Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot (Letter XIII) wrote:The essence of the method of “construction of the tower of Babel” is inverse crystallisation. Normal crystallisation—the “stone”—is the final state of the process of transition from the gaseous to the liquid state and from the liquid to the solid state. Thus vapour becomes water (liquid) and water becomes ice. Ice is crystallised vapour. Similarly, a general but warm intention becomes a current of discursive thought which, in its turn, results in a well-defined formula. Or in still other terms: the spiritual becomes psychic and the psychic becomes corporeal. The process of normal crystallisation is therefore one of concretisation from above below: The process of crystallisation designated as the “construction of the tower of Babel”, takes place, in contrast, from below above: With regard to this latter process, it is a matter of transformation into “body” of the psychic and spiritual.
To guard against ‘inverse crystallization’ we need to get a feel for the supra-imaginative states into which we are retracing. Let’s begin with a broad overview of the cognitive stages of development. We discussed in Part II how the instinctive spirit first develops a meaningful orientation to the lawful flow of experience from the impacts of the sensory spectrum. From many such impacts, it orients to the consonances and dissonances within sensory transformations, i.e. how the meaning of various sensory feedback harmonizes or clashes with its instinctive activity (e.g. the tactile and visual sensations of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole). This sensory orientation acts as a set of training wheels for spiritual activity to probe the ideal topology at a dreamy resolution and begin knowing itself as a distinct agency that contributes to the topology. In other words, the sensory impacts entrain the movement of our instinctive will so we can survive, become more independent, and later reproduce similar movements voluntarily in the act of thinking. Eventually, logical thinking develops as the capacity to voluntarily replicate/remember these instinctive movements when combining conceptual fragments of the meaningful topology, discerning how they harmonize or clash with each other, i.e. “logic”.
It is difficult for us to concretely sense this function of the sensory spectrum since we have already lived through it and outgrown it, distancing ourselves from the sensory flow through cognitive development. That is why we can reflect on the flow and discuss its functions as we are doing now. We could never have this discussion if the instinctive spirit was still immersed in and entrained by the meaningful sensory flow like animals or young children. Due to this cognitive growth apart from the sensory spectrum, our interactions with it have become mostly automated and the spectrum feels like rigidified feedback on our activity, so much so that we often forget that it is even functioning as feedback. That is why all adults in the modern age begin understanding the spectrum as not only perceptual feedback on their spiritual activity but as the cause of that activity. Even if we don’t explicitly philosophize or otherwise state this understanding, that is generally how we treat the spectrum during life experience. It feels like the stable source from which our inner activity lights up, especially since we drop into unconsciousness when we no longer have this sensory feedback during sleep.
Nevertheless, we can try to develop a little sensitivity to how the sensory spectrum essentially conveys meaningful feedback for our spiritual activity with an experiment called, ‘voluntary synesthesia’. We have to set our imaginative activity in motion to heighten sensitivity to what has otherwise become an extremely rigidified and passive relationship. We can first notice how, when we move our head to the right or the left, our visual field changes to encompass different objects. It is the same thing when we walk from one room to another, or from inside to outside. Our audial spectrum will also shift with these movements, although these shifts are even more merged into the background of consciousness. In our house, we may hear the buzzing of a computer in one place, the creaking of the floor or table in another, the air conditioner changing volume, etc. The same goes for odors. Our taste sensations shift mostly in relation to our eating and drinking activity, which is usually very rushed and lacks presence, i.e. we think about a million other things while eating. We are quite insensitive to the feedback from odors and tastes unless they are especially foul or pleasant.
Now, instead of only those normal dim modulations, we can imagine that when we move our head to the right, we also hear a tone that increases in volume, and when we move our head to the left, we hear a tone that decreases in volume. Likewise, when we look up, the tone pitch increases, when we look down, it decreases. As we reach for our computer mouse, this is accompanied by the taste of stale crackers, but if we take hold of our hand and begin gently stretching our fingers, we experience a sweet taste like honey. When we hum the notes of the scale (do-re-mi-etc), or play them on an instrument, these are experienced with corresponding colors from red to violet. The point of this exercise is to regain a bit of sensitivity to the connection between our psycho-physical activity and the sensory feedback, even if only in our imagination. The new sensations won’t be vivid and don’t need to be. By imagining unfamiliar sensory modulations from our activity, the feedback process that is normally merged into the background of consciousness may start to stand out more.
As children, we indeed meet the feedback of sensory impressions with a much greater sense of novelty and much less automatism. Every impression is packed with more fluid and denser meaning, although experienced more dreamily. Through this instinctive development, the meaningful sensory orientation eventually metamorphoses into the forces of logical thinking. The spirit begins to probe the consonances and dissonances of the ideal topology more and more independently of the sensory crutches, at more integrated levels of meaning, such as we find in pure mathematical thinking. The ideal relations of the latter are not drawn from sensory experience but are elaborated entirely inwardly as an independent thought-organism. Because mathematical activity explores the same ideal topology as physical-sensory activity at a more integrated level of meaning, the independently worked out relations can be applied to the sensory flow with great predictive success. Mathematical ideas unite the meaningful ‘frames’ of sensory experience, allowing us to encode many experienced and anticipated sensory states into conceptual symbols.
The philosophical or mathematical thinker becomes inwardly sensitive to the consonances and dissonances within purely ideal relations and that sensitivity is critical for all higher development. In other words, the sense-free thinker learns to attain meaningful orientation within the ideal topology independently of the physical sensory support, i.e. to ditch the training wheels. As long as our spirit is reliant on sensory support in the formation of its thoughts, it is merely associating, not thinking. Already-formed thoughts bubble up from subconscious depths and get coupled with other thoughts with the same necessity as sensory impressions and emotions impinge upon and entrain our attention. The spirit is not present in this chain of necessity, rather it meets the latter as something given, an already past movement, that forces it into certain reactionary paths of experience. This associative ‘thinking’ that is characteristic of normal experience is practically animalistic, i.e. it automatically generates associations between thoughts and spits out ‘speech’ without any real choice in the matter, just as the birds and crickets chirp without any choice. Thinking is only thinking and speech is only speech if there is a choice not to associate thoughts or speak.
The imaginative and higher stages of development we reach through spiritual retracing are a natural continuation of sense-free mathematical thinking. Higher thinking deconditions from mere associating, from reaction to already past movements of activity, and enters the real-time flow of spiritual activity. It is the same principle when a musician learns to not only reproduce a composition from memory alone, without the score, but also improvise new composition styles or measures. The higher thinker, like the musician, no longer reacts to past movements and already formed thoughts, but is actively present and participating in fashioning new thoughts and relationships of thoughts, even ones that have never been conceived before. This sort of skill requires a rigorous and devoted path of inner training that unfolds in stages. Mystics, psychonauts, or anyone else who has not cultivated rigorous logical thinking through the consonances and dissonances of the ideal (supersensible) landscape will be unable to attain focus within the imaginative or higher states. Instead, their consciousness will drop into passive dreamlike and sleep states as the spirit loses its sensory and imaginative feedback.
To briefly approach some experiential aspects of the higher states, we will employ an imaginative metaphor. The following is only the most cursory overview and much more inner exploration is needed to properly orient to the higher states, which are experientially unlike any modes of consciousness familiar from normal life.
Imagine that, from birth, you had no awareness of your physical form - no visible head, chest, or limbs. All you experienced were dim will impulses and these colored waveform impressions that are mysteriously modulated by your instinctive willing gestures. When you desire X the colors change and shift in one way, when you desire Y they change and shift in another way, and so forth. These colored waveforms are packed with dense meaning that points back at your activity or constraining factors on that activity. You only know of your existence in the reflection of these waveforms that are partially responsive to your activity. Practically, this is analogous to the state we are in when we first begin exploring our imaginative spiritual activity. We instinctively make certain inner thinking-will gestures and the imaginative panorama is modulated in corresponding ways. It is the same principle in normal conceptual-sensory activity, except in the latter case the sensory spectrum is quite rigid, whereas the imaginative panorama is much more fluid and responsive to our activity. Nevertheless, it is still constrained by independent factors, only we no longer confuse these factors for mechanical processes on the ‘other side’ of perceptual experience but understand them as living spiritual activity on the ‘same side’ as our activity, i.e. as more temporally integrated constraints on that activity.
If the colored waveforms were to suddenly disappear, however, we would stop receiving feedback from our imaginative activity and drop into unconsciousness, just like we lose consciousness at night when our conceptual activity stops receiving feedback from the physical senses. The only way we would remain conscious is if we became so intimate with our thinking-will gestures that we could sense their ‘geometry’ from within, analogous to how we can feel our bodily limbs from within as kinesthetic sensations (for example the tingling sensations when our foot ‘goes to sleep’). It is a transition analogous from sensory thinking to mathematical thinking that weaves independently of sensory feedback - we learn to navigate the meaningful topology without the feedback of any mental pictures. Indeed, the spirit must willfully extinguish the mental imagery and become inwardly responsible for the reflective function of that imagery. Imagine you have a pen and paper and need to write something legible without any sensory feedback - not only are your eyes closed, but you can’t feel your hands, the pen, or the paper either. You live entirely in the thinking-will gestures that normally animate your hands and must condense the meaning experienced into legible shapes.
To retrace into the next higher state of spiritual activity, which is the ideal basis of all physical processes, we would need to renounce even our thinking-will gestures and freely make our consciousness the unconditional vessel of a much higher Will. The only experience somewhat comparable within normal life is that of Love and few of us have known this experience first-hand. We have probably known physical and psychic love, which is always tinged with egotism insofar as we derive pleasure, satisfaction, comfort, security, etc. from the relationship. Yet spiritual Love is born from a state of unparalleled inner sacrifice, from the longing to make one’s entire being a faithful instrument of the Spirit without expectation of receiving something in return. The spirit should be willing to empty itself of all that it has so effortfully won as inner content through its previous stages of development, including its own self-willing. This type of surrender is not passive but is only accomplished through enormous inner strength. All that remains is pure cognitive becoming; the continual death of old intuitive forms and resurrection into new intuitive forms by the Grace of All-Being. In this way, we don’t lose the old inner content or our sense of individuality but gain their true meaning.
Another crude metaphor for these higher states is a wall with holes and only blurry extensions sticking through, making certain gestures. In the imaginative state, we know these extensions (the rich imagery) belong to a living being and they are dialoguing with us through meaningful gestures, but we are not sure what kind of living being the extensions belong to or the precise meaning of the gestures (there is still some gap between perception and knowledge). Through the next higher state, the wall becomes transparent and we perceive the whole being clearly; the gestures are immediately united with meaning and understood (perceiving and knowing are One). We now gain a clear sense of how the rhythms of Nature and our own lives are intended through the symphonic activity of more integrated spiritual perspectives. Finally, we sacrificially unite with the being itself and experience the meaningful gestures from its first-person intentional perspective. Now we understand the holistic ‘meaning of existence’ that is synonymous with Love. Through all these higher states outlined above, working in continual coordination with one another, the spirit gradually learns to live in the realm of Intents that shape and steer the World's experiential rhythms across all scales.(4)
When our retracing activity grows in resonance with the more integrated topology of spiritual intents, we begin developing intuitive sensitivity for the lawfulness within arcs of time, as we previously did for spatial lawfulness through our instinctive sensory-conceptual activity. We can start to sense how previous activity has seeded the conditions for our present state of being and how the latter, in turn, seeds the potential for new paths of experience. Imagine you are walking between rooms of your home but with each new room, it is as if you wake up from a dream and the previous room you walked through is but a hazy feeling that something happened. You move from the bedroom to the bathroom but, by the time you get in the shower, you barely remember how or why you are there. Such a dreamy and disoriented experience of spatial-sensory existence is rare, but it is practically the norm when it comes to inner temporal rhythms. We normally have a dim and fragmented memory intuition for how streams of past inner activity are rhythmically feeding back into our current state of being, and anticipation for how present activity feeds forward.
In a previous essay, I attempted to convey a phenomenology of truthfulness in which the “truth” is understood as the harmonious alignment of concentric layers of experience – intents, thoughts, feelings, sensations. When we intentionally misalign our inner layers of thinking, feeling, and memory/sensation, i.e. what we know as “lying”, how does this feedback into the experiential flow of our lives, the lives of others, and, at a larger scale, the historical flow of the World? Where do our lies go, so to speak, and from whence do they return into the experiential landscape? Such questions are hardly even asked in our time due to the aliasing effect. It is considered the height of absurdity to imagine our inner states can be involved in a lawful process that extends beyond the boundaries of our skin and the boundaries of ‘local’ spacetime effects. Nevertheless, that inner lawfulness is revealed through spiritual retracing. Even quantum mechanical science recognizes that all ‘particles’ of reality must already exist in entanglement with each other since they were merged at the initial Big Bang singularity.
As a simple imagistic symbol for this process, let’s consider the water cycle.
The Sun symbolizes the entirely inner domain of existence from whence the manifest spectrum condenses; the contextually nested spiritual intents mediating the entire cycle through which inner activity gradually objectifies itself into perceptual manifestations, and engagement with these manifestations feeds back to orient the flow of inner activity through the contextual perspectives. These invisible forces precipitate into our inner life and crystallize as sensory impressions, thoughts, feelings, and deeds before percolating in the subconscious as memories. Then we conduct our spiritual activity based on the lawfulness of this subconscious memory intuition and radiate inner impulses back to the Sun sphere, for example when we decide to tell a lie because we have rationally determined it will help us (or even help others) in some way. Yet in this ‘evaporation’ process, the impulses we send back become more and more ‘subtle’ as they ascend into more integrated domains of relative perspectives until we lose sight of them, which is to say our intellectual thinking consciousness can no longer trace their relations. For that reason, we forget to even consider how they are still influencing the Earthly stream of development.
It isn’t only our personal activity at work here but the collective activity of many relative perspectives pursuing intents. Our normal intuition is that we are self-enclosed bubbles of consciousness confronting an ‘external’ world that runs its course mostly independently of our activity. Yet we know that our genetic material is woven from a line of ancestors that becomes increasingly wider in scope, more universal, the further we trace them back. Likewise, the substances that comprise our body are drawn daily from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The air we inhale one moment was outside our skin the moment before and will be outside of it again the next moment. Our psychic life is woven from memories of interactions with the outer world and its beings. On the path of retracing, we find these outer facts are genuine reflections of inner realities. Our inner experiential space is felt to be superimposed with the experiential spaces of many other beings, not bounded by our skin and bones. This doesn’t mean we dissolve into a homogenous soup, because we can still discern what our activity uniquely contributes within this space, except the boundaries are not so neatly and sharply defined as they usually are.
Returning to the metaphor, when the impulses we send to the Sun sphere precipitate back into the Earthly stream of development, we often meet them with various shades of pride, perplexity, fear, and resentment. We are graced with insight, skills, and good fortune, and we often attribute these to our personal efforts. On the flip side, we are struck by accidents, illnesses, traumas, economic disasters, wars, and similar events, and we search for all manner of external parties to blame. The situation is crudely comparable to a woman who goes through the trials of pregnancy without any consciousness that her sufferings were the result of her previous intent to have a child or are in fact leading to the realization of that intent. The whole temporal arc that would connect the beginning with the end, and make sense of the sacrifices involved, is conspicuously missing. That is not to say all suffering is intended, but simply that the inner relations that lead to the suffering and the inner potential that could result from the suffering are generally obscured from view. An untold degree of unnecessary suffering is invited into the experiential stream simply due to this blind spot of consciousness.
An excess of pride, on the one hand, and projective fear, blame, and resentment, on the other, occurs in modern society because our sensory cognition loses sight of the spiritual water cycle and feels forced to locate the reasons for all sensory events within the spatial domain, in which every being appears to be a self-sufficient bubble of inner experience, an island-unto-himself. It is comparable to a person who has a magnetic compass and tries to locate the reasons for the needle’s movement only within the mechanical bounds of the compass, rather than broadening out their search to the whole Earth’s magnetic field, i.e. the invisible influences which primarily make sense of the needle’s movements. Similarly, the movements of individual and collective destinies can only be made sense of when considering the inner Cosmos as a whole and its manifold influences. Most of our passionate intellectual convictions result from a combination of ignorance and a craving to have immediate answers for our experiences. When we mitigate that ignorance by retracing into the temporal arcs, we also find it easier to resist the craving for quick and convenient answers. Instead, we become enthusiastic to continually trace those reasons at an intuitive level.
We can represent these overlapping temporal arcs of activity as follows:
The smallest arcs represent the temporal rhythms that are most ‘in-phase’ in our normal experience, where intentional activity and the perceptual result of that activity follow in close synchronization. When we intend to think about politics, for example, a stream of inner voice perceptions (thoughts) flows immediately as a testimony of that intention. The meaning of the thoughts will closely reflect our political intuition, and if some thoughts are out of place within that intuitive context, we get immediate feedback that our activity needs some adjustment. Perhaps we notice a glaring gap in the logic of our political thinking and therefore get feedback that we need to do more research on the history of nations. The relationship between spiritual activity and resulting perceptual experience is transparent. These are the temporal arcs that are most intuitively evident to us, so much so that we normally don’t pay any attention to them. We just take it for granted that when we intend to think, a stream of thoughts issues forth in close synchronization.
We can use the following metaphor to orient toward the inner nature of these temporal arcs.
As we go through life and accumulate experience through our intents, thoughts, speech, and deeds, we implode our spiritual activity into the World state and leave a ‘karmic trail’ that continues to follow us just as the ‘snake’ in the game above. Some of this tail will follow us perceptibly, for example, the thoughts we condense and post on an online forum, but most of it will remain supersensible (aliased) and therefore in the blind spot. This tail grows longer and longer as we externalize our activity into new judgments, speech, physical deeds, relationships, etc. that continue attracting our activity back toward their meaningful qualities. We should try to see through the visual illustration above and sense this process inwardly. The visual symbol should only be an initial anchor for our inner orientation, and eventually, the visual crutches should be released to let the inner meaning shine through. We are speaking here of spiritual activity that continually recedes away from our subjective perspective into the objective World state and then meets us again in metamorphosed forms of experience. Every new state embeds the reverberations of this receded activity as its intuitive context.
Our karmic tail grows longer as more of our intuitive Subjectivity is externalized as mental, emotional, and physical events. The more our karmic tail grows, the more likely it becomes that our present spiritual activity will ‘bump up’ against its past activity as a constraint and iterate over its meaning in a reactionary way. For example, if we externalize our spiritual activity into the shape of a political ideology, our thoughts will continue to attract around its ‘center of gravity’. In a sense, our soul becomes a vehicle for the ideology - we no longer actively think but allow the ideology to think through us.(5) Whenever we are confronted with some event related to political issues, our spirit will be attracted around this psychic mold and its mental and emotional states will continue to iterate over its meaning. Likewise, if we externalize our activity into the shape of a physical habit, like bouncing our legs, our physical states will iterate over its meaning without our conscious participation. We may not even realize we are doing it until someone else gets annoyed and tells us.
Eventually, the tail grows so long that the continual impacts engulf our spirit and the latter can no longer discover fresh pathways of experience; it can no longer extract new intuitive insights from its circular loops of iterated thoughts, emotions, and sensations. It is around this time that it departs the mortal coil of the manifest spectrum, which is what we experience as physical death. However, the karmic tail is still there as the spirit’s overarching context that attracts its stream of becoming, and therefore the spirit will continue tracing similar pathways of experience in the next incarnation, albeit with new impulses and insights. This situation persists until the spirit extracts the inner lessons to be learned from these past manifestations, which generally involve the perfection of cognitive and moral qualities and capacities.(6) In the case of an unhealthy relationship with another soul, for example, the spirit will continue flowing through this karmic mold and will encounter the same soul under different circumstances. It will have the opportunity to compensate for the existing dissonance with the other soul if it becomes conscious of this temporal arc. Then bumping up against its past activity becomes a redemptive rather than reactionary occasion.
Returning to the phases of the temporal arcs, if we have a job interview and tell a lie about our resume, it’s not as transparent how such an intent will feedback on our experience as the intent to issue a stream of thoughts. It may at first give us an advantage for the position we are seeking, and then only months or years later it feeds back on us from an unexpected direction. Perhaps we are led into a path of experience with our boss and colleagues where more and more lies are needed to support the initial lie, and we end up entangled in an unstable web of lies that eventually costs us not only our job, but also our family, friends, and freedom (maybe the job required a high-level security clearance). Such temporal rhythms are somewhat ‘out-of-phase’ and, therefore, are more easily ignored as we conduct our spiritual activity. This domain of the spiritual ‘water cycle’ remains in the blind spot for many people today, hence lying is not seen as a big deal and is even welcomed in some spheres of life like politics, law, marketing, finance, etc., or even interacting with children.
A broader temporal arc is involved when our inner subjectivity is not only impressed into thoughts, like political judgments, or into speech, like when we post on a forum or tell a lie, but into actions, like an enraged blow to another person’s face. The potential significance of that action for future states at the individual and collective scale is not clothed in the sensory element and therefore remains supersensible, aliased from perception. If we think about the deed enough, it becomes evident that punching another person could precipitate soul entanglements that span many years or even generations. Perhaps it will cause the other person physical and psychological trauma that influences their relationships for a long time, or perhaps their family members will also be affected such that hostility arises between that family and ours. We could also imagine this hostile act profoundly influencing a young impressionable child who happened to witness it. These effects could likewise get entangled in an endless subconscious chain of Nth-order effects.
Given the lack of transparency for the intellect within such broad temporal arcs, it is rather ominous to consider what can happen when cultural norms and expectations disincentivizing such impulsive actions are thrown out the window. We have already witnessed what can happen throughout the modern age, especially during the last century. Contrary to popular belief, nothing extraordinary needs to happen for World-scale wars to continue breaking out, rather humanity only needs to remain ignorant of the inner temporal arcs that contextualize its thoughts, speech, and deeds. It is only this inner knowledge that holds Hope for humanity once the instinctive crutches of cultural and natural life fall away. A soul schooled in spiritual retracing will already be accustomed to actively thinking and drawing on moral intuitions independently of all such external crutches, all rigidified past movements of activity, and therefore will not be caught unawares but rather will be able to spiritually improvise under all circumstances. (7)
Through spiritual retracing, our cognition enters into the overlapping temporal arcs of inner relations. We begin from the most in-phase domain – our mental life - and expand from the inside outwards. For example, we can become more intuitively sensitive to a wider aperture of our inner states of being, such that we anticipate what we would be thinking and feeling if we allowed certain impulses to take hold and influence our activity. We begin experiencing the ‘wavefunction’ of thought-potential, which ‘surfs’ through holistic images, before it collapses into a linear sequence of memory pictures, verbal encodings, and corresponding feelings and deeds. Now we have a larger ‘dataset’ for how our inner rhythms are modulated in relation to our activity (or passivity), i.e. we gain more sensitivity for the living IFS structure of our soul life (remember the illustration from Part II). If this inner life was previously a dark room that we were stumbling through, it is now as if certain parts of the room take on an increasingly luminous glow, making them especially noticeable throughout our daily experiences.
At a broader level, we can develop sensitivity for how certain world conceptions were adopted at various phases of life to explore diverse mental states that were necessary for specific individual and cultural tasks, and which develop specific soul forces. We may also become sensitive to how our childhood experiences planted the seeds of certain qualities, capacities, relationships, or opportunities that grew and blossomed in adult life. These isolated experiences in time may seem unrelated to one another from the perspective of outer life, but they find their deeper connecting substructure in the characteristic rhythms of the inner life, like protruding islands united by an underwater archipelago. Now we sense there was a purpose animating these temporal arcs and can freely seek to harmonize our activity with the overarching aims. It is ‘free’ because we are acting only out of deep insight into and unconditional love for the ideal aim rather than any external compulsion of natural drives, cultural authorities, or hypothesized metaphysical entities. It is a spiritual striving born of nothing other than ever-expanding Wisdom and Love.
As we ascend to the broader arcs, we are dealing with increasingly collective forms of activity that contextualize the narrower arcs and feedback on our experience. Our whole life destiny is contextualized by the epoch of civilization in which we were born, for example, and this epoch is associated with its unique tasks for individuals, communities, nations, and civilizations. A core task of our current epoch is precisely what we are working on now - freeing our spiritual activity from its material, emotional, and mental constraints so it can explore intuitive domains of experience that provide holistic orientation within the existential flow. Humanity should learn to start creatively managing the streams of thinking, feeling, and willing that were previously managed for it in the womb of the Spirit. That begins by intimately exploring the supersensible capacity by which we think about the World and our relation to it. Such an exploration cannot be engaged by analyzing our inner life from a safe distance but requires us to dismantle the elemental macros of our Earthly personality and be transfigured in the process.
One of the most encompassing temporal arcs for humanity is that of its Fall and its Redemption. This is the contextual arc that elucidates the very existence of our sequential conceptual-sensory states, together with toil, suffering, and death, and the eventual reintegration of their fruits into the holistic imaginative and higher spaces through the retracing of spiritual activity. The bookends of this encompassing temporal arc are the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. It is memorialized in countless ancient myths and religious doctrines, but we can also experience it as an intimate rhythm of our daily and yearly experience. The mythic narratives were not the result of theorizing or subjective fantasy but were instinctively drawn from the same intentional perspectives into which we can now retrace in full consciousness and freedom. Through the Tree of Knowledge, the plenitude of spiritual existence was decohered into conceptual-sensory fragments, and through the Tree of Life (retracing the imaginative and higher states), humanity will once again realize its immortality, i.e. complete continuity of consciousness between life and ‘afterlife’. Death will no longer be experienced as an abrupt ending but as a metamorphosis from one mode of conscious being to another.(8)
By intuitively sensitizing to these overlapping temporal arcs, we gradually gain an intimate appreciation of how our Earthly states of being are woven into the whole spiritual Cosmos. Our spiritual activity transitions from egocentricity to Cosmocentricity as our sphere of resonance expands. In normal life, our efforts at attaining deeper knowledge of the experiential flow via philosophy, history, science, etc. are made for intellectual curiosity or narrow personal aims. At best, it becomes a matter of developing material technologies or employing psychological and theological systems that can potentially help others. Through spiritual retracing, however, our efforts toward inner knowledge become united with the Cosmic intents through which experiential reality evolves at all scales, from the states of the most primitive life forms to those of the entire planetary organism. Knowing and Being become united in our ceaseless activity. We become responsible for the sins of the World, which is to say, the content of the whole World, as experienced in living thought, becomes a continual symbol for the intuitive ‘shape’ of our spiritual activity, and therefore lights the path of perfecting that activity for the creation of a ‘new Heaven and new Earth’. (9)
Citations:
(1) Matthew 9:16
“No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse.”
(2) Romans 7:18-20
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”
(3) John 15:13
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
(4) Valentin Tomberg, ‘Meditations on the Tarot’ (Letter I)
“To perceive and to know, to try and to be able to, are all different things. There are mirages above, as there are mirages below; you only know that which is verified by the agreement of all forms of experience in its totality—experience of the senses, moral experience, psychic experience, the collective experience of other seekers for the truth, and finally the experience of those whose knowing merits the title of wisdom and whose striving has been crowned by the title of saint. Academia and the Church stipulate methodical and moral conditions for one who desires to progress. Carry them out strictly, before and after each flight into the region beyond the domain of work and effort. If you do this, you will be a sage and a mage. If you do not do this — you will be only a charlatan!”
(5) Carl Jung
“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.”
(6) John 4:12
“No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
(7) Matthew 24:38-39
“For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.”
(8) 1 Corinthians 15:55
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
(9) Revelation 21:1
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away;”
