The Phonograph Metaphor
(Part 1)
(Part 1)
We can use as a foundation the essay Fundamentals of the Human Condition (FoHC). There we established that we experience a state of existence going through continuous metamorphosis. Here we can go further and say that this state is really a relative perspective of the World state. Even though the part of the World state which corresponds to our brain, sense organs, and so on, feels to be the major contributor to our conscious experience, it’s still true that this part could never exist in isolation. It is what it is only because the rest of the World state is just the way it is. For example, our organs would not exist without the Earthly and Cosmic environment from whose elements the bodily form has been built up. Our inner life wouldn’t be what it is without the social environment of the whole human civilization. Our present thinking wouldn’t be what it is without the linguistic forms in which we express our thoughts, and without all the understanding that humanity has brought to light in time. So, in our context, we should take our state of being as a narrow aperture within the World state. By this we don’t try to suggest anything mystical, nor do we try to postulate some metaphysical state of the universe. The goal is simply to sharpen our attention to the fact that nothing in our existence can be understood in isolation. Any phenomenon that we experience can only make sense when supported by the World’s totality. We’ll deviate from our secure phenomenological approach if we conceive of the World state as some theoretical object. From now on, when we use the term ‘World state’ we should conceive of the phenomenological totality of our experience plus our anticipation that there’s much more going on which is not present as immediate conscious phenomena but still somehow takes part in what we’re conscious of.
Our existence through time
If we want to depict our living experience in simple terms, without resorting to complicated scientific and philosophical concepts, we can compare it to an unfolding movie. Here of course, we don’t mean only the audio-visual aspect of our conscious experience but everything: feelings, thoughts, all kinds of perceptions, everything is part of the movie. This is a relative perspective of the unfolding World state. Yet strangely we feel active in this movie, it is not just something that we perceive passively. Through our thinking, feeling, and willing – we can call them collectively spiritual activity – it seems that to some extent we can steer the unfolding of the movie.
The question that has occupied the human mind ever since it awakened to its existence, has been – what determines the course of this movie? The part that we influence with our spiritual activity, we understand, but everything else moves in mysterious ways.
We can try to make some sense of all this with the help of the following metaphor. We know what a phonograph is. A needle moves through a groove furrowed in wax or vinyl. The shape of the groove causes the needle to vibrate. The needle is mechanically connected to a membrane and thus it vibrates too, which in turn agitates the air and produces sound waves.
In this analogy, the vibrations correspond to the total spectrum of our conscious experience. This ‘playback’ corresponds not only to sound but also color, taste, smell, feelings, thoughts, and so on. And just like a song can have lyrics for which we experience certain meaning, so our full spectrum experience is imbued with intuition. All that we experience makes varying degrees of sense.
The phonograph has an interesting property: it can be used for both playback and recording. If the wax is soft enough, we can conduct vibrations through the needle and impress shapes in the wax groove.
The needle is a metaphor for the focus of our attention. It is the part of our conscious experience where we are most in touch with the mystery of existence. The periphery of experience feels blurry, somewhat out of focus, but in the portion that feels in focus, it is as if we try to follow as tightly as possible the metamorphosis of the World state. In one direction the mystery of the World is the driving force of the playback and drags our attention with it. This would correspond to passive perceiving. We let our needle of attention be completely ruled by the World wax and we experience the movie flow. In the other direction, attention becomes a force and we actively impress some aspects of the movie. All this can be most clearly experienced in thinking. Here our ideal intents impress, for example, the sounds of our inner voice within the movie flow.
In reality, these two directions are never found in complete isolation, there’s always some blending of both. Imagine that we project a movie on a brick wall instead of on a smooth white screen. It’s obvious that the resulting image won’t be solely determined by the film. Similarly, we can imagine that the strength of our needle can’t modify the full depth of the groove but can only inscribe small engravings.
Of course, as with all analogies, this one is also not without its shortcomings. We have to avoid taking this metaphor as a model of reality. For example, if we take it literally, we’ll be immediately obliged to ask whether this World groove is something fixed and we experience the completely deterministic and inevitable playback of existence. For such reasons, we shouldn’t try to fantasize that such a World groove exists as some physical or energetic structure that can be perceived from the side, as it is in the animation above. Otherwise, this metaphor would imply some kind of dualism that will be impossible to reconcile. On one side we’ll fantasize the ‘real’ World wax, on the other is our ‘virtual’ conscious experience of color, sound, etc., and these completely different worlds have a single point of contact at the tip of the needle of attention.
In our phenomenological approach, we focus on the given experience of conscious phenomena. When we think of the World groove, we should focus on the inner experience of the constraints that our spiritual activity meets at every moment. These constraints are real. There’s no doubt that our will, feeling, and thinking continuously meet resistance. Thus, when we speak of the World groove, we shouldn’t jump into fantasizing some structures through which we move but, instead, lead our attention to the inner experiences of the invisible constraints which are not readily perceptible yet surely guide the flow of the movie. This is what we do even in physics – we interpret our perceptions as representing the movements of physical objects in space, yet the constraints that determine these movements are not something that can be found as some additional perception side by side with the others. They are conceived as the invisible laws of Nature. So, if we avoid fantasizing the World groove as some object that can be perceived, but instead focus entirely on the inner experience of the constraints through which our existence unfolds, we’ll be on secure phenomenological foundation and then we can even safely use a metaphor like the present without being in danger of taking it as a literal model of reality. In this sense, our phenomenal experience and the constraints are not two different worlds but aspects of the one world, they are completely overlapping so to say. The needle is not a point of contact between two completely different worlds but only symbolizes the degree to which we are conscious of their already existing unity.
The metaphor tries to draw our attention to the basic characteristics of the movie of existence. We live in continuous metamorphosis of our perspective of the World state which we experience as ‘playback’ of the movie. At the same time, we can ‘write back’ to the World state through our meaningful intents. These intents meet various degrees of resistance, as if we can impart only so much momentum to the needle.
If this metaphor is not to remain an abstract floating conception, we need to enter the concrete inner experiences of which the metaphor is only an expression. The best way we can do this is by attaining a more intimate experience of our thinking process. As a simple example, we can try morphing our inner voice through vowels using different speeds and intonations while trying to experience as tightly as possible what we’re doing. Not philosophizing about it but trying to be lucidly unified with our activity that impresses sounds in the World state.
Such thinking experiences are the clearest example of something in the movie flow for which we have intimate knowledge. It is as if most of the movie is driven by unknown laws and intentions but for the very small part at the tip of our needle, we feel to be the movie director. We have direct intuition for the way our inner voice metamorphoses. We have a sense of being creatively responsible for the constraints within which this part of the movie unfolds. We are just like a movie director who sees his own movie and feels, “These lines were my idea. I know what I was trying to artistically express, and I know in what direction it will go.”
Now the logical question would be: aside from the part that we are responsible for, can we know something more about the movie flow as a whole? Where it comes from and where it goes, what factors influence its unfolding? In the past, such knowledge has been given to humans through religious revelations. Man could grasp the flow of reality as the work of supernatural beings. Understanding the unfolding of the movie also gives the basis for moral life because it places human actions in a greater context with which they either harmonize or clash.
With the development of intellectual thinking, the means of grasping the flow of reality also change correspondingly. The mighty soul images of Cosmic happenings contracted and could resonate only with that which can be conveyed through the senses. The deeds of the spiritual beings thinned out and became abstract laws of Nature. Today the World has been reduced to a mental picture, a model of reality over which we make calculations and try to predict the unfoldment of the movie. Science acknowledges the World groove. In fact, if we grasp contemporary theories in a more pictorial way, we will see that here, with our phonograph metaphor, we’re not speaking of anything new.
For example, in General Relativity we have the World of curved spacetime and energy through which the observer flows along a geodesic. In quantum mechanics, we’re moving through phase space of superimposed states. As we move, the probabilities of the different superimposed states increase or decrease. All of this exists as thoughts in human consciousness, as meaningful vibrations of the needle that we experience in our imagination as pictures of atoms, spacetime, and so on. The actual World groove remains obscured to normal thinking experience – we only live in a mental model of the World groove and whatever can be impressed through the senses. It’s worth trying to get a more refined feeling for all this.
Thinking in models, and thinking as an expression of our living experience
The kind of thinking we exercise in modern science and philosophy can be depicted in the following way:
In our mind we try to analyze the flow of existence. For example, we envision states of a physical universe and try to find some logical rules that explain how one state (movie frame of existence) transforms into the next. The trouble with this approach is that the thinking that projects these mental models always remains in the background, in a blind spot as it were. It is obvious for science that if the model is to be complete, it should somehow capture also the processes that constitute the thinking process itself. So, in our modern scientific thinking we can make a mental model of the World groove and say “when our states transform through the curvature of the groove and vibrate thus and thus, we experience so and so.” To include our thinking about the World in our model, we may try to modify the above picture in the following way:
Now the World states (the circular lattices) represent our moment-by-moment perspectival experience of existence. These frames contain our thoughts about the model of reality (the movie strip frames) just like a line of dialog in the movie spans over several frames. This, however, leads to a recursive paradox because if we remember the blind spot, everything that we tried to overcome, applies to our present situation too. The picture above is still only a mental image in our mind (we may draw a thought-bubble around it). So, it seems that we can make mental models for our experience of existence, but these always remain mere thoughts about some theoretical existence. If we try to overcome the blind spot and capture in the model our real-time thinking process which thinks the model, we feel like a dog chasing its tail. Our thinking is like a hand that tries to draw a picture of ‘itself drawing a picture of ‘itself drawing a picture of itself ‘…’ ’ ’, and so on in an infinite recursion.
Thus, the real curvature through which our thinking metamorphoses is still only imagined as a mental picture. In this way, we don’t get any closer to the ‘real-real’ curvature within which the actual mental drawing process flows.
So is it possible to have actual knowledge of the real curvature through which our states of being metamorphose? Or, like Kant thought, is it the case that we can never have more than a mental representation of reality, while its true nature forever remains on the ‘other side’ of conscious experience as the thing-in-itself? We’ll try to show that such knowledge is indeed possible, although, unsurprisingly, it requires us to conduct our spiritual activity in novel ways.
This new cognition can initially be only approached as a feeling. It is obvious that simply producing more and more intellectual models, no matter how refined, will always maintain the duality between the theoretical (imagined) curvature that we experience in our thoughts and the actual curvature through which these same theoretical thoughts flow. Initially, we can seek the reality of the actual curvature of the World groove only as a quite indistinct feeling. Hopefully, over time, this feeling will become something much more refined, attaining a meaningful texture imbued with clear intuition, just like our mental images are imbued with intuition.
All further progress depends on grasping clearly what we have established so far. To this day science and philosophy have been preoccupied with thinking about the mystery of existence, while taking the actual thinking process for granted, as if it philosophizes from outside reality. The feeling that we speak of can only be found if we’re willing to postpone the building of theories about the constraints (forms and laws) and instead try to tightly observe our real-time thinking process and see if we can intuit some of the constraints directly from within this experience. In other words, we need to be willing to investigate why we think in the way we do, in what living constraints our thinking is enchained, what makes us pursue some lines of thought while avoiding others, and so on.
Grasping change
To start refining this feeling we can use as an illustration what is known in mathematics as the Taylor series. Fortunately, we don’t need to go into any of the mathematical details here (for anyone interested in the details, this video is a good introduction but it is not necessary for our goals here).
Consider a rail track and a small cart that can move back and forth along it. Imagine that we are shown only a photograph of it. Can we tell whether the cart was moving or stationary when the photograph was taken? We can’t tell (assuming the photo is perfect, no motion blur, etc.). The only thing we know is that at the time of photographing the cart was at a particular place along the track. Our guess about its previous or future positions would be as good as any other. Let’s imagine that it has been stationary. This can be depicted as (a) on the following graph:
The horizontal line means that in the past and in the future, the cart is at the same position along the track. Now imagine that, together with the photograph, we’re told that, at the moment of the snapshot, the cart was moving at a particular speed (distance per time) in the upward direction. Now at least we know that the cart would have been below its present position a tiny amount in the past and it will be above a tiny amount in the future. If this speed has been constant then the trajectory would be (b). But what if the speed was not constant? What if it was itself changing? In other words, what if the cart may have been slowing down or accelerating? Then we can be told that, at the time of photographing, the speed has been changing at a certain amount of distance per time, per time. If this acceleration/deceleration rate was itself constant the result would be (c).
This can go further. The acceleration itself can also be changing at a certain rate. The rate of change of the acceleration can be changing at yet another rate and so on. The more of these rates (in mathematical terms – derivatives of a function) we know, the better we can know where the cart has been and will be in close vicinity to the position of the snapshot.
Now consider our first-person experience. If all we could know was a single frame of existence, we would never have any consciousness of continuity through time. Even if these frames were changing, our conscious experience would consist of completely disconnected frames of existence, it would be like quickly flashing completely random states of existence. Here we may be tempted to say that we’ll still have the consciousness of “I’m experiencing a stream of random existential states”, but this already takes for granted our ability to remember, i.e. to have something like an echo of the previous frames in our current. In other words, a few frames down the line, the state is not simply random but contains some reverberations of the previous states which is intuited as “this has been going on for a while.” This should be eliminated too. Every frame should be considered as a full state of existence, not simply as representing the changing perceptual content, while we retain in another sphere our ability to encompass the change as a stream. In other words, we should imagine that each frame is completely disconnected, as if our existence is ‘reset’ at every step.
Clearly, we can picture this only abstractly since we are suggesting to grasp in a stream of consciousness something that we claim simply can’t be grasped in that way. Nevertheless, it can be a useful stretch of our minds. Things become more realistic precisely when we begin to add these ‘rates of change’. In our context, these are simply a symbol for our intuitive orientation within the flow of existence.
Experientially, we live in an ever-metamorphosing state of existence. We only know that because we intuitively grasp that this state was one thing just an instant ago and it will be another thing very soon. But our intuition of this metamorphosis can be even richer. For example, imagine that we explain something to somebody or simply tell a story. Then the way our experiential states transform is intuitively known. We know what we are trying to explain, we know what the story we are telling is. It’s all a matter of this intuitive knowing, which is only vaguely felt, to become the groove curvature through which our thought-states and speech are sequenced. In a sense, we have a dim intuitive awareness for the way the movie of our existence unfolds. We feel that, with our needle of spiritual activity, we modulate the thought and speech phenomena into the general movie flow. We don’t do that randomly as if inscribing noise, but the frames follow a meaningful intuitive curvature.
Another useful example is singing. Even if we sing only in our mind, with our inner voice we still inscribe something in the stream of the movie. And once again this is not random. We have an intuitive orientation to the groove through which our voice vibrates. In our intuitive context, we have the dim awareness of the song as a whole, where along the song we are, how our voice curves, and so on.
Hopefully, through such examples, it should be already clear that when we speak of the World groove, its curvature is only a metaphoric expression for something phenomenologically real – namely our intuitive orientation for the way our experiential state of existence metamorphoses. Most of this intuitive orientation is only our passive comprehension of the flow, but in our spiritual activity we feel as if our intuitive intents are the curvature of the groove. Obviously, the Taylor series analogy should not be taken literally. We’re not trying to intellectually analyze the movie flow into rates of change. The analogy only aims to point our attention to the fact that we intuitively know some aspects of the way the existential movie metamorphoses, even though we seem to be centered in the ‘now’ moment. Metaphorically we can say that we live in some intuition of the curvature of the World groove that our needle flows through.
The Phonograph Metaphor put together
Now we should be able to encompass the metaphor we have built so far. For reference, we can depict it in the following way:
1/ The colorful disc symbolizes the totality of our phenomenal experience. It is depicted as something flat within three-dimensional space but it should be taken to symbolize the total boundless volume of our conscious experience – our experience of the World state. In our metaphor, this is the ‘playback’ of the mystery of existence. There’s obviously a lot more of the World state that is not experienced in immediate conscious phenomena, however, we should also avoid postulating parts of the World state that are by definition inaccessible to experience.
2/ The mysterious World groove is something that is not to be found as yet another phenomenon that we can point at. That’s why we should not try to fantasize that it can be beheld from some exotic vantage point. We know the reality of the groove as far as we experience its ‘curvature’ as the intuitive aspect of our existence. It is the meaningful sense of orientation, which analogously to the Taylor series, gives us intuition about the way our existential flow is metamorphosing. This doesn’t preclude us from using metaphorical pictures for the World groove, like we’re doing now. It’s only that we have to be aware at all times that our metaphorical images are only artistic expressions of our intuition. For example, the image above is only symbolic – there’s no literal curvature that goes from one direction in space into another. In a sense, through such images, we clarify to ourselves – we re-present – what our intuition holds as a pure sense of orientation within the existential flow. It is as if by giving artistic and conceptual form to these intuitions, we anchor them, and they become more stable and clearer to us. It is the same with mathematical intuition. When we add numbers in our mind, it doesn’t matter whether we picture them as Arabic or Roman numerals, fingers or sticks. The important thing is that through these thought-images we anchor and stabilize our purely intuitive activity. In a similar way, our metaphoric depictions serve to make us more clearly aware of the intuitive curvature of our flow.
3/ The needle is a symbol for the most sensitive part of our experience, where phenomena make the most sense, where their metamorphoses are grasped to flow in alignment with the intuitive curvature we grasp. The totality of intuition is the same as what we called the ‘intuitive context’ in FoHC. When we allow the flow of existence to entrain our attention, this can be compared to ‘read operation’ or ‘playback’. On the other hand, we can also modulate the World groove. For example, when we think actively, we are engaged in ‘write operation’. The curvature of our intuition (for example, the story that we tell or the song that we sing) becomes the ordering principle for the words that we think. As already explained, these two operations are only to give us an intellectual foothold, but in reality, they are always intertwined.
Avoiding confusion caused by stubborn mental habits
It is critically important that we remain grounded in the phenomenological facts of experience. The nature of the metaphor is such that it very easily tempts us to imagine the World groove as some structure through which we move. But this would only lead to paradoxes. For example, one can object: “In this metaphor, our spiritual activity shouldn’t have any role, since whatever we impress in the World wax is immediately left behind. At the same time, whatever the incoming groove is carrying towards us is completely unaffected by our activity – our needle can’t write in the future.” Such an objection, however, completely ignores everything that has been given as a precaution.
From a phenomenological perspective, the only thing that we can speak of is the ever-metamorphosing present experience of existence. Even the sciences of physics, geology, history, and so on, have access only to the present. We understand time only as a storyboard of mental images that seem to make sense of our present state and its transformations. The way these mental images are conceived to relate remains an abstract intuition of laws of Nature.
It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate how in our own spiritual activity we have an essentially different kind of intuition about the way the flow of existence metamorphoses, compared to the abstract stitching of mental images and imagining that, in the ‘real world’, some laws of Nature do this job. Only in our intuitive activity it can be said that we experience most intimately the inner reality of a ‘law of Nature’ which contributes to the metamorphosis of the World state.
Now one can say: “But how do we know that our intuitive activity has anything to do with the true laws of reality? What if it is only an epiphenomenon, emerging from some deeper true laws, which may be in no way comparable with our subjective experience of being one with the causal curvature of transformation?” A similar objection was already addressed in FoHC when we spoke about freedom. The simple fact is that as soon as we theorize that the supposed ‘true’ part of the World state (which we can only imagine) causes the other, purely subjective part, we inevitably introduce some version of dualism and corresponding hard problems which are then impossible to solve. In our phenomenological investigation, we don’t need to postulate or blindly believe anything. We start from the givens of experience and expand further. It makes no sense to discard part of the given if we’re not able to recover it any other way. The World state is seen to metamorphose as something whole. Our intuition certainly grasps the most varied correlations between phenomena, but we shouldn’t be in a hurry to postulate that some phenomena cause others, especially when this can only be done in a completely abstract way. Here we should take fully seriously the well-known statement that correlation doesn’t equal causation.
For such reasons, when we think about existence there’s no need to fantasize some World wax that we somehow modify and move about, and which causes our subjective experience. There’s absolutely no need to imagine World states to the left or right, as belonging to some speculative time dimension of reality. All that concerns us is that the experiential World state seems to metamorphose in a lawful way and that, through our spiritual activity, we feel to be contributing to this metamorphosis in such a way that we intuitively know something of the curvature of temporal transformation. The concept of ‘World groove’ is only a symbol for this curvature which we can intuitively know to some extent.
At the same time, this shouldn’t throw us into the other extreme where we conclude that since only our present state is real then any mental images of past and future states are worthless. This would lead us to a kind of temporal agnosticism, where we simply observe the flow of existence from moment to moment and refuse to grasp any more encompassing lawfulness, as if out of fear that this may lead us into illusions. This might be the case if we conceive of these past and future mental images as pointing to some time-structures ‘out there’, but if we take them to be expressions of our intuition for the curvature of metamorphosis, then we are on the secure phenomenological ground. In that case, we can even think in images that do not yet reflect perfectly clear intuition, as long as it is conceivable that there could be a path of experience that can lead to such intuition.
And this holds true even for trivial things. Almost any new concept is first met with confusion. We clumsily arrange mental images in the hope that at some point they will be illuminated with the light of the concept shining from the intuitive context. If we want to work only with concepts that are already perfectly known, we’ll freeze in mental paralysis and nothing new will ever be known. So there’s nothing problematic if our concepts still lack full coherency, as long as we’re striving towards the overarching intuitive curvature which will provide that coherency. Problems only arise when we think in completely abstract concepts, which by their very definition point at supposed ‘realities’ that can never be part of direct experience and corresponding intuition.
Thinking, feeling, willing
We already spoke about the gradations of spiritual activity in FoHC. Here we can recast the phenomenological observations in the language of our present metaphor.
Thinking is the part of our spiritual activity that is most agile. We can metaphorically say that here our intuitive intents gently vibrate the needle and thus modulate thoughts and images over our base experience. Initially, these mental images are quite ethereal, almost ghostly, but at the same time, this is the part of our experience where we can grasp in the clearest way how our intentional intuitive curvature orders the inner flow. There’s almost no ‘distance’ or ‘phase delay’ between our intuitive intents and the flow of mental phenomena.
When saying that we modulate mental images, we should remember that the World state always transforms as something whole. As such, corresponding changes in the nervous system are also part of the process. This is clearly evident from the way head trauma or certain chemicals can alter the groove of thoughts and images. Yet when we speak of thinking, the characteristic thing is that our focus is on the experience of the mental images. When we think abstractly, we have very little concern about the full spectrum of the World flow that makes this thinking possible.
The feeling aspect of our existence is as if proceeding from deeper furrows of the World groove. We need much greater inner strength if our needle is to modulate these curvatures. For example, when we’re angry with someone, in our thinking we may be inscribing the stream of words “There’s no point to be angry, stop it!”, yet still fail to override the deeper playback of the actual feeling of anger. Our fleeting thinking modulations do not go deep enough to change the shape of the World groove. Here there is a greater leeway between our intuitive intents and the actual transformations of the feeling-depth of the groove. Everything of the nature of sympathies and antipathies can be considered to be such deeper furrows that most of the time determine the direction of our flow quite unknowingly to us. This greater leeway is also evident in the way our emotions are related to breathing and heart rate, of which normally we don’t have much conscious control.
Through willing we seek to penetrate the full depth of the movie flow. We no longer only try to inscribe mental images, nor do we only want to modulate our sympathies and antipathies, but we try to amplify our intuitive curvature to such an extent that it faithfully impresses in the World groove. In thinking we have little concern about what exactly happens in our body when, for example, we imagine stretching our arm, but when we try to do that through our bodily will, it is our primary concern that our imagined movement should match the one we perceive in the full spectrum of the World state.
Now it may be tempting to imagine thinking, feeling, and willing on a scale from easy to hard, since in thinking we only inscribe ‘lightweight’ mental images, while in will we have to overcome the full resistance of the World groove. Yet this could be misleading since it makes it seem that in our thinking we’re completely unconstrained. However, developing a new mental skill can be just as challenging as developing a new motor skill. Seeing things in this way helps us realize that what is hard is to transform the curvature of the World groove instead of freefalling through the usual channels. Changing our thinking habits requires persistence and determination, just as building muscle does.
Thinking, feeling, and willing shouldn’t be taken as some fundamentally distinct spiritual forces. In a deeper sense, they are all forms of a unitary intuitive activity. They all augment the curvature of the existential flow and they all feel effortful if these changes need to be more pronounced. In this sense, thinking is also willed. Yet we are also justified in acknowledging their differentiations. In thinking we’re concerned that our willed intuitive curvature becomes the riverbed in which mental images flow, while in willing we strive that this intuitive curvature modulates the full depth of the World flow. The latter clearly requires greater orchestration. For the first, we need only a well-functioning brain. For the latter, we need also our full body and maybe also the orchestration of phenomena beyond our skin. For example, a movie director first works on the idea, he develops the movie as a storyboard of mental images. A brain is enough for this task. But to impress the movie idea into the wider World flow, he needs to communicate the ideas, to organize the stage crew, logistics, actors, props, and so on. This doesn’t necessarily need to be more difficult. If all goes well, it might as well require less effort than the purely ideal development. Yet it is still true that realizing the idea requires the orchestration of a much wider volume of the World groove.
In thinking, we’re at the center. When we think we don’t do that to make our inner orientation more confusing. It’s the opposite – the intuition that we try to focus through our mental images only serves a purpose if it integrates our understanding, if everything that we think finds its place in a greater intuitive panorama. Even if we think of completely trivial daily problems, we still implicitly strive towards a mental image that fits like a puzzle piece in the curvature of our more encompassing goal. That’s why in thinking we feel like an inner kernel around which intuition of the World integrates.
In willing we need to go beyond ourselves. The images that we have integrated ray out and curve the flow of becoming to a much greater extent. As we ray out, however, we also encounter the curvature willed by many other beings. Thus, it’s not a question of tyrannically impressing our own intuitions in the World groove, but continually receiving thinking and feeling feedback from the way our impressions harmonize or clash with the greater flow. This feedback works back on our life in mental pictures, where we seek even more encompassing intuitions, which when rayed in the full depth of the flow, will better harmonize with it.
As we already said, thinking also reaches into the full depth of the World state, even though we’re not immediately concerned with it. However, we are not the complete master of the World curvature in either thinking or willing. We’re still only modulating it. In other words, there’s no such conscious phenomenon for which we can say “This is entirely my own creation and nothing else plays a part in it” (remember the analogy with the movie projector and the brick wall).
This needs to be mentioned because, otherwise, we can easily imagine that our spiritual activity – in the way we experience it in our present Earthly form – can be the singular master over the curvature of the World groove. But we need to develop the sensitivity that there’s a much greater depth of the World groove for which we normally have no direct experience. For example, we may have intuitive clarity about the movement of our hand, but we have no clear experience of what happens in the nerves, the muscle fibers, the cells' biochemistry, and so on. This is also apparent through the fact that our intents can’t do much in the case of a paralyzed limb. Many idealistic philosophies present things as if the contents of experience are just a thin dream picture – the World is imagined. From that perspective, it seems that our intuitive intents should be able to completely override the dream contents, much like a painter could redraw part of a painting. However, we should also consider the materialistic intuition which may go astray in many ways, but not about the fact that there’s a mysterious depth of the World groove that we currently only modulate with our intuitive intents without any clear consciousness of what happens there.
In that sense, in our lucid consciousness, it is as if we’re in the ‘middle’. The world below, towards the small, and that above, towards the Cosmic, we only grasp by projecting mental images over them. In this context, ‘below, above, and middle’ should be grasped qualitatively. Clearly, they are not spatially separated – there's small everywhere and there’s large everywhere. In a sense, our conscious life is fully superimposed with both the small and the large, but presently we can only resonate with particular ‘wavelengths’ of the intuitive curvatures. Through our will, our mental images surely modulate the depth but still in a way that we can’t trace in full detail. Our intuitive intents can directly override neither the curvature through which particles flow nor that of the planets. In that sense, when we speak of the depth of the World groove, we should conceive that it goes in both directions – towards both the small and the large. Of course, speaking about the curvature through which particles and planets flow is only for illustration. We’ll see that we need to speak about the curvature of the small and the large differently when we deal with their inner intuitive reality.
Lastly, an interesting reciprocity can be observed when we take thinking and willing as the two poles of our spiritual activity. In willing we try to modulate the full depth of the flow, yet we can only do that from our strictly personal bodily perspective. On the other hand, in thinking, intuition integrates around our personal kernel but at the same time here we live in something universal. The mental images that we experience are surely personal but in the ideas that we think we live beyond the confines of the strictly personal. For example, if a friend and I think about the Earth, our concrete thoughts are unique to ourselves but we surely feel that we are speaking of the same general curvatures of the World groove that constrain our existence. Seen in this way, in willing our spiritual activity rays from within the personal and impresses in the World state as if from the center towards the periphery, while in thinking we strive to reach universal intuition and integrate it into our personal kernel from the periphery towards the center. It is very important that this dynamic is grasped correctly. In our age, it is considered that thinking is something strictly personal. This, however, seems so only if we focus entirely on our cerebral experience of thought images. If we strive for a more encompassing view, we’ll easily see that it is precisely in thinking that we live together in the common intuition of the depths of the World groove.
Growing intuition
We have made some progress in developing a metaphorical vocabulary through which we can artistically express the purely phenomenological nature of our existential flow. Now if we reason through this perspective, we can logically ask whether it is possible to gain an even more comprehensive intuition of the World flow. This obviously happens for each one of us in the course of development since we are born. Even if we have lost some important conscious aspects of our childhood period – like openness, curiosity, freer imagination, and humility before those who are wiser than us – we can nevertheless say that as an adult we have a more comprehensive orientation within the World flow.
When we focus on everything around us that proceeds from human activity, we can more or less understand the inner life that inscribes itself in the World flow. Yet when we come to the other kingdoms of Nature, things are not exactly the same. For example, when we have seen a thrown stone enough times, we already gain some intuition for the parabolic trajectory it follows. We can close our eyes and imagine a thrown stone gaining altitude, slowing down, and then accelerating back toward the ground. We can even quantify this movement through mathematical thinking. In all cases, our intuition of the trajectory acts as the curvature through which our mental image of a stone metamorphoses through time. Of course, hardly anyone would suggest that this intuitive curvature of imagination has anything to do with the real curvature of the World groove (the scientist would call it spacetime curvature) within which the perceived stone falls. In our present consciousness it feels that whatever the essence of the greater world is, it lies on the ‘other side’ of our conscious experience. So effectively, in our modern age, we call ‘understanding of reality’ the ability to consistently arrange mental images (for example, through the lawfulness of mathematical thinking) and check whether the mental dynamics match the flow of perceptions (possibly amplified through technological extensions). This creates the characteristic split between our inner life of purely mental modeling of reality and the supposed reality-in-itself on the other side of our inner experience.
We already mentioned how we’re in a special position regarding our spiritual thinking activity: in a unique way, we are one with the curvature of the ‘law’ through which the existential movie unfolds. At the same time, we also saw that our inner state can’t be considered in isolation from the total World state. In fact, we have no phenomenological justification to see our inner experience as anything other than the experience of the World state. Any boundary that is imagined to be separating our inner world from the ‘other side’ of reality can be put there only by our own philosophizing. The fact that many of the details of the World’s totality are missing from our present consciousness does not justify the postulation of a hard boundary. In the same sense, our child consciousness didn’t contain much of the intuition we presently grasp. From the child’s perspective, this intuition could have been considered to lie outside consciousness, as if separated by a boundary or a veil. Yet over time, we grow into that intuition and it integrates into a greater musical whole.
Could it be that through the appropriate inner organization, something of the curvature of the World groove, which presently feels to be outside our consciousness, can be intimately known in the same way we intimately know the intuitive curvature through which our own thoughts flow? In other words, could it be that the intuitive curvature of the World groove is already present within our intuitive context but it is ‘blurry’, merged with the intuitive background of existence so to speak, since we have never sought the means to organize our inner flow such that this deeper intuition can be focused into clear concepts?
In a certain sense, we are already organizing our inner thought flow right now as we actively contemplate what has been expressed so far. Some readers may have already felt that while following the ideas, they did not simply receive some new bits of information, like we do when we read about dates, events, places, and so on, but their inner being has been stimulated to transform through novel mental states, the possibility for which was probably unsuspected until now. It is as if our thinking being discovers completely new degrees of freedom for its metamorphoses, which challenge our understanding of what we are and what reality is. From a phenomenological perspective, we have no justification to place an arbitrary limit on how far these degrees of freedom can expand and how much our understanding of what we are is allowed to change. Any such limits can only be self-imposed limits. This is the direction we’ll explore in the next part.
In this sense, they are on the same side of our conscious experience.