with. By conducting our activity in an unfamiliar direction, we create the opportunity for ‘new’ phenomena to reveal themselves.

A similar principle applies when we begin delaminating the soul layers merged with our thinking perspective. In fact, our bodily tensions are generally a result of these soul layers as well. Yet we can only trace these relationships through our conceptual life, by first growing inwardly sensitive to how the latter is ‘tensed’ by its varied assumptions, beliefs, preferences, etc. These mental factors act as thought-molds into which our conceptual activity is forced to flow as long as we remain unconscious of them and therefore entirely merged with them. They prevent our activity from becoming relaxed and open to new unsuspected thinking experiences; from conducting itself in unfamiliar directions of mental experience. Many of the most problematic encrusted habits of thinking are what we have been illustrating so far above. As always, by knowing them more intimately we also gain the opportunity to creatively manage their expressions in our life. Let’s conclude this part with a brief recap of these thinking habits that we are trying to gain cognitive distance from (which is not an exhaustive list):

• Simply believing or memorizing thoughts without actually thinking them.
• Only seriously exploring the domain of spatial-sensory lawfulness with our thoughts, ignoring the inner temporal domain.
• Projecting subconscious soul factors into intellectual judgments about the ‘World’, including other human souls.
• Failing to realize that we are probing our own inner ‘geometry’ through conceptual activity.
• Idolizing conceptual points of balance for the totality of ideal relations from which they were extracted.
• Forgetting the spirit’s psychic and physical ‘clothing’, such as world outlooks, are tools for it to integrate intuition of its concrete roles and responsibilities within the experiential flow of reality.
• Introducing a hard split between conceptual activity and potential higher forms of spiritual activity.

So, as we see, spiritual retracing is not about escaping from conceptual activity. We only cleanse the slippery patina of unexamined habits layered over that activity which obscure the deeper spiritual gestures. Just as a flower does not know the beauty experienced by the human being when beholding it, the formulator of a philosophical framework, the discoverer of a scientific fact, or the developer of a theory does not need to know the insights that are nonetheless contained within it and which we, as spiritual seekers, can inwardly retrace, thereby redeeming them from their isolated, externalized, and, therefore, selfish existence. Nothing that was conceptually developed in prior years of our individual or collective lives is forsaken, only repurposed and elaborated through the more holistic story that is unveiled to cognitive perception. In the next part, we will explore what it means for the intuitive spirit to find its lucid reflection not only in the spatial relations of sensory impressions, or the quantitative relations of mathematical constructs, but also in the temporal and qualitative relations of ideas, emotions, and intents.
Thank you Ashvin for creating new opportunities to grow!

For myself it is not easy to follow your essay completely.
I understand that the word-concepts serve as a understanding point for our use.
When we hear the concept freedom, we immediately understand what is meant, but there is still the opportunity to dig deeper into the concept and reveal more of its meaning.

So you say that our thoughts are crystallized of deeper ,,processes“ of our being, but the deeper processes are quite unconscious to us.
The question that appeared to me is when we for example have a NDE, and encounter sensory like beings, that are invisible ideal beings, which are reduced to picture like beings, is this reducing a mechanism or is it something that is living (intended by other beings for some reasons)?


I have to read your essay again to get more out of it.
I’m hyped to read your following essays (:
~Only true love can heal broken hearts~
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AshvinP
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

Post by AshvinP »

Güney27 wrote: Tue May 07, 2024 11:25 am Thank you Ashvin for creating new opportunities to grow!

For myself it is not easy to follow your essay completely.
I understand that the word-concepts serve as a understanding point for our use.
When we hear the concept freedom, we immediately understand what is meant, but there is still the opportunity to dig deeper into the concept and reveal more of its meaning.

So you say that our thoughts are crystallized of deeper ,,processes“ of our being, but the deeper processes are quite unconscious to us.
The question that appeared to me is when we for example have a NDE, and encounter sensory like beings, that are invisible ideal beings, which are reduced to picture like beings, is this reducing a mechanism or is it something that is living (intended by other beings for some reasons)?


I have to read your essay again to get more out of it.
I’m hyped to read your following essays (:
Thanks for following, Guney. 

Yes, the concepts are like a coordinate system for triangulating certain inner intuitive experiences within our shared ideal space. They lead us into the vicinity of that intuition, but of course, the success of reaching that intuition will depend on both the person giving the coordinates and the person receiving them. As you say, the more times we revisit the same concepts in good faith and with active imaginative effort, the more likely our search for the corresponding intuition will yield fruits. One of the main sources of diversion from the coordinates in the shared ideal space is thinking habits that begin to shift the coordinates such that they point somewhere else, somewhere more convenient and aligned with our preferences. It is like the game of telephone where people whisper something into the next person's ear and by the time it reaches the last person, the original phrase has been completely changed. 

The main theme of this section was to retrace some of these common thinking habits in the mental space that alias the intuitive meaning of experience from perception in this way. Your example of understanding the concept 'freedom' is a good one, because we often try to understand such a concept at only the lowest possible resolution, as it applies to our merely personal situation in sensory existence or perhaps the situation of our gender, race, or nation. Yet we can also understand freedom as a symbolic balancing point for many complicated ideal relations that we have experienced over the years. We have intuited that we feel 'unfree' when these mysterious inner relations seem to drive us toward various thoughts, feelings, and actions without any creative input from our 'I', our willful intents. On the other hand, we experience a move toward more 'freedom' when we become conscious of these inner relations to some extent, understanding how they drive us and what we may be able to do to regain some input into their unfolding. Here our understanding of 'freedom' becomes united with the continual exploration of the inner relations and the very process of experiencing more freedom. We are no longer simply theorizing about the 'nature of freedom' from afar, trying to find a rigid definition for it and base a whole conceptual framework around that definition, but probing the intuitive experiences and their relations from which the symbol was originally extracted. 

To imaginatively trace the symbolic concepts to deeper ideal relations, we need to resist the conceptual definitions and judgments and frameworks. The latter act as etched thinking molds that force our activity to flow around in closed loops rather than flowing out into the 'inverted cone' of relations. We can certainly come up with a conceptual framework for why the purely ideal realities are reduced into sensory-like manifestations. In fact, this is the work of Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings within our soul curvature that decohere the inspirations and imaginations into the sensory-conceptual element. Yet this is once again a mental mold that we have flowed our thinking into and can therefore remain quite unhelpful and even counterproductive if we don't also seek the inner relations. We should try to discover from within ourselves why we find it so difficult to remain with pure intuitive experience and need to cast everything into the rigid conceptual and sensory-like framework. 

For example, we could say such frameworks are simply more convenient, more pleasurable, and less effortful. They give us a nice spot where our spirit can rest and remain comfortable within the ever-morphing flow of reality. There is nothing wrong with this per se and, as discussed in the essay, it serves critical aims for intellectual and moral development. The problem is when the sensory-like manifestations are confused for the whole story, whether that is in the physical world (such as materialistic theories about atoms, particles, energy, strings, etc.) or the soul world (the NDEs you mention). Now it is time for humanity to gradually retrace its way back into the ideal currents that are not so easy to fix in place. For example, consider the meaning of a moral virtue like perseverance - this is not a sense-perceptible thing that we can encompass in spatial terms. To understand perseverance, we have to set our will in motion such that it can overcome persistent doubts and obstacles and therefore resonate with the ideal line of force that we symbolize with the word 'perseverance'. 

Once we are able to lift our feet off the ground and swim with the spirit more consistently in this way, the sensory-like manifestations are no longer such tempting ground for idolatry. We understand they are only testimonies for the purely ideal currents of our own inner life, for the movements of our own intuitive being. Then if our astral-etheric bodies loosen from the physical and we remain conscious, there is not so much risk of confusing the imaginative reflections we experience for the reality of ideal beings who orchestrate streams of Earthly destiny. Indeed many of the beings approaching us from without in the lower regions of the soul world are reflections of our own instincts, impulses, passions, and so forth. Once we have concrete knowledge of this possibility, we are no longer such easy prey for our own deceptions.
"A secret law contrives,
To give time symmetry:
There is, within our lives,
An exact mystery."
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

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AshvinP wrote: Sun May 05, 2024 4:12 pm In Part I, we laid out some broad principled foundations of the instinctively developed mental, emotional, and physical spaces of life and started to discuss the principles of spiritually retracing these spaces. To start this section, let’s first be clear that exploring this foundation is not entirely separate from the retracing itself. We are at the same time building our spirit’s sensitivity to the inner gestures it may encounter across the threshold of its sense-bound conceptual life. What resides across this threshold is not some separate world from the one we are accustomed to perceiving and thinking about, rather it is the normally invisible dimension of that same world.
...


Ashvin,

Thanks for publishing this! To me, this Part II appears like a superlative red thread, connecting together in a cohesive way many of the ideal stations that have been approached here in the past. This expertly arranged ‘flow’ helps the reader inhabit our efforts for the redemption of thinking, along an easy-to-follow path marked with contextual old and new illustrations. I believe this essay, because of how it’s structured and written, can facilitate volumetric insights into the submerged part of the iceberg of thinking. In particular, I think your organically developed revisitation of concept and the problem with the usual all-conceptual perspective, is very convincing for the rational mind who desires deep knowledge of reality. And this wrap-up not only makes complete sense, but is also compelling, because it ends on a subtle invitation to take action and experiment:
When we lose sight of the mysterious and irreducible context which our concepts uniquely encode, we become satisfied with the final products of the sense-based inferences, combining them together in various ways to build ‘reality’, and fail to follow the logical thread any further into the inner life which made the inferences possible. Most of the deep meaning embedded within our conceptual thinking is then ‘aliased’ from perception. The Big Bang theory could only be conceptualized because of this aliasing effect, but it comes at the expense of deeper penetration into what the intuition of ‘universal origin’ really signifies for our existence. The effect of this aliasing of meaning from our normal cognitive perception is the modern mechanistic understanding of the Universe. It is not the sensory relations themselves that dictate this understanding but the idolizing of our conceptual points of balance for those relations – we conflate the latter with the whole meaningful story.

That part of the story where desires and intents are to be found – the soul and spiritual life – is left out of account because it is no longer perceived. As long as the spirit remains constricted within the sense-based content of its intellectual movements, without concrete awareness of the more expansive ideal relations of the ‘inverted cone’, it is observing the World structure from the outside-in and reducing its qualities to their lowest common denominator. For that reason, the intellect only grasps the transformations of the mineral domain where forces of decay and death hold sway, while the organic domain of life forces remains veiled to it, as reflected in the ‘problem of abiogenesis’, as well as the sentient domain of soul forces, as reflected in the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The life forces and soul forces have been flattened onto the sensory-conceptual screen where they are confused for their mineral reflections in the body and brain.

Moreover, every all-encompassing theory of reality is nevertheless understood from a specific conceptual perspective which, in turn, is modulated by the whole subconscious life of soul. This is why conceptual agreement between the various encompassing ontologies of our time – materialism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism, etc. - can never be arrived at, in principle. The internal logical coherence of these worldviews hardly matters. What is missing is the self-knowledge which reveals deeper soul factors that steer a thinker into one logical framework or another, for one purpose or another, within complicated streams of personal and transpersonal destiny. These factors have been merged into the background of the thinking perspective and therefore remain in the blind spot of consciousness. They are used to perceive and think about reality, but they themselves remain unperceived and unknown.

At the level of the small details, I had a few questions while reading. Nothing is less sure, but maybe I have some of them in common with other current or future readers.

Title. I was wondering why you opted for a title which is ‘zoomed in’ on the idea of retracing. I have the impression that a new reader could get a sense of technicality from this title, while in fact you are tackling some of the most foundational and large-spectrum attitudes one has to awaken to and develop, on a mission to self-discovery and self-knowledge. For me it wouldn’t be inappropriate to incorporate some expression of high-level goals in the title.

Melody. I have thought this through a few times, and I still kind of struggle with the metaphor that analogizes the song’s harmony - as context for the song’s melody - to the imagistic thought-flow as context for the conceptual-verbal encoding of thoughts. I am not entirely onboard with this parallel, because the melody stands in relation to the song’s harmonic background like a stream of sounds in relation with another stream of sounds (although they’re all harmoniously linked with each other and one constitutes the context for the other). In contrast with that, the encoded verbal thought-sequence is a transformation, an extraction out of the pictorial context. Therefore I would rather see our entire flow of spiritual activity analogized to a melody - one of the harmoniously possible melodies fitting in the context of the song’s harmony - and for the intellectual-verbal-conceptual thoughts, I would rather see the musical score as a more clear-cut analogy. The score is an extraction, an encoding, a portable format for the artistic richness of the musical idea. The score can attempt to render both the melody and its context, and it can be conveniently rethought, re-experienced by someone else. And, like for our encoded intellectual renderning, there is the risk of entirely overlooking the imagistic depth of experience, to only re-art the codes and rest satisfied in their closed-circuit consistency.

Relations in images. I was wondering why, speaking of the pictorial consciousness of the young child: “At first, this thinking still unfolds entirely in mental pictures rather than verbal concepts. The pictures reflect objective relations in the environment which bring pleasure or pain, which attract the soul through sympathy or repel it through antipathy”, you refer to objective relations, rather than observations. Since relations evoke the extraction of concepts, I’d say the sight of the toy reflects an observation, an experience, which excites in the child a bodily memory imprinted in the physical-etheric body as pleasure or pain, akin to what Cleric explained here about animal consciousness. By the way, I believe that, if the pre-verbal child does not see the toy, there’s no chance that its picture pops up and makes the child search for it, because that would require a formed memory capacity and some level of conceptualization. It’s only when the toy becomes visible that the bodily will is excited. I guess many of us have the experience of how quickly pre-verbal children forget about objects that become invisible. Out of sight out of mind! Which is why, I believe, for the young child, the game where a person repeatedly hides himself and suddenly ‘reappears’, from behind a table napkin for example, is so exciting.

The function of conceptual-verbal encoding. Reading the following:
In that same vein, we should also be clear that there are critical aims attained by this encoding of the imagistic potential. For one, the abstraction from images related to our personal interests into clear-cut concepts provides the basis for establishing a vertical hierarchy of ideas that relate to the interests of broader spheres of beings; to moral virtues like charity, generosity, forgiveness, and so on. As long as we flow along with images related only to what brings pleasure or pain, to what we have sympathy or antipathy for, we cannot expand our personal interests to encompass those of our fellow beings with whom we need to live harmoniously. Try to imagine the meaning of a virtue like forgiveness using only a picture – it won’t be possible with a single picture but will require a complex unfolding scene of pictures, something like a mini legend or fairy tale. We simply couldn’t manage our ethical life if we had to do this pictorial reenactment whenever we wanted to ensoul or embody the virtuous meaning. With the abstracted verbal concept, something of the essential meaning is encoded into a manageable unit that can be accessed more easily.

It took me a while to understand why the images of pictorial thinking (not encoded in verbal concepts) are said to only relate to our personal interests - pleasure and pain. Then I realized it’s because you refer to pictorial consciousness as in the primitive man, or the pre-verbal child. I guess it’s the question about condensing forgiveness in one image that derailed me. Beyond the fact that it is actually possible to do that (take, for example, the sculpture “The Representative of Humanity”, and surely many other works of art) a confusion may arise from the reference to forgiveness - which is primarily a feeling. I guess the reason why you point to what a single picture can convey is to signify that many pictures would require to draw conceptual relations of cause and effect, they would require the intellect. But then, you use an example that mixes up feelings and moral concepts. Maybe it’s just me, but I think this part may benefit from some more extended elaboration.

I also wondered why you didn’t go first with the most basic way to illustrate the usefulness of concepts, namely building a comprehension of the relations between sensory observations, in order to make sense of the material flow of reality, and anticipate it, predict it. Not necessarily like in the physicist's formalized understanding yet, but at first simply as a conscious understanding and opportunistic utilization of that flow.


Cat example.
Returning to my cat – she will often hear a noise from one direction and start looking in a completely different direction. That is because her sensory consciousness is more spread out, more intermingled with her environment, less channeled into sharp ‘rays’ of visual or audial sensations.

I see why examples of animal consciousness are helpful to gain a sense of the merged, imagistic consciousness that preceded conceptualization and verbalization. But just in this particular example, maybe your cat's bodily reaction signals something else, rather than confusion about the spatial origin of the sound. I believe cats have a strong ability to pinpoint sounds. Their sensory consciousness is more spread out, but that doesn't impede acute sensory perception (the resolution of the dream picture).Their ears are very mobile and each ear can be shaped and turned independent from the head, towards the origin of the sound, so as to perceive it more precisely. Maybe the reason for looking elsewhere is something related to the contrast between the home environment, where stimuli are much diminished for the animal, and some exposure to the outside, the more natural environment, and/or to the presence of a human observer?
The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence is the very same which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately thany any other process in the world.
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

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Federica wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 12:13 pm
AshvinP wrote: Sun May 05, 2024 4:12 pm In Part I, we laid out some broad principled foundations of the instinctively developed mental, emotional, and physical spaces of life and started to discuss the principles of spiritually retracing these spaces. To start this section, let’s first be clear that exploring this foundation is not entirely separate from the retracing itself. We are at the same time building our spirit’s sensitivity to the inner gestures it may encounter across the threshold of its sense-bound conceptual life. What resides across this threshold is not some separate world from the one we are accustomed to perceiving and thinking about, rather it is the normally invisible dimension of that same world.
...


Ashvin,

Thanks for publishing this! To me, this Part II appears like a superlative red thread, connecting together in a cohesive way many of the ideal stations that have been approached here in the past. This expertly arranged ‘flow’ helps the reader inhabit our efforts for the redemption of thinking, along an easy-to-follow path marked with contextual old and new illustrations. I believe this essay, because of how it’s structured and written, can facilitate volumetric insights into the submerged part of the iceberg of thinking. In particular, I think your organically developed revisitation of concept and the problem with the usual all-conceptual perspective, is very convincing for the rational mind who desires deep knowledge of reality. And this wrap-up not only makes complete sense, but is also compelling, because it ends on a subtle invitation to take action and experiment:

Federica,

Thanks for the positive feedback and these very considerate thoughts. I am glad to hear that you feel it invites action and experiment, because in a sense that is the main intention of these first parts - to give people enough of an overarching context for why the phenomenology of spiritual activity actually matters, and perhaps a dim anticipation of what sort of experiences could be attained in the initial stages of inner development. On the other hand, I still realize that none of that will make much of a difference for anyone who goes into it with lukewarm interest or skepticism, such as we have often encountered here on the forum.

At the level of the small details, I had a few questions while reading. Nothing is less sure, but maybe I have some of them in common with other current or future readers.

Title. I was wondering why you opted for a title which is ‘zoomed in’ on the idea of retracing. I have the impression that a new reader could get a sense of technicality from this title, while in fact you are tackling some of the most foundational and large-spectrum attitudes one has to awaken to and develop, on a mission to self-discovery and self-knowledge. For me it wouldn’t be inappropriate to incorporate some expression of high-level goals in the title.
I have never been good with titles :) I wanted to include the idea of 'retracing' to emphasize we are not emploring some completely new realms of spiritual activity of beings, but restoring the inner dimension of what we have already instinctively developed through. For example, in the Occult Science discussion, a few people seem to feel Saturn, Sun, Moon are quite fantastical visions of human pre-history and struggle to see how those descriptions are important or relevant to developing higher cognition or how they relate to evolving to new stages of Earthly existence.

In general, I have become more comfortable with the expectation that these articles will only reach people already seriously interested in Steiner, spiritual science, and so forth. Perhaps it will help them approach the core ideas from a more concrete phenomenological angle. In that sense, I figure the technical title won't be too out of place for anyone already familiar with 'spiritual activity' in the way Steiner uses it, i.e. that all of reality is only spiritual activity in its various manifestations.

But I am curious, how would you title it? Maybe your input will help me title future essays.

Melody. I have thought this through a few times, and I still kind of struggle with the metaphor that analogizes the song’s harmony - as context for the song’s melody - to the imagistic thought-flow as context for the conceptual-verbal encoding of thoughts. I am not entirely onboard with this parallel, because the melody stands in relation to the song’s harmonic background like a stream of sounds in relation with another stream of sounds (although they’re all harmoniously linked with each other and one constitutes the context for the other). In contrast with that, the encoded verbal thought-sequence is a transformation, an extraction out of the pictorial context. Therefore I would rather see our entire flow of spiritual activity analogized to a melody - one of the harmoniously possible melodies fitting in the context of the song’s harmony - and for the intellectual-verbal-conceptual thoughts, I would rather see the musical score as a more clear-cut analogy. The score is an extraction, an encoding, a portable format for the artistic richness of the musical idea. The score can attempt to render both the melody and its context, and it can be conveniently rethought, re-experienced by someone else. And, like for our encoded intellectual renderning, there is the risk of entirely overlooking the imagistic depth of experience, to only re-art the codes and rest satisfied in their closed-circuit consistency.
In a sense, the musical example is not so much an analogy as a direct illustration. The example you give with the musical score is a good comparison too, since it is exactly the process by which we condense meaning into encoded symbols in writing, such as we are doing with these sentences. Actually, I was planning to use a similar example of musical notation in a subsequent post to illustrate exactly what you say - "there is the risk of entirely overlooking the imagistic depth of experience, to only re-art the codes and rest satisfied in their closed-circuit consistency."

Yet for this part, I also wanted to add the experiential dimension where readers can get imaginatively engaged in experiencing their thoughts as the flowing melody within a certain feeling context, perhaps even humming along or engaging hand movements. As you probably remember, this example is taken from what Cleric provided on the Symphony thread (although a different BD song). So I will just quote his discussion from that post (and I probably should have added a few more sentences to elaborate the relationship):

Cleric wrote:The violin is an instrument that is very similar to the human voice. In general, it is played monophonically, just like the human voice can play only one pitch at a time. In this case, the violin creates the melody. It's clearly visible in the bluish lines. The lowest of the lines is the fundamental tone, above it are the overtones.

The guitar in this case provides the harmony. It plays arpeggiated chords.

This simple two-instrument performance allows us to easily distinguish the two aspects. The melody is relatively easy to comprehend. We simply have a pitch that moves up or down. We can very easily feel this if we hum or whistle along.

Harmony is much more complicated. There are so many ways in which different pitches can be combined. And not only that, but these combinations and sequences result in different feeling transformations. These are achieved through chord progressions. They are very tightly related to any structure of a story, where, for example, we have introduction, development, culmination, and resolution.

The spectrum of the guitar chords is more complicated because it is polyphonic (even though in this case the notes are played in arpeggio). We can't that easily trace them with our linear thought as pitch that moves up and down through time. We would need parallel threads of thinking if we were to do that. Thus harmony is felt more holistically, like the aura, the color of each of the acts through which the development goes. The violin/melody is more like the voice that sings along (and in fact, the lyrics of the song use the partiture of the violin).
Relations in images. I was wondering why, speaking of the pictorial consciousness of the young child: “At first, this thinking still unfolds entirely in mental pictures rather than verbal concepts. The pictures reflect objective relations in the environment which bring pleasure or pain, which attract the soul through sympathy or repel it through antipathy”, you refer to objective relations, rather than observations. Since relations evoke the extraction of concepts, I’d say the sight of the toy reflects an observation, an experience, which excites in the child a bodily memory imprinted in the physical-etheric body as pleasure or pain, akin to what Cleric explained here about animal consciousness. By the way, I believe that, if the pre-verbal child does not see the toy, there’s no chance that its picture pops up and makes the child search for it, because that would require a formed memory capacity and some level of conceptualization. It’s only when the toy becomes visible that the bodily will is excited. I guess many of us have the experience of how quickly pre-verbal children forget about objects that become invisible. Out of sight out of mind! Which is why, I believe, for the young child, the game where a person repeatedly hides himself and suddenly ‘reappears’, from behind a table napkin for example, is so exciting.

Right, I was certainly trying to illustrate the child who has already developed memory intuition, i.e. after the stage of object permanence, but before this memory stream is highly crystallized into the verbal encodings. This example was again drawn directly from Cleric's post here.

Cleric wrote:All this can happen in the pre-verbal stage. Of course, all of it happens completely instinctively in the child's consciousness. Yet it is already a kind of thinking. For example, the child may also know soul images of its parents that are very stern and don't allow it to take anything from the box of candies (only the parents are supposed to give them when they decide it's appropriate). So now the future image of the child taking the candy interferes with another image of a parent being present in the room. In that case the feeling of being scold at mixes in and that feeling is unpleasant, it is undesirable. So there's a conflict between the images. Now the child through instinctive creativity has to wait patiently till no parents are present in the kitchen, so that it can pursue its original image.
The function of conceptual-verbal encoding. Reading the following:
In that same vein, we should also be clear that there are critical aims attained by this encoding of the imagistic potential. For one, the abstraction from images related to our personal interests into clear-cut concepts provides the basis for establishing a vertical hierarchy of ideas that relate to the interests of broader spheres of beings; to moral virtues like charity, generosity, forgiveness, and so on. As long as we flow along with images related only to what brings pleasure or pain, to what we have sympathy or antipathy for, we cannot expand our personal interests to encompass those of our fellow beings with whom we need to live harmoniously. Try to imagine the meaning of a virtue like forgiveness using only a picture – it won’t be possible with a single picture but will require a complex unfolding scene of pictures, something like a mini legend or fairy tale. We simply couldn’t manage our ethical life if we had to do this pictorial reenactment whenever we wanted to ensoul or embody the virtuous meaning. With the abstracted verbal concept, something of the essential meaning is encoded into a manageable unit that can be accessed more easily.

It took me a while to understand why the images of pictorial thinking (not encoded in verbal concepts) are said to only relate to our personal interests - pleasure and pain. Then I realized it’s because you refer to pictorial consciousness as in the primitive man, or the pre-verbal child. I guess it’s the question about condensing forgiveness in one image that derailed me. Beyond the fact that it is actually possible to do that (take, for example, the sculpture “The Representative of Humanity”, and surely many other works of art) a confusion may arise from the reference to forgiveness - which is primarily a feeling. I guess the reason why you point to what a single picture can convey is to signify that many pictures would require to draw conceptual relations of cause and effect, they would require the intellect. But then, you use an example that mixes up feelings and moral concepts. Maybe it’s just me, but I think this part may benefit from some more extended elaboration.

I also wondered why you didn’t go first with the most basic way to illustrate the usefulness of concepts, namely building a comprehension of the relations between sensory observations, in order to make sense of the material flow of reality, and anticipate it, predict it. Not necessarily like in the physicist's formalized understanding yet, but at first simply as a conscious understanding and opportunistic utilization of that flow.

It is possible to begin condensing imaginative symbols for the vertical ideas only after we have gone through the encoded conceptual space and extracted its fruits. A pre-verbal child looking at the Representative of Humanity will never intuit the same higher-order ideas that we do. In other words, our elaboration of the vertical intuition through conceptual thinking is implicit in the imaginative symbol, whereas someone who had not gone through that conceptual process would just see a hunk of wood with a man and some weird-looking creatures or whatever. All art can be considered a rudimentary retracing from the conceptual space into the imaginative space, in that sense.

The 'forgiveness' example asks the reader to experiment with the hypothetical that they have not already conceptually elaborated this intuition and then see how they could arrive at it by simply relating the meaning of a bunch of different sensory-like pictures together. Yet again, Cleric :)

Cleric wrote:Another important distinction to make is that the meaning is not confined to the word. This is relatively easy to grasp through the fact that we can say 'table' or we can imagine a table. In both cases we live in the same meaning. It's more challenging with higher order concepts like, say, 'generosity'. We don't have a direct sensory perception that corresponds to generosity, like we have for a table. To make a picture of it we have to be mobile, we have to imagine, for example, a whole scene - a person that gives something with best intentions to others. It is clear that some insight is needed here. If the purely sensory layer of this scene is presented to someone else, they may not grasp that it is the quality of generosity that is portrayed. Thus, even if non-verbally, we still need the concept of generosity. For this reason language shouldn't be despised, as it allows us to move through this hierarchy of concepts. Only through this depth of intuition we can proceed from the flat sensory pictorial thinking towards Imagination.

In general, each paragraph of these essays could probably be elaborated into an essay or two of its own. So definitely a lot of discussion is left out. On the usefulness of concepts, we could go on endlessly with how they serve as a bridge from the instinctive spaces to the intuitive spaces. I am trying to condense the few points of discussion that I think may be useful for understanding subsequent essay parts that have already been preliminarily drafted. Particularly the focus will be on the transition from pictorial to conceptual and conceptual to imaginative, and the overlap between our experience of the conceptual and imaginative spaces. There will be some elaborated discussion in the next part of how conceptual activity allows us to understand and anticipate the experiential flow of reality and how imaginative activity simply takes this capacity to more holistic levels of insight.

Cat example.
Returning to my cat – she will often hear a noise from one direction and start looking in a completely different direction. That is because her sensory consciousness is more spread out, more intermingled with her environment, less channeled into sharp ‘rays’ of visual or audial sensations.

I see why examples of animal consciousness are helpful to gain a sense of the merged, imagistic consciousness that preceded conceptualization and verbalization. But just in this particular example, maybe your cat's bodily reaction signals something else, rather than confusion about the spatial origin of the sound. I believe cats have a strong ability to pinpoint sounds. Their sensory consciousness is more spread out, but that doesn't impede acute sensory perception (the resolution of the dream picture).Their ears are very mobile and each ear can be shaped and turned independent from the head, towards the origin of the sound, so as to perceive it more precisely. Maybe the reason for looking elsewhere is something related to the contrast between the home environment, where stimuli are much diminished for the animal, and some exposure to the outside, the more natural environment, and/or to the presence of a human observer?

You may be right with this cat example and I am not sure. I have also noticed the agile ear movements that seek to triangulate the source of sounds. It seems to me that this indicates the conscious experience is first more holistically spread out within an enclosed sphere and then gets narrowed down to a specific location. It is kind of like the sound 'bounces around' in panoramic fashion before being more precisely located. Whereas for humans in the intellectual waking state, we initially experience visual and audial sensations in sharp 'rays' that come from one direction or another of infinitely extended space (of course through technology we can recover something of the panoramic sound quality). The whole narrowing down process still happens but remains unconscious for normal thinking.

Of course, the flow of time-experience would be quite different as well. I often see my cat staring at a spot on the couch, bed, etc. before jumping to it and I remember it only seems like she is contemplating for so long because my thoughts follow the sensory transformation in a linear sequential manner, whereas from her perspective it is more like the transformation of dream imagery without any clear sense of temporal flow.
"A secret law contrives,
To give time symmetry:
There is, within our lives,
An exact mystery."
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

Post by Federica »

AshvinP wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 3:29 pm But I am curious, how would you title it? Maybe your input will help me title future essays.
Oh I didn't reflect on the big picture of coming essays and their titles, which you perhaps will group in larger collections with titles as well, so that was not a very considerate comment I'm afraid!
The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence is the very same which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately thany any other process in the world.
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

Post by AshvinP »

I was wondering why, speaking of the pictorial consciousness of the young child: “At first, this thinking still unfolds entirely in mental pictures rather than verbal concepts. The pictures reflect objective relations in the environment which bring pleasure or pain, which attract the soul through sympathy or repel it through antipathy”, you refer to objective relations, rather than observations. Since relations evoke the extraction of concepts, I’d say the sight of the toy reflects an observation, an experience, which excites in the child a bodily memory imprinted in the physical-etheric body as pleasure or pain, akin to what Cleric explained here about animal consciousness.

Sorry, I forgot to address this part of your comment. The reason I spoke of objective relations was to emphasize that the pictures are not simply personal fantasies, like many dream images, which we conjure up and 'subjectively' impose on reality. Rather it is the objective spiritual environment of beings and their relations reflected within our personal consciousness as pictures. The pictures are entirely constrained by the objective spiritual environment just like our normal thoughts and sensory perceptions. This becomes quite important when we speak of retracing into the pictorial space to develop imaginative cognition. Many people assume that imaginations can be subjective picturings according to our wishes, preferences, etc., which could indeed be the case in certain unprepared (atavistic) altered states, but the true retracing method leads us into the reflections of an objective soul-spiritual environment that constrains the flow of images by which we learn about that environment.
"A secret law contrives,
To give time symmetry:
There is, within our lives,
An exact mystery."
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Re: Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part II)

Post by Federica »

AshvinP wrote: Wed May 08, 2024 8:18 pm
I was wondering why, speaking of the pictorial consciousness of the young child: “At first, this thinking still unfolds entirely in mental pictures rather than verbal concepts. The pictures reflect objective relations in the environment which bring pleasure or pain, which attract the soul through sympathy or repel it through antipathy”, you refer to objective relations, rather than observations. Since relations evoke the extraction of concepts, I’d say the sight of the toy reflects an observation, an experience, which excites in the child a bodily memory imprinted in the physical-etheric body as pleasure or pain, akin to what Cleric explained here about animal consciousness.

Sorry, I forgot to address this part of your comment. The reason I spoke of objective relations was to emphasize that the pictures are not simply personal fantasies, like many dream images, which we conjure up and 'subjectively' impose on reality. Rather it is the objective spiritual environment of beings and their relations reflected within our personal consciousness as pictures. The pictures are entirely constrained by the objective spiritual environment just like our normal thoughts and sensory perceptions. This becomes quite important when we speak of retracing into the pictorial space to develop imaginative cognition. Many people assume that imaginations can be subjective picturings according to our wishes, preferences, etc., which could indeed be the case in certain unprepared (atavistic) altered states, but the true retracing method leads us into the reflections of an objective soul-spiritual environment that constrains the flow of images by which we learn about that environment.
I see, thanks Ashvin, and for the previous clarifications as well.
The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence is the very same which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately thany any other process in the world.
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