Philosophical Speculations

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 4:41 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 4:18 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 3:43 pm In general, whenever we isolate a part of the perceptual spectrum and point toward that part as specifically derailing our conscious thinking efforts, I feel that something is off - we are subtly redirecting attention from the responsibility of our own selfish and myopic soul tendencies (which exert their derailing influences equally in the verbal and pictorial spectrum) toward the perceptual spectrum itself, which is merely the instrument of our soul life.

Why didn't you raise a similar objection when Cleric described verbal language in terms of protein sequencing and H bonds? I don't suggest any redirection of responsibility. On the contrary, the responsibility of spiritualizing language is made concrete and directly operable, both from the way of feeling (as described in the addition to my last post) and from the way of thinking (because through imaginative cognition the vertical connection with meaning is made more robust, hence we better preserve ourselves from the sensory spell of language). It's our lacking thinking-feeling processing of language that perpetuates the spell. So there is a clear responsibility: through spiritual development we acquire the means to make our activity more robust, to avert the delusions lurking in our modern relationship with language. By the way, I doubt it is exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum.

Cleric wrote:

Necessarily, our language takes sequential form, just like the primary structure of the protein consists of a specific sequence of amino acids. I believe this is how most of the writings here feel for many - just as an endless string of words, without beginning or end, that just go on and on without anything happening. This however, as we have explained many times, is only because it is unsuspected that the value of these words only comes if through them we grasp an ideal secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word. The speaker assumes certain ideal form with their "I" which is then sequenced into words. Those reading can reconstruct the ideal form if the string of letters is folded in the proper way.

(this is a fantastic anchoring symbol, thanks for reminding me!)

This is exactly what I am speaking of when I say the verbal forms, no matter how they are sliced and diced, are not intrinsically associative and derailing, but rather embed unsuspected value when we reorient our perspective through the purification of the most proximate soul constraints, i.e. refolding the string of letters in the proper way to intuit the "secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word." To my recollection, Cleric has never spoken of a special sub-cycle of the planar thinking cycle in which the verbal sequences exist and exhibit inordinate attractive power that necessarily derails our thinking. He does not speak of another parallel 'way of feeling' by which we can purify the soul depths, rather the unveiling of feeling-richness within the Word is the natural consequence of higher thinking development (I realize we have spoken of BD/OMA before as a more feeling-based approach, but also that this by itself is only appropriate for a more limited spectrum of modern souls, whereas for most of us it will only bear fruits when built on the foundation of philosophical-scientific thinking development). It is always our thinking that purifies the soul depths and, for those who have already developed verbal thinking through Western culture, it is the best tool for getting a grip (i.e. ice skates metaphor) within our volatile passions, desires, vanities, etc. That is, of course, what we are doing here and now on this forum. The protein picture above, for example, works so well as an anchoring symbol precisely because it is accompanied by the strings of letters reflecting the ideal form of Cleric's "I" which sequenced the words, when encountered by readers who have also done some work toward purifying mechanical thinking habits.

Are you noticing any difference between these perspectives on verbal thinking?

By the way, I doubt it's exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum, for the simple reason that languages are expression of folk souls. As such they comprise specific soul tendencies: an additional layer of "derailing influences", on top of the personal egoistic ones. This is in addition the the faculty of language to favor in our mind an associative, dreamy flow. If you say that pictorial symbols and linguistic symbols are equally derailing, you directly oppose everything I have so far proposed about language (that you previously described as "interesting").

When we speak about "language" at the depth of the folk souls, we can't isolate that to either verbal or pictorial. Language at that scale, where there are group soul tendencies, apply equally to verbal, pictorial, gestural, etc. So, yes, in that sense I am directly opposing what you are so far proposing about language. I think you are focusing too much on your thoughts about "derailment", rather than trying to intuit the depth structure of the soul constraints through which such derailment happens. It just seems to happen more with verbal forms because those are the forms we are most familiar with utilizing in our modern thinking.

Cleric wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2024 2:39 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2024 4:56 pm And so I find the cycle most estranged from our human scale to be the life and death cycle. I definitely can’t get any phenomenological sense of continuity of consciousness/memory beyond this one present life I’m living. I know, of course, that this is possible with enough spiritual development, but I am looking at the ‘natural’ human scale in our time, which I suppose I represent more or less. Up next, the daily cycle. I find it to be the most comfortable, the one in which continuity of consciousness is at the highest.

We need to be clear what 'natural' implies. If it is about at what scale adults in our age find their consciousness to be most predominantly treading, then yes, your observation is correct. An adult consciously programs mainly the daily routine. We say "I'll get a breakfast, then I have some emails to write, then I'll need to go to the bookstore and maybe grab a lunch with Suzy." If asked about the greater rhythms, like the Arabs the person may say "Tomorrow never comes" - it's of no use to make detailed plans for longer timespans, except in the broadest lines, because things are so uncertain nowadays. On the other hand, when asked about the smaller rhythms, they are too volatile, too uncontrollable. Even the conversation with Suzy was probably mostly small talk, piling up verbal depictions of daily happenings.

We need to keep in mind that this 'natural' scale can change with age and also can be different from person to person. For example, a small child lives much more in the moment-by-moment consciousness of play, without much concern about meals, clothing, etc. which are taken care of for him. The astronomy professor may be living all day in the mental images of the Big Bang and the billions of years of cosmic evolution. If it was not for his dear wife to make him meals and do his laundry, he would have to spare some processing time also for such trivialities.

So to repeat, as far as your observation is concerned, it is in place. Adult people feel that the 'inputs' to the game of existence mainly concern the navigation of the daily rhythm. However, when we speak of 'natural' rhythm in the cognitive evolutionary sense we should make a simple observation: even when we plan our daily routines we still do that at the ticking scale of our real-time thinking. This is what I attempted to illustrate here:



It all amounts to differentiating between the thinking process itself and what is being thought about. When we find it natural to live in thoughts about the daily rhythm it means exactly that - the scaled mental images of happenings at a daily scale constitute the language that we feel most fluent in.

As long as we are in ordinary consciousness and use our bodily instruments (brain) for support, whatever intuitive scale we project into, the sequencing of scaled mental images ticks at a certain rate which is comparable to the rate at which we speak/think. We can call this rate 'natural' because it is more or less the same regardless of whether we think about astronomical evolution, daily routines, or whizzing electrons. This is also why in concentration we begin by attuning to this rate. It is here that we can begin uniting with our deeper being, who projects thoughts into all scales.

It is interesting that when you came to the forum you argued for something else. You were drawn by the idea that time - as far as we experience it as thoughts about past and future (and the mental engineering of our daily rhythm certainly falls in here) - is in a sense unreality. Reality was to be found in the present moment. You have gone a long way since then, and gradually the intuitive curvatures of time along which the ever-present moment transforms (the Taylor series analogy) gained reality too. As said, it is completely true that most adults are predominantly conscious of curving the daily rhythm. The tighter rhythms have become completely habitual (semi-automatic), such as everyday movements, opening a door, washing, dressing up, talking, thinking, etc. But this 'natural' situation is in a way unnatural, it's kinda off center. This is reflected in secret ways in the fact that we have Earth with a tilted axis, that the heart is slightly offset from the center, and so on. In completely harmonic evolution, man would very gradually evolve from the natural ticking rate of mental images. He wouldn't have to make daily plans because the Angelic beings would instill them unto man until he could curve his daily rhythm in harmony with the planetary rhythms. Our evolutionary scenario, however, is such that there are competing 'parents', so to speak. Thus, simply letting go and expecting that we'll be cared over, doesn't work. Man curves his path of being in the presence of conflicting inspirations. Thus we become prematurely responsible for taking conscious control of curving our path at different scales, according to our understanding and ideal.

Curving our path at the daily rhythm (speaking in a completely secular sense), while being completely without control over our mental flow, is still an off-center situation. Now, we can do a lot of spiritual work on harmonizing our inner activity across scales even if we do not take the path that runs right through the core of thinking spiritual activity. We can do this by following the teachings of BD and OMA, for example. These give many advice that lie precisely in the organizing of the daily patterns, yet they are based on an understanding of the vertical resonances. It seems that those who are willing to tackle the mystery of man head-on (that is, to tread the path of Initiation), are still relatively few. This, of course, doesn't mean that the remaining greater part of humanity is doomed. Initiates can distill guidelines for living which are scaled thoughts from all levels tested in practice, and those who have at least a little faith can quickly see whether these guidelines lead their path for good. Those who want to walk such a path with greater awareness and understanding even before they have attempted some of the advice, can only do so by going through their thinking being. Then, such teachings are still of the greatest value because we should remember that all techniques for living at different scales do not simply come by automatically in meditation. They have all been distilled by Initiates who faced many trials in life and at the price of many difficulties, found ways to overcome the obstacles. The great thing about going through the path of cognitive development is that when we read about these living techniques we often quickly see why and how they can be effective.

With all that said, as living beings here on Earth, we are responsible for having a conscious approach to all rhythm scales of our flow. This doesn't mean that we should or can determine them single-handedly. Prayer is always the way to seek resonance with the 'parents' that we have chosen. As such, it is natural that we need to organize our daily rhythms, and this may even take a lot of our processing time. I mean that in the sense that we shouldn't imagine we can focus entirely on our real-time thinking and expect that everything else will fall into place by itself. But as far as reaching toward the true stages of higher consciousness, in our meditations we should always first find the ticking rate at which all our thinking ticks and then fully synchronize with that rate. It is from within this kernel that gradually the inner nature of the higher rhythms is grown into. Just because we think comfortably about higher scale rhythms (such as the daily), doesn't mean that our spiritual being lives natively at that scale. Instead, our intellectual being lives in the scaled mental images of greater timespans, while the thinking process that does the thinking at its native ticking rate still remains somewhat instinctive. To make this explicit, thinking all day God, God, God... - the infinite curvature there could be - doesn't change the fact that the pronunciation of these thoughts still happens at our ordinary intellectual rate. In this extreme case, it is easy to see that one practically loses all means to know the Spirit that manifests in the thinking at the intellectual rate. In other words, reaching a higher state of being is not the same as thinking primarily of the greatest rhythms, for ex., Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc. For this reason. To find our true being we can only do by closing the distance at our ordinary thinking ticking rate, through concentration in the seemingly simplest thoughts. I think it could be better - at least in the start - that these thoughts are not scaled images of other rhythms but keep us right in the real-time flow - that is, we need to concentrate on the thought directly in its imaginative content in the here and now.

Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 9:45 pm I agree. The verbal forms are not “intrinsically” associative and derailing. They are associative and derailing only in their predominant use in our epoch. And they can be redeemed through spiritual development.

Your recollection is correct, Cleric never mentioned an additional cycle, that’s only my proposition. However the protein metaphor does evoque that the primary structure - the linguistic form in its sequential, most sensory transliteration - flattens out the original meaning. It takes apart the density of meaning and puts it in diluted sequences. These linguistic sequences are smeared out in spacetime and follow their primary-structure specific modular architecture. It’s a modular encoding.

What I wrote above:

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.


is actually another way to describe the same thing as the protein metaphor. Strangely, you cut off of Cleric's quote precisely the sentence where the pictorial symbol was mentioned and represented. But even in the amputated quote: do you see, in the protein metaphor, that the pictorial symbol is one level up closer to the Word, compared to the word symbol?

This makes it clear from one more angle that it cannot bear the same derailing influences as the verbal symbol, as you argue. Do you see it?

...

Beyond that, what I invite you to notice is that there is no contradiction between what I wrote and anything Cleric has written about language.

As long as the texts on which LLMs have been trained are produced by thinking beings, it is natural that the weightings of words should reflect something of the ideal relations

It is true that much of the training data may come from Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and FHM, but it is also trained on the Bible and all religious and philosophical literature (including anthroposophical) so it's natural that the statistics may have distilled some of the higher-order linguistic centers (even if only their flattened projections)

So I guess it's a question of even finer distinction and differentiation. For example, it feels to me that one can still enter some form of an Imaginative state even without the experience of tone. This is obviously true in a visionary state. What one cannot know, however, is Inspirative cognition, the inner life of the spiritual world. That's why Steiner calls Inspiration inner hearing. This is the Music of the Spheres. Of course, we are not speaking about perceptual sound but about the fine 'vibrations' of meaning within which our soul lives. What we called sound ether is the more perceptual counterpart of this. In the tone of inner activity we can more intimately comprehend how the inner life of the Cosmos is superimposed.

So when you say "Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards." I'm inclined to say that we can do that to some extent even without verbal anchors but we cannot do it unless our soul lives, even if still instinctively, in the Inspirative world of ideal tone. This is the decisive factor. If we have that, we'll find a way to express that musicality even with hand gestures, even if with greater difficulty and with a lesser chance of conveying the deeper experiences to another soul. Experiencing our spiritual activity in the inner voice brings us closer to consciousness of the Inspirative world, yet we should remember that the latter instills the Logoic order to all ethers.

It doesn’t help that you keep repeating that thinking is the primary way, and that language is not intrinsically derailing. I agree with that, you have repeated that dozen times by now. Language is a code, and can be decoded - once again from the side of thinking and from the side of feeling, and yes, this comes from spiritual development of thinking activity, and, in parallel, from cultivation of the beauty and meaningfulness of sound and tone in language, because, as Cleric just said "we should remember that all techniques for living at different scales do not simply come by automatically in meditation". So the feeling side is still very useful to address, through cultivation of sound and tone in language.

Federica wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 4:58 am 2. I precisely show you how the two are fully compatible, and how your contention - word-symbols and pictorial symbols hold the same associative/derailing potential - is plain incompatible with the protein metaphor, where pictorial symbols are found one level up closer to the Logos, the Word, compared to world-symbols. I ask you: “Can you see it?” I ask you: “Do you see that your contention is incompatible with Clerics illustration?”

Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jan 01, 2025 9:45 pm I agree. The verbal forms are not “intrinsically” associative and derailing. They are associative and derailing only in their predominant use in our epoch. And they can be redeemed through spiritual development.

Your recollection is correct, Cleric never mentioned an additional cycle, that’s only my proposition. However the protein metaphor does evoque that the primary structure - the linguistic form in its sequential, most sensory transliteration - flattens out the original meaning. It takes apart the density of meaning and puts it in diluted sequences. These linguistic sequences are smeared out in spacetime and follow their primary-structure specific modular architecture. It’s a modular encoding.

What I wrote above:

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.


is actually another way to describe the same thing as the protein metaphor. Strangely, you cut off of Cleric's quote precisely the sentence where the pictorial symbol was mentioned and represented. But even in the amputated quote: do you see, in the protein metaphor, that the pictorial symbol is one level up closer to the Word, compared to the word symbol?

This makes it clear from one more angle that it cannot bear the same derailing influences as the verbal symbol, as you argue. Do you see it?

Now this shouldn't make us think that linguistic thinking was an evolutionary mistake. For our evolutionary scenario it was completely necessary. And it is only through the hierarchical structure of linguistic cognition that we can gradually move towards the even deeper spiritual fractal-levels of reality. In that sense, we haven't yet even utilized the full significance of the spoken word.

So it's not about simply abandoning verbal thinking but uniting its hierarchical structure of meaning with pictorial thinking...

Another important distinction to make is that the meaning is not confined to the word. This is relatively easy to grasp through the fact that we can say 'table' or we can imagine a table. In both cases we live in the same meaning. It's more challenging with higher order concepts like, say, 'generosity'. We don't have a direct sensory perception that corresponds to generosity, like we have for a table. To make a picture of it we have to be mobile, we have to imagine, for example, a whole scene - a person that gives something with best intentions to others. It is clear that some insight is needed here. If the purely sensory layer of this scene is presented to someone else, they may not grasp that it is the quality of generosity that is portrayed. Thus, even if non-verbally, we still need the concept of generosity. For this reason language shouldn't be despised, as it allows us to move through this hierarchy of concepts. Only through this depth of intuition we can proceed from the flat sensory pictorial thinking towards Imagination.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 6:35 pm Here are some more thoughts just to make the relation of my other responses to the above more explicit. We should be clear that Cleric never says "the pictorial symbolis one level up closer to the Word", as if that symbol hangs in isolation from the entire meaningful context, explicated in word-symbols, in which it was placed. What the pictorial symbol does is simply give us a way to more easily live into the implicit depth of the word-symbols which are already there and are absolutely necessary for projecting the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structures onto the objective perceptual plane.

Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 3:26 pm if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized. For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent. It is our knowing of the connection between the lamp and illumination that fills our intuitive context. From this standpoint we can very slowly try to feel how our words crystalize as symbols of precisely this intuition filling our whole conscious atmosphere. Of course, the actual thinking words we hear only in the act of truly speaking them, yet we may be surprised how much we already intuitively know even before that.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 6:35 pm This points to something we have both been ignoring to some extent, which is that we can't neatly separate "language" into words, pictures, etc. as if they are all independent of one another, and we sometimes use one and sometimes use the other. Even when we speak of "mental images", in the broad sense this means imaginative replicas of any bodily experience, whether visual, audial, tactile, etc. These are always overlapping to some extent - we shouldn't imagine that when we think in pictures about our future plans, for example, that the inner voice is completely absent, only that it has receded out of focus. If we are sensitive enough, we can still sense the reverberations of this inner voice spectrum within the pictures as well.

Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2025 10:19 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 6:35 pm Here are some more thoughts just to make the relation of my other responses to the above more explicit. We should be clear that Cleric never says "the pictorial symbolis one level up closer to the Word", as if that symbol hangs in isolation from the entire meaningful context, explicated in word-symbols, in which it was placed. What the pictorial symbol does is simply give us a way to more easily live into the implicit depth of the word-symbols which are already there and are absolutely necessary for projecting the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structures onto the objective perceptual plane.

Clearly, your "as if" is only your "as if". I never said or implied that pictorial symbols hang in isolation. That they don't hang in isolation is implied in the protein metaphor, as well as in the elephant one. And what they do is not to simply give us an easy way to live in the depth of word-symbols. Words are way easier. Pictorial symbols are a level of depth upstream the word-symbols. They are the bonding elements of the "secondary structure" of meaning. When we live in pictorial symbols, the words are not already there. Consider this description of how the pictorial symbols are upstream the word-symbols, which later crystallize from pictorial scenes:

Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 3:26 pm if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized. For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent. It is our knowing of the connection between the lamp and illumination that fills our intuitive context. From this standpoint we can very slowly try to feel how our words crystalize as symbols of precisely this intuition filling our whole conscious atmosphere. Of course, the actual thinking words we hear only in the act of truly speaking them, yet we may be surprised how much we already intuitively know even before that.

This is an example, it doesn't cover all cases, but surely illustrates how the more volumetric, condensed pictorial flow precedes the word flow, though we are not used to sense it. BTW, in the example, we can also hint at the tertiary structure of meaning. Another thing that appears is that the word symbols are necessary only at times, when conceptual hierarchy is required by the specific thought concatenation we want to express (but note that even the concept of generosity can be expressed nonverbally). On the contrary, the imaginative flow is always there, and always necessary, though not always conscious. Obviously, what you say that articulated, layered, abstract communications often require verbal encoding is true. Still, we don't always need to operate a full descent into horizontal, flattened sequencing. Verbal encoding is the most sense-drenched projection of meaning onto the sensory plane. Pictorial symbols are also sensory, but lack the auditory aspect. Most importantly, they lack the combinatory character of alphabetic language (that only sound and tone can redeem). This combinatory aspect of alphabet language contains an additional threat for the intellect, on top of the personal soul constraints. This is something you don't seem to have noticed in what I proposed: surely the personal soul constraints affect both pictorial and verbal thinking, however verbal thinking adds an extra challenge, in that it locks thought into sensations twice as strongly.

You ask for a phenomenological recap. We can use the example of illumination in the quote above. We first have the meaningful insight. This can even be without imaginative element (tertiary structure). If one is less sensitive, one senses it once it has become imaginative: a pictorial scene or frame is inwardly perceived. This visual-only symbol is "like a hydrogen bond", as Cleric said. We can experience how it condenses in itself, without expressing them, a multiplicity of potential word-symbols. Notice: the exact words could be many, arranged in various ways. The pictorial symbol structures that potential in a concisely meaningful volumetry. It has an extra inner-dimension, and one less outer dimension, compared to the various discursive word-symbol sequences that could unfold from it. As you say, words are often necessary to express complex ideas, but we should be clear there is a price to pay for this further descent into the encoding/senses. Verbal is indeed more intelligible than pictorial symbols, more versatile, more fitting the complexity of sequential reasoning, but it is also - when taken as a mere thought expression tool - more diluted in spacetime, more discursive, more dialectic, more flat, more dead. All this is a first-person experience. One antidote to these risks is to become more sensitive and conscious of the inner volumetry at the level of the imaginative symbol/flow upstream the flow of words.
And so yes: when we do that, we are closer to the Word, we are in imaginative flow, rather than in discursive flow. In the protein metaphor, we are one level up closer to the one meaning of the protein.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 6:35 pm This points to something we have both been ignoring to some extent, which is that we can't neatly separate "language" into words, pictures, etc. as if they are all independent of one another, and we sometimes use one and sometimes use the other. Even when we speak of "mental images", in the broad sense this means imaginative replicas of any bodily experience, whether visual, audial, tactile, etc. These are always overlapping to some extent - we shouldn't imagine that when we think in pictures about our future plans, for example, that the inner voice is completely absent, only that it has receded out of focus. If we are sensitive enough, we can still sense the reverberations of this inner voice spectrum within the pictures as well.

As I said, the metaphors I used imply the non separateness. But I don't agree that the inner voice is always present. Surely you will say I am not sensitive enough to hear it. But what if the sensitivity is about not allowing the verbal encoding to happen? Letting it happen is clearly the path of non resistance. Moreover, we know from experience that words are not always a necessity: even better than the case when a word escapes us, we can think that there are innumerable worded ways to express a future plan, as potential crystallizations of the pictures/imaginative flow. A whole potential of expressions is available - not that we are forced to one single inner voice path that is immanent in the pictures. BTW, this fact of experience is another way to realize there may be other factors that could make the word sequence crystallize in a form rather than another, as an extra element of distortion, beyond the personal soul factors.

I began by referencing a conversation that Simon was recently involved in convened by Tim Adalin (Voicecraft about the question “Is the earth enough?”). I invited Simon to share any lingering ideas or questions from those conversations. Simon reflects that the second episode was packed with “a lot of broad frameworks for thinking about the world,” and by the end of it he was quite full, trying to feel into what still seemed relevant for him. He explains that he is drawn to the question of the direct experiencing of concepts such as the noosphere or “earth’s consciousness.” If the universe is alive and everything has an interior, how might we communicate with these beings?

Simon then introduces the topic of nonphysical astral beings by talking about Carl Hayden Smith, who is involved in “DMTx” explorations, an extended DMT experience that Simon describes as “super sci-fi” yet “very, very real.” He calls it “a form of space travel” that is totally different from the materialist framework. He finds it exciting that, rather than building computer interfaces, people are “installing psychotechnological interfaces or energetic interfaces” for human consciousness to communicate with what some esoteric traditions call astral beings.

Thus, a human being who is not careful with regard to this may even see thousands and thousands of pictures from the Akasha Chronicle; yet, even so, if he does not apply the test as to whether or not these pictures are obliterated through an absolutely active sight, these Akasha pictures, in that case—no matter how many facts they may reveal—can be looked upon only as pictures of man's own inner life. It might happen, for instance—I repeat, it might happen—that someone who sees nothing more than his own interior, projected in very dramatic pictures, imagines these to be events, let us say, which extend over the entire Atlantean world, through whole generations of humanity. ... And, all the while—no matter how seemingly objective—this might, under certain circumstances, be merely a projection of his own inward being.

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 12:27 pm But in a nutshell, It seems to me that this is at the core of the debate here. We need verbal thinking because we can better find our "I"-force there which experiences itself in the modulation of tone, which is more intimate than light and warmth. But from then on, we can use that "I"-force to modulate also the pictorial aspects. Then, these aspects are clearly experienced as being radiated and supported through the same "I"-force through which we radiate speech.