Before beginning, let’s do something simple. Let’s just take a quick survey of our present existential state, where we are, what we are doing, what our mood is, and so on. Basically, we try to make a rich snapshot of our state of existence. Then we take this a step further and try to feel how at some future time we may be able to look back on our present state. Notice that when looking back, we may remember not only the phenomenological content but also the fact that we’ve been looking upon the future moment. This can quickly become mindboggling if we continue analyzing it intellectually (since it becomes recursive, as an image reflected in multiple mirrors), so we won’t go more into this now. It is enough to feel how our present state, with its whole context, thoughts, feelings, etc. is offered by our present self for contemplation of a future self. That’s all.
What happens if we take simple harmonic waves and add them together? Generally, the individual waves add together where they are of the same sign and extinguish themselves otherwise.
Above, we sum together waves which are all in phase at x=0 and have the same amplitude (technically, these are cosine waves). So only the frequencies differ. Or otherwise imagined, it’s like these waves are springs anchored at x=0 and squished and stretched with different strengths.
What happens if we sum infinitely many such waves, of all infinitely many possible frequencies? Well, it is certain that all waves will be in phase at x=0 – they will only add together. All other points will have infinitely many waves criss-crossing at different phases, so on average, they will extinguish each other. And this gives us an idea of what is called the Dirac Delta Function. It is a function that has an infinite value (an impulse) at x=0 (because infinitely many positive numbers are added there) and is zero everywhere else. It has many applications in mathematics, physics, and communications, but they are beyond the point here. We’re only using it as an artistic picture.
In an abstract way we can say that every state of being can be seen as a unique combination of the infinite many waves with different phases. It’s not that reality is ‘made of’ such metaphysical waves, but only that our intellect can analyze it in such a way. Concentration can be considered the attempt to bring these rotations (every wave can be seen as a rotation, like the arrow of a clock) into phase. The delta impulse can be thought of as the singularity, the state of Cosmic Concentration, where all possible states of existence intersect. All other states are like deviations from this singularity state.
Now the question is how to make this abstract picture into something that can be approached as a real experience. We need meditative concentration. The contextual rhythms of our existence need to converge on this single goal. If we proceed with our intellectual habits, we might expect that in this meditation, within our field of consciousness, some ‘object’ will start integrating, something that ‘looks like’ the impulse spike. This, however, is only a mental image that we can initially use for anchoring our otherwise chaotic cognitive activity. The delta pulse is not something that we can contain within the field of our consciousness, but an expression for the increasing coherence of all innerly experienced contextual rhythms of existence. True development requires that we bring into phase also the greater rhythmic aspects of our existential flow (clearly, we can not that much change these greatest of these Cosmic rhythms, but rather our intellectual and feeling rhythms must seek attunement to them). For example, many people, when reading about concentration, won’t even stop to feel what it means to focus our ray of attention on a single point and willfully sustain that state for a while. Why not? Precisely because of the real rhythms of transformation that tumble us on the hamster wheel. To approach such a state, we should at least conceive as a mental picture how our life should take a different course than usual for at least a few minutes. It is only when we are able to sustain the rhythms of our will in line with the mental image that we really start to concentrate the waves.
In other words, the concentration is not something that happens merely in our mind, while our life and outer reality are something completely independent, but true concentration is the transformation of the rhythms of destiny. This may sound like a strong claim, but we should understand things in their full significance if we are not to trip over trivial facts that we simply refuse to recognize.
Let us now remember the experiment from the beginning. Now we can try to vividly resurrect all those phenomena that we snapped. Not only that, but we can also remember how we were looking upon our present state. What we expected in the future is now the present. Take a moment to feel how our past self has been looking with anticipation into our present. This is not something that we usually do. We do not often try to feel how our present state will be embedded in a future perspective. This line of reasoning allows us to deepen our meditation tremendously if we succeed in imbuing it with the needed seriousness of feeling.
Think of the following. When we begin our meditative session, we often start from a more or less disorderly state. We take a few moments to breathe deeply, to calm down and relax both physically and psychologically, then we start giving a firm focus to our mental flow. Now we can ask: “Is this meditative state something that I’ll remember from within a future state after death? In other words, will my soul-self find itself if it remembers my present meditative state?”
This is a very powerful question to contemplate. It raises the seriousness of the situation. Often, we can barely remember our inner flow from twenty minutes ago. We certainly experienced something; we went through thoughts, images, feelings, but now, when looking back, in a sense, they are all ‘averaged out’. We realize that a great part of our daily inner flow is mere oscillations around a baseline, which rarely produce something of significance. On the other hand, the experiment from the beginning is something that we hopefully remember much more clearly. As a matter of fact, it is likely that we’ll be able to remember it even tomorrow. Our inner act of looking upon a future state in itself highlights the experience. Instinctively, we do something similar even in the trivial case when we simply try to remember something, for example, “Remember to throw out the garbage before leaving for the weekend.” Even though we do not do this in the explicit way we did our experiment, it is still an attempt to highlight certain experiences such that they can stand out in a future state.
In these trivial cases, we have the convenience that our future state won’t be that different from the present. Yes, if we remember something after many years, many aspects may be different. Our political views may have changed, our interests may have shifted, but it’s still an embodied human experience. Things are more difficult when considering the after-death state because we’ll be in great error if we simply extrapolate our present sensory-intellectual flow of experience there. This does not mean that there’s nothing in common between the future state and our present embodied one. Actually, it is precisely from that which we have in common that proper higher development can proceed. It is from this ‘in common’ that consciousness of the disembodied state unfolds in our meditative life, even when we are still in our Earthly state.
There’s no easy way to describe these other states of being because initially, we can only imagine things we are familiar with from our embodied life. We can only gradually grow into the other states. Many of our Earthly meditative sessions would still average out when contemplated from within the disincarnated state (‘remembering’ from within the disincarnated state is already of a different character compared to our ordinary purely mental memories). However, there can also be those states in which we recognize “Here! In my meditation I was looking upon this [presently disincarnated] state, and now I recognize myself in that past meditative act, which is now reverberating in the World ether. In a way, this meditative session now feels like an organ of my present Cosmically expanded being.” No doubt, thinking in this way puts some pressure. But at the same time, it is a powerful way to seek those rhythms of our meditative flow that will be recognizable/usable after death.
Can we give some examples? At every stage of temporal existence we’re intuitively metamorphosing through states in a way that makes different degrees of sense. In our daily life, we navigate the flow of sensory stimuli, and just like we navigate the streets while driving according to road signs, so the sensory stimuli are like recognizable handles that we grapple at and direct our Earthly actions. In the disincarnate state, a great amount of these handles diffuse in the World sphere. Now we navigate a more flow-like existence that grapples at streams which from our incarnate state seemed more contextual. For example, we feel how our stream of destiny is flowing closer and closer in parallel with that of another soul, while others diffuse. We feel how our interests and desires steer the flow in certain ways, and so on.
When seen in these ways, we gain an idea about what of our present snapshot will be memorable after death. We need to feel the temporally extended contextual factors. Where am I in life? What are my main drives at this stage? Why am I meditating at this moment? And so on. This flow of destiny is the natural resolution of the soul-self. In addition to the curvatures of destiny, at this resolution, the soul-self also understands something of the workings and shaping of the bodily organs. It becomes clear how pushing in a certain direction of the flow, elastically agitates counter-flows that affect both the soul tensions but also the accretion of the bodily form.
At this stage, our flow is still mainly of personal character. It is our destiny that is at the focus. Of course, our destiny does not make sense in isolation. The rest of reality, the flows of other souls and beings, still impresses in our perspective of soul space but the coherence of our existential movie still gravitates around the development of our character. Everything else is like the environment and factors within which this development proceeds. All of this changes further when we try to look upon an even more refined future self. If this future self is to recognize itself in our present meditative life, we need to cohere even more encompassing rhythms. Now our flow of destiny is seen as inseparable from the flow of World development, both spiritually and organically. We need a true interest in the common flow within which all our destinies are modulated.
The Delta Impulse can be a very fruitful mental image to start our meditation with (only on the condition that it has been imbued with the meaning developed here). It is around our focal point of attention that the integration of the Cosmic rhythms beings. Yet, the coherence of the rhythms of reality is not something that we can accomplish only in our head to unveil the mysteries of existence. We can only do that if we realize that the attunement of the rotations equates to the steering of our destiny, transforming our life of feeling and will, too. But more critically, this view can help us assume the needed prayerful attitude in meditation such that it acts like a tuning fork. We basically open up and yearn to find the center of those rhythms of our existence that will make our present meditative state recognizable from a future perspective.
We can also illustrate these things in their temporal dimension:
Here, by ‘dimension’, it is not meant anything metaphysical, but only the way in which our intellect can represent to itself the intuitions of becoming through time. Let the above image symbolize the span of a day of our life. The circles orthogonal to the time axis represent the momentary states that we go through, each consisting of a unique constellation of the rhythmic factors. The middle part represents a meditative session that brings the rhythms into greater coherence (by mainly altering the thinking, feeling, and willing rhythms of our soul life). Seen otherwise, it can be said that we do not move along the axis, but we’re always at the t=0 point, and the state metamorphoses around and within us. Here, we’re depicting the coherence not as an impulse, but rather as concentration, as a point where the rhythms are brought together in greater harmony (but this shouldn’t be confused for fitting their reality as an object within the container of our mind).
As said, we shouldn’t expect that we can single-handedly nudge the rhythms of our Cosmic context. Our job at present is to make our mental life a fractal-like artistic expression of the deeper intuitive spectrum, and of course, this demands that our feeling rhythms (sympathies and antipathies) must be gradually transformed. Obviously, if we do not feel a certain interest and sympathy for such a path of experience, we’ll never find ourselves meditating. When our bodily experiences are brought into greater coherence with the flow of destiny, this also makes it possible in the disincarnate state to have a clearer consciousness of the sensory state, because our soul-self can recognize itself in these past states. Conversely, a large part of our sensory life, the sensations that we so much enjoy today, is largely seen as a haze as long as it hasn’t been experienced as an integral aspect of the fuller Cosmic life.
Probably the main goal of this impulse function metaphor is to counterbalance the default inclination of our intellectual self, who feels that all knowledge consists of cramming phenomena within the container of our consciousness. If we grasp the impulse spike in this way, we’ll arrive at the very opposite of what is intended – a kind of solipsistic fantasy. Instead, the image suggests that to find that common intersection of all possible first-person states of being, we need to concentrate more and more (splitting the moment). It is only by approaching this infinitesimal t=0, that, maybe somewhat counterintuitively at first, we find our point of overlap with everything else. Thus, the impulse is a kind of Cosmic Hub, the zero point, the singularity, the Source, to which every other state, past or future, of this or that being, or this or another evolutionary scenario, is at zero distance, so to speak. From a temporal perspective, this point is at infinity; we shouldn’t imagine that we can experience in meditation something like “Here, I’m not at the zero point.” Instead, in the course of all evolution, we gradually and iteratively approach that point, where all beginnings and ends, all Alphas and Omegas converge. In the image above, after dipping into the meditative state, we hopefully emerge again in our daily life by sustaining a little bit of the Cosmic coherence. We should keep in mind that true insight into reality doesn’t arrive as some abstracted ‘in principle’ understanding during our meditative session, but only by gradually discovering how our own flow of being is embedded within reality. In the process, we find our common being (common first-person intersection) with the states of all human beings and the hierarchies.
