Federica wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2024 11:52 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Feb 16, 2024 4:35 pm
Sure. To be clear, I was also saying if there was more inspiration, meaning I didn't have anything really solid worked out yet, although perhaps there are a few loose ideas floating around.
The place to start is with how we always utilize and expand our DoF through
active thinking. With habits these days, I think people find it difficult to even differentiate between passive and active thinking (perhaps they feel metaphysical thinking is also active, when in fact it is quite passive). Then we explore the most proximate ways in which thinking can loosen its mental constraints, starting with various assumptions about the 'nature of reality', the 'subjectivity of intuition/meaning', and how reality exists on the 'other side' of our perceptions. Of course, this is what Cleric's posts/essays have excelled at and I don't have any particular new angle of presenting the phenomenology at this point. But one thing I have been thinking about recently is the
memory constraint on our spiritual activity.
In the first stages of phenomenology, we can easily differentiate TFW (or TFS) constraints by pointing to examples from daily experience that anyone can access and actively work with in their imagination and memory. Eventually, though, the inversion point comes when we must start probing the 'future-memories', trying to remember something that has not yet happened. It is the stage when we move from probing the most proximate mental and soul constraints on our spiritual activity to probing more Cosmic-scale constraints (or the
inner dimension of the FS constraints) by trying to approximate the higher stages of cognition. As Cleric points out, this type of probing is characteristic of all creative problem-solving, but with the phenomenology of spiritual activity, we are attempting to also be conscious of what we are intuitively doing in our problem-solving. So I have been thinking about ways to further flesh out what that is all about, how it 'works' so to speak.
Here is one possible angle from which to explore it. Through active thinking and concentration (which is simply much more focused and intensified active thinking), we expand our "I" into more holistic 'now' states, even if only for very small and irregular durations at first. For ex., we could experience a whole sequence of thoughts over 10 minutes in a flash as holistic potential, which we would otherwise explore in their sequential relations. In that process, we gain insights into the living structure and flow of reality that would otherwise take much longer to arrive at. In a certain sense, the flashes condense into a few images/insights that which we would otherwise reach by exploring through many conceptual states of being, spanning perhaps months or years.
Let's imagine that there is an inner soul configuration that corresponds to traumatic experiences as a child, perhaps a pattern of subtle abuse by elders. We could imagine a scenario where we reach the insight of this inner soul configuration related to "subtly abusive childhood" by simply thinking long and hard about our current thinking habits, preferences, likes and dislikes, emotional swings, relationships, and overall character. We could systematically trace this current constellation back to childhood experiences that we remember, perhaps even by interviewing our parents, teachers, etc., or by consulting whatever other old records of this childhood experience still exist. Maybe we would need to put our soul life in the hands of a psychologist or a hypnotist and let them tinker around with it to bring sunken memories into consciousness.
On the devotional intuitive thinking path, however, we can commune much more directly with the spiritual forces that structure our psyche and body and the whole 'superposition' of our states of being over any given incarnation (and even beyond), through the concentric alignment that brings the Cosmic forces intending our inner perfection more 'in-phase' with our local soul life. We enter into a sacred dialogue with these forces and they provide us flashes of insight (moral imaginations, inspirations, intuitions) - which may start 'short and sweet' but can increase in frequency, intensity, and duration - that help us navigate our path in
complete freedom. They don't compel us to do anything, only provide us with the more holistic resources and knowledge that we need to make an informed decision for ourselves. Even our normal thoughts are similar flashes where our conscious state aligns 'in phase' with our higher Intuitive Being, but they are simply too chopped up spatially and temporally for us to extract many deeper insights from them.
In this sense, we loosen the constraint of memory experience and find DoF to explore the future-memories through the concentric alignment of concentration, which feeds back into additional DoF through holistic insights into our experiential stream. It could help to incorporate this angle (at a much more fleshed-out level) into a phenomenological treatment so the transition from directly accessible experience of TFS constraints to 'future-memories' of higher cognitive constraints doesn't seem so jarring and orthogonal. It is seen as simply a transition from a more fragmented 'now' state which embeds a dim memory of past states and dim anticipation of future states (both of which seem to be lacking concreteness and realness in some way), to a more holistic 'now' state that embeds memory and anticipation as more concrete and real intuitive experiences.
Thanks for these insights, Ashvin.
At this point, I am under the impression that what you refer to as the phenomenology of 'future-memories' of higher cognitive constraints is equivalent to development of clairvoyance, to making progress on the inner path. Is this possible?
In this connection, I would think that the usefulness of seeking a phenomenological approach (and of using the word 'phenomenology') decreases as we progress. Not to mean that the approach has to change moving forward, but that the more the proximate FS layers are phenomenologically understood from within, the more it becomes self-evident that there are no other approaches possible than the inner, directly experiential one. So I was wondering whether the expansion towards the more space-neutral and time-neutral dimensions of spirit can still be 'phenomenological' in a pregnant sense? Parallel to the inversion you speak of, the concept of ‘phenomenon’ progressively loses its meaningful grip too. Rather than phenomena that manifest ideas, there is unity. And even beyond unity, which still evokes the idea of parts to be united, there is only immediate ideal life. My bridging speculation here would be that, by the moment that inversion point is reached, there is no more risk that the higher cognitive constraints are felt as jarring and orthogonal to the directly accessible TFS phenomenology. In this sense, I don’t understand well how, in your vision, the expansion of the DoF constitutes something different compared to the process of vertical progression along the inner path, as illustrated in your essay, through truthfulness and higher cognition.
I realize I was conceiving the DoF in a more circumscribed sense. Maybe I could use the word lateral. Since there are multiple potential trajectories of aligned (truthful) progression, what individual angles can be probed and negotiated, by leaning against the karmic constraints? I lack any precise idea of how the DoF may be cultivated in the spirit realm. At the accessible phenomenological level, once an unprejudiced conception of reality starts to form, it seems to me that DoF are exercised in all forms of active thinking. This includes thinking exercises, and also normal intellectual (scientific and inventive active thinking) and clumsy pictorial thinking. Even wishful thinking, as long as the intention is pursued to responsibly confront the karmic constraints.
Thanks for these thoughts, Federica.
In a certain sense, the point of introducing this angle (or any similar angle) is exactly to bridge the sense of discontinuity you are expressing above between the pursuit of phenomenology and higher cognitive experience. That is a very understandable thought and one that I have certainly experienced many times, as I am sure many others do as well. It is difficult to see how we go from examining accessible TFS constraints in our imagination/memory to probing the higher-order curvatures that
intend these constraints from within, without a leap into some clairvoyant state.
Here the image of concentric alignment is helpful, because that is what we are seeking in all cases. When we turn thinking back upon its living structure and flow, as we do in phenomenology, we are aligning our ITFS experience and centering our local intent within the Intent to inwardly know and perfect our spiritual activity. The latter is what the spiritual Cosmos intends for us. The same inner stance of course applies in our concentration practice, except at a more intense level. In that sense, it is an entirely continuous gradient from the phenomenology of spiritual activity to the higher cognitive states of aggregation.
The flashes of insight we get from reading Cleric's new phonograph essay, for ex., are the
same flashes that we get from concentration in a more intensified way (after much practice). We are reaching the same insights the average person may reach after many years or even lifetimes of reasoning through the phenomenal spectrum of experience, once it clicks that this spectrum is in some way a reflection of their inner depth organization. As the inner constellation naturally evolves, many new opportunities are opened up for realizing that connection and leveraging it to realign the spiritual depth. The expansion of DoF through phenomenology/concentration is simply to reach these insights in a more creative and effective way.
In that sense, there is nothing essentially different between phenomenological inquiry, the vertical alignment/progression, and the corresponding expansion of DoF - they are all the same. We can notice how they feedback in a positive cycle - the more we expand DoF, the more we notice aspects of phenomenal experience that were otherwise merged into our perspective, and therefore the more 'data' we have available to conduct our phenomenological inquiry. For ex., we may have been flowing along with a certain mental habit, say reductionism. Through our efforts, we distance our thinking from this habit and now we can trace how it influenced many second-order conceptions we had about our existential reality - how life and sentience evolved, the nature of our concepts/ideas, etc.
Also, in our concentration practice, we don't need to have any inner visions, panoramic experiences, 'hear' the music of the spheres, access the Akashic record, etc. for these flashes of insight. In fact, those things are always occurring, but we probably don't have the strength of I-consciousness to remain awake for them. They occur 'behind' the concentrated gaze of our "I", as it were. Nevertheless, the alignments with our higher Inutiive Being continually happen in the concentrated state and transduce as conceptual insights that are distributed throughout our waking experience. Again, these insights feedback into our phenomenological inquiries throughout the day, and also
inspire us to pursue such inquiries more often within our daily stream of tasks.
I agree that there is no need to introduce any boundaries between concentration, phenomenology, and the 'lateral' philosophical, scientific, religious, etc. thinking either, in terms of expanding DoF. The only thing we need to be careful of is
overestimating how much DoF our thinking has from its habitual constraints, such as abstraction, reductionism, beliefs, preferences and sympathies, etc. when we take it in a 'lateral' direction. It's quite possible we are still merged with some of those constraints and, although we have a dim conception of what they might be, we don't have enough fine control to creatively manage them with our spiritual activity. In this case, I think there are certain safeguards we can use in such thinking, the main one being to resist forming any conclusive judgments about the 'nature' of what we are thinking through, and at all times remaining
conscious of the possibility we are doing so. Such judgments will only act as another layer of constraint on our potential DoF, and if we aren't even aware we are forming them, they will remain fixed in place until we become aware.
