Thrown Into the Unintuitive Flows
Once we have done some work deconstructing the imaginative, feeling, and willing (bodily and social) spectrums of our intuitive life, we can more keenly sense what it means to lack intuitive orientation within the primary flow. This orientation only feels somewhat lucid and refined within our narrow subflow of mental images, where there is a high degree of correlation (responsiveness) with our intuitive intents. All the psychic and physical constraints illustrated in the previous part, which come into focus when we try to ‘ripple out’ our intents beyond our mental subflow, introduce a level of indirection between these ‘inputs’ (intuitive intents) and the flow of emotional or sensory ‘outputs’ (perceptions). This indirection diminishes the input-output correlation and our corresponding orientation within the flow. Within the feeling and willing spectrums, it is as if more leeway is opened for our inputs to diffuse into the ‘atmosphere’ and return to meet us later in unrecognizable output forms. The inputs and outputs grow increasingly ‘out of phase’, just as in our 4x4 delayed aperture metaphor. The mental images receding from the horizon of our consciousness that we observe and contemplate are then only the reverberations of long-receded gameplay, encoding habitual movement patterns to which we have lost intuitive sensitivity.
Returning to the public speaking imagination, let's imagine the unruly audience member felt impelled to shout over us because we bullied him in childhood. Yet we forgot all about this deeper connection over the years, and thus we felt it as a completely unexpected, unintuitive interruption in our intended flow. It is a similar feeling when our bodily processes ‘revolt’, preventing us from navigating toward desired states, and we have little intuitive sense of how our previous inputs contributed to the disharmonious output stream. Do we usually have any clear sense of why or how a throbbing headache entered this output stream, for example? We are often beset by aches, injuries, illnesses, and misfortunes that seem to enter our flow from an orthogonal direction, unrelated to anything we can remember doing. Perhaps we experience a similar feeling with many of the global events we read about in the news. In such events, however, we can barely even imagine how our previous intuitive inputs would have contributed to the outputs. They feel like completely independent happenings of the primary 8x8 flow. For that reason, we ascribe these events to chance, destiny, or the ‘evildoing' of others and accept the corresponding pain, uncertainty, confusion, and frustration as inherent aspects of our existence.
It is the same lack of intuitive orientation that is present when everything is running smoothly: when we feel healthy, our wealth is growing, our relationships are improving, we are gaining new insights in our fields of inquiry, and so on. The main difference is that, in these times, we begin to veil our lack of orientation by ascribing the positive developments to our hard work, cleverness, superior qualities, and so forth. Instead of recognizing that many of these developments enter our flow just as mysteriously as the negative ones, we take credit for them and thus begin to take them for granted. We imagine we can sustain and build on them simply by navigating the flow with our current qualities and capacities, continuing along our current trajectory. That puffed-up stance leaves us in a pitiful state of lacking orientation within the flow, but not even knowing it. When things are no longer running smoothly, and we are forced to recognize our lack of orientation, we also don’t know how to regain it. We then rely on our instincts to kick in, as we begin dreamily modulating our inputs such that a point of balance is restored, i.e., we take rest, move more carefully, refrain from excessive food and drink, try to learn about our current state, try to mend the fences with our neighbors, and so on.
Yet that balance is maintained only briefly before another jagged interruption in the smooth flow inevitably occurs. This dynamic can be experienced acutely in a game of Chess. When we attain a winning position, we often become complacent and overconfident in our ability to navigate the game flow seamlessly, as if on autopilot. It becomes a classic case of ‘counting our chickens before they hatch’, anticipating a smooth flow that will somehow propagate itself without our continual inner effort. When that inner stance is adopted, it won’t be long before we lose concentration and blunder a piece or the entire game. Our pride in the winning position veils an underlying lack of orientation to the present game flow. The following short clip provides an example of how that dynamic can unfold:
In our occult education, we can leverage such experiences to attain a more refined sense of the archetypal inner dynamic that influences our flow in the most varied life circumstances. When we act recklessly and injure ourselves, for example, it is unlikely that our injury will heal in a smooth and linear process. Once the pain subsides, it likely won’t be long before we feel ‘in control’ again, fall prey to our usual habits, and instinctively use the injured member too forcefully, setting back the healing process by some number of days. Likewise, if we smooth over a dispute with our friend or partner and our relationship with them is humming along smoothly, it won’t be long before we say or do something insensitive and reopen the old wounds. In that sense, as soon as our intuitive flow starts to feel a little more stable and comfortable, we instinctively fall back on our untransformed patterns of thinking and acting, which quickly throw us back into the oscillatory loop between optimal moves and blunders. The tip of our navigatory flow is then experienced like the second arm of a double pendulum, chaotically oscillating, overcorrecting to one side or the other, and only rarely crossing through a point of balance.
Full essay - https://spiritanalogies.substack.com/p/ ... -chess-fba
