Philosophical Speculations

"We can first notice how certain psychic constraints are formed. For example, if we get into a heated argument with a soul close to us, this is associated certain passionate inner movements, e-motions, that gradually 'cool down' and settle as a psychic constraint. For hours or even days afterward, our feelings and thoughts may keep returning to this argument even if we intend to forget about it and move on. So that is an entirely phenomenological constraint that we can locate by remembering inner experiences that we have gone through (or noticing them in real-time)."

Are you okay if we land on another term than 'constraint' in these contexts? I'd rather keep that one for situations in which something is more-than-not applying an overall limit, whereas most of our examples are of forms of experience that have a very creative interactions with our ongoing activity. I'd rather call it a 'patch' of experiencing that we continue to go on in. That way, it holds both the way this could be some kind of rut and obsession, but it could also be a very liberating and creative process; and, the same 'patch' (which is a mesh of many intuitions and instincts) could be met in both ways, and even both at the same time. I'd want to reserve 'constraint' for something like a dogmatic assumption like, "I can only think about this on Sunday" or "Something about brown eyes makes people interrupt more often", anything that has an emphatic division-like gesture to it, less intutively explorative and more instinctual-reflexive.

"As we broaden out into deeper aspects of the psyche, we come to constraints like our temperament and native language. Our present thoughts are quite helpless in transforming our temperamental qualities that are continuously shaping and steering those thoughts. These inner qualities are still traceable to receded constellations of activity that we (instinctively) engaged in during early childhood. Our temperament also shapes how we interact with other souls as adults, and in that sense, we can say the likelihood of forming more proximate constraints, for ex. the frequency of heated arguments we get into, is nested within this temperamental constraint. If we skew toward a highly choleric temperament, we probably end up in such arguments frequently. So there is something of a hierarchical relationship between the temperamental qualities and the modes of interacting with other souls. The former ordinarily 'bends' the space of potential in which the latter can manifest more significantly than vice versa."

Yes, I would think of these as the more fundamental aspects of our onging experiencing. They typically not what we are placing under our meta-conscious lens, and, even when we do, we are then attending to our attended versionings of these deeper aspects. It is still always only one ongoing experience; but we can become more sensitive to it by explicating it via some kind of phenomenological method.

"That is a very crude outline of the situation, but hopefully, it's enough to get started. To be clear, I'm not suggesting these constraints are ordered in some linear and easily delineated way - they are all overlapping in complex ways, but nevertheless, we can get a general phenomenological sense of the axis of 'pliability' along which they exist. Do you think we see a general pattern of contextually nested phenomenological constraints here, which expand from implicating relatively more personal activity to more transpersonal activity? If so, what are your general thoughts on to what extent we can know the more transpersonal constraints in the same way we know our inner experience of the heated argument or, at a deeper level, our temperamental qualities?"

Yes, I think we have to create those transpersonal experiences. We don't create 'windows' to see them more clearly, but we can interact with our experiencing in new ways that allow it to express itself and be understood in the expression. This is a transformation of the experiencing. It can be considered an explication as long as we don't read the old-fashioned notion of explication into the process, as if there is something 'in there' that we then represent; The processes of explicating is a carrying forward of the implicit, which means a transformation.

Whereas the evolution of the eye (I mean that metaphorically as I don't consider the eye an object that interacts with an outer world) would necessarily be a process in which the representations must be deeply shared and 'same', learning to 'read' the implicitly functioning aspects of the Cosmos will not be that at all. It makes sense if we are in a phase that has presuppositions that lead us to think about building organs of perception that allow us to represent a spiritual world in a way that is much like (not in terms of sensory experience) learning to see the details of our outer world. It makes sense that we could hae some marginal success in implementing such a development so that some people craft a lens that produce similar such clairvoyant experiences. I'm not surprised that traditional Theosophists who develop clairvoyance to various degrees tend to end up seeing the same countours of a spiritual world. I think the same will go for any spiritual group in which representations are being shared and meditated upon. Typically it is a very tiny ammount that become even first-state clairvoyant (within the way they understand clairvoyance) and they tend to see and experience the spiritual world in a manner that conforms with their expectations and does not disconfirm anything significant from the person who first gave them the representations.

But, yes, I do think that humans can become increasingly sensitive to their experiencing and more and more of it can be explicated in massively unique ways, always somewhat objective and, to that extent, helpful for given contexts. Some of these developments can really mess up an individual or group. Others, not so much. And others, will likely allow people to develop both a moral and cognitive life that is increasingly whole and beautifully expressive.

Maybe helpful in pictures a way I feel and conceptualize 'transpersonal':

If we think of the ontological primitive (however we conceptualize it, represent it, feel it, assume it, know it...) as doing what it does because it is what it is, we can recognize the most basic 'gesture' of this Being as the archetype from which and into which all other movements and gestures will necessarily flow. Some will resonance with this gesture more deeply; others will move into patterns that can't sustain the fundamental impulse. A lot like surfing, all the creative and coordinated shifts necessary to stay on the board and for it to move beautifully and skillfully across the water.

In this sense, and within my frame, even the most basic and simple individualized being is an instancing of fundamental reality; therefore, those deepest patterns, that fundamental gesture, is even the simpliest beings fundamental gesture. It won't be able to explicate itself via this being very far or deeply. At first. Via evolution, it will profliferate itself via countelss beings, always attempting to maximally move through its evolving 'new' selves. Some wont' make it very easy Other's will provide novel pathways in which it can find purchase.

All of this to say that as we individuate, we can grow more sensitive to how the archtype is 'pressing' into us as a fundamental aspect of our experience. We won't observe this archteype as in image and 'see God' (although, our assumptions might force us to clothe very deep experience in this way and believe we are seeing God or Jesus or whomever), but we can carrying the impulse forward to various degrees via our living, via ideas, actions, art, questions, etc.. Even if we hold frames that force this impulse into representations that do limit it, we probably aren't consciously choosing to do so and it very well could be the only way to generate the next expression of it. From there, there is always an opportunity for a new explication, a new carrying forward. Of course, this can always get derailed by by complexity of the 'mesh' that is our ongoing experiencing.

But we can say that the transpersonal aspects are those that are more sensitive to the whole itself, the artchteypal pattern of becoming 'human'.

So we don't get lost in my weeds.

I"m merely saying that, yes, I believe there is an evolving of experience that includes the 'more' by individuating it.

Are you okay if we land on another term than 'constraint' in these contexts? I'd rather keep that one for situations in which something is more-than-not applying an overall limit, whereas most of our examples are of forms of experience that have a very creative interactions with our ongoing activity. I'd rather call it a 'patch' of experiencing that we continue to go on in. That way, it holds both the way this could be some kind of rut and obsession, but it could also be a very liberating and creative process; and, the same 'patch' (which is a mesh of many intuitions and instincts) could be met in both ways, and even both at the same time. I'd want to reserve 'constraint' for something like a dogmatic assumption like, "I can only think about this on Sunday" or "Something about brown eyes makes people interrupt more often", anything that has an emphatic division-like gesture to it, less intutively explorative and more instinctual-reflexive.

Yes, we can use 'patch', but I will take this opportunity to flesh out a few things so we are both clear on what we are trying to orient to by exploring these 'patches'. There is always a sense in which we can hypothetically imagine how the patches lead to new creative opportunities. Perhaps I intend to move on from the heated argument and start thinking about other things, but my attention keeps getting dragged back to the argument. Now I am distracted while pulling out of my parking space in the grocery store and back right into another car with a person in it. It turns out the driver of the other car is a fellow spiritual seeker and, had I not been distracted, I would have never bumped into this person and formed a new creative relationship with them. As we can see, all of this is within the realm of imagined possibilities but remains quite hypothetical and abstract.

What is important, in my view, is how we experience the patch from our first-person perspective, without speculating on all the hypothetical possibilities that could emerge from experiencing the patch. I need to be completely honest with myself about this - the heated argument patch is dragging my attention along helplessly even though I intend to move my attention in another direction. I experience my attention activity as being at the mercy of this patch even when it leads to unexpected and creative results. This is the most important sense in which it is a 'constraint', although we can call it a 'patch' as long as we are intuiting that same meaning from the symbol. In other words, we shouldn't use 'patch' as a way to float off into all kinds of hypothetical possibilities about where any particular experience can lead us. 

It is always tempting to conclude that we may be just as well off flowing with the patches, letting them creatively interact with our ongoing activity and lead us to new situations and experiences. We can certainly think of situations in which such a thing actually happened or could happen. But the key here is whether we can take a more active role in attaining these new situations and experiences without all the meandering pathways, by anticipating the patches and redirecting their impulsive flow as much as possible given our current stage of inner development. Perhaps I can consciously withhold attention from the heated argument and redirect it toward spiritual pursuits, and then a similar spiritual seeker will be attracted to my vicinity without first needing to meander into the accident. This is a really trivial example, but if we scale this principle up to the societal level, we can start to see how humanity can avoid many catastrophes by resisting the usual patches of cultural life and becoming more sensitive to them.

Yes, I think we have to create those transpersonal experiences. We don't create 'windows' to see them more clearly, but we can interact with our experiencing in new ways that allow it to express itself and be understood in the expression. This is a transformation of the experiencing. It can be considered an explication as long as we don't read the old-fashioned notion of explication into the process, as if there is something 'in there' that we then represent; The processes of explicating is a carrying forward of the implicit, which means a transformation.

Whereas the evolution of the eye (I mean that metaphorically as I don't consider the eye an object that interacts with an outer world) would necessarily be a process in which the representations must be deeply shared and 'same', learning to 'read' the implicitly functioning aspects of the Cosmos will not be that at all.

Related to this, I think we need to be clear that the patches are, in a sense, 'always there' and influencing us, whether we know it or not. I will relate a bit of personal experience here just to highlight this phenomenological principle. One of my initial obstacles on this path was feeling that, despite my efforts with spiritual study and exercises, I didn't seem to become more inwardly present, stabilized, peaceful, etc. In fact, something of the opposite occurred. I felt that everything within the 'receded context' of spiritual activity was making a stronger impression on me. whether that was my diet, the things I watched on TV/computer, the music I listened to, the time I spent indoors vs. outdoors, the types of interactions I had with other people, etc. These things suddenly seemed to have a more pronounced effect on my inner life and rhythms, mostly a destabilizing effect. It would be easy to conclude from this fact that I was doing something wrong, that the exercises were hurting more than helping, but that's only if we assume that the destabilizing effect wasn't there when we were unaware of it, flowing along with the patches as usual. If we don't make that assumption, it dawns on us that we are simply becoming more sensitive to the ways in which these patches have always been modulating our inner lives beneath the surface of waking experience. Our lack of sensitivity spared us from the sense of being destabilized and therefore we may have felt these patches were nothing to worry about. This inner sensitivity puts us in a more informed position about the consequences of the patches and whether, based on that intimate knowledge, we desire to modulate the patches or not. 

So it's fine to speak of 'creating' the transpersonal experiences, but we should also be clear that we are simultaneously discovering meshes/patches that were already there and that, by gaining more intimate knowledge of them by resisting the usual freefall through their curvatures, we feel like we now have deeper intuition of why our life was unfolding in the mysterious way that it was before. As a metaphor, we can imagine that we have discovered intuitions of oneness, twoess, fourness, and fiveness, but not threeness. We can study the ideal relationships between these already discovered mathematical intuitions. Then one day, by conducting our mathematical imagination in new ways, we stumble upon the intuition of threeness. We can say that have 'created' this new mesh of mathematical experience. But, at the same time, it will dawn on us that, even if we have never discovered threeness, the experiences of the other mathematical relations could only exist as they do if something like threeness had always existed. The same principle can be applied to the ideal experiences associated with the inner patches that we aim to become more sensitive to through our concentrated phenomenology. 

Another place we can locate this in our first-person experience is the transition from dreaming to waking experience. You may have had the experience upon waking that something of the dream life was 'still there'. Perhaps some of the dream images were still vivid in your waking consciousness and when you opened your eyes, you could see them overlaid on the sensory impressions for a few moments. These dream images are not simply more exotic sensory impressions but are of a qualitatively distinct nature - for ex., they may be animated sequences in which the characters/objects seem to have a life of their own. This experience gives us a hint that this dream life doesn't simply disappear into a void when we wake up, but rather our dreaming be-ing remains underneath the surface and its activity is 'drowned out' by the 'strength and weight' of sensory impressions. There is an intimate relation between this subsurface dreaming activity and our ordinary thinking during waking life, including our capacity for memory and fantasy. We can only become conscious of this relationship, however, if we resist the usual patches of sensory impressions and verbal thinking that continuously drown out the dreaming activity.

"What is important, in my view, is how we experience the patch from our first-person perspective, without speculating on all the hypothetical possibilities that could emerge from experiencing the patch."

Yeah, I hope I've not given you the impression that my goal is for us to think hypothetically about spiritual reasons why we might get caught up in a train of thought. I'm not sure why you brought that up, but, needless to say, I agree that it is the direct experience of the argument that matters.

"I need to be completely honest with myself about this - the heated argument patch is dragging my attention along helplessly even though I intend to move my attention in another direction. I experience my attention activity as being at the mercy of this patch even when it leads to unexpected and creative results. This is the most important sense in which it is a 'constraint', although we can call it a 'patch' as long as we are intuiting that same meaning from the symbol. In other words, we shouldn't use 'patch' as a way to float off into all kinds of hypothetical possibilities about where any particular experience can lead us."

I admit that I'm often surprised at the implication you take from my comments. Yes I don't want to float off into spiritual or metaphysical abstractions in noticing the experience of the argument. Again, not sure what I said that implied this to you.

In the experience itself, there are countless 'threads' of living intuitions that can be participated. Or, we can just participate the more subconscious elements of it and robotically live it on repeat. But the 'patch' offers countless pivots and while I can't mastermind and control exactly what will arise if I attend to the patch, if my prior experiencing has given me various 'moves', understandings, or skill-sets, in attending to the patch, an intentional state that carries these forward can very well interact with it and lift out valuable insights or new intuitions about the situation itself. I don't find this metaphysically speculative or abstract, so please let me know if you need me to shift my language in a way that you recognize as grounded and realistic about such experiences.

I have to run. Later today, I will respond to the rest of your last post. Thanks.

"It is always tempting to conclude that we may be just as well off flowing with the patches, letting them creatively interact with our ongoing activity and lead us to new situations and experiences."

Again, somehow I led you to believe that I just think we should let whatever happens happen and not engage in intentional states with our experiencings. Hopefully, my last responses helped and I can figure out a way to assure you that I thought I've been giving lots of examples of the extreme importance of intentionality and skillfullness in experiencing our experience. It sort of feels like a waste of my previous words that you're feeling the need to 'set us straight' and get things practical. That said, I obviously appreciate what you are saying about not merely letting anythign happens that happens.

"We can certainly think of situations in which such a thing actually happened or could happen. But the key here is whether we can take a more active role in attaining these new situations and experiences without all the meandering pathways, by anticipating the patches and redirecting their impulsive flow as much as possible given our current stage of inner development. Perhaps I can consciously withhold attention from the heated argument and redirect it toward spiritual pursuits, and then a similar spiritual seeker will be attracted to my vicinity without first needing to meander into the accident. This is a really trivial example, but if we scale this principle up to the societal level, we can start to see how humanity can avoid many catastrophes by resisting the usual patches of cultural life and becoming more sensitive to them."

A man who is having increased arguments with his wife, might find himself constantly replaying them in his mind. Yes, he might eventually, by going back into the arguments, open something up or the experience might shift in a way that helps him finally get his bearings. Or, he might find himself wanting to pray while feeling those feelings. Maybe he recently read a book on prayer and those intentional states arise in the context of the repeated memories. His prayerful approach might lift out deeper aspects of what he is actually feeling in that patch. Maybe he is seeing a spiritual counselor and intentional states arise regarding the practices he is working on in that context. The 'patch' already contains the threadings of experience necessary to open up into very deep and/or healing and/or necessary insights. But it will require some kind of crossing with other states in order for those threads to be noticed and developed.

Regarding your early meditative experiences; yes, hopefully most people who take up mediation and esoteric exercises have been told why they should expect increased destabilized states as one aspect of the progress. Steiner and most other, even mainstream, traditions tend to address this early on. Your personal example was nice to hear about.

"So it's fine to speak of 'creating' the transpersonal experiences, but we should also be clear that we are simultaneously discovering meshes/patches that were already there and that, by gaining more intimate knowledge of them by resisting the usual freefall through their curvatures, we feel like we now have deeper intuition of why our life was unfolding in the mysterious way that it was before."

Okay, so it's fine to speak of creating transpersonal experience. Good to know!

And, again, hopefully you realize that I'm not saying anything differently than you about the extreme value of prior skills, capacities, insights (all of which are always embedded in intentional states) when it comes to self-understanding and inner work. I'm a therapist and I don't just instruct my clients to keep doing whatever they are doing. I draw their intentional states to other ways of attending to experience. I imagine that sooner later you're going to see that you don't need to keep pushing against this notion that I am denying the importance of how we attend to our experience. When you first suggested we stop and look at the experience of intentionality, I immediately said most of this in response.

"This experience gives us a hint that this dream life doesn't simply disappear into a void when we wake up, but rather our dreaming be-ing remains underneath the surface and its activity is 'drowned out' by the 'strength and weight' of sensory impressions. There is an intimate relation between this subsurface dreaming activity and our ordinary thinking during waking life, including our capacity for memory and fantasy. We can only become conscious of this relationship, however, if we resist the usual patches of sensory impressions and verbal thinking that continuously drown out the dreaming activity."

I would say that these more subtle aspects are in the 'usual patches' and it is by attending to them there that we learn to become more capable of shifting and creatively working with them. I understand why we might use metaphors like subconscious or 'underneath', but in terms of phenomeonlogy, I personally find it much more accurate to notice the way they are already present in the patch itself.

I don't want to 'dumb down' our conversation because I know that we are both pointing to subtle aspects of experiencing and just trying to find a shared language; but, that said, it seems like your concern at this point is that I see that 'patches' of daily and/or typical and/or repetitive experiencing require more than just 'going with the flow' if they are to open up and reveal their deeper aspects. If you are somewhat suspicious that I perhaps don't share this view, I'm happy to give examples so we have something concrete. But I think you probably are aware that I am with you that the way in which we attend to our experiencing is where it's at.

"Related to this, I think we need to be clear that the patches are, in a sense, 'always there' and influencing us, whether we know it or not."

Ultimately, I believe there is one experience happening always, all prior experience is 'in' this one experience, capable of directly functioning in how this current experiencing is unfolding. Poor concepts have forced us to think of experience as if it comes in units; therefore, we have to conceptualize an unconscious in which habits, intuitions, memories, hopes, etc., are stored and can subconsciously influence a current conscious experience. I believe these ideas (even when they are held in less clunky ways) shape how we attend to our current experiencing.

It's not that I'm not seeing the light from the stars when I look up at the blue sky; but we can say that the image of the star itself is obscured. That is a metaphor more than an example.

The way aspects of experience function implicitly is not the way they function as 'themselves'. The way my grandfather's paitent teaching me how to fish is directly experienced as I teach my daughter to read is not the same as even a very evocative memory of that time with my grandfather. This is obvious. But the important point is not to imagine that experiences exist as 'themselves' in some primary way and are accessed or uncovered via attentional moves. They can be carried forward in countless ways, one of which is a sort of 'snapshot' of how they originally formed. But even that is happening in a creative context and is a changed experience. Again, if this sounds too abstract, we can look at it directly with any daily experience; somebody shouts at me and makes me sad. That experience is now implicit in my current experiencing and its functioning/shaping can be noticed in various ways or not; and this noticing is a carrying forward of 'it' that does not have to be treated as shining a flashlight on it or getting under other experience to see it or isolating it as itself. Even an experience that I will never remember can be directly experienced if we don't limit 'direct' or 'experience' to the typical notions of 'looking at' already-finished forms. The more we notice the nature of ongoing experience (high or low, spiritual or not), the more we notice that the 'already-formed' are actually always still-unfinished. I still find the metaphor of 'already formed' very useful as long as it isn't taken literally.

To be clear, whenever I start to speak more about how I think about these things, I don't say that in direct constrast to how I think you do. There might be a contrast but that isn't what causes me to now and then frame things in my language. When I read something from you that I do explicitly see differently, I say that directly. I realize that without saying this, it would be possible to read some of the above as if I'm ascribing ways of thinking to you that you haven't demonstrated.

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

And now an analogy for how all experience is living within and as the one ongoing experience; there are very detailed changes in how we take each step that are the result of how aspects of our peripheral vision are feeding into our movements. It isn't that I believe that my grandfathers fishing instructions are necessarily implicitly functioning in the experience I am having typing this sentence (well, NOW they are!), but that the degree to which they are or are not is not available - in most cases - to my ongoing experience. Just because there is a kind of experience where we go, "Oh, I just realized that the argument from this morning has been shaping the speed of my typing all day," doesn't mean we should use such an experience as a baseline/archetype for what it means for experience to be directly had while not being consciously labeled or segmented as 'itself'. Otherwise, we will fall into the same trap of believing that the goal is to be conscious of 'all' the 'experience-units' that are 'making up' this ongoing experience.

The morning tea, the sound of the birds while brushing teeth, last night's meditation, the upcoming meeting are not isolated experiences that are shaping exactly how this experience is right now, yet they are 'all' (along with infinitely other) together-already in how this experience is arising. When we lift one out as such, we must realize that 'it' isn't what has been directly 'had' in the experiencing. The blending is what functions in the formation of this patch. And the patch comes into and cross with this present blending. In other words, it is the crossed 'product' of this present blending. We could say that there is always a patching-into-blending that is the nature of experiencing. There is no blending free of what is occurring into it. There is no occurring that is not already shaped by this blending. They are intrinsic and I'd say this goes for any actual being of any kind. Not because I've studied every being, but because in studying experiencing, it seems to me this is an ontologically primitive aspect of it. Currently, I can't even coherently conceive of what 'experiencing' could mean if it didn't have this polarically creative aspect as its very nature.

I"m not needing or expecting you to respond to each paragraph I'm sharing today. I know that only some of the early ones directly relate to what you are trying to suss out from me. So please know that my expectation is not that you'll respond to each idea I've shared. I've just had opportunities to pop in here.

To be clear, whenever I start to speak more about how I think about these things, I don't say that in direct contrast to how I think you do. There might be a contrast but that isn't what causes me to now and then frame things in my language. When I read something from you that I do explicitly see differently, I say that directly. I realize that without saying this, it would be possible to read some of the above as if I'm ascribing ways of thinking to you that you haven't demonstrated.

Same here. I hope that also answers some of your questions above - I am just following my intuition, based on the discussion so far, for what aspects of experience it might be helpful to focus on more. None of it is intended to imply that you are doing something in particular that needs to be corrected. 

I think we can sense two distinct poles at work here which we are somewhat concerned about to various degrees. You can let me know if what follows is somewhere in the ballpark. First, let me present another example. Let's say that all of a sudden I start developing some symptoms - I am always short of breath, I am often nauseous, I am constantly in sour moods, my thoughts are erratic, and things of that nature. Then one day I decided to go to the doctor and I was diagnosed with lung cancer. It turns out this problem had been festering for many years but I had no reason to suspect it existed before. Now I look back and can see how certain physical and mental symptoms that I barely noticed before or wrote off as unimportant or attributed to something else entirely, were actually testifying to this inner condition. The lung cancer was secretly steering my bodily and soul life in certain directions but I only became sensitive to its existence when the symptoms grew extreme. I'm sure we agree this is a phenomenological example rooted in living experience. 

1/ On one hand, there is a concern about the pole of postulating ontological structures mostly independent of our first-person activity. At this extreme, we start thinking about organs, cancer, etc. as if they represent some isolated structures that have always been there and our attention to them is just something added on top of the 'realities-themselves'. We start wondering about how all these structures arose independently of us and form some rigid reality on top of which our mental life emerges. This lung cancer metaphor can also be applied to many spiritualists who speak of beings, realms, planes, etc. in the same way. These things are all conceived as various subtle structures that have existed and now our present mental state comes along and tries to figure out what they 'really are', when the reality is that all we know is our present state of being. We can only find the realities to which these concepts are pointing within our present state of experience.

2/ On the other hand, at the other polar extreme, there is the concern that all of these inner constraints/patches are simply conceived as a thin dream picture that we imagine into existence moment by moment. This is common in certain mystical conceptions even though it conflicts so directly with our living experience, such as the fact that we can't simply imagine away the lung cancer or pretend that it only started to exist when we became aware of it. It's usually not made so explicit, of course, but the practical function of these conceptions is to flatten the inner depth into the present state of awareness and imagine the whole 'objective world' is dreamed up by my mental activity or something exactly like my mental activity, with the same sort of experiential gestures I am familiar with. This is more in the domain of my recent concerns and why I was stressing the contextual depth and how it is 'always there' even when we are unaware of its subtle influences, which are of a qualitatively different nature than the mental gestures we are familiar with.

I hope it is clear that I have never been suggesting anything like 1/. From the beginning, the concepts used are symbolic pointers to limited aspects of first-person experience that we can try to notice and become sensitive to from within the present state of being. There is no suggestion that we are reaching back into some independently existing 'past', for example, when we recall memory images that constrain our remembering activity. We are simply trying to orient to the phenomenological reality that, when we try to remember what we had for breakfast, we make new intuitive movements within our present state that are intended to condense mental pictures that fit harmoniously within the 'intuitive breakfast curvature'. If we condense mental pictures of pancakes when we remember having only eggs, these will feel dissonant with the temporal intuition that exists only in the now. So there is no question of 'what we had for breakfast' as some independent reality that we now trying to correspond our thoughts with.

The concept of inner constraints, contextual depth, certain aspects of our existence that are 'always there', etc. is symbolic of our present state of experience in the exact same way. Cleric has provided a very helpful symbol in this respect when illustrating a meditative exercise. I'm not posting the whole exercise here, but I think you will get the relevance from this short excerpt:

It is also important that our whole inner being should be engaged in the exercise. It is common that we do something with our hands while we talk or verbally think about completely unrelated things. This can happen also in meditation. We may be doing the visualization but our inner chatter may be drifting. This is especially true when we become so familiar with the visualization that we perform it mechanically, out of habit. To counteract this we may try to engage our inner voice too. For example, when we turn our imaginary camera left or right we can pronounce in our mind ‘left’, ‘right’, or simply sounds. This is not strictly necessary but it can be useful in the beginning because it helps us feel what it means to be fully engaged in the movements with our whole being.





It feels as if the rotations of the mental image are not entirely free but our imaginative will is entangled with all kinds of elastic threads that pull it in various directions. Once again, we shouldn’t expect to see such elastic bands as some objective perceptual fact. It’s the other way around – our living experience of the elastic constraints within which our intuitive activity operates is artistically expressed.

If we understand the above metaphor we should also have the proper intuition for what it means to have consciousness in this state. In our ordinary life we consider for real only that which forcefully impresses into our senses. In the described state however, what confronts us as real are the invisible elastic tensions of soul life – forces that continually bend the direction of our existential movie. We can never expect these forces to forcefully impinge in our consciousness and present themselves as objective facts similar to bodily perceptions. The simple reason for this is that while we remain passive we simply freefall through the elastic curvatures of the inner flow. Then we are unaware of it just like we are unaware of gravity in a free fall. We gain consciousness of the elastic forces, which from our ordinary perspective feel like sympathies and antipathies, only when we concentrate, as if by trying to maintain a certain ideal form of our inner being, and then be vigilant for the way the elastic forces try to modify that form.

It's kind of obvious for most people that, when such an image is used, it is not intended to depict an ontological structure that exists somewhere in our soul space quite independent of our real-time imaginative activity. Yet when we start using more 'spiritual scientific' concepts for these same invisible 'elastic forces' that are always 'bending' our inner activity in complex yet lawful ways, then there is much more risk that people confuse them for succumbing to 1/. Again, I'm not suggesting this is exactly what you are doing, but I am just trying to help orient us between these two poles and see if that can help us focus the discussion most fruitfully. As Cleric hinted above, even when we speak of 'sympathies and antipathies', and we locate the experience of how our attentional activity is pulled in certain directions or repelled from others, this is still a mental symbol for some mysterious inner constraints/patches that we will only gradually come to know at an intuitive level through our concentrated efforts. Although these inner forces don't obey the 'laws of physics', they do exhibit another sort of lawfulness that gives rise to characteristic patterns of inner activity that help make greater sense of a lot of what we experience during the course of our lives, which we previously felt to be random occurrences or symptoms of some external factors.