Are you moving away from God or toward God?

[AshvinP]

Much more could be said here, but I am simply trying to draw attention that there is a significant difference between Kim et al. and the methods/results of spiritual scientific investigation into how the current Earthly situation comes about. Can we agree on the existence of that difference?

Well, I see you point and can see the difference. KM did not go to such elaboration but I can see where these approaches could be reconciled. KM mentioned that the world creation was a result of synergetic and collaborative manifestation of ascended beings. So, if we would further elaborate on that, we could arrive at "a more holistic perspective, where the inner TFW rhythms of all beings are overlapping and superimposed, modulating each other in complex ways." However, I think the picture is even more complicated because there are also fallen beings acting and manifesting against the collaborative manifestation of the Divine and the ascended beings, and there are also a multitude of beings in indeterminate stats like us that think, act and manifest partly in collaboration with the Divine and partly not in collaboration when driven by our own egoic motives that are not coherent with the Divine Will.

Alright, well I just wanted to heighten attention to this critical difference. Cleric has provided the inner phenomenological basis for this difference. So, at this point, I think we all agree the critical difference exists, as further shown in your response to Cleric - "However, I'm still not convinced that there is no pre-meditation phase in the process of the Divine creation" - and the subsequent reasoning. This is good, in my opinion, and perhaps unprecedented in our previous discussions.

I will just make a brief remark. It is only logical that what we consider, "when the Divine created the first "sound" and the ascended beings (Elohim) modulated it to form the mainframe of the Cosmos" is still present. Since the Consciousness is One, we must have 'been there' and must be able to still be there and, in a sense, will always be there.

Granted, it is very difficult for the intellect to wrap its head around this. Since it takes time for us to think, to write and read words, the feeling of sequential events spread out in time is built into the very act of thinking and verbalizing our ideas on this forum. We really need to struggle to sense how time-experience itself is part of the Divine 'sound' and the overlapping modulations that we experience as the phenomenal matrix. The feeling of sequential events spread out in time only appears within the modulations of the intellectual self. Until we get a concrete inner sense for this, the idea that higher cognition provides the inner experience of the earlier generation and primordial Divine intuitive movements will unsurprisingly seem fantastical, like it is talking about 'time travel' or something that is inherently unknowable, and therefore can only be speculated over with our intellectual wobbles.

[Stranger]

I will just make a brief remark. It is only logical that what we consider, "when the Divine created the first "sound" and the ascended beings (Elohim) modulated it to form the mainframe of the Cosmos" is still present. Since the Consciousness is One, we must have 'been there' and must be able to still be there and, in a sense, will always be there.

Right, I should have said "I don't have memories of that" rather than "I was not there".

Cleric had mentioned multiple times how the phenomenon of time is related to the way the memory works, and I agree. I think the phenomenon of the sequential time is a result of a specific mechanism of the partitioning and flow of the Cosmic memory. But the existence of this mechanism is essential and allows for the dynamics in the Cosmos, because without it the world would be just an undifferentiated and static soup of the overall Cosmic memory.

[Stranger]

Another way to look at Clerics perspective that there was never a pre-meditation stage in creating the Primordial Sound is that the Divine has never even "created" the Sound, the Divine is always and timelessly the Sound and inseparable from it and from the knowing intuition of it. So, the Divine is the primordial conscious and alive vibration space-field (Consciousness-Sound, formless and form inseparably) with the innate ability of willful manifestation of its own intuitive ideations. It is both personal and impersonal but ultimately integrates both of those aspects and at the same time is beyond both of them. So, in a way, both personal approach to the Divine developed in Abrahamic religions, and impersonal approach developed in Eastern religions (Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita) are valid, yet each is incomplete if taken on its own.

[Güney27]

There is no question that we can and should develop our cognition while in the physical form and attain to higher levels of cognition. However, that by itself is not sufficient. It is not only the level of cognition that determines whether a being moves toward God or away from God, but it is also whether the development is moving toward the realization of oneness or away from it into the dualistic state of consciousness. Note that in the dualistic state the cognition can also be highly developed and sophisticated and integrated into a hierarchical structure of (fallen) spiritual beings.

OK. Stated like this, I think we can safely say that the way you use 'oneness' here, is identical to what we often refer to as the 'high ideal'. In other words, it's about our inner self-determination which is an absolutely free act (that is, creation out of nothing, it can't be seen as caused by something else) and we must affirm it at every instant (that is, it's not something that we put in place once and then we can leave it to manage our flow from the background).

Anyone who has enough experience with lucid dreaming or OBE should also be familiar with it. It is somewhat similar to the interplay of intuitive and imaginative cognition: we can have an intuitive idea (say, of a sphere), and then apply our willing intention to imagine it, and then boom - an imagination of a sphere appears in the space of our imagination. With the sensory manifestation the process is very similar, but in this case we would get a sensory appearance of a sphere instead of imaginative one.

Here I actually wrote a much more expanded response with more context but in the end I was worried that seeing so much text will make the reader simply skim over in frustration. I'll try now to be more direct even if it turns out less clear.

In short, the described Creation process holds a very dangerous lure. Even though we are aware that these descriptions are simplified and not to be taken literally, they still make it such that the intellect inflates into Cosmic proportions.

When we imagine that the Divine creates the World in the described by KM way, we habitually translate our mode of consciousness to the Cosmic. More concretely, we imagine that the Divine premeditates the World, he develops the idea of the World into a Cosmic mental picture and then impresses it into the matter-light. This description is very convenient because it is really a description of what our inner process looks like (thus we need not develop any new skills). For example, in a lucid dream or a OOB we still feel that we have this premeditative space where we can develop certain mental images and then impress them into the dream environment.

If we cling to this view, however, we stumble on something very peculiar when we try to investigate how the mental images themselves are summoned. We are tempted to again translate the whole process and we are led to the idea that we pre-premeditate our thoughts, and boom - we have a mental image. By the same logic, however, we'll have to imagine pre-pre-premeditative activity two booms away from the mental image, and so on. This, of course, doesn't stand to the facts of experience. We can't find such a pre-premeditative process. All we have is dim weaving in intuitive movements which gets impressed in mental images receding as memory (what I tried to illustrate in the video feedback exercise). There's simply no such pre-premeditative space where we design our thoughts with pre-thinking and only then decide to let them become normal thoughts. (anywhere I use the term 'intuitive movements' obviously I don't imply some externally observed movements but rather the unseen inner activity that we can approach by asking: "What do I innerly do in order to think? (or simply add two numbers)")

This lack of premeditative space is beautifully expressed in the first pages of Genesis, where it is described how the Elohim first created the World and then saw it was good. We have given this example many times (it's also in the first pages of PoF). The Elohim do not have premeditative space where they build mental pictures of the World. They don't build an inner vision of the yet non-existent World, then condense that vision in denser spiritual substance and say "It is good - the impression looks just as good as we first imagined it." Instead, the World matrix takes form out of their invisible intuitive movements. It is the same in our thinking process. We can't premeditate what we're gonna think and only then think it. Such a premeditation would already be thinking that raises the same question about itself. This is why we have always insisted that in meditation we should move toward the experience of the pure thinking flow - in this process, although in miniature, we experience most closely the primal creative process.

Why is this important? Because this premeditative space - as something seemingly loosened from the World flow, in which we weave mental images - is something very specific to our human condition. This premeditative space is really the space in which the intellectual self finds its be-ing. Even the next higher/more primal stage of consciousness (Angelic) no longer has such ability. The result is that by thus extrapolating our human condition to the Divine, we give the intellectual self the false sense that the Divine operates in principally the same way - premeditates in the Divine Intellect and condenses the idea into the matter-light field. This attitude becomes a severe obstacle because it takes this premeditative sphere in which the intellectual self's existence is based, as something fundamental. The intellect says "I have it, the Divine has it. It's an attribute of pure consciousness, this is how it works." However, it is precisely this premeditative intellectual space that we must sacrifice in meditation if we are to know more intimately the Divine creative process. We sacrifice the space with its specific constraints and ingrained habits, not what flows into it and animates it.

I am sure that if you invoke your scientific scrutiny, you'll agree. It sounds too 'set up' that pure consciousness should be fundamentally constituted such that it has a sphere for premeditation of mental images which are later impressed into the matter-light (not to mention that this raises additional questions about the nature of this matter-light). Doesn't it feel more intuitively right that the primordial existence should have been simpler, more parsimonious, elegant? In science we have the concept of generations. For example, we have the generations of stars, where the first could have been made only of helium and then some heavier elements were formed, the next generations could fuse even heavier elements, etc. Doesn't it make sense that a consciousness that is differentiated into a premeditative sphere and an outer sphere should be a later generation?

KM says how the Creator forms in his mind an image of what kind of world he wants to create and then goes on with its realization. Now you may say that I'm nitpicking, that these are simplified descriptions and shouldn't be taken too literally. But that is exactly the point - it makes a world of difference in what way we simplify things. If we provide the convenient picture of a Cosmic Intellect that premeditates in mental images and then creates the world, this is the sweetest lure for our intellect. The latter gladly takes the lure in one gulp and inflates to Cosmic proportions. Now it says "Of course, these are simplifications. But the principles are more or less like this. It's only the scale that differs. From this moment on, my geometry is more or less set. It only remains to find within myself the Divine mental images that have been used to create the World." This however completely conflates a later generation consciousness with the primal creative. We can only approach this primal state in the experience of precipitation of pure mental images, as testimonies of invisible intuitive movements. We can't see whether our thoughts are good or bad until we think them. Then they serve as feedback on how to invisibly will our intuitive movements differently, which results in new receding images and so on. It is here that the high ideal plays - our yearning for Love, Wisdom, and Truth.

The main idea to be extracted from all this is that if we really want to approach the primal reality, we need to concentrate on the process of intuitive movements manifesting into perceptible thought images. Here one can object "but this is only part of the story, focusing entirely on premeditation of thoughts loses from sight the outer sphere where the thoughts need to be impressed. We need a more balanced striving for a higher unity where the thinking sphere is only a part of the whole." Yet this takes the differentiation in premeditative and outer spheres for a fundamental feature of the Essential Being. Isn't it logical that the primal act of the Divine Spirit should be something akin to intuitive will projecting as inner Cosmic Phenomena (not that there's 'outer' but just to make sure the perspective is grasped correctly)? In our limited and manifold condition, isn't it projecting ideal movements into thought images, that seems most identical to this primal activity of the Spirit? If the Intuitive Spirit doesn't project the phenomenal content of the inner Cosmos as something akin to a thought projection, then what's the creative activity like? God uses his mind to think images of the World and then uses his hands and will to create it? And such God with already differentiated mind and body should be conceived as the primal principle of existence? I believe that anyone who has at least some sense for the fundamental Unity that all science, philosophy, art, and religion have been seeking to express, would be deeply dissatisfied with any such view that begins with something so complex at its foundations.

To put that in a simple picture, we can imagine that the Divine thinks the sound 'aaa' continuously and fills the inner Cosmos with it. We should picture that from the first-person perspective. This is not premediation. There's no mental pre-sound and manifested-out-loud world sound. There's only one kind of sound that fills the inner Cosmos as a result of the invisible intuitive will of the Divine. So, it is as if in the experience of this receding as memory sound, the Divine recognizes its existence. The Divine doesn't think by juggling mental images, doesn't philosophize, but his Cosmic consciousness is imbued with the pure meaning which if it could be expressed in words could be something like "This sound is an image of (it reflects) my willful intent". Now another more limited perspective concentric with the Divine (remember, there's only One Consciousness) also moves intuitively. It moves in such a way, however, that it interferes and modulates the intuitive movements of the Divine with its own, and as a result a wobbling 'aAaAa' sound is experienced. This lesser being doesn't recognize itself to be the producer of the fundamental 'a' sound but recognizes its activity within the wobbles. If it could express its intuition it might say "I'm not responsible for the resounding 'a' but I can surely recognize how I wobble it. My intuitive intents are perfectly reflected in that wobble. The fundamental sound is a reflection of the intuitive activity of a greater Being in which I'm embedded. I only modulate this activity with my own and the result is experienced in the wobble." Conversely, we can say that the Divine also recognizes the presence of the wobble in its own sound production. In a sense, the Divine has sacrificed the perfect control over the sound and allowed unknown intuitive movements to wobble it. These movements can eventually reach coherent self-reflection (self-consciousness) within the wobbles they dimly produce through their dreamy intuitive intents.

Now on the surface, one may say that the above is just a different way of conveying what also KM says. The thing however is not so much in the words chosen for the description but how this description urges us to place ourselves differently in the World Process. We can immediately sense how the above description alleviates a great burden from our shoulders - we don't even need to speak about a created world as some object within Cosmic consciousness. This burden is inherited simply due to the fact that the intellectual consciousness, by virtue of its own existence, grasps reality as inner activity in premeditative space of mental images, and impressions in the denser matter-light spiritual stratum. This stratum already feels as a 'thing', it has been created as some 'object' (Cosmic wax) and now to understand that, the intellect needs to find the mental images (seals) at the scale of the Divine Mind that have been impressed in the amorphous wax to give it its present form. In any case, there's a clear distinction between objectively created denser spiritual machinery (the World, the simulator, etc.) and the less dense Divine Mind that has premeditated the machine in Cosmic mental images.

Contrast this with the above picture. Notice how there's really no created world that exists as some 'object' independent of the Divine premeditations. All there is is the continuous resounding of Cosmic phenomena, continually thought into existence and immediately fading as memory. The World is really this real-time resounding - cross-modulated by the most varied intuitive intents. The lawfulness of the World is not contained in its objective mechanism but in the smoothly varying phase-relations of the resounding intuitive intents. There's no separate real world and some simulated world existing as an object inside the Cosmic container. There's One resounding phenomenal sphere of experience, that can be experienced from infinite constellations of specific phase-relations, as long as intuitive activity is able to find there a coherent self-reflection. The intellectual self is itself such a perspective. It is not placed in some simulated world away from the real one. It's only a vantage point within the Cosmic sound, portraying a very complicated interference of intuitive intents, where the spirit knows itself in wobbly modulations that it calls thoughts. There are other wobbles of the most varied scales that the intellect doesn't feel responsible for. They feel as a more inert corporeal and Cosmic environment. It is this condition that the intellect erroneously projects back onto the Divine. The intellect turns things upside down by saying "The Divine is similar to me. It weaves in mental wobbles and these wobbles create the Cosmic sound." But this is completely inverted! This is not true even in a lucid dream - we can't say that our thoughts create the raw colors of the dreamscape. We still only modulate it. We create a hard problem for ourselves when we fantasize that our wobbles create out of themselves the raw phenomena that is being wobbled! And we further project this onto the Divine. The Divine is wobbling in premeditative Cosmic mental images and then somehow produces from them a created world that is no longer a mental image. All of these illogisms result from the simple inversion that the intellect has promulgated because it secretly desires to immortalize its later generation existence.

This is not to abominate the intellect. It is perfectly in place. It is only that we need to see its images as modulation produced by our inner intuitive activity, through the feedback of which we seek to get a grip on the complicated ideal phase-relations. The fundamental activity, however, manifesting in thought images is essentially the same as the Divine that manifests in the Cosmic sound. It's only that at our level of coherence the vibrations of our intuitive activity only modulate the resounding flow, while the vibrations of the Divine activity seem to us like producing the raw phenomena that we modulate. The most critical thing to recognize is that we don't modulate the already manifested phenomena. Everything that we perceive is already in the process of fading as memory. What we modulate is the collective intuitive movements (and conversely, they modulate ours). Think of a clay pot on a turntable. The World is not the pot. What we perceive is only a momentary image of the World process. The Divine intuitive activity is as if defining the main movement of a hand that shapes the picture of the clay. Lesser activities nudge that hand and thus produce modulations in the resounding image. The lesser beings say "I'm not responsible for the general picture of the clay but I can recognize my activity in those wobbly shapes that I have contributed by nudging the hand. Yet I repeat - the image of the pot is not some objective world that is being shaped. Our phenomenal world is only the volumetric image of a collective Cosmic thought process. What is real is the interference of intuitive intents, that slowly morph their phase-relations - every being contributing their modulations according to their high ideal.

Even though I intended to write a short response, I see that it again approached, if not surpassed, the size of the scrapped one It seems I'm unable to do that in less words. I'm tempted to continue but I'll force myself to stop. I hope that something of value can be extracted.

Thank you!
This is so insightfull

[Cleric K]

Cleric, thanks for interesting insights. I agree that " What is real is the interference of intuitive intents, that slowly morph their phase-relations - every being contributing their modulations according to their high ideal." However, I'm still not convinced that there is no pre-meditation phase in the process of the Divine creation. First of all, I do not know the right answer, I don't remember being there when the Divine created the first "sound" and the ascended beings (Elohim) modulated it to form the mainframe of the Cosmos, so I can only speculate and consider different views here. I agree that when we try to describe the Divine, we usually just extrapolate our inner experience of how our own consciousness works. And according to our experience, in some cases, we skip the premeditation phase and act immediately, but in some other cases, we do have pre-meditation phase when we first consider alternative options and then make a choice for only one specific course of action out of all alternative options. So, it seems to me that when a number of alternatives of action exist, there is a pre-meditative phase in order to make a decision on which alternative to choose before manifesting it. Since the number of different variants of possible world manifestations is infinite, the Divine Monad and the Elohim would need to premeditate on all of them and then decide on the only one that is the best option out of all others. But we can also argue that this selection does not have to be a distinct phase and can happen simultaneously with manifestation just the way you described. As an analogy, it would be similar to the path integral formulation of classical or quantum mechanics where all possible paths exist simultaneously, but the result of their accumulative interference forms the actual path of a system.

Hi Eugene,

First, I just want to clarify that lack of premeditation shouldn't be confused with manifesting something arbitrary. Think of it in the following way. Someone asks you about a field that you are well versed in, say, microcontrollers. Then you begin to explain things. What happens here? There's no premeditation. Most likely you don't interrupt your speech by first pre-speaking in your mind and only then repeating it out loud, although in certain situations this is exactly what we should do, especially if we are leading an emotionally charged conversation where we simply don't trust ourselves enough and are worried that steered by affection we may say something inappropriate. Then it is indeed advisable to first hear our words in pre-meditative space and if 'they are good' we speak them out loud. But assuming that you know your field very well, and the conversation is relaxed, you most probably simply manifest speech directly. So there's no premeditation here, we don't pre-calculate our thoughts, but this doesn't in the least mean that we're spitting arbitrary words. Instead, from the time the question has been asked, it is as if we have attuned ourselves to certain ideal curvatures and now our speaking habits are allowed to bring to focus certain aspects of the general intuition. It is as if we 'read out' the intuitive context of our being. It is interesting to introspect and try to see "What is my knowledge of microcontrollers? Where is it?" It's obvious that we can't look and point at something in our phenomenal space. A lot of insight can be gained if we try to feel this invisible intuitive background and try to follow as tightly as possible how our explaining thoughts manifest as if in the streamlines of the intuitive flow.

When we say that the Elohim do not premeditate the creative process, this doesn't mean that they do that by producing arbitrary forms. Instead, in their Cosmic intuitive context lives a Cosmic Idea that is bursting forward into manifestation. Here we should indeed try to realize how different all this is from our human state. Here we feel like human forms caught in the stream of physical metamorphosis and our ideas and plans most of the time only tangentially try to augment the flow. For a Cosmic spiritual being of such a grade, however, things are very different. The Elohim don't say to their wives "Honey, I'm going to work now, I have an important project, and the deadline is by Sunday. Prepare my favorite wine for the evening." These beings do not have such dual lives. The creative idea is not something that they tangentially attach to from time to time to their 'normal' lives. The conscious perspective of these Cosmic minds is one of unbroken meditation. They continuously 'explain' the creative curvature within which their own existence is flows, and thus modulate the inner World Image (or the sound, in the context of the previous post). Of course, it is logical that these beings do not explain existing knowledge but instead something completely new bursts forward, a Cosmic Stream of Inspiration from even higher, which they too can't fully encompass.

Another metaphor is that the World flow is being continually manifested much like an improv performance (as we recently mentioned here). Of course, we're not speaking about stringing together random spiritual movements but following (or being inspired by) the contextual streams intuitively willed by even higher minds.

This contextuality is key to proper insight. We may feel that God has to premeditate the creation because otherwise, it would be irresponsible to sing the World flow in any arbitrary way. It makes sense to our human minds, that things need to be carefully planned. Otherwise, hastily spat-out creation lyrics don't rhyme well and can become a nightmare for countless conscious perspectives embedded with them. This reasoning however takes as an assumption that the World flow is willed by a singular Divine self (we simply project our singular egoic experience on a fantasized Divine being). If we consider the contextuality of the Cosmic intuitive fields, however, things assume a different character. These Minds are not static but they themselves evolve. In this way, the highest Minds whose activity supports the primordial Time-Memory flow, do that through infinite Wisdom. These Beings have evolved through the contextual gradient and have the wordless intuition based on experience, of what it means for a carrier World flow to be good. Lesser Minds, such as the Elohim for example, depend on the higher more integrated intuitive activity to support the carrier potential, while they manifest that potential according to the skills and creative impulses at their level.

This is all simplified, of course, but it can help us feel how such contextuality of the intuitive potential provides the atmosphere of prayerful trust within which the whole Cosmic symphony resounds. It is only in our fragmented existence that the ego has lost trust in the contextual intuitive streams and doubts that the Love and Wisdom of the higher Minds Inspires the best existential flow. As we have explained so many times, this in no way robs us of our freedom. Each stratum of the Cosmic organism operates at a different scale of the intuitive movements. At our scale we can't will by ourselves the carrier streams and the archetypal modulations. We can rebel against them and pretend that we are free from them but in this way we simply drive ourselves in sub-optimal situations. In other words - yes, we are free - free to make our situation worse.

If we grasp the above and realize that the proper Minds live in absolute trust toward the higher intuitive fields (aligned in the high ideal of Oneness), we also realize that the premeditation of the World flow doesn't need to be intellectually calculated. As long as each level of being seeks its Inspiration from the higher Wiser fields, it is as if the World flow is indeed wisely premeditated. Yet at each level, the Minds experience the manifestation of their modulations (and the resulting perceptions in the World Image) as their free activity, as part of the great improv Symphony. As long as the minds seek that overarching higher Inspiration, their flows will be harmonized. And this is really the core message of PoF.

When we say that things will go fluidly as long as we seek the harmonious context of the higher-order intuitive streams, this doesn't mean that this happens easily and effortlessly. One may object "But if I live in Inspiration from the higher intuitive streams, life will be boring. There'll be no thrill, no fear of mistakes." We can only say that if we have never sought what it takes to approach and deserve that Inspiration. There are many 'crosswinds' in the World flow. To live in the Divine Inspiration requires much more Love, Wisdom, and Strength than we are willing to imagine.

So now that we see how premeditation can be understood differently with respect to the higher beings (and even to our human condition where one can live by Providence), it could be easier to grasp how our intellect actually has a 'hidden agenda' by insisting that God premeditates in something similar to Cosmic Intellect. To understand this, consider what our human premeditative space provides us with. As we established in the previous post, our thinking process (the realtime utterance of thoughts) is not intellectually premeditated (this would lead to recursion). In a sense, we are dimly exploring the cross-modulations of the intuitive curvatures and we are making select streamlines explicit in the thought images. We as humans, however, are capable of keeping these thoughts to ourselves. Please realize, that this doesn't imply some fundamentally different spaces of manifestation. Our spiritual activity always modulates the One World Flow reflected in the Inner World Image. We shouldn't forget that when we think, the processes in the phenomenal space occupied by our body are still modulated - our brain activity follows the modulating curvatures of our intuitive intents. So our premeditative activity is not as if existing in a separate world. There's only One World flow and all loci of intuitive activity modulate it. The difference between premeditation (thinking) and allowing our thoughts to agitate our will, is that in the second case, the modulation goes a little deeper, so to speak.

In this sense, we should be clear that our premeditative activity still manifests in the World flow and not in some parallel space. In this less deeply modulated sphere we can mentally 'rehearse' certain actions and speech, as for example, to hear in our mind how something will sound before we say it out loud and hurt somebody. The truth is that our thinking activity is usually rather sloppy. And in general we tolerate that sloppiness because we feel that we have this buffer space. We can sloppily produce 10 thoughts and if one of them is viable we may say it out loud. If we are to refine this sloppiness, we would need to develop much greater sensitivity for the intuitive and feeling currents within which we move, we would have to seek appropriate Inspirations, and so on. This is a lot of work affecting an intimate sphere of our inner being that people would rather circumvent if possible.

Here I speak of the intellect in general, please don't understand it as personally addressed. It concerns each one of us. When the intellect is happy to behold its streams of thoughts manifesting in any way they may, it would obviously prefer to axiomatize the situation, to leave it unquestionable. What better way to do this if not to imagine that God manifests analogously sloppy Divine Intellectual torrents? God, as Cosmic Intellect, simply observes his sloppy Thoughts flowing, accepting them as the unquestionable way how his Divine Intelligence works. Good thing that these sloppy Cosmic Thoughts are first withheld from modulating the full depth of the World flow! Instead, they are curated, the best are chosen and then the World flow is shaped in depth. Yes, this is such a convenient picture. The intellect doesn't have to worry about the intuitive curvatures that it explicates. If something smelly pops out it will simply be discarded before it has modulated the World flow too deeply. Yet, in some cases, even this ability is a luxury. There are plenty of people who can't keep their tongue behind their teeth, so to speak. In their case, the sloppy torrents directly modulate bodily space.

Not all areas of life can benefit from this buffer space. If we are in an improv musical band, we'll soon be kicked out if we don't seek finer steering of our realtime musical manifestations. In such realtime scenarios, we don't have the luxury to pile up sloppy musical phrases and then choose what to manifest through our fingers, or whatever bodily means we use to play the instrument.

In the great flow of existence we'll need to perfect our realtime skills. Not simply because our band members demand it but because this is the way our consciousness expands. As long as we are happy with our buffering premeditative space, we have no incentive to improve our realtime skills. We let ourselves mumble whatever the Cosmic interference brings about, and we exercise a little bit of control only we have to curate which mumblings could be allowed for deeper modulation without causing too much damage. The evolution of our be-ing, however, consists precisely in becoming more and more conscious of the hidden feeling and intuitive curvatures that guide the thought-torrents along their streamlines. Together with the development of the consciousness of these deeper curvatures, we discover also the conscious intuitive movements through which we can modulate them. And this is how the spiritual being evolves - it gradually becomes consciously active in the modulation of the higher order streams of the World flow. We can only move in that direction, however, if we develop interest in gaining clearer and clearer consciousness of the Cosmic interference within which our sloppy thought-images coalesce. As long as we are happy with whatever manifests at the horizon of our consciousness, the inner realities of the Cosmic interference remain only a fantastic picture.

[AshvinP]

I will just make a brief remark. It is only logical that what we consider, "when the Divine created the first "sound" and the ascended beings (Elohim) modulated it to form the mainframe of the Cosmos" is still present. Since the Consciousness is One, we must have 'been there' and must be able to still be there and, in a sense, will always be there.

Right, I should have said "I don't have memories of that" rather than "I was not there".

Cleric had mentioned multiple times how the phenomenon of time is related to the way the memory works, and I agree. I think the phenomenon of the sequential time is a result of a specific mechanism of the partitioning and flow of the Cosmic memory. But the existence of this mechanism is essential and allows for the dynamics in the Cosmos, because without it the world would be just an undifferentiated and static soup of the overall Cosmic memory.

I will just offer a broad perspective on what has been presented so far. We can imagine a simple experiential observation we make in the course of life. For ex., let's say we observe a small child is influenced more by the manner or tone of speech than the specific content of speech. The same thing applies to a pet. We can tell the dog, "Hey dog, go sit down in that corner" many times in a calm voice like we are communicating to another human, but that's unlikely to modulate the dog's physical movements. But if we use our arms to point and modulate our tone to be stern and say, "Go sit down in the corner!", that will likely be much more effective in modulating the dog's physical movement even though it's practically the same speech content.

Now we can take that simple observation and consider two different paths of thinking through it:

1/ We start wondering about the "explanation" for this experiential observation. How is it that some modulation of our invisible manner of conducting spiritual activity affects the dog's movements differently even when the content of the communication is the same? Perhaps we start looking for something within the brain and physical body itself that should explain this difference, some "mechanism" by which certain forms of spiritual activity interact with the dog's brain and stimulate neural firings differently, depending on the manner and tone. We can really try to imagine how things become more and more externalized and complex on this path - it doesn't even matter what concepts we reach and whether they are technically 'correct' at some level, but we are more interested in the way our thinking is forced to move in greater and greater constraints that desensitize it to the original intuitive movements that formed the basis of the observation.

2/ We simply stick with the given experience that the modulation of our invisible intuitive activity influences the dog's movements and does so in different ways depending on the manner of modulation. We don't go searching for some other mechanism that purports to explain why this happens. Instead, we let this observation feedback on our intuitive activity and try to become more and more sensitive to how modulations of that inner activity influence our observations and understanding of perceptual content. We expand our observations into different domains of perceptual content, not to find some causal mechanism, but as a way to heighten attention to the same experience of intuitive movements that we started with. We realize that the only possible 'explanation' for these modulations will come from the ever-greater purified experience of those intuitive movements.

So that is simply to offer my perspective and my own approach to Cleric's last few posts, for example, or the communications of spiritual science. What Cleric presented is a symbolic conceptual framework for the inner experience of our premeditative space and its relation to the One World of intuitive modulations, the ideal phase-relations. There is no need at this point to move our intuitive activity in search of some other mechanism or external explanation for this inner experience. Instead, we can continue purifying the state of this inner experience of our intuitive movements and expect to elucidate its application to the lawful metamorphoses of the World state from within those continual efforts.

For example, Cleric artistically expressed the following aspect of inner experience:

There's only One World flow and all loci of intuitive activity modulate it. The difference between premeditation (thinking) and allowing our thoughts to agitate our will, is that in the second case, the modulation goes a little deeper, so to speak.

In this sense, we should be clear that our premeditative activity still manifests in the World flow and not in some parallel space. In this less deeply modulated sphere we can mentally 'rehearse' certain actions and speech, as for example, to hear in our mind how something will sound before we say it out loud and hurt somebody.
...
Not all areas of life can benefit from this buffer space. If we are in an improv musical band, we'll soon be kicked out if we don't seek finer steering of our realtime musical manifestations. In such realtime scenarios, we don't have the luxury to pile up sloppy musical phrases and then choose what to manifest through our fingers, or whatever bodily means we use to play the instrument.

In the great flow of existence we'll need to perfect our realtime skills. Not simply because our band members demand it but because this is the way our consciousness expands. As long as we are happy with our buffering premeditative space, we have no incentive to improve our realtime skills.

Anyone can try to confirm what these words are pointing to through observation of their own experience in the act of premeditative thinking versus more spontaneous 'realtime' spiritual activity, and Cleric provided a few examples to anchor our inner explorations as well. We can notice how the former indeed provides necessary support to minimize outer harm when our intuitive movements are sloppy. Then when we can also go investigate other aspects of sensory experience or supersensible communications born from various philosophical and spiritual paths, not to find some proof or explanation for that inner experience, but to heighten sensitivity and attention to what we already discovered to be true through our inner experience. For example, we may come across the following:

The arms and hands also become peculiarly expressive after death. From the arms and hands one can, in effect, read the biography of the human being between birth and death—most clearly of all from the hands, which even in physical life are full of significance and divulge much to an intelligent observer. The way in which a man moves his fingers, how he holds out his hand to us, whether he only offers his finger tips or gives a warm hand-shake—all this can tell a very great deal. Much can also be learned by studying the forms assumed by the hands when a man is sitting quietly, or when he is at his work. Such things pass unnoticed, as a rule; but human beings become much more interesting, when we observe what they do with their hands and fingers, for here they divulge what they really are. After death this is true in a far higher degree; the life-history can be read from the appearance assumed by the arms and hands.

It is the same with other organs. Everything becomes expressive, everything becomes physiognomy. After death the human being wears his moral-spiritual physiognomy.

Practically the above is another way of expressing that there is no premeditative space within the intuitive curvatures after death, where we can modulate our intuitive activity to produce thought-wobbles but not so deep that it takes hold of the outer physiognomy. That Earthly luxury evaporates after death because we are swimming in the superconscious, the earlier generations of intuitive activity. Then all our intuitive movements modulate deeply within our being and are immediately expressed as 'outer physiognomy', i.e. rendered transparent to the cognitive perception of other relative perspectives. We can no longer hide our inner life as something 'private'. As Steiner mentions, people who have developed sensitivity to these things can even discern the superconscious reality as it is expressed through physical gestures during Earthly life, and for such people, the premeditative movements of thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc. of others are not as 'private' as those others imagine. The path of intuitive thinking we speak of here is simply becoming more inwardly attuned to this reality during life - to begin the work of perfecting our 'realtime skills' before we cross the threshold.

[Güney27]

From my experience with lucid dreaming and OBE I can say that in these states there is not much discontinuity and we remain mostly on the same level of spiritual development, or best case going may be just about 1.5 level higher. By just going out of body or into lucid dream we are not guaranteed to enter into the realms beyond the "simulation". Whether in waking or dreaming state, in the body or out of it, we can still be within the "simulated" reality or outside of it, and it depends mostly on our current level of spiritual development rather than whether we are dreaming or sleeping, incarnated or discarnate. Yet lucid dreaming is still a useful practice in a sense that it helps people to break from being too much identified and entangled with the physical level of reality, and to step into the realms beyond the sensory world. Dream yoga (lucid dreaming) has been part of the Tibetan tantric practice for ages, yet it was not found to be a spiritual panacea, but only one of the instrumental tools in the spiritual toolbox.

Right, lucid dreaming and OBE (or 'astral projection', 'astral travel', etc.) by itself does not allow us to remain creatively conscious within the higher octaves, it only loosens some sensory constraints and the soul substance becomes more pliable. We basically reach the personal astral world, a projection of our desires, preferences, ideas, etc. In earlier times, this may have been different, a more effective way of communing with spiritual worlds, but now it no longer helps much because our cognitive constitution has evolved. You may not have seen this post, but Seth Miller characterized it as follows:

In the case of the astral dream, when we meet this guardian we encounter patterns--essentially sympathies and antipathies--from the untransformed part of our astral body. In an etheric dream, we meet the projections from the etheric body in a kind of default way: experiences (even our own actions within the dream) happen as if to us, not as actions freely taken by us as is possible when we are awake. But in the astral dream the Ego has just awakened to itself, and the possibility now exists for the Ego to experience a whole sensory panorama, through the stimulation of the astral body, that is no longer bound by the rules of waking life. In other words, “one’s wildest dreams” can literally be fulfilled as experiences within the astral dream.

In a sense, the astral dream is a kind of training ground for higher spiritual perception. The lower guardian poses us this question: What will you do when you awaken into the world of the spirit? The guardian is asking us, and providing us with an opportunity to demonstrate, the extent to which our Ego is capable of infusing the astral body with its Higher Will. If a lucid dream is thus used as a kind of playground for the fulfillment of desires that arise from habits within the astral body, we prevent ourselves from gaining access to higher spiritual perception, remaining satisfied with our own projections instead of opening to the vast spiritual world available beyond the mask raised by our astral body. We kid ourselves if we think that what
happens in our dreams is private, known only to us. This inner space of the dream, particularly the astral dream, is like the foyer of a grand palace: so filled with potential wonders that it is possible to get lost there, mistaking the entrance for the inner sanctum.

Such dangers--for they are dangers to spiritual development--have been well-known throughout the esoteric traditions, from the ancient Greek’s imputation “Nothing in Excess” to the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz to the teasing rituals of the African Bushmen to the yogas of
ancient India. The astral dream is a sign that the Ego is waking up to its higher nature, not that its mission is accomplished.

So the 'astral dream' is not what we are speaking of with higher cognition that remains conscious during sleep, but at best only a kind of preparation for the latter. Here are the sorts of experiences that can be discovered through remaining creatively conscious during deep dreamless sleep:

What is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World has to exist for the reason that the human being must first prepare himself to have this feeling, the feeling of having lost that support which the physical body affords, and to bear that anxiety in the soul which is caused by his facing something entirely unknown, something indeterminate.

As I stated, this feeling of anxiety does not exist for the ordinary sleeper; it is not in his consciousness, but he does pass through it, nevertheless. That which constitutes anxiety, for instance, in every-day physical existence is expressed in certain processes, even though they be subtle processes of the physical body: when man senses anxiety, certain vascular activities in the physical body are different from what they are when he feels no anxiety. Something occurs objectively besides what the human being feels as anxiety, restlessness, etc., in his consciousness. This objective element of a soul-spirit anxiety man experiences while he enters through the portal of sleep into the sleep state. But with the feeling of anxiety something else is connected: a feeling of deep longing for a Divine-Spiritual Reality that streams and weaves through the cosmos.

If man should experience in full consciousness the first moments after falling asleep—or even hours, perhaps, in the case of many persons—he would be in this state of anxiety and of longing for the Divine. The fact that we feel religiously inclined at all during the waking life depends first of all upon the fact that this feeling of anxiety and this longing for the Divine which we experience in the night have their after-effects upon the mood of the day. Spiritual experiences projected, so to speak, into physical life fill us with the after-effect of that anxiety which impels us to crave to know the Real in the world; they fill us with the after-effect of the longing we bear while asleep, and they express themselves as religious feelings during the waking hours of the day.

But such is the case only during the first stages of sleep. If sleep continues, something peculiar occurs; the soul exists as though split, as though split up into many souls. If the human being should experience this condition consciously—which only the modern initiate can completely behold—he would have the sensation of being many souls and consequently think that he had lost himself. Every one of these soul beings, which really are merely shadowy images of souls, represents something in which he has lost himself.
...
You can see the reciprocal action between being asleep and being awake! On the one hand the human being, in his longing for the Divine during the first stage of sleep, experiences that which induces him to develop religion during waking life. If this religion is developed during the waking life—and it was developed through the influence of the initiates—it has its effect again upon the second stage of sleep: through the after-effect of this religious mood the soul has then sufficient strength to bear the sensation of being split—at least to exist at all amidst this plurality.
...
During this second stage of sleep the human being acquires, not a cosmic consciousness, but a cosmic experience in lieu of the ordinary physical consciousness. As stated before, only the initiate goes through this cosmic experience consciously, but everyone has this experience in the night between falling asleep and waking up. And in this second stage of sleep the human being is in such a state of life that his inner nature carries out imitations of the planetary movements of our solar system. During the days we experience ourselves in our physical body. When we speak of ourselves as physical human beings, we say that inside of us are our lungs, our heart, our stomach, our brain, etc. ... this constitutes our physical inner nature. In the second stage of sleep the movement of Venus, of Mercury, of the sun, and of the moon constitute our inner spirit-soul nature... In the second stage of sleep, between falling asleep and awakening, that which occurs in the spirit-soul part of our being consists of these circulations of the planetary movements in astral substance, just as our blood circulates through our physical organism during the day, stimulated by the movement of breathing. Thus through the night we have circulating within us as our inner life, so to speak, a facsimile of our cosmos.
...
After this experience, we enter the third stage of sleep. In this third stage we have an additional experience—of course, the experiences of the preceding stage always remain and the experiences of the next stage are added thereto—in the third stage is included, what I should like to call the experience of the fixed stars. After experiencing the circulation of the planetary facsimiles we actually experience the formations of the fixed stars, that which in former times, for instance, was called the images of the Zodiac. And this experience is essential to the soul aspect of the human being, because he has to carry the after-effect of this experience with the fixed stars into his waking life in order to have the strength at all to control and vitalize his physical organism at all times through his soul.

It is a fact that, during the night, every human being first experiences an etheric preliminary state of cosmic anxiety and longing for the Divine, then a planetary state, as he feels the facsimiles of the planetary movements in his astral body, and he has the experience of the fixed stars in that he feels—or would feel if he were conscious—that he experiences his own soul-spiritual inner self as a facsimile of the heavens, of the fixed stars.

The above will immediately sound like some theoretical model when looked at from the outside, as mere speculative informational content about 'higher worlds experienced during sleep'. Alas, there is no easy way to show that it is born from fully conscious intuitive experience within the spiritual worlds. This content cannot be properly evaluated in isolation from the rest of the core spiritual scientific communications, just as we cannot properly understand the functions of the lung without also considering the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, etc. It all holds together as a living ideal organism. Nevertheless, we can at least remain open to the fact that there are mysteries of the Spirit beyond what we have already experienced and which play an intimate role in structuring the Earthly flow of existence. By becoming more intuitively and imaginatively conscious of these factors, we truly overcome the 'dualistic' cognition and understand the Earthly-sensory realm, with all its lawful metamorphoses of nature and culture, as one and the same with the Spirit world, the only World there is or could be. The whole thought of the sensory world as a 'simulation' simply loses meaning for us, except as the loosest of metaphors to help anchor the intuition of how our inner movements structure the perceptual flow.

Ashvin,

Isn’t it interesting that Steiner never gave exercises for astral projection, while other masters gave these exercises in our current time.
For example daskalos often mentioned astral projection and Samael aun weor too(a gnostic initiate who was aware of Steiner).




They say that one can a lot of wisdom and guidance from higher beings trough this way.
Of course one can be blinded and there are dangers to it.
But the content of the visions one see are there anyway in waking life.
Maybe many people will think that they leave earth and enter a “world behind the veil”, instead of becoming conscious of a deeper current of their own spiritual constitution, but that is the fault of their world conception.

Most people that are having these experiences, interpret them in a wrong way, because they didn’t work in their own world conception.


Did you ever come across Samael aun weor?
If you don’t then you would find a lot of similarities to steiner and a lot of interesting writings from him.

[Stranger]

Here I speak of the intellect in general, please don't understand it as personally addressed. It concerns each one of us. When the intellect is happy to behold its streams of thoughts manifesting in any way they may, it would obviously prefer to axiomatize the situation, to leave it unquestionable. What better way to do this if not to imagine that God manifests analogously sloppy Divine Intellectual torrents? God, as Cosmic Intellect, simply observes his sloppy Thoughts flowing, accepting them as the unquestionable way how his Divine Intelligence works. Good thing that these sloppy Cosmic Thoughts are first withheld from modulating the full depth of the World flow! Instead, they are curated, the best are chosen and then the World flow is shaped in depth. Yes, this is such a convenient picture. The intellect doesn't have to worry about the intuitive curvatures that it explicates. If something smelly pops out it will simply be discarded before it has modulated the World flow too deeply. Yet, in some cases, even this ability is a luxury. There are plenty of people who can't keep their tongue behind their teeth, so to speak. In their case, the sloppy torrents directly modulate bodily space.

Not all areas of life can benefit from this buffer space. If we are in an improv musical band, we'll soon be kicked out if we don't seek finer steering of our realtime musical manifestations. In such realtime scenarios, we don't have the luxury to pile up sloppy musical phrases and then choose what to manifest through our fingers, or whatever bodily means we use to play the instrument.

In the great flow of existence we'll need to perfect our realtime skills. Not simply because our band members demand it but because this is the way our consciousness expands. As long as we are happy with our buffering premeditative space, we have no incentive to improve our realtime skills. We let ourselves mumble whatever the Cosmic interference brings about, and we exercise a little bit of control only we have to curate which mumblings could be allowed for deeper modulation without causing too much damage. The evolution of our be-ing, however, consists precisely in becoming more and more conscious of the hidden feeling and intuitive curvatures that guide the thought-torrents along their streamlines. Together with the development of the consciousness of these deeper curvatures, we discover also the conscious intuitive movements through which we can modulate them. And this is how the spiritual being evolves - it gradually becomes consciously active in the modulation of the higher order streams of the World flow. We can only move in that direction, however, if we develop interest in gaining clearer and clearer consciousness of the Cosmic interference within which our sloppy thought-images coalesce. As long as we are happy with whatever manifests at the horizon of our consciousness, the inner realities of the Cosmic interference remain only a fantastic picture.

Practically the above is another way of expressing that there is no premeditative space within the intuitive curvatures after death, where we can modulate our intuitive activity to produce thought-wobbles but not so deep that it takes hold of the outer physiognomy. That Earthly luxury evaporates after death because we are swimming in the superconscious, the earlier generations of intuitive activity. Then all our intuitive movements modulate deeply within our being and are immediately expressed as 'outer physiognomy', i.e. rendered transparent to the cognitive perception of other relative perspectives. We can no longer hide our inner life as something 'private'. As Steiner mentions, people who have developed sensitivity to these things can even discern the superconscious reality as it is expressed through physical gestures during Earthly life, and for such people, the premeditative movements of thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc. of others are not as 'private' as those others imagine. The path of intuitive thinking we speak of here is simply becoming more inwardly attuned to this reality during life - to begin the work of perfecting our 'realtime skills' before we cross the threshold.

Thanks for the insights, guys, I agree. We can actually see in in our inner experience - we often may have pre-meditative contemplations about different alternatives and be indecisive about them, but when we connect to our intuitive level, we can immediately sense which one is right with no alternatives and without discursive arguments. So, there are indeed no alternatives and premeditations on the higher intuitive level, they only happen in our pre-meditation buffering zones within our lower-level discursive minds.

Accidentally, I was reading a text of an outstanding Christian theologist St. Maximus the Confessor, here is what he wrote on the absence of "premeditative buffering space" in the Divine Mind. This text is quite amazing and there are also other insights in this text aligned with idealist and SS views. Unfortunately St. Maximus was not a well-accepted theologian in the mainstream Christianity and so his views have not been widely adopted. This quote is from St. Maximus commentary on St. Dionysius the Areopagite "On the Divine Names"

And since God is the Creator of everything, everything is in His thinking. But He Himself is the Prototype of all this and thinks about it, without borrowing images from others, being Himself the Prototype of existence. So neither He is in a certain place, nor the things that are in Him are, as it were, in a certain place; but He contains it as He has Himself, abiding in it, and everything remains together and is contained in Him inseparably, and in inseparability is inseparably divided. So, His thoughts are things that exist, and things that exist are images. His thoughts should be understood this way: as soon as He thinks something, it appears or exists. This kind of thinking would have to be preceded by something conceivable, so that, having thought it, it can be done; but He, thinking about what exists, thinks about Himself and comes into contact with what exists in Him. After all, His very thinking is the birth of existence. For what exists in Him is the image, and this is the idea. And He, being entirely mind, is entirely knowledge. The minds coming from Him and abiding in Him are like scientific theorems. They are in Him collectively and at the same time separated, just as a multitude of knowledge resides collectively in the soul, remaining unmerged and acting outward in turn, as needed.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Isn’t it interesting that Steiner never gave exercises for astral projection, while other masters gave these exercises in our current time.
For example daskalos often mentioned astral projection and Samael aun weor too(a gnostic initiate who was aware of Steiner).

...


They say that one can a lot of wisdom and guidance from higher beings trough this way.
Of course one can be blinded and there are dangers to it.
But the content of the visions one see are there anyway in waking life.
Maybe many people will think that they leave earth and enter a “world behind the veil”, instead of becoming conscious of a deeper current of their own spiritual constitution, but that is the fault of their world conception.

Most people that are having these experiences, interpret them in a wrong way, because they didn’t work in their own world conception.


Did you ever come across Samael aun weor?
If you don’t then you would find a lot of similarities to steiner and a lot of interesting writings from him.

Very well said, Guney! You have characterized the situation well. This is also the core point of my response concerning the breathing exercise. It all depends on our intuitive orientation to the contextual gradient in which our lives flow, whether that is sensory life or deeper movements of inner life (and of course, sensory experience and its lawfulness is also "inner"). The more we are inwardly attuned to the contextual modulation of intuitive movements, the more we can permeate psychic and bodily processes with lucid knowledge. 

Then we are not so much at risk of conceiving astral projection as a journey to a separate realm with entirely separate laws, with new exotic beings and processes, etc. Then the new perceptual content can artistically speak to us of the higher karmic lawfulness in which our movements are embedded, the streamlines of destiny that shape the individual-collective tasks ahead of us. What was once a great danger is redeemed as new degrees of freedom to expand and refine our intuitive orientation. A great sign of that orientation is when we already feel that the higher lawfulness is present in our daily flow of experience - as you say, the content of the visions is always there anyway - structuring how we perceive, understand, and interact with the flow of perceptual content. We can become more sensitive to how our opinions, beliefs, desires, preferences, etc. modulate the way we direct our attention to perceptual content, what ideas catch our attention, the way we feel about those ideas, the way we interact with others through speech and gestures, etc. When we add all those modulations up, so to speak, we realize just how instinctively involved we are in shaping the perceptual flow of experience and how more potentially active we could be at a fully conscious level, steering toward higher ideals (within the constraints of more archetypal modulations, of course).

At the same time, we shouldn't underestimate the lure of these astral projection techniques. Merely having a decent phenomenological orientation is necessary but not sufficient, because we don't have a good measure of exactly what powerful forces are working in our soul life and will come to heightened expression when we approach the soul spectrum more directly. To use a cliche example, a person can be quite familiar with their alcohol addiction, to have a very good conceptualization of the dangers of excessive alcoholic consumption (which may be a relatively small amount on a spiritual path), but once they have the first drink or even the first sip, it's off to the races. The altered soul state induced by the alcohol establishes the conditions for further temptations to bypass the normally vigilant and resistant "I" more easily, and this spirals in a negative feedback loop. 

In a similar sense, if we haven't already strengthened our realtime thinking skills through repeated practice and by living into the virtues, then we will be much more susceptible to temptation within astral dreams. We may not realize how strong the externalizing habit of cognition still has a grip on us. Steiner mentions something similar with higher cognition and reincarnation - many people who start to gain insights in this domain don't realize how strong the temptation is to draw premature conclusions about who they were in a past life, which are usually conclusions that conveniently make them feel more elevated, profound, important, virtuous, etc. A similar thing can happen in the imaginal space where we are interacting with our personal soul landscape but we are not aware of how desperately we want to believe we are dialoguing with higher spiritual beings. We can become excessively comfortable with the exotic degrees of freedom these astral dreams afford us, perhaps even a seemingly high level of spiritual insight, and lose incentive for further inner development.

I have heard of Aun Weor but have not looked into his teachings in any depth. What are your impressions of his writings so far? I will take a look at the video, thanks. 

[Cleric K]

Accidentally, I was reading a text of an outstanding Christian theologist St. Maximus the Confessor, here is what he wrote on the absence of "premeditative buffering space" in the Divine Mind. This text is quite amazing and there are also other insights in this text aligned with idealist and SS views. Unfortunately St. Maximus was not a well-accepted theologian in the mainstream Christianity and so his views have not been widely adopted. This quote is from St. Maximus commentary on St. Dionysius the Areopagite "On the Divine Names"

Thank you for the valuable quote, Eugene! It's quite remarkable that you found it right at this time, coinciding with the topic our conversation.

Thanks for the insights, guys, I agree. We can actually see in in our inner experience - we often may have pre-meditative contemplations about different alternatives and be indecisive about them, but when we connect to our intuitive level, we can immediately sense which one is right with no alternatives and without discursive arguments. So, there are indeed no alternatives and premeditations on the higher intuitive level, they only happen in our pre-meditation buffering zones within our lower-level discursive minds.

Maybe just a little remark here: at this stage, it would be better if we don't tie what we are talking about with the concept of right/correct. Things are quite simple and actually people like Sam Harris use them for an argument against freedom. For example, we are told to think of either green or red cube. There's no correct answer, we just need to think of one of them. It is actually an interesting exercise to try and observe what we do in our inner process in order to 'collapse' our imaginative flow toward one of the two cubes. It is very elusive. It is as if we balance a stick on our finger until at some point we decide to drop it to the left or right. And SH is right that we can't claim this is some absolutely free act. Maybe we were already losing balance and decided to play along as if it was our choice. Maybe there was wind, our hand was shaky, we have a secret bias to one of the directions, etc. The other possibility is to make a reasoned choice and reach 'green' or 'red' as the end token in a chain of thoughts. But this only displaces the problem because now each thought of the chain poses the same question.

In this sense, neither we nor a God can know the full details of the realtime becoming. What we can do, however, is to gradually unveil the curvatures within which our activity has been operating, rising above mechanical habits, desires, etc. Sure, this doesn't make us absolutely free, we are still facing the same enigma of our willful becoming but on a higher level, we are steering a landscape of deeper currents, within which we were previously blindly flowing.

In the Phonograph Metaphor I tried to illustrate the holistic nature of the flow in this way:



Our thinking sequences are not some special forces acting from our premeditative conscious space over the World space. Instead, our thinking torrents are wobbles over the One World flow that we experience. Taking the wobbles of thinking space for something that sets us as a being that acts on the perceived picture of the World, is a simple mistake resulting from being conscious of a too narrow aperture of the World flow. In that case, even though we imagine that our phenomenal environment is all 'consciousness', we still interface with that environment through the proxies of our mental images. And this is the real problem. In this way have no incentive to expand the aperture and recognize that our inner flow is one and the same with God's flow, and our thinking space is weaved of wobbles modulated over it, through which we experience miniature representations of our intuition about the greater flow. The greatest trouble, however, comes when we imagine that in this thinking space we are completely free and we only encounter constraints when we try to impress our thoughts in the World clay. Then we imagine that our red/green thoughts are completely independent of the phenomenal environment.

So in a nutshell, we need to conceive that as we will our becoming through thinking trains, we take part in the exact same willful becoming that moves the whole World state forward. It's only that we consciously wobble a certain more limited aspect of the total inner World.

This still begs the question: what are the individual conscious experiences if there's only one Divine first-person flow? Here we can use as a metaphor the concept of decomposition.



A rotary motion can be decomposed as the sum of one horizontal and one vertical (as EM waves can be decomposed into H and V polarizations). The decomposition of the World flow is not some mechanical action that is performed in a specific moment as if God says "So my flow was whole a second ago but now I have decomposed it onto several bases and thus I have created beings". Instead, we can imagine that this flow is potentially decomposable in infinite ways. However, only those decompositions can be experienced as be-ing, which unfold in such a way that the transformations from moment to moment of the World state are grasped from the decomposed perspective as compressing into an appropriate memory picture which alone allows for the sense of continuity of existence, and thus - be-ing. So the spiritual beings are not some distinct entities that are attached as observers to certain angles of the World flow, but there are simply specific decomposed experiences of the World flow. There are no predefined number of decompositions. Those that are not experienceable as integrating memory flow, simply provide no basis for the consciousness of be-ing. If the flow is organized by other beings such that the means for integration of memory are developed for a certain perspective, then be-ing awakens there and continues to follow its world line of integration toward consciousness of the Whole World flow.

So instead of imagining that we are spatialized consciousnesses with private mental interface proxying the interactions with the phenomenal environment, all flows of being are practically concentric and superimposed. All of this is quite abstractly stated and if we turn it into a metaphysical theory will soon encounter all kinds of difficulties. The goal here, however, is not to make models but to get an intuitive feel for our given inner flow. One of the consequences of this intuition is that we are saved from the spatialized picture where we have to envision all kinds of speculative mechanisms through which souls exchange 'psychic photons' between each other and the environment.

For example, if we imagine the superimposed inner flow decompositions of all people from a given nation (imagined not as stacked abstract pictures in front of us, but imagining the inner life of those people superimposed over ours), obviously there's will be some regularities. Most of the things will 'cancel out' but certain elements of the flow will 'add up'. These would be certain soul tendencies characteristic of the group, the inner gestures that form the common language, and so on. This summed-up decomposition, even though more integrated, is nevertheless still a decomposed flow state with respect to the full reality. Not only that, but it may turn out that this sum is part of a coherent perspective that integrates within the World flow. Such a be-ing is known as Folk Spirit or Archangel in Christian terminology. This doesn't imply that this being's conscious flow consists only of these summed-up flows of people. No, these are only where our human flows intersect with that of the higher being. Its inner flow may be far richer with many aspects that are not so readily identifiable within our human decompositions. The important thing, however, is that this higher order (more holistic) experience of the World flow, is active. Through its willful becoming, this being wobbles these aspects of the flow. These in turn, for ordinary humans, serve as deeply subconscious curvatures within which their Earthly flows unfold.

Through Initiation, the organization of our flow can stretch to the scale at which such beings modulate the World flow. Then we can comprehend something of what the archangel does at these scales, and we can even consciously align or resist these Cosmic curvatures. From the way we have described things, it also becomes clear why we can never gain consciousness of the depth of the World flow as a result of some purely personal development. We can only imagine that, if we are under the influence of the spatialized conception. Then we say "What's the problem? Just as I can buy a pair of binoculars, why can't I develop my spiritual seeing organs or take some drug, and see better the spiritual environment?" This however is a complete extrapolation of our physical intuition. In the reality of the superimposed flows, it's not a question to see something out there. We cannot see what the archangel does, as if we expect to see something familiar, like chopping wood. The inner life of the archangel remains completely unknown to our consciousness unless we expand our interests to feel how our flow is superimposed with that of all people from a nation. Only in that way we can grasp the common element that is intuitively steered by the archangel. And here 'common' needs to be taken in the most literal and intimate sense possible. Our inner spaces and their curvature are literally one in between each other and with that of the archangel. This saves us from the illusionary picture of an archangel as a floating orb in spirit space which somehow sends out and replicated its intents in the orbs of human beings.

Then if we go even further than the national spirits, we can experience the common element in all human beings. This leads us too to a perspective of the World flow that is a coherent be-ing. And this is the be-ing know as the Christ. The intuitive curvatures that he modulates over the total World flow are that of the inner life of the Divine Man, bending the flow at Solar scales. It is fairly easy to see in this way, why the impulse that the Christ brought to humanity is that of Love. Only through it we can have the strength to find our superimposed flow with all of humanity.