The Phonograph Metaphor
Part 2
Part 2
Differentiating from the general flow of necessity as a means of expanding consciousness
Because of the scientific habits of our age, when we think about gaining a more intimate experience of the World groove, probably the first thing that comes to mind is that we should somehow gain insight into the way particles and forces work. But in reality, as we saw in connection with our willing spiritual activity, this depth of the physical world is initially the furthest removed from where our intuition of the flow is at its clearest focus – the experience of our thinking. We know the physical world only as far as it impresses through sensory perceptions and we form corresponding mental images. What happens in our organs and cells, we don’t have direct consciousness of. Our intuition can only grow from where we find it to be already one and the same with the intuitive curvature of the World groove. If we jump directly to physics or metaphysics, we once again introduce the duality between the intuitive curvature within which our philosophical thoughts flow and the supposed ‘true’ curvature of the World groove, which, alas, once again remains ‘on the other side’. For this reason, gaining a deeper knowledge of the World groove starts from within outwards.
To take a step in this direction we should first realize that what makes us self-conscious beings is the possibility to recognize the engravings of our spiritual activity within the phenomenal panorama. If our inner experience was one of simply flowing, as if completely merged with the World groove (completely in playback mode), that would be a trance-like existence.
Self-consciousness dawns when we recognize ourselves as a spiritual force that, so to speak, can raise its head above the flow of necessity. This is first achieved in a dim dream-like manner through instinctive pursuit of what feels sympathetic, and avoidance of the antipathetic. Then at a later stage, this activity reaches higher lucidity when memory afterimages of experiences begin to be lifted and we find ourselves capable of intuiting their relations. One of the consequences of this is that we begin to grasp our existence through time, we feel ourselves as a being that persists through time by encompassing the memory images of our previous states and anticipating the images of future states. When these images become contracted into symbolic representations, we arrive at our familiar thinking. At this point, the ‘distance’ between what we do as intuitive activity, and what we behold as the engraved phenomena of mental images, becomes so small that the latter feels like a faithful mirror of our intents.
With each of these steps, we lift ourselves from the flow of necessity. This doesn’t mean that we become completely independent of it. Initially, this lifting happens entirely in our intuitive life, we differentiate from the flow as a thinking being. Here someone may say: “But by thus differentiating we only reinforce our separation from reality. We should seek oneness with reality, not separateness.” This objection, however, rests on a prejudice – it assumes that by merging with the trance-like flow of necessity, we do the best thing. Yet this completely ignores the fact that in this flow of necessity the good, but also the evil, are intermingled. For example, a person who lives completely merged with the grooves of passions and urges has no clear consciousness of them. They are simply part of the unquestionable way his personality works. His behavior is coerced by the playback of existence. If he commits a crime because of his passions, the one who absolutizes oneness would have to say: “That’s alright, he was simply one with his nature.” On the other hand, a person who can differentiate from these instinctive grooves forms mental pictures of them. These pictures reflect a new intuition – that there’s more than one path of experience. When the mental images are laid over our general World conception, we can see how an action driven by a given passion would harmonize or clash with our understanding of the World flow. We are free in our spiritual activity when out of such panoramic conceptions we can give way to certain thoughts, desires, and actions or resist them. Thus, differentiation is not about becoming alienated from the World flow but precisely the opposite – to become much more conscious of it and guide our activity such that greater harmony can be achieved.
This ability to wriggle out our intuitive activity from the flow of necessity gives us the basic blueprint of what it means to gain consciousness of the World groove. Now the question is whether we can conceive that there could be many more such curvatures with which our experience is still fully merged and thus we’re completely unconscious of them – we simply witness their playback.
If we only think intellectually about these more encompassing curvatures of the World groove we’ll arrive at some kind of metaphysical theory, but their reality will still evade us, it will all remain as mechanically arranged mental pictures that only point at something beyond our conscious experience. To approach reality, we need to go in a direction that modern man has very little incentive to follow. We need to open up to the possibility that even our thinking is not absolutely free. We surely feel as if our thinking voice is the expression of the truth of what we are, how we feel, and intuit reality, but are we really free regarding what form this truth takes, or do we simply express the playback of existence in the way we find it? If we examine our life of thought we’ll have to concede that most of the time we’re simply flowing along curvatures that we do not consciously shape. In fact, most of the time our thinking feels like daydreaming, it simply flows and resembles no more than a commentary on the flow of existence. Our thoughts are merely the verbal symbols for the intuitive context that we metamorphose through. In a sense, our thinking can be compared to a dog on a leash taken for a walk in the park, having some perimeter of freedom but with no clear awareness of the forces that lead it hither and thither.
Metaphorically, we move through a tunnel of inner experience and intuit the ‘reading out’ of symbols on the walls but with very little awareness of the way the tunnel meanders. So the first step is to become aware that whether we like it or not, we’re flowing through the World groove and most of the time our thinking activity simply nods along and comments. How then can we gain deeper consciousness of these curvatures through which our needle treads? By first humbly acknowledging that these curvatures are greater than what we normally scribble with the tip of our thinking needle. In other words, we shouldn’t imagine that we’ll find these curvatures as we do the thought engravings that we’re familiar with in our intellect. Yes, we can surely symbolize them with thoughts but we need a whole different inner attitude if we are to approach their reality. This attitude is one of humility and prayer-like openness. We should admit to ourselves that just because we can symbolize the dim intuition of these deeper grooves through our thought engravings, it doesn’t mean that we override them. Neither does avoiding thinking about them make us free from their curvature through which our existence flows anyway. For example, if we want to change a trait of our character it’s not enough to just think about it, although this is a necessary starting point. We have to do something on a deeper level. Take forgiveness for example. Even a child understands the difference between just saying something and actually meaning it from the heart. To forgive someone it is not enough just to think of it as an arrangement of words. In this way, we’ll still be traveling through the old feeling curvatures. We need to alter something in the soul-scale curvature of the World groove. If we do that, something really changes and we indeed begin to flow through a different track, so to speak.
When our soul is gnawed at by dark feelings, it is as if we’re traveling through a correspondingly shaped curvature of the World groove. In our normal consciousness, we don’t see this environment but it continually shapes our mood and steers the direction of our thinking. Our needle vibrates accordingly to the greater groove and we experience the finer vibrations as correspondingly dark thoughts. Even if we try to override this by scribbling with our needle “Everything is great”, we still can’t help but feel the surrounding cold and darkness. In order to step into a different environment, our thinking has to be amplified such that it can give an impetus to a force in the depth of our feeling-life. Then something in the curvature of the World groove alters and new moods, and new thought-images flow into our consciousness. This is rarely a one-time switch. For a long time, we may need to accumulate this soul force that will allow us to switch tracks. And even then, the two grooves may meander closely together, now going apart, then intertwining again. In general, everything of the nature of sympathies and antipathies can be understood as dim perceptions of the deeper soul groove that we flow through.
Self-knowledge and inner development
The natural course of life often forces us to recognize certain soul grooves, even though it won’t present us with the means of conceiving them as we do here. To know something more of the flow of existence, something that won’t be freely bestowed on us by the ordinary movie course, we need to differentiate our spiritual activity from the usual flow. Only in this way, we can gain consciousness of what has been thus far completely merged with the background of existence. For example, we make a step in that direction when we no longer take our likes and dislikes as some immutable attributes of who we are. Normally we say “I like that” and that’s all. We simply report through verbal thought symbols the way we feel without ever caring why we’re so constituted that the thing in question feels pleasant. Yet we can go further than this if we ask: “What does this feeling tell me about the soul landscape I’m moving through?”
There’s not much in our present culture which stimulates us to ask such questions. Thus, if we want to experience something unlikely to occur in the ordinary flow, obviously we need to do something that is outside that flow. Asking questions like the above can certainly heighten our awareness of the hidden groove but ultimately all would remain as some kind of intellectual psychoanalysis. Endlessly philosophizing about the World groove doesn’t lead us into its reality. In the end, we know as reality only that part of the intuitive curvature within which the philosophical thoughts flow. This, however, shouldn’t throw us to the other extreme where we conclude that thinking is of no use, and we should seek some completely non-cognitive way to experience the World groove. This can only result in the mentioned trance-like consciousness. Then all our intuition diffuses into the general awareness that we’re going through the flow of existence but that’s pretty much the end of the road as far as an understanding of reality goes. To approach true consciousness of the flow, we need to discover so far unsuspected ways of conducting our spiritual activity. These forms of activity are available as slumbering potential in each one of us, but usually, nothing in our ordinary life stimulates their organization and awakening. We need a way to step out of the usual stream of intellectual thoughts, yet not for the sake of abandoning them but to know much more intimately the deeper curvature through which they normally flow. The way we approach these new forms of cognition is through meditative concentration. In this way we resist the usual flow of intellectual thoughts but without giving up the intuitive nature of our spiritual activity. At this time it may look strange that concentration could lead us towards a novel form of cognition since it seems like a halting point of all inner life, but we’ll see that things are different when we actually step into the experience.
Concentration and meditation
Holding our focus still, even for a short while, can be challenging at first. The World groove can be very complicated and not in the least in an orderly state. We can compare this with scratches on a record.
How often do we try to focus on something when with a ‘scratchy sound’ our needle jumps in a completely different groove and is carried through a corresponding tunnel of experiences! Interestingly, these jumps of attention already provide us with intuition about the curvatures of the World groove – even if these curvatures are more like imperfections in the World wax than musical streams. These jumps may have various sources. They can proceed from habits deeply ingrained in the physical spectrum of the groove, they can be part of our disorderly feeling life, and so on. In any case, we need to persist with our efforts to ‘hold the needle with a steady hand’.
As we hinted above, concentration as we describe it here should be conceived differently from what one usually imagines. In the ordinary sense, concentration feels like stagnation of inner life. It is as if life continues to flow around us with all its beautiful and interesting features, while we force ourselves into a point and miss all of it. With such an attitude it is easy to see why such an activity quickly becomes boring and one soon abandons it completely. But if our metaphor is grasped correctly, it should be clear that here concentration is something more. It is the development of inner strength through which we extricate ourselves from the ordinary disorderly flow of necessity and in this way we begin to gain consciousness of the hidden curvatures of existence, through which we otherwise flow without knowing.
Even if we understand that, we encounter the next obstacle. We may be eager to perceive the mysteries of existence but in the beginning, when we turn away from the immediate sensory perceptions and concentrate in our mind, we encounter only the grooves of our personal life. These are curvatures that we can most readily relate to. This alone can already demotivate some people because it means that we have to gain true self-knowledge, and we know very well how we often prefer to live with a self-image of our liking instead of knowing ourselves in true depth. This true knowledge of ourselves, of the actual grooves of our soul life, can be so unlike the superficial self-image that we hold in our ordinary consciousness, that we may feel subconscious reluctance to elucidate this stratum of existence. Of course, if we are determined to know reality, nothing can stop us from slowly gaining consciousness of the soul grooves and making the necessary corrections.
Higher consciousness
Let’s try to gain a more concrete intuition of the way our consciousness transforms as our activity differentiates from the flow of necessity. First, we have to be aware that we need a kind of fine balance when concentrating our spiritual activity. If we drive the tip of our thinking needle with excessive strength, we become a tyrant preoccupied with the ‘write’ operation. We become fixated on the scribbles that we impress in the flow and as a result, we become correspondingly insensitive to the greater curvatures of the groove. It’s not that we are free from these curvatures but only that in our over-fixation in the forms that we impress with our needle, we become oblivious of everything else. At the other extreme is the state where we completely let go of our spiritual activity. This leads to the mystical trance where our flow is completely determined by the World groove and as a result, our consciousness is diminished into an admittedly expansive but completely nebulous condition. For such reasons, our meditation should lead to a delicate balance between activity and receptivity. The focus of our thinking needle is both the ‘writing’ and ‘reading’ organ of our intuitive life. We actively keep our focus steady but at the same time perceive how the groove agitates it.
The above may seem like a contradiction – how can we keep our focus steady and at the same time allow it to be agitated? A rough analogy can be drawn from the sense of touch. For example, if we are blindfolded and we try to examine the shape of an object, we need to be active with our will to move our fingers, but at the same time, we are interested in the tactile sensations through which we gain intuition of the form. In other words, we don’t want to override the form of the object through our will (such as may be the case if we’re working with plasticine) but we will our movements only as far as we can feel the resistance and constraints conveyed to us through the sense of touch. Similarly, as we keep our concentration, all the distractions that try to slip our needle into their grooves begin to feel like inner nudges. They push our attention slightly but not so far that we switch grooves. The interesting thing is that these nudges are felt not simply as some mechanical pressure, but they are something meaningful. In a way, each nudge is intertwined with a flash of intuitive insight through which we know in what direction our thoughts would have run had we allowed our needle to switch tracks.
Initially, in our consciousness, we feel in such a way that we’re submerged in sensations and corresponding meaning. When we concentrate, we leave all of this in the periphery. We relax the periphery of conscious experience – our whole body, our head space, all fidgeting and bubbling emotions – and gently concentrate on a thought image in our mind’s eye. This feels as if we’re giving up a whole world of riches for a single thought. Naturally, everything that we have relaxed in the periphery still tries to drag our attention and lead us in its grooves. Yet, as we persist with our efforts, and we resist the nudges, we gradually realize that we’re not losing anything of the riches of our ordinary consciousness. In fact, we begin to rediscover everything once again, although in a different way.
The more we learn to resist the nudges, the more we realize that we can, in a sense, think through such nudges. In our normal consciousness, we feel the need to speak out our thoughts through our inner voice word by word. When we resist going through these grooves (where the verbal thoughts are produced in sequence) we begin to realize that we can still experience the meaning of our thoughts by allowing their meaningful nudge but withholding the flow through the sequential verbal thoughts. This leads to a kind of imaginative thinking, where holistic meaning is grasped within the metamorphoses of rich images. Here ‘images’ refers to not only visual but any kind of conscious phenomena, in the same way that we can remember memory images of any kind of conscious phenomena. For example, take the verbal thought “I need to make breakfast”. This thought reflects certain intuition about the way we intend the movie flow. By resisting the sequential verbal thought, we may feel the nudge of this intuitive intent similar to the way we experience a flash of memory. When we remember something, say an event from our life, it usually fills our intuition as if we grasp the whole scene as a storyboard picture. This picture may be very dim, it may have no details, it may not even be visual in nature, but there’s nevertheless some conscious sensation that anchors the intuition about everything connected with the event in question. If we need to explicate that memory-intuition, the storyboard flash will have to be expanded into many more movie pictures and lines of dialog. Similarly, when we resist explicating our thoughts about the breakfast verbally, its nudge can be experienced as a similar storyboard flash where we see ourselves preparing it. Through some practice, we can become aware that our inner flow always consists of the metamorphoses of such soul images. In fact, at this level, our soul life is of precisely the same nature as when we dream at night. The difference is that when we’re awake these dream images are being continuously constrained by the grooves of physical life. From that perspective, verbal thinking can be grasped as the intuition of this hidden soul dreaming being additionally broken down into a stream of symbolic encodings. The important thing, however, is that on a deeper level, we always flow through such soul imagery, it’s only that through the conscious habits of our age we are normally conscious at the level of the symbolic modulations and the rest is only dimly felt. If this is understood, it should also be clear that one of the goals of concentration is to resist the usual habits that quite subconsciously break down the deeper flow through the soul groove into symbolic encodings.
All this shouldn’t be taken in a one-sided way and imagine that the thinking which conceptualizes the deeper flow is only some handicapped condition and we would be better off as soon as we learn to think entirely in metamorphosing storyboard pictures. Thinking in concepts is critically important at our stage because it gives us the needed sharp focus and grip through which we can reorient and educate our deeper flow. It needs to be remembered that the grooves of our soul flow are not perfect. It’s enough to glance over our disorderly emotions and conflicting desires in order to convince ourselves of this fact. If we simply try to eliminate our conceptual life and live entirely in the soul flow, we’ll feel as though sliding on ice - there will be very little possibility of correcting the disorderly soul grooves. In that respect, the concepts of our thinking life can be compared to the sharp toe-picks that figure skaters use to control their slide in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
At our present stage of evolution, grasping our flow through storyboard-like pictures and clear concepts go hand in hand. Focusing only on the former would result in a dreamy and irrational flow that continuously drives us into conflict and contradictions. On the other hand, preoccupying solely with the latter would turn us into dry intellectuals who have abstract concepts for the World groove but shy away from knowing and being active in its intuitive reality.
Horizontal and vertical thinking
To make everything even clearer it can be useful to look more closely at our normal thinking process. In our ordinary thought life, our activity feels as if it moves and rearranges mental puzzle pieces (words, images, whole storyboard pictures, etc.). They are either mental images that feel like replicas of conscious phenomena, or symbols for them. The symbols, however, are conscious phenomena too – for example, the thought-word ‘house’ is in itself a mental replica of a sound experience, yet ordinarily, we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house. As already explained, in this kind of thinking we tend to forget that we’re actually thinking. What we experience is the intuition behind the arrangements of the puzzle pieces, i.e. how they click together between themselves and with the perceptual spectrum. We can call this kind of thinking horizontal or planar because it feels like we are ‘here’ with our intellect, merged with the background, and we arrange mental images ‘there’, on the imaginative plane in front of our mind’s eye. We can also distinguish another kind of thinking which we can call vertical or depth thinking.
These are not fundamentally different modes of thinking. In their essence, they are both means of focusing intuition. The difference is that in planar mode all our intuition is about the mental images that click together, without much concern about the actual thinking process, while with depth thinking, it is precisely the fact that we’re focusing meaning from within our intuitive context that is of prime importance.
The latter kind of thinking can most easily be exemplified through our activity of remembering (see also the ‘what we had for breakfast’ example in FoHC). When we remember something, we focus the memory thought-images from within our intuitive context. We are interested not simply in any mental images (which would correspond to fantasy) but precisely those that fit musically within the dim intuition of the thing we try to remember. The fact that they fit in this way doesn’t in itself guarantee that our dim intuition is truthful. The memory images that explicate this intuition need to fit also with the rest of the phenomenal content. In other words, we should always be pursuing the harmony of the facts.
When historians seek to reconstruct the events of the past, their thinking is in the planar mode. Their intuition grows through mental pieces that click together with perceptual facts – written records, artifacts, etc. Here the ideal is to let the perceptual facts, if we may so express, exercise a kind of ‘suction’ on our intuitive context and draw the meaning to themselves. The historian feels secure only when the intuition thus drawn is fully determined by the perceptual facts, there shouldn’t be anything subjective.
Yet when we remember events from our own life we use the depth mode, even if instinctively. Then the order of our memory images is determined from the hidden curvatures of our intuitive context. We don’t see our memories as open books in front of us, but we do the reading from within our intuitive context by explicating something that we intuitively know. This is also the mode that we use in any form of creative thinking or mathematical insight, except that in these cases it is as if we try to remember something that has not yet happened. In both cases, we’re striving to explicate something that we only dimly intuit. The difference is that, in the former case, we try to explicate mental images from intuition that feels already well-formed and familiar, while in the latter we try to remember mental images that we will experience for the first time, as if from domains of the intuitive context that we’re just now getting to know. Nevertheless, the inner activity is similar. In both cases, we try to bring to focus not just any random mental images but precisely those harmonizing with the dim intuition that we try to explicate (the thing that we try to remember or the solution to the problem we’re working on).
Expanding thought-texture
Meditative concentration begins with experiencing as tightly as possible how the mental image at our focus reflects our intuitive intent. In other words, the mental image is like a small patch of our inner space for which we’re completely aware: “I’m one with the intuitive curvature which of itself explains why this mental image is experienced in my mind’s eye.” The reader may find it difficult to see how concentrating on a mental image has anything to do with flowing activity. As an analogy, we can imagine a waterfall, which looks like a static column, yet the water is always moving. Another example could be a movie projector which, even if displaying a static image, must emit ever-new light. In ordinary life, our thinking continuously jumps from mental image to mental image with very little lucid awareness of the soul flow that guides it. Concentration is precisely the means through which we can resist these jumps and gradually awaken to the intuitive curvatures of the flow, within which the mental image is only like the shape of the waterfall or the static movie picture.
What mental image should we use for our meditative concentration? The image itself is not of prime importance (although it may have an impact if it is emotionally charged, thus initially more neutral images are preferable). What counts is that the image should anchor our more encompassing intuition about what the whole purpose of the meditation is, and it should rest in a fruitful feeling context. Even the puzzle piece that we use for illustration can be used as a mental image for meditation. The important thing is not the concrete perceptual details of the image but that it is imbued with the intuition that we developed above. We should try to feel how because of everything we said so far, this puzzle piece holds for us a quite different meaning than it would for a random person to whom we say: “Imagine a puzzle piece.” They would immediately imagine one, yet almost certainly the meaning that they will experience would be one of a “small colorful object that fits in a bigger picture.” Try to appreciate how different the meaning is if we concentrate on such a mental image when it is grasped in the context of what we’re discussing.
If we understand this, we should also understand that there’s no need to stare into the mental image as if we expect it to crack open and see some more exotic perceptions fly out from it. We also shouldn’t expect that some ground-breaking insights will emerge from this simple concentration. What happens is usually much more trivial, yet it is precisely in such small steps that we slowly but surely move toward deeper insights. For example, as we sustain our concentration, we may experience an intuitive nudge and we may suddenly become aware of how, in the last months, even without aiming for it consciously, we have been spending time in inner reflection. We may become aware, as if through such a storyboard flash, how sometimes we’ve been watching TV, but our mind had wandered and we were dimly thinking about some questions concerning the mysteries of existence. We realize how in such instances we’ve been dreamily flowing within certain grooves. Now that we have tried to resist the usual flow, a storyboard flash has anchored the clear intuition that this has indeed been happening. In our lives, we often use expressions like “I’ve just realized that …”. What we thus realize is very rarely something that has just popped into existence. The realization itself has indeed just popped into our consciousness but the thing that we realize has often been there all along, hovering in the intuitive context. We may have even been flowing many times through its grooves without recognizing it, just like we dream each night but rarely realize that we are dreaming.
When we spend time in such concentration, usually it is precisely such kinds of realizations that pop in. These are often so trivial that we easily miss their true significance. Each of these realizations is like a micro-awakening from a dreamy groove within which we have been instinctively flowing. Taken in isolation, these realizations are negligible, but together they quickly add up. Each one of them feels like we step out of ourselves and realize something. We may remember the way we said something to somebody and we didn’t sense at the time of speaking how we may have hurt them. We may recognize how our thoughts and actions have been unknowingly guided by some, until now, unsuspected trait of our character. Perhaps how our desire to always be right makes us argue even when our position is unsubstantiated, and so on. With every such micro-realization we succeed, at least for a moment, in lifting our head above the stream of necessity. To be sure, many of these realizations are not pleasant. Some make us enthusiastic and joyful, especially when we recognize how a completely new life opens up for us to which, in comparison, our life so far seems like dim slumbering. But others can make us feel uncomfortable and even, as a kind of subconscious protection from additional such realizations, make us doubt whether there’s any point in pursuing that direction further. Nevertheless, it is only through such small steps that we can become conscious of the deeper curvatures of our soul flow.
Notice how we start our concentration with a concrete mental image but when these intuitive nudges pop in, they rarely have much to do with the original image. And this should be expected. The goal of concentration is not to remain forever locked into a single mental image but to use the latter as a seed point (much like snowflakes need a grain of dust to begin crystallizing around it). What thus grows is our intuition not of the shape of the waterfall – which we already know anyway – but of the hidden flow that makes that shape possible. Over time, around that point more and more of the hidden intuitive context and its curvatures become explicit. Together with this, the storyboard flashes grow into more panoramic images that fill our consciousness. The critical thing to understand, however, is that these images are not simply visions. Just like a single thought-image receives its meaning from the intuitive context, so these panoramic storyboard images are of thought-nature. It is as if a deeper being within us instinctively tries to become conscious of its existence. It tries to explicate the still dim intuition of its be-ing through such storyboard flashes, just like our intellectual ego explicates its existence through verbal thoughts.
In time, we probe these deeper intuitive grooves more thoroughly, and gradually the imaginative flashes attain a much more fluid character. Now we really begin to grasp the hidden strata of our soul life. Our consciousness becomes imbued with a delicate thought-texture. It becomes clear that this texture is always there, it is the imaginative element within which we normally experience our mental images, memories, and fantasies. Now the imaginative patch has expanded from the center of our concentration – or alternatively stated, it has harmoniously integrated with that which is always there anyway – and reflects in images the nature of our intuitive flow through the deeper curvatures of soul life.
Such descriptions may raise suspicion in the reader. Is what we’re describing here just a method of expanding the arena of our fantasies and letting them run wild? Not in the least. Even in the materialistic worldview, we can understand that these imaginative phenomena should still be related to completely lawful processes in the nervous system. Even if these images don’t make sense to us, even if they are random hallucinations, they reflect something of the actual metamorphoses of the World state. This is the basic mood that we need to equip ourselves with if we want to gain truthful orientation in this mode. Becoming lost in imaginative reflections is a real danger that in no way should be underestimated, but at the same time, we also have all the means to overcome illusions and approach realities.
When we see things in this way, illusions are simply phenomena to which we experience some intuition and prematurely stop any further investigation that would place the experience in a wider context reflecting the harmony of the facts. For example, if an image of a UFO flashes before our mind’s eye this is not in itself a problem. It becomes illusionary only if we remain with the first interpretation that came to mind and stubbornly resist triangulating the experience from many more angles. In that sense, the contents of our expanded imagination shouldn’t be seen as portraying literal sensory-like perceptions of a finer world. Instead, just like our ordinary mental images, they should be seen as artistic representations of the intuitive curvatures that constrain the metamorphoses of our flow of being. In other words, the element of imagination is not something that we should stare into and analyze to see what it is ‘made of’, but instead we should always have the attitude: “How does this imaginative content reflect aspects of the intuitive context and help me become more lucidly aware of the intuitive curvatures that guide and constrain my flow of becoming?”
Our ordinary cognition feels like arranging puzzle pieces into mental models, while in this imaginative consciousness, it is as if we are intuitively steering from within the complicated invisible landscape of grooves. Our intuitive movements and their constraints are artistically reflected in the thought-texture. In our intellectual life, it feels that our intuitive gestures weave in mere thoughts. In this way we can philosophize, we can build thought-models about existence, but true existence remains in the background. In the true imaginative state, we can no longer speak of such duality. Here we are entirely centered within the deeper flow of existence. Everything that we experience in the imaginative texture reflects our real-time existential flow. Our navigation in this state is still more or less instinctive. It is guided by sympathies and antipathies, yet these attain a much more cognitive character. They are no longer simple feelings but forces of pursuing or avoiding meaningful paths of experience.
In all cases, we should appreciate how the path of knowledge that we describe here, is inseparable from true self-knowledge, inner and moral development. This is something that will be met with the greatest prejudice from those schooled in our contemporary scientific habits, where the ideal is to have a full separation between the subjective inner life and the objective contents of the senses. Hopefully, it is already clear why such an approach can never lead to true and direct intuitive knowledge of the World groove. Yes, knowing the secret curvatures of our soul life is rarely a pleasant experience, yet when we work on ennobling and guiding our soul life towards a higher ideal we’ll be rewarded by intimate knowing experience of the depths of reality that is simply unimaginable through the abstract and fragmented cognition of our age.
Musically nested intuition
So far we have referred to the intuitive context as something monolithic, and in a sense it is, but at the same time, the way in which this context is elucidated in the course of inner development, shows that we can better navigate it by grasping it as something contextual, like a musical hierarchy of nested intuitive flows of existence. When we intimately experience the movements of our thinking, we have the starting point where the intuitive curvature of the World groove is experienced to be fully in-phase with part of the phenomenal contents of consciousness. But as we saw, these thinking metamorphoses are embedded within the higher-order curvature of our soul life. Our understanding of the flow of being coincides with our expanding awareness within the greater intuitive curvatures of the World groove. This can happen in the right way only if we strive to harmonize these nested intuitive curvatures. For example, when such harmony is attained, our thinking life feels to be musically embedded within the soul flow. In a sense, the curvatures through which our conceptual thinking flows are felt to be self-similar to the curvatures of the dreamy soul flow, even though of a different scale and quality. Now our thoughts are not simply about some theoretical existence, while the true World process that makes these thoughts possible remains in the background, but they are experienced like sub-harmonics of our deeper intuitive flow. Every thought now feels like a testimony that tries to focus certain qualities of the deeper intuitive flow into a concept.
personal, all-in-one take on it. (I know you don't agree with where language stands in relation to the pictorial flow in this image. This is only a picture of my current sense):
That's amazing, Federica! Thank you!
