On the Given World-Picture (or 'sensuous manifold')

[AshvinP]

Like I said, I only have an hallucination of what that person means. I've certainly met people who can distinctly and evocatively describe their self-willed attentional activities, but who, from my observation, are living in a delusion of freedom. And the converse, people who describe their attentional activity in words and phrases that eliminate the notion of a self-willed 'center' that they identify with, and yet who I experience (and they describe) as living from a space of highly senstive freedom. Of course, because of the linguistic structures that make the most sense to them, their language will seem to contradict any possibility of 'freedom' to those who can't fathom how it is logically possible to be free without having the notion of a subject that is 'doing' the freedom.

Steiner's (and others), "It thinks in me" and "It wills through me" are experiences that many people not within his tradition describe as their own experience when they pay closer attention to what is actually happening in their experience of attentional activity. To steer clear of debate mode, I am not saying that their experience necessarily confirms Steiner's description, only that they read his phenomenology as validating what they experience.

But, yes, I can imagine the person you are describing being very lost and wayward and deluding themselves in various ways.

When I pay close attention to the experiences of going through your exercises, I don't find a 'self' that is doing the exercise. I do find a narrative about that. And, most importantly, I 100% can attend to the facet of the experience that I am happy to call 'self'. I tyipcally speak in terms of 'self'. It's useful, more useful than coming up with terms that work against the grain. Sort of like how Steiner will use language that presupposes space/time/perception and then need to clarify that he simply can't avoid speaking in those terms but wants the listeners to realize he pointing to experiencing that is outside of those frames. And, I really can speak of a 'self' and mean it, despite knowing that most people have a slightly different frame for it.

The importance of noticing what is utterly distinct about intentional experience can't be overstated. As you say, there is a causal identity in that experience. For me, one way of saying it is that there is a polaric experience between "It" and "I" that feel absolutely fundamental and in which the experience of freedom arises and, if carefully maintained, can be developed. I can see why the experience of this polarity will be languaged by some as a primal self-experience, and by other's a primal 'no self' experience. If those different people each seem to be demonstrating the 'fruits' and underlying phenomenologies of the experience, I see them as each speaking from a direct experience of this polaric 'primitive'. But, as I said, people can be speaking 'perfectly' from either position and still be lost completely. I only know this because I still can experience falling off the surf board in both directions. But learning to surf and stay up for longer periods and find our own style of interacting with the waves...is well worth the spills. As I know you know.

Right, those are important points to highlight. There is no need to postulate any metaphysical "self" or "no self", "center" or "no center". And there are plenty of people who go to the other extreme, treating all of their feelings and thoughts as the pure and original expression of their personal intents. Cleric gave a great illustration of these extremes with a clip from Friends

We can observe an interesting polarity that has two extremes. One extreme is when we completely embrace the belief that Monica is flipping the switch and we only observe the playback. Such a view however doesn't have any practical value. We still need to act 'as if' things depend on our inner activity. We can't simply let go and observe how Monica takes us out of bed, showers us, works, feeds us, and so on.

On the other extreme is Phoebe. This is where there's rightful criticism about how free we really are. It's true that most of our life we simply flow along and say "I'm totally doing it!", without realizing just how many of the things happen for the most complicated reasons, and as you say, we just take credit. This is just as a pathological condition, as the first.

If we express our intuition of a story to a friend, we know the story won't tell itself - we need to move our intuitive activity and condense the meaning into corresponding pictures and words. Yet we know this activity is also constrained by various factors - we can't claim responsibility for the imaginative 'substance' that constrains the palette of mental pictures we can summon. Probably we won't be able to summon mental pictures of perceptual experiences we have never had during life. When we condense those pictures into verbal words, the palette will be constrained by the languages we have learned. The way we can express those words will be constrained by the organization of our throat, larynx, vocal cords, and so on.

But to become more sensitive to these constraints it is a precondition that we feel causally united with the attentional activity that we concentrate and thus experience how the constraints drag against that activity, providing flashes of insights as to their inner nature.

With this we have the basic principles in meditation. On the one hand (activity), we aim to artificially sustain a perfectly laminar flow compressing into a focal point, but on the other (receptivity), this activity delineates how the intended flow conflicts with the wider flow within which our individually intended flow is concentrically embedded and modulated. The deeper our concentration is, and reciprocally, the greater the time span of the sphere of our meditative song, the greater the spectrum of scales we can intuitively grasp. As a simple example, imagine that we begin our meditation and try to feel our meditative song extending into an one-month time span. Our immediate reaction would be “One month? But this is impossible!” But why is it impossible? Because such an artificially sustained one-month laminar flow would be severely resisted by the World flow. We say: “My body will ache, I’ll fall asleep, my wife will kick me out, I have other things to do too”, and so on. Yet this already shows in a rudimentary way how even at the purely intellectual prospect of this meditation, we begin to gain awareness of many patterns of the World flow, within which our existence is normally embedded. Most of them are completely trivial but we can only notice them if we resist them.

Otherwise, we can only conceive the constraints abstractly as we normally do in our intellectual inquiries of philosophy and science while we continue to passively flow along with them. Ironically, this is what happens when we go to the extreme of "no center, no self, no doer, etc.", numbing our sensitivity to the inner activity and its constraints. We are forced to continue treating our thoughts like they are our pure and original expressions for all practical purposes and intents in life, even while we abstractly claim they belong to some "mysterious force" that we have no responsibility for. Then we feel like these undeniable constraints are limited to Earthly existence and will evaporate after death. You will notice most modern mystical (and theistic) conceptions tend toward biding time on Earth, putting up with the undeniable constraints, and placing all hope in the belief that they will no longer apply across the threshold. Then it's no wonder the Guardian is continually avoided since we feel that, after death, our soul can circumvent the whole effortful process of intuitively sensitizing to and creatively shaping the inner constraints.

So, if we can get beyond that initial self-imposed limitation that crops up in various forms depending on our inner disposition (more materially, psychically, mystically, spiritually inclined), the process really becomes a scientific method of inner experiment, observation, feedback, new experiments, new observations, etc. All the terms used along the way should refer directly to the first-person flow of activity and the intuited constraints. Naturally, more and more terms will need to be employed as our intuition grows more dense and refined, and those diversified terms will also help us orient, steer, and refine our intuitive exploration in a positive feedback. If we remain faithful to this inner scientific method, we won't fall into the common traps of mistaking the concepts for isolated realities or disassociating from conceptual activity and pretending we have reached the "truth" free of any inner constraints. This intuitive-artistic method is where the whole 'system' of spiritual science comes from - it is a purification and elaboration of the experience of attentional activity and its overlapping, cross-modulating constraints at various scales of existence, condensed into a wide array of artistic symbols.

................................

I'm not really following you about the Steiner student who has gotten to the first step but then isn't developing the capacity to directly perceive the realities they are reading about in the core texts. I'm not sure that it is important that I grasp such an example, but I was just curious about it because it is interesting to think about the experience of starting to directly know something that you never knew existed until you read about somebody describing it themselves. The easy analogies are hearing about a distant land from somebody and then going there yourself; but I think this leaves out the most interesting differences when it comes to 'discovering' or 'validating' a reality that a clairvoyant has first described and then explained that if we develop correctly we will know because we will validate that experience.

But more importantly, the ground floor kind of exercises you've been sharing are certainly examples that I feel could help anybody become more sensitive to the nature of their attentional activity. I can see why a certain kind of person, who has soaked up a certain linguistic tradition, would probably not even be attracted to these kinds of exercises because they would immediately interpret the language incorrectly through their lens. And the same thing happens in the other direction. People like me who love Kuhlewind exercises can easily dismiss descriptions of experience that seem to make mistakes from the very beginning by using the same words differently, or different words in an unknowingly same way.

So, in my opinion, anybody who can begin your exercises can experience an increase in sensitivity that will have all the benefits that come with increased concentration capacity, increased awareness of the 'flow' and 'curvatures' forming experience, and just the joy that comes from grasping an aspect of Truth firmly in hand. And much more.

I'm glad you find it all helpful. Of course, all of this is not an end-itself, but should lead to practical transformations in our lives and the World in which those lives are embedded. I wonder if you would agree that practically all the predicaments humanity faces today, as individuals and groups, is because most people take the inner flow as unquestionable and don't seek to elucidate the 'intuitive curvatures' in which their inner states are contextualized?

[findingblanks]

"Otherwise, we can only conceive the constraints abstractly as we normally do in our intellectual inquiries of philosophy and science while we continue to passively flow along with them. Ironically, this is what happens when we go to the extreme of "no center, no self, no doer, etc.", numbing our sensitivity to the inner activity and its constraints."

Agreed. And I'd say that people equally numb themselves by mistakenly attributing to themselves core processes that are part of the polaric nature of being always united with the whole. Not 'united' in the sense of two parts that can connect, obviously The numbing, in my opinion, is any form of an even tacit certainty as to what 'causes' what. And this can fall in both directions. For me it is important to always keep recongizing how even the way in which a person is numbing themselves can often be a way in which they are becoming more sensitive to other aspects of experiencing they had disregarded. Fortunately, we all have 'time' to keep rebalancing all of this.

"Of course, all of this is not an end-itself, but should lead to practical transformations in our lives and the World in which those lives are embedded. I wonder if you would agree that practically all the predicaments humanity faces today, as individuals and groups, is because most people take the inner flow as unquestionable and don't seek to elucidate the 'intuitive curvatures' in which their inner states are contextualized?"

Yes. In my opinion, it will be the degree to which humanity finds countless ways (and these can seem to be very contradictory on the level of schemas as practice) to draw the attention to its creative activities, deeper and deeper, more and more strangely, more and more religiously, increasingly devoted. It won't look the same. It will spit out different 'products'; but they will all be stamped by a humanity in which the diversity is an exclamation of the deeper unity that is emerging and individuating itself through the flexible tenacity of the practitioners.

[findingblanks]

Regarding setting the goal to stay meditating for a month. Yes, all of those 'objection' intuitions would come flooding in, showing very real aspects of the individual's reality. And I'd hope that one of the intuitions they'd get to slam into and really taste is all off the 'ideas' concentrated into the flash of an intention to meditate for one month straight. In a similar way, if I have a client who comes in and says the classic, "I really don't think I have anything too deep to talk about today," I'll sometimes ask them to get centered, feel into their 'body' and say very calmly to themselves, "There is nothing at all challenging happening in my life," and to pay attention to what happens in response.

This often provokes laughter as they begin to tell me about the mesh of feelings/ideas that their 'body' burped up in response to that statement

Learning to interact with ourselves in these ways (serious play) is vital.

[AshvinP]

"Otherwise, we can only conceive the constraints abstractly as we normally do in our intellectual inquiries of philosophy and science while we continue to passively flow along with them. Ironically, this is what happens when we go to the extreme of "no center, no self, no doer, etc.", numbing our sensitivity to the inner activity and its constraints."

Agreed. And I'd say that people equally numb themselves by mistakenly attributing to themselves core processes that are part of the polaric nature of being always united with the whole. Not 'united' in the sense of two parts that can connect, obviously The numbing, in my opinion, is any form of an even tacit certainty as to what 'causes' what. And this can fall in both directions. For me it is important to always keep recongizing how even the way in which a person is numbing themselves can often be a way in which they are becoming more sensitive to other aspects of experiencing they had disregarded. Fortunately, we all have 'time' to keep rebalancing all of this.

"Of course, all of this is not an end-itself, but should lead to practical transformations in our lives and the World in which those lives are embedded. I wonder if you would agree that practically all the predicaments humanity faces today, as individuals and groups, is because most people take the inner flow as unquestionable and don't seek to elucidate the 'intuitive curvatures' in which their inner states are contextualized?"

Yes. In my opinion, it will be the degree to which humanity finds countless ways (and these can seem to be very contradictory on the level of schemas as practice) to draw the attention to its creative activities, deeper and deeper, more and more strangely, more and more religiously, increasingly devoted. It won't look the same. It will spit out different 'products'; but they will all be stamped by a humanity in which the diversity is an exclamation of the deeper unity that is emerging and individuating itself through the flexible tenacity of the practitioners.

Alright, so it may be useful to explore this polaric nature more. Usually, the polarity is conceived as being between subject and object or "I" and "World", which we can refine as attentional activity (subject) and inner constraints on activity (objective World). This also helps emphasize how the latter is not only the spectrum of sensory phenomena, but also things like our habits, desires, assumptions, etc. that objectively constrain attentional activity. Yet we can also say these objective constraints are also attentional (subjective) activity from a more integrated perspective (and therefore united).

As a simple metaphor, we know that our pets or small children confront various objective curvatures that constrain their instinctive activity, i.e. the intents of their owners/parents or other adults. For ex., the states of being my cat can experience are constrained by my intentions. I stand in a certain evolutionary relationship with her such that my intentions structure the 'curvature' through which her daily experiences flow. Within that structure, she can 'choose' to follow certain sympathies or antipathies - she can avoid the laundry room, lay down on some soft surfaces, run around some hallways and rooms, and direct her attention to various birds, squirrels, and such from my balcony. But she will never run out into the streets or the woods behind my apartment, or drink milk and eat chocolate, or many similar things, because that is not part of the structured potential that I have intended for her states of being to unfold through.

Of course, it's not a one-way relationship - my intentions for my cat's curvatures of existence are also modulated by her states, by her soul-gestures. If she gestures a state of ill health, my intentional activity will be modulated to take her to the vet. If she gestures a state of patience, my intentional activity is modulated to bring treats into her curvature. Nevertheless, there is a definite relationship here - what she experiences as constraints of an 'objective World' that are 'given to her' are, from a more integrated perspective, experienced as my subjective intents (given by me). Do you agree that we can intuit a similar relation between the objective constraints that humans meet, for ex. our emotional patterns, habits, desires, temperament, ideologies, etc., and more integrated subjective perspectives conducting attentional activity? Is a key part of our individual and collective higher development to attain deeper insight into these vertical polaric relations, precisely so we don't either flatten the constraints out as some mysterious (and unknowable) World that we passively observe or take credit for them as 'my feelings', 'my desires', 'my political beliefs', etc.?

[findingblanks]

"Do you agree that we can intuit a similar relation between the objective constraints that humans meet, for ex. our emotional patterns, habits, desires, temperament, ideologies, etc., and more integrated subjective perspectives conducting attentional activity? Is a key part of our individual and collective higher development to attain deeper insight into these vertical polaric relations, precisely so we don't either flatten the constraints out as some mysterious (and unknowable) World that we passively observe or take credit for them as 'my feelings', 'my desires', 'my political beliefs', etc.?"

These questions are not very clear to me, but let me take a stab at it.

Well, maybe give me an example of what you mean, maybe using some kind of daily habit. Start with a daily habit and let me see what you mean about penetrating that in a way that is analogous to your cat example.

I'm less concerned by the linguistic and experiential filters than by the actual experiencing that is happening. And I realize that this complicates things for me because, unlike most of my friends in these here hills, I have to forfeit a certain kind of confidence that comes by pin-pointing the language claims. Somebody will deny there is free will and, for others, this will already tell them all they need to know. And vice versa. This is why I will often sound to others like I am standing in the mushy middle, unsure and without conviction. This is far from the case, but I understand why various filters will ensure that my typical kind of response has to be framed in that manner.

But back to the phenomenology: I personally have never experienced an intentional state that wasn't arising spontaneously. Language and personal filters can flatten this into a 'no free will stance.' That's fine but I'm more happy noticing the way that it seems clear to me when people give examples of free-will decisions they are making, I can't find a difference in the phenomenology itself, once I remove any linguistic framing (in either direction). And when these debates breakout, I find that the real debate isn't about if there is free will or not, but it is a combination of deeply important values getting entwined in misunderstandings of odd mixtures of metaphysics, regional language, personal filters, etc., This is why even very smart people will end up simply pointing out performantive contradictions or saying, "Well, you obviously believe in free will because your language implies it all the time." And, hey, that is partially true, especially when you realize that free-will typically is pointing towards a deeply significant and direct experience of intentional states and self states. In college, it was fun to debate it. Still can be! But my attention is more and more drawn to the warmth and creativity (or lack of it) that you can experience in the person who is trying to pin-down their experience in a philosophical or discursive frame.

At the end of the day, if somebody really appears to be living in a 'thy will be done' manner, I can't imagine why I'd want to argue about words ("it's really your will or a combination so don't say...!") when we can look at the world and try to figure out new ways to engage.

I think an example using a daily habit would help me make your question more concrete.

[AshvinP]

But back to the phenomenology: I personally have never experienced an intentional state that wasn't arising spontaneously. Language and personal filters can flatten this into a 'no free will stance.' That's fine but I'm more happy noticing the way that it seems clear to me when people give examples of free-will decisions they are making, I can't find a difference in the phenomenology itself, once I remove any linguistic framing (in either direction). And when these debates breakout, I find that the real debate isn't about if there is free will or not, but it is a combination of deeply important values getting entwined in misunderstandings of odd mixtures of metaphysics, regional language, personal filters, etc., This is why even very smart people will end up simply pointing out performantive contradictions or saying, "Well, you obviously believe in free will because your language implies it all the time." And, hey, that is partially true, especially when you realize that free-will typically is pointing towards a deeply significant and direct experience of intentional states and self states. In college, it was fun to debate it. Still can be! But my attention is more and more drawn to the warmth and creativity (or lack of it) that you can experience in the person who is trying to pin-down their experience in a philosophical or discursive frame.

At the end of the day, if somebody really appears to be living in a 'thy will be done' manner, I can't imagine why I'd want to argue about words ("it's really your will or a combination so don't say...!") when we can look at the world and try to figure out new ways to engage.

I think an example using a daily habit would help me make your question more concrete.

Before we move to the examples of vertical polarity that I was metaphorically pointing to with the cat, we may need to explore this a bit further. To be clear, I have no interest in convincing anyone there is "free will" as some metaphysical property of subjects. To the question of whether there is 'free will' for a modern human perspective, I think the answer must be yes and no, depending on what domain of experience we are inquiring into and the particular evolving circumstances of the human perspective at issue. I think the question would be more appropriately phrased, "In what ways can we intuitively sense that there is a free-ing of the will with respect to a perspective's attentional activity as it attempts to express its intuitive intents in thoughts, feelings, and deeds and meets inner psychic and bodily constraints?" As always, these questions cannot be answered merely theoretically but only by living into the experience of attentional activity and its constraints, i.e. actively moving activity through the most varied directions and states, paying attention to the feedback, and experiencing how its degrees of freedom are constrained by certain inner qualities (selfishness) and states of ignorance in relation to how they are transformed-expanded through certain inner qualities (virtues) and higher insights.

With that said, let's focus on this - "I personally have never experienced an intentional state that wasn't arising spontaneously."

I need some more orientation to what you are describing as 'spontaneously'. At first blush, it would signify to me something similar to the example we discussed, where the person felt thoughts simply pop mysteriously into consciousness and the feeling of first-person causal responsibility for those thoughts is assumed to be an illusion or delusion of the 'false ego' (or something like that). But I doubt that is what you mean. For example, what about the thoughts you experienced and verbally sequenced when condensing the intuition of the previous post's meaning? Was the state in which those thoughts came 'into focus' a 'spontaneous' occurrence and, if so, can you elaborate on what that means phenomenoligcally? It may be best to compare that state to a state where, for ex., a fly buzzes its way into your field of hearing and vision and you try to track the meaning of its movements and sounds for a while. What is the difference in the 'spontaneity' of these two states, if any?

[findingblanks]

Hey there,

So one thing I have to keep in mind is that I'm always already in an intentional state to some degree. And these degrees can vary in massively significant ways. If I'm somebody who loves Donald Trump and I'm tired but he is about to give a speech, I could say, "Hey, I'm super tired but I'm going to give all of my attention to this speech and really concentrate on it." Before the memory that he's about to give a speech came back into my awareness, I was in some other kind of intentional state. I might have been lazily watching the way the leaves were brushing up against the window while also thinking about what to make for dinner. If I'm sensitive enough, I can notice that even just to keep my attention on the leaves requires some intentional activty, even if at the time, I might say that I have no will power at all. So any new intentional burst will happen within the context of another ongoing kind of intentional activity. Falling asleep can be experienced as requiring a specific kind of intentional holding of space, and letting go of other intentional spaces. And, needless to say, very often an intentional activity is happening in the midst of all sorts of inner and out environmental comings and goes, some of which are new intentional impulses ("maybe I'll go by the porkchops now...") that get dismissed.

In the past, I would not pay careful attention to how intentional impulses arise within an already intential context. This caused me to say, "I was doing such and such and then I chose to go get the food at the store." That would have matched a fairly large amount of the experience, but it would have left out the moment in which the new impulse came. It would have ignored the fact that the intensity of that impulse was as inherent to it as its very coming. I might have said, "Well, I thought about going shopping, but it took me ten minutes until I made myself get off the couch and get in the car." And I would say that a close inspection of the flutterings of intentional meshed activity in those ten minutes has the same structure as any other process of being intentional. I might say that it took great will power to finally overcome my laziness. And I now there is a rich phenomenology in that. And yet I'd say that if we could rewind the clock and empty my coffee cup of .13 mlgs of caffine, I wouldn't be surprised if in that fluttering of arising and fading intentional impulses (along with the content and the intensities), I ended up staying on the couch. Now, of course when I said, "It took all my will power to get off the couch" even though I don't knwo that we've done this experiment and found at least one variable that was essential to my getting off the couch, my statement is a accurate and true as it needs to be in conversation with a friend. If I saw the video and realized that that tiny ammount of caffine is what made the real difference, I'd still be able to remember all of the inner work I did that I say made me finally get off the couch.

So, you are correct that my use of 'spontenously arising' should not be imagined as some empty subjective state in which suddenly, out of nowhere, I am bombarded by an intentional impulse. It will emerge in sometimes patchy, sometimes jolts, sometimes, fluid, but always it comes within a prior living process that it must 'cross' (A Gendlin term but it often makes basic sense anyway) before either continuing or fading. Doing the will exercises fits well into this consideration. In fact, it was when I first really began to notice my will exercises in this way that I noticed a shift in the experience and/or understanding of the experience. Needless to say, I'm still very comfortable saying that "I chose to begin moving my finger slowly towards my chin, and I chose to hold that intentional state until my finger made contact."

[AshvinP]

Hey there,

So one thing I have to keep in mind is that I'm always already in an intentional state to some degree. And these degrees can vary in massively significant ways. If I'm somebody who loves Donald Trump and I'm tired but he is about to give a speech, I could say, "Hey, I'm super tired but I'm going to give all of my attention to this speech and really concentrate on it." Before the memory that he's about to give a speech came back into my awareness, I was in some other kind of intentional state. I might have been lazily watching the way the leaves were brushing up against the window while also thinking about what to make for dinner. If I'm sensitive enough, I can notice that even just to keep my attention on the leaves requires some intentional activty, even if at the time, I might say that I have no will power at all. So any new intentional burst will happen within the context of another ongoing kind of intentional activity. Falling asleep can be experienced as requiring a specific kind of intentional holding of space, and letting go of other intentional spaces. And, needless to say, very often an intentional activity is happening in the midst of all sorts of inner and out environmental comings and goes, some of which are new intentional impulses ("maybe I'll go by the porkchops now...") that get dismissed.

In the past, I would not pay careful attention to how intentional impulses arise within an already intential context. This caused me to say, "I was doing such and such and then I chose to go get the food at the store." That would have matched a fairly large amount of the experience, but it would have left out the moment in which the new impulse came. It would have ignored the fact that the intensity of that impulse was as inherent to it as its very coming. I might have said, "Well, I thought about going shopping, but it took me ten minutes until I made myself get off the couch and get in the car." And I would say that a close inspection of the flutterings of intentional meshed activity in those ten minutes has the same structure as any other process of being intentional. I might say that it took great will power to finally overcome my laziness. And I now there is a rich phenomenology in that. And yet I'd say that if we could rewind the clock and empty my coffee cup of .13 mlgs of caffine, I wouldn't be surprised if in that fluttering of arising and fading intentional impulses (along with the content and the intensities), I ended up staying on the couch. Now, of course when I said, "It took all my will power to get off the couch" even though I don't knwo that we've done this experiment and found at least one variable that was essential to my getting off the couch, my statement is a accurate and true as it needs to be in conversation with a friend. If I saw the video and realized that that tiny ammount of caffine is what made the real difference, I'd still be able to remember all of the inner work I did that I say made me finally get off the couch.

So, you are correct that my use of 'spontenously arising' should not be imagined as some empty subjective state in which suddenly, out of nowhere, I am bombarded by an intentional impulse. It will emerge in sometimes patchy, sometimes jolts, sometimes, fluid, but always it comes within a prior living process that it must 'cross' (A Gendlin term but it often makes basic sense anyway) before either continuing or fading. Doing the will exercises fits well into this consideration. In fact, it was when I first really began to notice my will exercises in this way that I noticed a shift in the experience and/or understanding of the experience. Needless to say, I'm still very comfortable saying that "I chose to begin moving my finger slowly towards my chin, and I chose to hold that intentional state until my finger made contact."

Intentional states certainly reside on a spectrum and are embedded within a prior living experiential process. The key question is whether we can discern any inner structure to this spectrum of intentional states. For that, I think we need to focus on more 'boundary' examples, just as we can better appreciate the rich qualities of Sunlight penetrating through the atmosphere when the Sun is rising or setting.

Let's take the example of reading through a text. I'm sure you have had the experience of intending to read a book, to pay close attention to the author's meaning while you are reading, yet your thoughts start drifting away to something else. An associative chain of thoughts is set off somewhere along the way. Imagine that you continue following the words visually and maybe even inwardly sounding out the words on the page, but none of the meaning is registering. At some point, you wake up from the associative chain and realize you stopped following the meaning a few sentences or paragraphs before. Only now, once awakening from this dreamy associative chain, you can intend your attentional activity to retrace back to where the distraction occurred and try to faithfully fulfill your original intent again.

Do you agree that we can phenomenologically speak of an overarching intent here in which the thought-states unfold, and that it would be pretty untruthful if, after the fact, we told ourselves the dreamy associative chain was also our intent? In other words, if we say the intentional state of faithfully following the meaning of the text and the 'intentional' state of wandering into other thoughts before we retrace the text to try again, are equally 'intentional states' even though they are mutually exclusive? Is that the phenomenological reality or it is something we conceptually add to the experience after the fact, which somewhat conveniently allows us to gloss over all kinds of inner factors that pulled us away from fulfilling the original intentional state?

The other thing to mention is when you say the bolded words, you are implying a new intentional state that intends to examine the act of 'keeping my attention on the leaves' or the 'flutterings of intentional meshed activity in those ten minutes'. Now I still don't think it's clear what this new intentional state is adding to the prior experience, but it's clear that, without the new intentional state that sensitively inspects the prior states, the experience of the prior states would not be felt in the same way. So again, is it faithful to experience to say the subtle inner movements of keeping attention on the leaves was 'always there', as some kind of metaphysical reality, or rather that we only became sensitive to the subtle inner movements when forming a new intention to retrace our imagination through the mental pictures of the prior attentional activity that was being dragged by visual sensations?

[findingblanks]

As an aside, when you say, "So again, is it faithful to experience to say the subtle inner movements of keeping attention on the leaves was 'always there', as some kind of metaphysical reality..."

I'm not sure what I said that implies noticing the leaves movement is some kind of metaphysical reality. I was merely pointing to an experience of watching the leaves.

........

I'm not thinking of intentional states as competing for authenticity in a way that would make me say they are all equal. If I'm going to be fired by not finishing a project in the next 15 minutes, I'm happy to say that the intentional states necessary to finish are of 'higher' value; but it's relative. Some people might say that a higher being has been nudging me out of the job because that's the only way I'm going to meet my future wife next week. I definitely don't want that last example to have us go into metaphysics. I only used it because I want to stress that my willingnesss to talk about which intention state is more important will always need to be tentatively held within a wider context that doesn't carve them up via that critiera.

But, that said, let's assume that the trail of associations that take me away from my intention to read carefully are NOT related to some deeper value that I've been neglecting. In other words, as great as this book might be, let's not assume that I start being distracted by thoughts of an argument with my wife earlier in the day and how that is connected to some bigger conflicts that I've been avoiding in myself. We can assume that I get distracted by random thoughts about what color to paint the walls.

I would say that the first microsecond that my mind shifted from 97% focus to 94% was spontaneous, and probably so subtle that I didn't consciously notice it. And any shifts that finally then opened the door to the color of the walls could be similar. And, as you say, I might spend a few paragraphs mainly focused on thoughts about the walls. Now, I'm in those thoughts. The first microsecond shift back towards "Oh, wait, the book!", agian, I would say could be a 'slower' process of moving back a few percentage points, or it could just jump right back as a powerful thought, mixed with frustration at my lack of will and excitement to get back to the text. I would not have designed the texture of how it comes. Because it could have come with a lot more frustration or maybe not much at all. It could have come with a, "Probably should keep reading...but...maybe I do need to put down the book and figure this out..." My point is that I won't have consciously designed the mesh of implicit and explicit textures that are there when it comes.

"Only now, once awakening from this dreamy associative chain, you can intend your attentional activity to retrace back to where the distraction occurred and try to faithfully fulfill your original intent again."

The most interesting part of that sentence for me is the 'can.' When I think of what it is like when I suddenly am jerked back into my task at hand, I think of the wide varieity of ways that new intentional state can come. Often, it's much like it was when it first arose, and I just grip the book and focus. Although, I notice that I don't design that curvature, even when part of what I'm doing is something like, "Okay, I need to focus more than I just want" and I really 'push' inwardly to ramp up my focus. That isn't always what happens. Even when it does, it is hardly a gaurantee that I'll stay on track. Sometimes a very light 'get back on track' is powerful. Sometimes ramping it up seems to do the trick. Sometimes, I realize that the distractions were showing me that it really isn't time to be reading. Sometimes I ignore that intuition and keep distracting myself by focusing on the book. In that case, I guess we could say that now there is a more important set of intentions that are being sublimated to what was the most important one (at least what I thought was) when I decided to have some very focused reading. In fact, I might say that what appeared as a clean intention to read is now discovered to be 44% distraction from other implicitly functioning experiences.




Gendlin created a technical phenomenological concept of 'occuring-into-implying' which points to how any subjective (not in the not-objective sense) event as always both an occuring component and an implying. I say this because, our typical concepts force us to think of things like 'intentional states' as if they are always acting as themselives alone and we lose sight of how when they are functioning implicitly in the shaping of the experience that is currently occurring they are 'more' than themselves. So, even when my intention to read in a focused manner arose, it crossed with a mesh of intentional (and other states) to becomes exactly what it was in first arising. My conscious mind might flatten it out in a simple meta-conscious explication like, "I strongly intend to read this book", leaving out all of the felt-implicit aspects that are already pushing in other directions. What might be discuraging about my view is that I precludes the possibility of a meta-conscious grasping of a pure state in which I am aware of all of the very real and active implictly functioning other states. This doesn't at all deny the significance of developing practices that help us become more and more clear and senstive to the relation between intentional states and the wide variety of phenomena that they can produce and that can arise and fade within them.

"Do you agree that we can phenomenologically speak of an overarching intent here in which the thought-states unfold, and that it would be pretty untruthful if, after the fact, we told ourselves the dreamy associative chain was also our intent? In other words, if we say the intentional state of faithfully following the meaning of the text and the 'intentional' state of wandering into other thoughts before we retrace the text to try again, are equally 'intentional states' even though they are mutually exclusive?"

I've addressed this above from a different angle, but I think much of what I said relates to this. I think they are both 'equally' intentional states in that they meet the minimum requirement for noticing that they contain intentional activity. The distractions about painting the walls could be a function of other very important ideas/needs implicitly functioning in their formation. And, this is just from my view and experience, the experiencings that are implicitly functioning are occurring to the extent that they are shaping the texture of what is now unfolding. But, to your point, yes they are mutually exclusive in that I can't focus strongly on the text and focus on the need to paint the walls in a way that allows each to maximize its purpose. In other words, I can agree that intentional states can come into conflict.

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In case you read the above already but haven't responded, I added a few sentences of clarification.