AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 11:22 pm
It occurred to me Cleric provided a nice way to somewhat quickly approach the inner improvisational experience and also its relation to what we later call habits or technical skills:
To make this clearer we can try to imagine a certain pattern of nudges that we choose on the fly, say, left, left, right. We perform these nudges without trying to imagine the receding effects, we only imagine the nudges, as if we nudge a steering wheel. Then we put the nudges aside for a moment, for example we may count to five, and then try to repeat them.
Here we have something that on first look seems completely trivial but which is very fruitful if we give it the needed attention. When we try to repeat the pattern we should try to feel what gives us the possibility to do so? In the first pass we chose the pattern without any constraints. Whether that choice was truly free doesn’t matter. There are certainly invisible constraints to our imagination so our choice is probably biased but normally we’re not aware of these constraints. In the second pass, however, we wilfully try to imagine something that is not random but fits in certain constraints. When we perform the first pass it is as if something of our act diffuses and continues to reverberate in our conscious context. Then when we try the second pass we seek the movements that resonate with the invisible reverberations. If we do the wrong pattern we feel “that’s not what I did”. How do we know? Because the knowing of what we did in the first pass still hovers in our conscious context and allows us to feel whether the pattern we perform in the second pass resonates or dissonates with it.
When we look at things with such intimacy we can see that there’s something phenomenologically real for which our visualization is a symbolic expression. We may not visually see our thoughts receding but it is obviously true that every thought is infused in our conscious context and can be sought when we try to align new movements with it.
In blue, we experience spiritual activity that doesn't know what it's going to do/think next but freely improvises. Then this spiritual activity recedes into conscious and subconscious memory and becomes something akin to a habitual constraint (although not yet so encrusted as most things we refer to as habits). If our patterns of nudges were practically useful for some Earthly task, then it could even become a technical skill after some practice. In red, we have spiritual activity that is constrained, that merely tries to replicate/remember based on the receded context of fully finished experiences. It is much more scripted spiritual activity that anticipates its next thinking-nudges. The more we experiment with such inner movements, the more these otherwise abstract differentiations between 'superconscious' and 'subconscious', and similar ones, will be elucidated.
So, as trivial as this may seem, it is really the essential inner difference between what is being called 'improvisational thinking' and non-improvisational, instinctive, habitual thinking (which eventually can also impress into emotional and physical habits). We clearly need a harmonious balance between the two. We can't simply keep nudging our steering wheel in form-free flow without any reference to the receded context or else we'll drive off the road into a ditch. Yet if we only focus on replicating receded thinking-nudges, we'll only move in a straight line and never visit new experiential terrain. In our time, the receded context is well-established - we have very set patterns within the mental, emotional, and physical spaces. So naturally we should focus more and more on cultivating the form-free capacity on the blue end of the spectrum, by which we can bring life and purity into the rigidified patterns.
But as we discussed, this isn't simply by continually improvising new thinking-nudges out of our personal and arbitrary will - it involves devoting and uniting our inner activity to a much higher Will that is the original source of all improvisational capacities. The higher Will draws our imaginative activity along trans-objective contextual relations that flash as insights and increasingly make sense of our current perceptual state. Then we become more conscious of the whole superconscious-subconscious depth flow, how these domains relate to one another, and can creatively participate in harmonizing the layers of our intuitive being.
Yes - thanks for the wrap up.
Upon reflection, I believe that a big part of my reservations about terming this idea "improvisation" is of linguistic nature. Because of my background in a neo-latin language, when I hear improv**** I inevitably connect it with the Latin root (im-provisus) which literally means unforeseen. It is the same word as "sudden", "precipitous", but in English, this is undetectable. So, in neo-latin idioms improv**** may have a negative connotation. In a way, it is the opposite of providence, providential. It's im-providential.
