Philosophical Speculations

I'll have questions of clarification regarding the first paragraph before going on. Hopefully later today, I can get back here. Thanks.

"In the experience of this willed movement of attentional activity, there is pure knowing of (mostly) undifferentiated content."

Are you talking about when my eyes are closed? When I open, I wouldn't necessarily call my experience mostly undifferentiated, but I just need to know your meaing of that term in this context. Also, I want to know your meaning of 'knowing of'. I don't want to assume you mean a kind of knowing that would indicate deep knowledge about, even at intuitive level. And I know that sometimes 'knowing' is used in a sense to mean that I am aware of the 'suchness' of an object or event in my experience.

"If we closed our eyes and didn't focus on any particular object or image, but simply used the 'space' as anchor points for the experience, then we lived entirely in the movement of attentional activity and no questions arose about the meaning of this activity."

While I can agree fully that I wasn't intellectually pondering the meaning of the activity, I have to admit that I was continually aware of this activity as intricately related to intuitive questions and expectations guiding it. But, yes, no questions arose in the abstract sense of me interrupting the activity to reflect upon it in that way.

"In a sense, anything we could ask about the meaning of this experience would be immediately explained by the experience itself."

This is too wide open for me to claim I really know what you mean.

Maybe you describing a few questions you could ask that would be immediately explained.

Thanks

findingblanks wrote: ↑Tue Sep 17, 2024 9:59 pm "In the experience of this willed movement of attentional activity, there is pure knowing of (mostly) undifferentiated content."

Are you talking about when my eyes are closed? When I open, I wouldn't necessarily call my experience mostly undifferentiated, but I just need to know your meaing of that term in this context. Also, I want to know your meaning of 'knowing of'. I don't want to assume you mean a kind of knowing that would indicate deep knowledge about, even at intuitive level. And I know that sometimes 'knowing' is used in a sense to mean that I am aware of the 'suchness' of an object or event in my experience.

"If we closed our eyes and didn't focus on any particular object or image, but simply used the 'space' as anchor points for the experience, then we lived entirely in the movement of attentional activity and no questions arose about the meaning of this activity."

While I can agree fully that I wasn't intellectually pondering the meaning of the activity, I have to admit that I was continually aware of this activity as intricately related to intuitive questions and expectations guiding it. But, yes, no questions arose in the abstract sense of me interrupting the activity to reflect upon it in that way.

"In a sense, anything we could ask about the meaning of this experience would be immediately explained by the experience itself."

This is too wide open for me to claim I really know what you mean.

Maybe you describing a few questions you could ask that would be immediately explained.

Thanks

Yes, with the eyes closed or in a dark room, focused entirely within the inner gestures that move the attentional activity. This would be possible to do with eyes open but much more difficult due to habitual 'grasping' tendencies baked into our visual sense, as it were.

We can approach the meaning of 'knowing' in this context by thinking about the from the OP again. We wrote it with certain ideas and intimate feelings, put it in an envelope, and sealed it. When our gaze glances over the , it acts as a rich symbol that anchors everything that we have expressed there. We know the contents of the because we can resonate with the intuitive activity, weaving within certain meaning, that went into forming those contents. Someone else who was staring at the sealed envelope would be ignorant of its content, no matter how much he analyzed its outer properties.

Likewise, when we are concentrated within the inner gestures of the attentional movements, we are weaving within the meaning of 'directing my ray of attention' and are perfectly resonant with that meaning. Granted, there is other implicit meaning in the background, like 'doing this exercise as a part of a phenomenological inquiry', but we have managed to find a resonant point of contact within all this implicit meaning where the flow of experience is made sensible entirely through our attentional activity. We know this resonant point unlike we know any other perceptual content - for most of the latter, we start out like the person staring at the sealed envelope who didn't write it. (of course, there is variability of 'resonance' within the perceptual content and that is something we can explore later).

The questions that are immediately answered are typical ones that we may ask of other perceptual content - where did this come from, why is it here, what does it mean, and similar ones. Such questions don't even occur in the act of moving attention and experiencing the movement because they are immediately elucidated by the experience itself. The meaning of the act is what we projected into it, it came from our willed intent, it is there because of that intent, etc. We could compare this to, let's say, my coffee cup on the table. At first, I may feel like the coffee cup is here because I want coffee, it means a 'receptacle for liquids to imbibe', it came from various natural and industrial processes, etc. We can always speak abstractly like that about perceptual content and claim we have "knowledge" of it, but if we went through the attentional movement exercise, we clearly sense the difference between the 'knowing' of one and the other. The perceptual experience of the latter (I'm using 'perceptual' to mean anything we can think about or remember) was known in a much more intimate and direct way since it was united with our real-time activity.

Thank you.

"Granted, there is other implicit meaning in the background, like 'doing this exercise as a part of a phenomenological inquiry',but we have managed to find a resonant point of contact within all this implicit meaning where the flow of experience is made sensible entirely through our attentional activity."

I think that I place much more significance and attention (phenomenologically and intellectually) on the active role of implicit meaning than most of my friends in these attentionally gymnastic context. I say that not to swerve the conversation but just as a trail-mark for this conversation.

I feel comfortable saying that "I" am bringing about the activity of the exercise; however, by that I do not mean that in doing the exercise I am having a spiritual understanding of the nature of "I" or any type of penetrating transformative grasping of its nature. It would be easy for me to transpose other experiences and assumptions into this spot of the exercise and, then, 'feel' a deep significance here. But I just want to be very clear that when I say that it is obvious that "I" am guiding the attentional activity this is a shorthand that captures the distinction between what feels to be the one 'spot' in which impulses are created by 'me' versus how all other impulses-perceptions arise and fade in 'my' experience. It's always 'my' experience. The 'spot' I can press down upon is what we might be calling attentional activity. I wouldn't be able to call this activity 'free' in the sense of having been able to do something else; however, I can call it 'free' as in the direct knowing that it will not come about without a distinct intentional flow that I call 'mine'.

Please don't think that this is an intellectual exploration for me. The phenomenology of doing the exercise is such that I fully grasp why people might need to express it differently, and I'm not sensing that it is the words and phrases that matter. So, for all intents and purposes, I'm ready to proceed. I can go back to the comment you made that had the first couple stages.

In terms of meta-comments at this point, the only one that I think might be more than a trailmarker is the following; As you say, there is a 'knowing' experience taking place throughout the exercise. The intellect would force us to 'unpack' what is 'in' this knowing as if it is composed of bits of dead concepts all stacked tightly next to each other. I know you don't share that view! But I am forced to use language here, so even my best efforts will somewhat imply the wrong thing. For me that 'knowing' attentional flow is constituted by many elements (that word is a great example of the linguistic hurdle here), one of which is the way in which the very capacity to do the exercise is grounded in a very specific mode of abstracted (non-participated) consciousness that generated and contains very specific concepts (implicit and explicit) and felt assumptions about reality. By 'grounded' I do NOT mean that the exercise is 'stuck' or an instance of that other modality. Not at all. The exercise is alive and using that modality as fuel, breaking it down. The knowing moving into and through this exercise involves the direct sense of moving from that modality into this modality and it involves an acute knowing of the way in which this modality (the unfolding experience of the exercise) is only being 'discovered' via this present generation. It is being generated and thereby discovered. This implicit yet direct knowing (which is just one 'thread' of the attention activity of the exercise) contains my personal history of having formerly identified this 'discovery' as being a 'prior' and more 'basic' experience upon which the 'later' and more intellectual modality is built. In other words, I used to have this 'same' experience and unknowingly failed to grasp the way in which other implicit meanings were shaping it so that it seemed obvious to me that I was experiencing a sort of 'ground floor' upon which all other cognitive forms depend. Having slammed into the errors of this assumption, my experience now when I do such exercises is that the knowing attentional (intentional!) activity not only relies on the prior non-participative elements, it is generating a new space entirely, a space that instances 'final-participation'.

So that is just background context regarding myself. In terms of the experience of doing the exercise, it seems to me we are enough on the same page to continue.

..................................... [ after writing the below comments, i realize this is a big chunk. I have no issue with you if you read the first part and then ask me to pause before I do the second part of the exercise. I'll check in here before I carve out 15 miutes to do it later today, hopefully ]

The next step you gave was:

"If we are pretty much on the same page with that, then we can gradually start to reintroduce perceptual content while steering clear of any habitual assumptions. (although I think what we are doing coincides with the core movements of Steiner's early work, we can leave those works aside for now and simply conduct an independent phenomenology/epistemology). As we move forward, we are trying to focus only on what we can experience of the relation between attentional activity and perceptual content while leaving aside all extraneous assumptions. In other words, the conclusions we reach about this experience should be invariant of any specific conception of 'what reality is', 'how it works', 'the relation between subject and object', etc. For example, if we experience certain colors or sounds, we can report on this fact and it remains true regardless of whether we are awake, dreaming, on a psychedelic trip, etc. We should try to apply that also to inner perceptual states of desires, feelings, thoughts, etc."

I'll take 15 minutes later today to dive into this step. However, let me think outloud before I do and maybe you'll have time to respond before I dive in.

This idea of 'reintroducing' is very interesting, especially in the context of my experience that the 'perceptual' elements that exist in my day-to-day experience are not whatever I will be experiencing in the experiential modality of this exercise. I instantly intuit a possible obstacle of accidentally smuggling in implicit assumptions if I at all equate the experiencing of 'the familiar world' with whatever I am generating in this space. By 'smuggling in' I don't mean that the resulting experience wouldn't be intense and very unusual and even very helpful and deep. No, I'm not worried that I will simply reintroduce the same experience. It's the opposite. It would be not noticing how the 'smuggling in' contributes to what is so unique about the resulting experience. This was my prior experience after years of working (via the early texts) with a version of the 'picture' born from working intentionally within epistemology.

I'm about to write a pargaraph about 'early human', but, don't worry, not because I think you are introducing that line of thought. We know that the early humans did not experience sense-perceptions and then add spiritual meaning to them. So, for them, there would be no such thing as 'stripping' cognition from sensory experience. The sensory experience participated the meaning directly as a unity. We western dolts don't see how our concepts have created the false impression that our percepts can be divided from what we think about them; we fail (not us!) to see that this very sense of empty percepts IS an expression of the idolatry operating in the generation of our experiences. In other words, the 'obviousness' we experience that percepts just float around us until we give them meaning is generated by the very ("Ahrimanic", I would say) Ideas that these percepts are expressing.

My 'familiar world' experience is a mix of highly enlivened and highly deadened experiencings (from seeing my daughter's slight frown to glancing at a pipe in the ceiling). This exercise now shifts me into a space I am now generating by enacting a new kind of attentional activity. The knowing flow of this experiencing includes all that I said above along with much else; deep curiosity, extreme sensitivity to the 'texture' of this space, direct awareness of increased intentional flowing, etc.,

So, now, I am about to 'reintroduce' what we are calling 'perceptual content.' You know me I don't want the reintroducing this 'perceptual content' to cause me to forget that in this new space that I am generating, everything is post-'familiar world' not pre. I am not back at a more basic or earlier or primal stage in the flow of this exercise. But I can feel that it would be very easy for me to assume 'something' like that by the very act of even just tacitly assuming that I am now observing the familiar world 'more clearly' or more 'accurately'. I'm NOT saying that is what you are suggesting. I'm sharing implicit aspects of the experiencing as I go through this. I love this stuff.

"As we move forward, we are trying to focus only on what we can experience of the relation between attentional activity and perceptual content while leaving aside all extraneous assumptions. In other words, the conclusions we reach about this experience should be invariant of any specific conception of 'what reality is', 'how it works', 'the relation between subject and object'..."

I am not going to do this stage until later today when I can give it the right amount of time. This 'leaving aside of all extraneous assumptions' is wonderful. However, for me, much more tricky than it sounds. I already know what it is like to do this exercise (or variants) and find myself experiencing a 'picture' of my environment (including inner) in which I am much more in touch with the mystery infused into its very fabric. That experience is of course hard to describe in words, but I can say that when I am in it, the boats on the ocean outside my office window are no longer 'boats on the ocean outside my office window'. There is still an implicit contact with them as that, but now they are mysteries that I could, if I chose to, become curious about in new ways. Same goes for the 'water' they 'float' upon. All aspects of the experiencing could become a focus of direct attention and the mystery of unknowing along with the desire to understand would be guiding each step. That is an experience I cherish and know fairly well.

There is a chance I wil be regenerating that kind of experiencing as I dive into this next step of slowly reintroducing perceptual elements without any assumptions. However, there is a chance not. All I can do is dive in. I'll let you know when I do and what it was like. Thanks again.

Thanks!

Or, in other words, the experiencing that is this exercise is the generating of a final-participation kind of space in which a new kind of percept is produced and engaged with by a new kind of attentional activity. This is in contrast to the idea that we are talking about applying a new attentional activity to the former perceptual pole.

By the way, I like 'attentional activity' over 'thinking' because it allows for the way in which the activity itself is a unity of what the intellect would say is thinking, feeling, and willing. So, if I use that term in our conversations, I want it to carry forward this meaning. I say this realizing that just saying 'thinking' should also imply the feeling and willing aspect as well. But sometimes, even in Anthro circles, 'thinking' is used in contrast to feeling and willingl. So 'attentional activity' allows for those periods that lean more towards the observational pole as well as those that lean towards the cognitive pole.

By the way, I realized that I will just wait until you have a chance to respond before I do the next step. I am in no rush, fyi.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2024 5:56 pm Or, in other words, the experiencing that is this exercise is the generating of a final-participation kind of space in which a new kind of percept is produced and engaged with by a new kind of attentional activity. This is in contrast to the idea that we are talking about applying a new attentional activity to the former perceptual pole.

By the way, I like 'attentional activity' over 'thinking' because it allows for the way in which the activity itself is a unity of what the intellect would say is thinking, feeling, and willing. So, if I use that term in our conversations, I want it to carry forward this meaning. I say this realizing that just saying 'thinking' should also imply the feeling and willing aspect as well. But sometimes, even in Anthro circles, 'thinking' is used in contrast to feeling and willingl. So 'attentional activity' allows for those periods that lean more towards the observational pole as well as those that lean towards the cognitive pole.

By the way, I realized that I will just wait until you have a chance to respond before I do the next step. I am in no rush, fyi.

Thanks Jeff for the last two comments providing some of the background context of how you are approaching these exercises. I can certainly tell that it is not just intellectual analysis but artistic descriptions of your first-person inner experiences. Although I may be taking more of the "teacher" function in this particular thread, I am also enthusiastic about receiving this feedback from you so that I can explore the relevant inner experiences from new and diverse angles. It is always a continual process of learning through artistically explicating intuitions in conceptual form and receiving feedback.

This idea of 'reintroducing' is very interesting, especially in the context of my experience that the 'perceptual' elements that exist in my day-to-day experience are not whatever I will be experiencing in the experiential modality of this exercise. I instantly intuit a possible obstacle of accidentally smuggling in implicit assumptions if I at all equate the experiencing of 'the familiar world' with whatever I am generating in this space. By 'smuggling in' I don't mean that the resulting experience wouldn't be intense and very unusual and even very helpful and deep. No, I'm not worried that I will simply reintroduce the same experience. It's the opposite. It would be not noticing how the 'smuggling in' contributes to what is so unique about the resulting experience. This was my prior experience after years of working (via the early texts) with a version of the 'picture' born from working intentionally within epistemology.
...
So, now, I am about to 'reintroduce' what we are calling 'perceptual content.' You know me I don't want the reintroducing this 'perceptual content' to cause me to forget that in this new space that I am generating, everything is post-'familiar world' not pre. I am not back at a more basic or earlier or primal stage in the flow of this exercise. But I can feel that it would be very easy for me to assume 'something' like that by the very act of even just tacitly assuming that I am now observing the familiar world 'more clearly' or more 'accurately'. I'm NOT saying that is what you are suggesting. I'm sharing implicit aspects of the experiencing as I go through this. I love this stuff.

Right, I think we are on the same page here. For ex., we can look at the perceptual content of 2+2=4. This reflects the familiar intuition that a twofoldness, a pair of apples for ex., plus another twofoldness, a pair of oranges, will comprise a fourfoldness of fruits. Yet we can also perceive it at a higher level of integration, as holistic perceptual content reflecting the brand new intuition of our mental operation, what we did inwardly to relate the two twofoldness together. So, in that sense, we are reintroducing the perceptual content at a more integrated level since we are investigating it in relation to our attentional activity. Our attentional activity in relation to various domains of perceptual content has become the new perceptual content against which we can form new intuitions that would never arise otherwise. This integrated perceptual content is not something we are familiar with from ordinary experience, since we couldn't function too well when navigating the sensory world while remaining conscious of it. It is only possible when we reach the starting point of experiencing attentional activity and try to effortfully resist habitual thinking tendencies that threaten to collapse the new perceptual content into the past familiar content, i.e. the content of our participatory attentional relations with perceptions into mere informational descriptions of some objective and independent perceptions (like the memory of four fruits 'out there').

I will add one more thing about the starting point of experiencing attentional activity. We can think about its importance by considering why most people feel, when investigating a tree for ex., that the meaningful contents of knowledge about the tree is not the 'tree itself'. Rather they feel the meaning of their thoughts about the tree are representations or symbols for some other object that is 'the tree' (not the perceptual content, but something else behind or beyond that content). That is precisely because the meaningful experience of the tree is not the same as the meaningful experience of our attentional activity. With the latter, there can be no confusion that the content of our knowledge about attentional activity is merely representative of some 'attentional activity itself'. Similarly, our thoughts about the meaningful intuition of the mental operation 2+2=4 are not experienced as representing some 'operation itself', but they are inextricably interwoven with the operation. So this starting point is critical for accustoming our attentional activity to feeling the thoughts that stir from its movements against perceptual content are not representative of some other reality, but are the reality they are exploring and are constrained by. This helps us gradually decondition from the habitual tendency to assume thoughts about perceptual experience are merely representative. 

To be clear, in my view, almost all of the value comes from the inner journey itself. We are not aiming at reaching a last concluding sentence in the last post on the last page of this thread which will suddenly illuminate "the nature of cognitive reality" for us. There is no strict linear progression of facts and reasoning that will lead to such an illumination. All too often people approach the inner aesthetic epistemology in this way. Fortunately, I think you and I already highly value the process of finding new decrees of freedom within our spiritual activity and potentially sensitizing the latter to more integrated domains of participatory meaning, without expecting some linear presentation of arguments that will elucidate everything for us. But that is not to say we don't reach definite understanding and developmental goals along the way. What was previously implicit meaning of our attentionally active states of being becomes more explicit insights into how those states unfold. We certainly do reach these goals and that is how we will also know that we aren't just doing mental gymnastics for entertainment or curiosity but also for moving toward higher spiritual ideals.

Yeah, it takes a lot for me to think that somebody is only doing mental gymnastics. Even folks who are caught up in analytical models that I don't care for at all, I feel that they gain depth by concentrating their attention and trying to work through thoughts and experience carefully.

That said, in this context, we are very much wanting to keep our feet on the ground just as much as formulate the idea and practices.

You have started with a fun and direct exercise. That's my style. It's very different if somebody starts in the linear way that you mentioned:

"We are not aiming at reaching a last concluding sentence in the last post on the last page of this thread which will suddenly illuminate "the nature of cognitive reality" for us. There is no strict linear progression of facts and reasoning that will lead to such an illumination. All too often people approach the inner aesthetic epistemology in this way."

And you mention how some people try to work from a "linear presentation of arguments that will elucidate everything for us."

Yes, I take issue with approaches that begin by telling us what we must 'first' experience before we can grasp "XYZ" in order to know for sure that "BINGO". I especially take issue with such approaches if they posit steps which are supposedly obvious or taken for granted that aren't so.

Here, in this context, it is a breath of fresh air because the point is to do the exercise you mention and you're telling me that I first have to have some other concept in mind before I can really begin to understand my experience. You're certainly not telling me about what happens before I become conscious of my experience.

I'm ready to be guided through your next step.

Alright, so we observed the way we move our focus through the forms in our visual field. Then we ‘zoomed out’ from any particular form and tried to expand our focus and include as much as possible of our peripheral vision as well, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Then we zoomed even further out while trying to include all other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth, and so on. Then we also included our emotional state and the awareness that we’re doing this particular exercise. This gives us a sense for the totality of perceptual content, as a kind of superposition of that content, i.e. any experience that we can possibly direct our attention toward. Another mini-exercise we can do for sensitivity is as follows:





Reaching out with your hands in front of you and your index fingers pointed up. Put your fingers close together and focus your sight at the point in between the fingers. Then slowly try moving your straightened arms away from each other, tracing half circles going in the opposite directions. As you distance your fingers, try to keep them both in sight but without moving your eyes and jumping from one finger to the other. Of course, it is optically impossible to have both fingers in focus as they get further and further away, so the gaze should be straight ahead while you remain keenly aware of the whole periphery. At the same time, avoid allowing your gaze to be attracted to either one of the fingers. The half-arcs should continue widening until we can't sense our hands in the periphery anymore.

The result of this exercise is that we end up in a state where we have expanded our visual field such that we encompass its whole circumference and we're not focused on any perceptual object in particular. The exercise can be extended further by widening our attention of the other senses as well – try to encompass the whole auditory field, your kinesthetic bodily sensations, your intellectual thoughts, your emotions, etc. Our attentional activity is now focused in supporting this holistic state. We shouldn't try to control the perceptions or try to feel them clearly. It's natural that the field of perceptions should feel blurry, and it is precisely that which allows us to find a point of concentration that is not attached to any particular perception but is nevertheless anchored within their holistic meaning.

As we know, this perceptual content is only one pole of our meaningful experience. The other pole is the attentional activity itself, through which meaning is 'incarnated' into perceptual content. Again, we want to put aside any speculations on whether this "actually happens", "always happens", etc., i.e. specific conceptions about the relation of attentional activity and perceptual content, and simply observe the invariant fact that it certainly does happen in various circumstances. One such example is the Arabic script that we discussed before but we can think of countless similar examples. Practically any time we are learning to conduct our attentional activity in new ways within the flow of perceptual experience, we need to incarnate new intuitions to meet the perceptual content.

To give the foundational experience of our attentional activity more depth, we can try 'zooming' in from our total knowing context. Try for a moment to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout your life. Think about the different periods of your life and how each has contributed to what you are now. Think about all the physical and mental skills that have been developed, all that has been read, seen, and learned. We should feel this only in a nebulous way, as background potential. Now let’s encompass the room we’re in with our sight. Notice how, of the innumerable things that we know within the background potential, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, of all the places we have been, the knowing that we now experience has a completely specific timbre - we recognize it as we recognize the voice of a friend. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms. Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition and we now have a sense of what the object is.

Hopefully, we now have some basic inner sensitivity and orientation for the two poles of our knowing experience and their rhythmic interaction. These 'thought-asanas' should begin shaping into a 'theory' of knowledge in an entirely direct and experiential way, similar to how we know the experience of attentional activity in such a way. Anything to discuss before moving on?

"....and simply observe the invariant fact that it certainly does happen in various circumstances."

Yes, we simply can notice that there is always attention-to-something, even if that something is very subtle. Some would say awareness, I'm fine with that. But in this context I prefer attention.

"One such example is the Arabic script that we discussed before but we can think of countless similar examples...."

I assume it doesn't matter that the script carries a mesh of meaning for me, despite not being able to read it.

"Try for a moment to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout your life. Think about the different periods of your life and how each has contributed to what you are now. Think about all the physical and mental skills that have been developed, all that has been read, seen, and learned. We should feel this only in a nebulous way, as background potential.

This is a nice Gendlinian shift in the exercise. I'm not sure you've worked with Klocek's books and exercises, but there is lots of sweet overlap between this and some of his.

"The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms."

Yup, I'm with ya.

"Hopefully, we now have some basic inner sensitivity and orientation for the two poles of our knowing experience and their rhythmic interaction. These 'thought-asanas' should begin shaping into a 'theory' of knowledge in an entirely direct and experiential way..."

Yes. While there are some difference in structure, language and, I think, assumptions, the basic exercise you are moving me through is similar to what I practice, and similar to the way some folks practice who are crossing Gendlin's philosophy of the implicit with Steiner/western esoteric basic exercises.

It's fun!

context:

In 96, I began with Steiner's basic exercises as he lays them out in Theo, Knowledge, and Occult. About a year later, I made modifications based on my reading of Kuhlewind. In 98, Swartzkoff's [sic] book shifted things a bit. Later that year, I got to spend some personal and group time with YBA. That was pretty epic. Being married to a wildly psychic woman certainly spiced up some of my early expectations that had to be tempered and rooted out. While taking the 10-month Goethean Science course, I'd say that the daily practices with Dennis and his Seeking Spirit Vision crossed into and made some new adjustments. Towards the end of that course, I got my hands on that huge tome by Carl Unger and it had impact. I had some practices I was keeping very constant but I rhythmically experimented with others as my concentration and cognitive-perceptual shifts began. i would say that these were the main texts/folks who were informing me. Once Dennis becomes your teacher, you got him for life. For the next 3 years or so, my experience was that I was right in the pocket that to this day is still the center of gravity regarding those who prefer the cognitive path. Around 2003, I slammed into my first real knowledge-dramas. Two years in the dark night of the soul (in this context) and then a beautifully bizarre series of events got me to study Experiencing And The Creation of Meaning by Gendln with an Anthroposophical hermit out in the back hills of Vermont, crossing it with PoF and the other core texts. He was a teacher-friend for me, but it was an honor getting to watch his own highly developed capacities go through a metamorphosis during our studies. I still wasn't grasping ECM very deeply, I was only able to read it from my more fixated spiritual lens. But he helped shatter that lens for me. So did my dark night. He began to describe the way his own 'higher' perceptions were transforming as he deepened the crossing. With about 4 months of this process, he crossed the damn threshold. Beautifully so. He had hoped that I could make enough progress with ECM so that I could read A Process Model without projecting all of my 'residue of unresolved positivism' into it, so that I could see the ways that Gendlin both rooted some of that out and also projected it himself. But I wasn't ready to pick that one up until 18 months later.

For all the issues I have with the core texts, Kuhlewind and others, I absolutely see why and how they get any sincere student to begin paying much more attention to their attentional activity, and prod them to begin doing daily exercises to deepen the work.

It's really fun and of real value to be guided through a serious fellow practitioner's way. I appreciate it very much.