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In the last few centuries, human thinking has gradually refined a specific way of conceiving reality. We hold in our mind some picture, a model of the universe. A model that goes through different states, as governed by universal laws. What we have access to, however, are not the ‘true’ laws of the universe but thinking laws (most often mathematical). We think the transformations of the mental model-state and then verify through experiments whether our predictions match perceptions.
It is critically important to understand the place of thinking. Without it, there’s no notion of subject, object, mind, matter, and so on. Before there could be any understanding of existence, there’s thinking. If we step back and consider things from a purely experiential perspective, we can easily see that the only transformation of states that we know is that of our first-person existential ‘movie’. Our immediate reality is weaved of color, sound, smell, kinesthetic sensations, feelings, thoughts, will, etc., which go through continuous metamorphoses. That’s why things seem so uncertain nowadays. Do we live in a matrix, dream, informational, or material reality? All we really know is the flow of our conscious experience. Particles, fields, spacetime, energy, information, and so on, we can only imagine in mental pictures and see if their mental dynamics match the dynamics of other phenomenal content. Unless we postulate some version of mind-matter dualism (which then becomes an unsolvable hard problem), the thinking process that conceives these mental images should be seen as an inseparable part of the metamorphoses of the universal state, just like a physicalist would imagine that thinking is simply the transformation of a brain-portion of the universal state.
Above we try to represent the fact that our thinking about reality is a part of the universal states (represented by the lattices), just like in a regular movie a line of dialog is spread over several frames. Yet what we grasp above is still only a mental picture. When we think like that, we continually try to extricate ourselves from the movie – we try to step outside of it and encompass the universal process objectively, just like we can contemplate a domino chain. When we do that, however, we easily forget that we’re now engaged in a new thinking process that simply thinks a mental model of itself. As Kant concluded, it seems that through thinking we can never reach the reality of the universal process (the thing-in-itself). In our consciousness, we know only the ‘output’ (mental images) proceeding from the real universal process, and the most we can do is to behold these model-thoughts in different configurations, which we hope somehow represent the true but unknowable universal/thinking process.
But what if we’re simply approaching the problem in a prejudiced way? At what point did we decide that the only possible way of knowing existence, consists of building and contemplating objectified mental models? Studying the images in an anatomical atlas is one thing, but experiencing how our bodily states feel from within and exploring the degrees of freedom in which we can will them, is a different kind of knowing. Could it be that we can experience and know the thinking process – which is an intrinsic part of the universal process – in a similar way? In other words, could it be that to know the universal process means not to make a mental model of it but to know it from within, to know the constraints and degrees of freedom of its potential?
This raises the question: “If we put aside our mental modeling habits and the quest for the laws to which the existential movie complies, then how can we know anything about existence except the obvious fact that we experience it?” Consider what we do with our inner activity when we tell a story to a friend or sing a song. If we look at it broadly, we can say that in these acts we have a certain intuitive understanding of the way the existential movie unfolds. We don’t make calculations and predictions but we live in some intuitive intent that ‘explains’ the order of words. If I listen to someone else talking, I may not know where their story is going, but in my first-person case, the idea that I want to express explains the sequence of thought forms.
There are many things in the existential movie that we have intuitive awareness of. All that we know as a certain fact is our momentary phenomenal frame of existence here and now, yet the metamorphoses of the movie make varying degrees of intuitive sense. This is what the curves in the image above signify. Without them, every frame of existence would feel random and unrelated to anything else. The curves symbolize how, for some aspects of the movie, we have intuition about where it comes from and where it’s going. Thinking is the starting point where this can be explored most clearly. When we think, it is as if the phenomenal frames (which contain the sounds of our thoughts) metamorphose along the intuitive curvatures that give them their order and meaning. When we think about a planet moving through curved spacetime, we can do that only abstractly through mental images. We wouldn’t say that the spacetime curvature we try to model is what moves our mental picture of the planet. Thus our conceptions of both the planet and spacetime point to something beyond our immediate experience. But this is different when thinking itself becomes the center of experience. Now the metamorphosis of the existential movie is known not by abstract speculation but by being one with the intuitive curvature that in itself explains why some aspects of the movie flow (in this case the mental images) unfold in the way they do. In a certain sense, we may say that this is what it feels like to know a law of Nature from the inside.
Clearly, this kind of knowing demands some retraining of our thinking habits which otherwise keep objectifying our understanding. We ask “But what are these intuitive curvatures made of? In what space do they exist? What laws govern them? What if our thinking is only an epiphenomenon of more fundamental forces?” and so on. Most of these questions arise simply because we immediately forget what initially led us to the need to seek knowledge in a new way, and instead, just like a broken record, we continuously snap back to the same old groove, the same old ways of mental modeling. To cultivate these new cognitive habits we need a different way of conducting our knowing activity. We need a kind of meditative concentration through which we stabilize the phenomenal flow and experience its metamorphoses as if guided by streamlines of meaning. We don’t seek to see the intuitive curvatures as some objective phenomena, just like we can’t see our intuition of a story that we try to explain to a friend as something objective. Intuition is the inherent knowing aspect of our existence. It’s like the pure sense of meaningful orientation within the complicated transformations of phenomena. When we call it ‘intuitive curvature’, we’re only metaphorically expressing this meaningful orientation.
This kind of meditative concentration is different from what is today often popularized as meditation. In the latter case, thoughts are usually pushed away and diffused. We seek some purely contemplative state in which we hope the mysteries of existence will reveal their secrets. But in what we describe here, we need to be cognitively active. We need to willfully and intentionally give direction to our cognitive stream. By focusing that stream into a thought-form, we attain to a certain inner stability, as if we press the needle of a compass into the paper. From that stabilized state we now have the needed support to resist the usual curvatures of the flow. Then we gradually begin to gain intuitive awareness of these curvatures through which our existential movie unfolds all the time, even if we are not aware of it. We begin to understand how our interests, preferences, likes, dislikes, passions, ideologies, thinking habits, etc. continuously act like attractors that shape our existential movie.
In this way, we arrive at a striking realization. When we tell a story we’re more or less freely aligning the frames of our movie flow (at least the part corresponding to thoughts and speech) with the intuition of the story. But we’re not nearly as free when we consider the deeper curvatures of our soul (psychic) life. For example, if I’m not in control of my character, a fit of anger takes the unfoldment of the existential movie in a certain direction with iron necessity. I simply flow along. Through the meditative exercises, however, we can first become conscious of these soul curvatures – which now become intuitively known – then we can begin working creatively on them, we can gradually alter the invisible curvatures such that the existential movie can be guided much more consciously in a direction aligned with our moral ideal.
Now one can say: “This makes a good metaphor for our inner psychic life but it gets us nowhere near to understanding how the universal state at large metamorphoses.” Such an objection, however, rests on a very deep, yet unjustified prejudice. It’s the idea that our soul state is somehow distinct from the universal. But we’ve seen that our inner flow can’t be taken in isolation from the universal without postulating some form of irreconcilable dualism. If we loosen that prejudice then we should see no principal limit to how deeply the intuitive curvatures of the existential movie can be known. The main obstacle here is that we habitually take intuition/meaning to have only personal existence. Yet nothing in the given necessitates such a limitation. The strictly bodily experiences are indeed specific to my perspective but what about other aspects of the existential movie? When I intuit that the movie flow is constrained by something which I can call the ‘Earthly context’, does my friend intuit a different Earth when she meditates on her flow? The thought-forms through which we explicate these intuitions are certainly personal to our perspectives, but we surely feel that we’re speaking of the same Earthly context.
Difficulties arise only if we imagine that the intuitive curvatures end at some outer boundary of our personal sphere and beyond that we’re dealing with some other form of reality, completely opaque to our cognitive life. If we heal ourselves from this unwarranted prejudice, our meditations lead us into stages of consciousness where we grasp the unfolding of the existential movie as flowing not only through the psychic intuitive curvatures but also curvatures that we can call archetypal and universal. It is as if different levels of mind are responsible for a whole contextual hierarchy of meaning, along whose curvatures the total existential state metamorphoses. The highest-order minds bend the curvatures through which the potential of the general evolutionary plot of the movie unfolds. From our embodied standpoint we may say the intuitive life of these highest orders of mind, constitutes the constraints within which the movie ‘lattice’ of potential – from the Cosmic to the elementary – metamorphoses. Other minds creatively work out more and more specific details, which have their sensory shadows in the kingdoms of Nature, until we reach the human level where we find ourselves within a complicated interference of intents, storylines, characters, bodily sheaths, and so on. These contextual minds are not on some ‘other side’ of our inner world, just like we do not consider our conscience or subconscious mind to be on another side. The higher-order minds can be considered as even deeper levels of our inner being, which, however, are not our own personal possessions but encompass greater and greater holistic and transpersonal aspects of the universal process. Even though highly interrelated and interdependent, these minds are practically autonomous, having their own level of development and individual intuitive intents.
Above we have a highly schematic metaphor for three different existential perspectives. Of course, we can never contemplate the universal state from such an external-to-reality vantage point – we’re always within one such perspective. Yet such a symbolic picture helps us illustrate how the deeper we penetrate into the intuitive curvatures of the existential movie (from the individual center toward the periphery), the more we become conscious of our perspective as embedded within contextual minds that curve the metamorphoses of the movie at different levels of wholeness. The main obstacle to this understanding is that we need to first become acquainted with and organize the chaotic and misguided curvatures of our own soul life. These chaotic curvatures stand in our way as a kind of Guardian who prevents our consciousness from expanding into the higher-order intuitive streams that alone explain the true nature of existence – not theoretically but through consciously uniting with the perspectives of the minds from whence the inner flow of existence is being intuitively and creatively intended. This journey begins with a simple shift in cognitive life. Instead of feeling like an enclosed mind that builds a private mental model of reality, our mental images become artistic expressions of the intuitive curvatures within which the existential movie unfolds. Through meditation and overall spiritual development, we find our concentric relations with the higher-order minds – we begin to intuit their intents and the way they structure our phenomenal environment. The tragic and deepening crises that humanity goes through have at their root the fragmented states through which reality is experienced and known. It is our urgent duty to seek the true foundations of our existence and restore the musical resonance with the symphony of Cosmic minds.
, just like we watch TV as an end-user and other beings are responsible for both the TV and what is being aired.
- it's the Celestial Harmony (I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the Earth). At this stage all forms of expression of our spiritual being need to become musical. Everything we think, feel, do, needs to become like harmoniously fitting notes in the Divine Symphony.
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That's why things have to be explained from more angles such that we don't stumble at the labels but seek the realities that are labeled. I hope the little experiment helped you see that there's always intuitive spiritual activity behind any form of expression - be it physical, mathematical, musical, etc. If you can recognize yourself within this inner spiritual core, which expresses through different lenses, you should also grasp the deeper sense in which 'Mind' was used.