Essay: The Redemption of the Meaning Crisis (Part III)
Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2025 4:08 pm
"Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another." (Ephesians 4:25)
Rediscovering the ‘Interference Patterns’ of the Experiential Flow
In the previous part, we imaginatively rehearsed ‘zooming out and in’ along the spectrum of scales that contextualize our experiential state at any given time. We tried to feel how our experiential state can be ‘thickened’ into a superposition of qualitative potential, and conversely, is filtered along a gradient of that potential until it manifests in our consciousness as particular perceptions which recede as memory, i.e., as symbolic replicas that we manipulate sequentially in our intellectual pursuits. When we say the potential filters “until” manifesting in our conscious state, we shouldn’t imagine some process that we can follow with our consciousness as a linear temporal progression, like the filtering possibilities of a crossword puzzle or game of chess. The experience of such a linear progression is itself the effect of the intuitive filtering process. Only when we awaken within the already filtered intellectual scale do we experience the ‘ticking’ of sequential states, most clearly experienced in the sequences of our inner voice. If we contemplate our dream scale of experience, for example, we can sense how such a linear flow is absent. Nevertheless, we can still feel that the intuited potential leads and attracts our fully filtered experiential states in some sense, acting as a ‘carrier wave’ for the latter.
The outcome of the meaning crisis depends entirely on whether human souls attain a more refined and vivid feeling for this contextual and narrative structure of their first-person experiential flow. We should start to feel like our every state is a critical ‘frame’ in the movie flow of existence, which is being filtered and attracted into certain ‘plotlines’ by interfering intents. At the same time, the soul is actively contributing to this flow, which is experienced mostly clearly in our imaginative process. Depending on how intuitively conscious we become of the interfering intents that constrain our perspective, we can feel ourselves more or less responsible for contributing certain ‘lines of dialogue’ to the movie script of existence through our inner activity. This dialogue then feeds back into the deeper scales and modulates the direction of their unfoldment. As a simple example, when we become more conscious of the ideas expressed in a technological device, such as our computer, we can then understand ways to modulate the computational states and steer them toward certain outputs (for example, by learning a programming language).
All of these symbolic images should begin to feel like they speak of concrete experiential facts and relations that we have lived through. We can no longer expect to attain satisfaction by merely theorizing about the plotlines of existence, any more than we would expect to attain such satisfaction from seeing a sketched diagram of a movie plot instead of living through its scenes. The concepts and illustrations we use here serve their proper function only when they help us attend more vividly to the lawful experiential flow we live through each day in our imaginative, emotional, and volitional activity. The lawfulness of this flow is not something mechanical or computational, but such a device can serve as a symbol for how our living intuitions help us steer the flow more effectively. After all, the computational device originally precipitated from our organic inner activity. Everything ‘inorganic’ or ‘mechanical’ in nature and culture was once in a state of living flux, woven out of interfering intuitive intents.
The interfering intents of our existential plot are trivial to notice in the cultural sphere, i.e., the formative influences of family, education, economic activity, social pressures, technology, and so on. They are more difficult to recognize in the natural rhythms of life, such as the seasonal or daily cycle, the water cycle, the patterns of climate and natural disasters, our bodily rhythms, etc. Yet all such influences are mediated by our ghostly imaginative replicas that recede as memory, confined to our headspace, while only our momentary sensory state seems to possess immediacy and concreteness. We can imagine the last time we had a stinging headache or toothache. If we tried to think through the meaningful depth of the evolutionary process in such a state, our attention would be constantly diverted back to the painful sensation. Something similar is continuously happening in our imaginative life whenever we try to focus our cognitive activity within the meaningful depth of existence, only it’s usually less noticeable because the ‘pain’ is diffused across many sensations over time.
For that reason, even the cultural waves of interference that shape the imaginative process are felt as insubstantial and mostly ignored. We can dimly survey them in our memory pictures, but it isn’t clear how exactly those influences structured our temperament, language, habits, knowledge, opinions, and so forth. Each atomic soul thus feels alone in its private space, in sole possession of its inner content, which is hidden from all other souls, while only immediate sensory content is shared. As we saw, the solution to this isolated state is not to abandon the ghostly replicas (which would be impossible, even if we wanted to), but to delve even deeper into the imaginative process through which they take shape; to make that process feel more immediate and substantial by leveraging the replicas as imaginative anchor points within the transpersonal flow. Through metaphors, illustrations, examples, and associated lines of reasoning, we can start to feel the inner contours by which our intellectual state takes shape and gradually expand from there into more expansive domains of the evolutionary process.
Our intellectual scale only exists because the interfering influences are ‘sucked into’ the neurosensory organism and reflected as a stream of ghostly imaginative pictures that recede as memory and grow increasingly ‘out of phase’ with our present state. We then gradually recall a tiny portion of these pictures and manipulate them in our inquiries to try and piece together the once-holistically experienced patterns of the expansive scale spectrum, i.e., to remember their regularities and anticipate how they are attracting our state. That is practically the birth of all philosophy, religion, science, art, and technology. Through these disciplines, we have been instinctively piecing back together the holistic patterns in the form of laws, principles, archetypes, doctrines, etc. All of our vocations, hobbies, family life, and daily tasks can also be seen as more indirect ways of recovering intuitive orientation to the holistic patterns that shape our metamorphosing states. These activities feel more related to immediate bodily and emotional concerns, but underneath the layers of varnish, they are still ways of navigating the existential questions posed by life. Even clipping our fingernails is a decohered expression of such an intuitive orienting process.
Yet, no matter how thoroughly we fashion the principles that elucidate the experiential flow, they remain just as ghostly as our imaginative pictures and feel like something orthogonal to the ‘true reality’ that they are supposed to elucidate. No matter how cleverly we organize our communities and nations, we still feel as atomic souls with access to only our private experience of mental pictures, while everything else impresses upon the ‘wax’ of our imaginative space as a mysterious and unknowable seal. As the intellectual soul bumps up against the walls of this seemingly hopeless condition, the pessimistic mood of alienation takes hold and spawns mental outlooks that seek to justify the condition. From here emerges the whole spectrum of modern philosophies, theologies, and scientific theories that maintain an unbridgeable distance between the imaginative content of our thinking and the interfering intents that are implicit in shaping that content. The intellectual soul becomes invested in maintaining its crippled state because such a state seems to relieve it of responsibility for its inner process.
Thus, it is only at this intellectual scale that we feel alone with our seemingly ‘private’ inner states, while the implicit meaningful context of existence feels to exist on the opaque [unintuitive] side of such states. The interfering patterns of many living beings then confront our consciousness as belonging to the ‘external environment’, or to use a previous metaphor, as the background conversation of ‘other tables at the restaurant’. That is, the inner lawfulness of such patterns feels like dimly meaningful noise, similar to the tingling sensations of our sleeping limbs. The chasm between the two became so extreme in the last few centuries that the intellectual soul felt like its now unquestioned ghostly pictures only exist to theoretically model the opaque patterns, casting the latter into rigid and universal ‘laws’ that can only remain as pictures plastered to the soul wall. This tapestry of mental pictures undoubtedly participates in the interfering waves of activity, but it only grasps the lowest common denominator of such interference patterns. They are all merged as a ‘standing wave’ of rigid spatial experience and corresponding thought-replicas.
We briefly discussed in Part I how both our physical and mental domains of experience, as individuals and collectives, take shape from these interfering waves of activity. We can also intuit this state of interference by contemplating how we reach more and more shared experiential qualities the more we go ‘up’ along the spectrum, accommodating unknown domains of intuitive potential, or ‘down’, encompassing the already finished facts of experiential states. Not only our emotions and temperaments, but also our biological and physical structure approach sameness as we descend from organs and tissues to proteins, molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles. These are fully finished products of previous spiritual activity, which are easiest to experience in the way our habits of thinking have taken shape (for example, the habit of using receded mental pictures to ‘explain’ the real-time inner process from which they precipitated). On the upper side, the soul opens into the space of potential ideas and ideals, noble feelings and virtues, and impulses of conscience. These waves are also most clearly experienced in our active thinking, which strives for truthful understanding and ethical orientation within the flow of existence.
If we imagine the interfering influences as overlapping Moire patterns, then our isolated intellectual self-perspective arises as an ‘imploding vortex’ of condensing potential. As the potential storylines are filtered through the contextual constraints (as in the crossword metaphor), they take shape as our concrete impulses, feelings, thoughts, and sensations, which then recede as memory images. The latter provides a sense of conscious continuity, the capacity to think, and, over many years, shapes our stable personality traits, desires, habits, preferences, skills, intellectual outlooks, etc. These memory impressions also shape our bodily structures and processes (for example, the neural pathways of our brain). In a certain sense, our psychic and bodily life can be experienced as woven out of distinct temporal layers that are superimposed, like accumulated tree rings or geological strata. For example, we could trace some neural pathways to a strata in childhood when we imitated gestures and learned to speak, some physical scars to a strata in adolescence when we acted recklessly and suffered a bad injury, some physical traits to the strata of our genetic ancestors, and so on. The same principle applies to our habits, mannerisms, skills, and knowledge.
Leveraging the Imploded Patterns For New Inner Degrees of Freedom
These superimposed layers all testify to previous patterns of spiritual activity across the scale spectrum, which now exist simultaneously at our intellectual scale and provide its meaningful context. At the same time, these imploded patterns provide a foundation from which the soul can accommodate new potential. For example, the trauma we experienced in a childhood accident may have provided the foundation for us to become more vigilant and resilient in the face of unexpected circumstances, which then makes us more adaptive to our environment as adults. Likewise, our ingrained emotional patterns may make us more acutely sensitive to opportunities for developing skills that we may otherwise pass by. Every imploded bodily and psychic pattern is not only a finished product, in that sense, but also a potential seed of some new quality or capacity that can blossom in the soul; an opportunity for new imaginative degrees of freedom to be integrated. When we fail to use that opportunity, on the other hand, the imploded patterns continue to attract our inner states into their gravity wells, and we experience them as forces of oppressive fate in our bodily and psychic lives.
Once again, this is experienced most clearly in our imaginative process, where every pattern of imploded symbolic replicas either enslaves our soul life to obstinate prejudices, opinions, assumptions, rigid beliefs, and so on, or provides an anchoring foundation from which we can intuit new domains of meaning to steer our thinking through. Whether the former or the latter prevails depends on our conscious orientation to this imaginative process and its function within the flow of life experience. The more conscious we remain, the more we can leverage the imploded patterns for lucid ideals instead of being leveraged by them for shadowy aims. We can contemplate the Mandelbrot set to get a better feel for this rhythmic process in our imaginative life and thereby improve our conscious orientation. The set is a fairly simple calculation that we can theoretically perform in our imagination; however, we would need to do it for every point in the complex plane and mark the result (whether the iterated value stays bounded or flies to infinity). The first image of the set looked something like this:
Mandelbrot wrote a program that calculated a rough grid of points and used the printer to type a symbol or space depending on the result. That resulted in a map of what his imaginative process could have been if he had calculated each point in his mind. The moment his eyes saw that image, his inner activity could steer through the domain of mathematical intuition in slightly different ways, and correspondingly different thoughts began condensing against the newly imploded patterns. The imploded map of printed thoughts acted as a seed point from which his inner activity could steer into new intuitions of the lawfulness within mathematical experiential space. These are imaginative degrees of freedom which may have otherwise never been integrated; the insights would likely not have emerged from a stepwise progression of mental calculations. This same principle applies to all the thought-maps humanity has progressively inscribed into the imploded World state over the millennia, whether in oral tradition, stone inscriptions, papyrus, printing, digital signals, or otherwise. They are all potential seeds from which our intuition of the scale spectrum and its lawful dynamics can grow.
We can also sense that there is a fractal-like structure of rhythmic patterns that is preserved across the imploded ‘tree rings’ of the scale spectrum, from our bodily and personality constellation to those that modulate the life trajectory of many other beings. As a simple example, we can think of Ernst Haeckel’s principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. For our purposes, we can say that each organism experiences the same transformations in its individual development as those experienced by its line of ancestry in its historical development. In that sense, each organism carries the whole history of natural evolution on Earth in its usually subconscious memory stream. These self-similar patterns exist not only at the biological and morphological scales, but in the rhythms of psychic and cultural evolution as well. For example, each human individual traverses the instinctive modes of consciousness from infancy to adulthood that were traversed by the human species over many millennia. At the biological scale, such a rhythm manifests in the dynamic between DNA and proteins:
In that sense, what happens at the deeper biological scale, reflected in the relationship between DNA and proteins, projects into our intellectual scale as the relationship between imploded thought-replicas and the intuitive will that leverages those replicas to navigate potential pathways of imaginative experience. We could go on endlessly with such patterns, for example, in the respiratory and circulatory rhythms, which paint an image of the feedback process between the intuitive center of potential and the perceptual periphery of finished forms. The body’s substances are continually renewed through these rhythms, just as the soul’s cognitive life is continually renewed through its imaginative rhythm. The analogical Hermetic principle of ‘as above, so below’ only works to bring insight into the meaningful foundations because this fractal self-similarity exists across the scales and implodes into perceptual patterns. That is why we can leverage our symbolic replicas to construct metaphors and imaginatively rehearse the experience of more integrated scales along the spectrum.
Adopting this participatory perspective on our experiential flow already brings us to a much deeper appreciation of the language through which we communicate meaning to ourselves and others. Our words are not simply abstract signs for mysterious independent realities on the opaque side of existence, but anchor points for a spectrum of experiential states that all exist on the ‘same side’ of our current imaginative perspective, stretched across overlapping scales of intuitive depth. By becoming conscious of the characteristic qualities and dynamics of our imaginative life, we also become more attuned to the characteristic dynamics of the wider World evolutionary process across the kingdoms and over many ages. In that sense, existence can be imagined as a Mobius strip, i.e., there is only ‘one side’ to it which is experienced as the shared unity of intuited ideas-ideals or the shared sameness of perceived physical forces and particles, depending on whether we ‘look up or down’. At deeper scales of meaning, these two are increasingly unified as lawful curvatures of destiny.
(Painting by Claude Heiland-Allen)
The whole diversity of relative first-person experiential states exists on this same side and unfolds between the poles of pure intuitive will (white) and pure thought-perception (dark) in self-similar patterns that project into our intellectual scale. The reality of other beings who shape the existential flow is not to be found on the ‘other side’ of our fragmented mental pictures any more than we can break a mirror into pieces and expect to discover the reality of the reflected objects behind the mirror. Rather, the reality of the ‘beings-themselves’ is to be found in the implicit constraints that shape and guide our reflective thought-pictures along the mirrored surface. By inwardly feeling out the bends and curves of that surface (such as sympathies and antipathies), we can begin intuiting the nature of the ‘geodesics’ along which the mental pictures flow. Such geodesics are the interfering intents of various agencies that are active along the scale spectrum. Our sympathies and antipathies are not random feelings, but can be discerned as living forces that ‘bias’ our states in certain directions, toward subconsciously purposive outcomes.
Feeling Our Way Into the Holistic Soul Organism
It can help stimulate our intuition of this filtering process through which we reached the current isolated condition if we stretch our imagination into the holistic Cosmic (Intuitive) state. In this state, there is only a single attractor of existence: pure becoming. It is a process of continually outgrowing the present state and trying to encompass its qualities, thus leading to the experience of a stream of becoming. There is only ever experience of a present state, an eternal ‘now’, yet the effect of trying to continuously integrate the qualities experienced in the present state is the feeling of a metamorphosis through states. The perspective-in-becoming knows itself in its imploding memory states, which perfectly reflect its inner striving and imbue it with infinite Wisdom. This state of pure becoming is present across all scales of existence as the fundamental carrier wave, including our intellectual scale. It is what we are always experiencing within our innermost core, and we can attain a glimpse of its presence through proper concentration.
For example, we can try a brief exercise the next time we are in the shower. We gently hold our breath and place our face in the warm stream. We use the face since it is one of the most sensitive parts of the body to our inner gestures. Now we are immersed in a unitary sensation, imbued with the meaning of ‘propulsive refreshing wetness’. When we hold our breath, it should be easier to quiet distracting thoughts from intruding and also defocus all other sensations, since inhalation is associated with inner activity being sucked into the intellectual-sensory scale. We let all such thoughts and sensations relax into the periphery, out of focus, and remain centered within the pure stream of becoming through ‘refreshing wetness’. Of course, we should only attempt such an exercise if we have no conditions related to dizziness, fainting, etc., when holding our breath. All such exercises should only be tried in the safest possible conditions. The aim is to live with our imaginative activity as much as possible, for at least a few moments, within the inner meaningful flow of our metamorphosing state.
Even a few moments of breathless focusing into the meaningful water stream should help us attain an intimation of a deeper scale of soul activity, characterized by the quality of ‘pure becoming’. Our meaningful state of refreshing wetness continually implodes as memory states with perfectly self-similar quality. Each new present state embeds the reverberations of previous self-similar states as a perfectly laminar flow. There are no chaotic desires, emotions, sensations, or thoughts pulling our attention, but only a continuous outgrowing of the ‘old self’ into something qualitatively new. The characteristic experience of this inner stream of pure becoming is the same for all coherent perspectives. Thus, it is not something that belongs to our private conscious state, like our momentary perceptions and thoughts, but is a foundational lattice for the possibility of experience as such. It is as if all possible perspectives are concentrically organized around and superimposed over this central axis of the inner flow. Our relative perspectives take shape as specific modulations of this axis along the scale spectrum.
If we translate such an inner flow to the Cosmic scale, we have the superimposed experience of all possible relative perspectives of the Whole, all possible first-person qualities of experience that can compress into an integrating (lawful) memory stream. We can imagine this primordial soul superposition as perfectly communicating vessels. It is as if, as soon as one soul vessel expresses an impulse-idea, all other souls resound in resonance and provide meaningful feedback on how this impulse-idea fits into the holistic soul organism. All members of this organism possess an inherent trust in the symphonic and shared inner process, such that they remain perfectly receptive and responsive to the feedback. A shadow of such a smooth and shared inner process can be experienced if we try to vividly remember a time when we were engrossed in conversation with another soul, as if ideas were flowing within and through one another with zero friction, i.e., without misunderstandings, confusions, uncertainties, awkward pauses, etc. These rare types of experience provide fleeting glimpses of our existence at deeper scales of activity, which are always overlapping our present intellectual state and sometimes ‘trickle’ into it.
We can also use a comparison to team-building exercises to get a better sense of this original ‘Edenic’ state. For example, each soul may be responsible for contributing only one scene or line of dialogue to a story before passing the story on to another soul who contributes another scene. The overall lesson here is that no single soul can direct the story process on its own. We can't add the scenes by expecting that the story will go in our intended direction, and when our turn comes again, we will be able to continue our personally preferred storyline. Instead, a sense of cooperation must be cultivated where each soul radiates out an idea and completely lets go, trusting that idea to the ‘periphery’ of other souls. Then others develop it, and when it gets back to us, we need the humility to work on something that is not entirely ours. In ideal circumstances, this shared process would result in a contextually layered and intuitively harmonious storyline. Each team member feels partially contributing to this storyline through their faithful receptivity to the impulse-ideas of other members.
Each new stage of development from this Edenic state adds a mirror, so to speak, which is a symbol for the more complexified oscillations of interfering spiritual activity. Once we begin breathing and lose our centering within the flow of refreshing wetness in the shower, for example, it’s as if several mirrors are introduced into our consciousness, and we begin bouncing between their reflections. Now our attention oscillates between the most varied sensations and thoughts; between thinking about pre-shower experiences and desiring post-shower experiences, between feeling slightly depressed or uplifted, between moving in this or that direction, and so on. The inner flow of pure becoming is still there like a carrier wave for our experiential states, but it is obscured by the complex mirroring dynamics. We start to feel like we can only infer the inner flow and theorize about it with our symbolic pictures. Thus, a few levels of indirection are introduced between the inner flow and our reflective pictures. Our modern feeling of isolation and alienation results from our sensory-conditioned mental pictures being reflected or ‘folded up’ several times over within the Mobius strip of transpersonal reality.
As the superimposed soul state gets folded in on itself, the waves of spiritual activity begin to work at cross-purposes to one another, generating ‘friction’ and decohering the superfluid transpersonal flow. The thread between interfering waves of inner activity and their reflected perceptual content becomes increasingly out of phase. We can imagine if, instead of trusting the team storytelling process, some participants began to ignore the others and continue generating their preferred scenes. Some other participants then begin to shout over their fellow storytellers when it’s not their turn to contribute. These frictional relations then lead to a state where each storytelling perspective feels entangled in a narrative with convoluted details and scenes that make very little intuitive sense. All of the interfering waves now meet us as an objective external environment. This objective environment provides the thought-maps that can kindle our intuitions, as discussed before, but it also carries the risk of objectifying other souls as mere utilitarian tokens for our myopic aims. That is, if we become enchanted with the folded state and fail to retrace our maps back through the filtering-folding process from which they took shape.
As another metaphor to phase relationships, we can imagine standing in front of a mirror and waving our hand. The reflected hand movement in the mirror ordinarily manifests nearly simultaneously with our inner will gestures. That is the in-phase relationship of the Edenic state. Now we can imagine that the reflection only manifests after some delay, corresponding to folded states. After some threshold of ‘phase delay’, we would feel like the thread connecting our inner will gestures and the mirrored images is 'severed'. The reflected hand would feel like it's barely moving under our control. Eventually, it would feel like it’s completely moving on its own, as some foreign object obeying mysterious laws. Then we would feel forced to 'explain' the hand movement abstractly, by connecting the mirrored images with various thoughts that feel ‘logical’. That is the phase relation between our ordinary intellectual scale and the 'outer world' of images. By the time our inner movements come back to meet us in the reflected images of the natural kingdoms and most cultural phenomena (including even our mechanical creations), we lose sight of the elastic thread linking the two domains and thus mistake the images for independent realities that we can only theoretically model with our ghostly thoughts.
The phase delay in our folded-up state means that our ghostly thoughts can normally only elucidate what is long past, what has already been accomplished in the evolutionary process. In such thoughts, we only contemplate the World in its process of decaying and dying, rather than the possibilities of existence which can be reborn from out of its ashes. This out-of-phase relationship between inner activity and reflected images is why we feel like what other souls experience beyond our immediate spatial vicinity doesn’t relate to or influence our inner experience at any given time. We imagine these souls and their inner process could be ‘switched off’ and it wouldn’t change any aspect of our inner lives. It is no wonder, then, that we feel so isolated and alienated. As a metaphorical comparison, that is like imagining we can move around individual molecules in a volume of water without disturbing the entire medium. The central axis of the inner flow is the ‘medium’ through which all souls experience their becoming, yet the varied phase relationships within that flow make us feel like we are only crafting our personal inner content and following personal trajectories toward our personal aims.
The religious impulses of all ages have been centered around unfolding the convolutions of this folded structure into which the human soul's experience has been filtered, i.e., what it experiences as its ‘external’ psychic and bodily environment; the institutions of Culture, the kingdoms of Nature, and their complex interrelations. Through the most varied mythic images, devotional poetry, carefully orchestrated rituals, and so on, such impulses helped the soul accommodate instinctive insights into the superimposed soul organism in which its life is embedded and unfolds. It helped souls become sensitive to unfamiliar inner content, trajectories, and aims that go beyond the confines of their myopic perspective. Yet, in the last few millennia and especially the last few centuries, the intellectual soul has developed a scientific way of thinking, and this new way of interfacing with meaningful reality cannot be bypassed. Our symbolic intellectual replicas must now become instrumental in mediating our religious impulses and unfolding the Möbius strip. Put another way, the sacred life that was characteristic of the ancient religious impulse should be reintroduced into our normally dead, yet lucid, philosophical-scientific thoughts.
In Part I, we explored how modern souls attempt to reintroduce life into their imaginative process through the most varied intellectual theories, artistic and religious pursuits, and forms of entertainment. These forms of sensory-conditioned theorizing, entertainment, and technology are essentially subsensible substitutes for the inner movements and degrees of freedom that are more faithfully experienced and cultivated through spiritual practices that expand ‘resonance’ with the interfering intents animating and shaping our inner content. With these substitutes, the intellect rushes to restore the holistic experience by squeezing the soul through many levels of indirection. Then we are like the drivers on the road who keep accelerating and decelerating, swerving in and out of lanes, in the middle of heavy traffic. We imagine we are ‘saving time’ and ‘reaching our destination faster’, but after some time, we either get in an accident or realize that we have only ended up behind the fellow drivers that we started next to, who patiently and harmoniously moved with the flow of traffic.
Like the latter drivers, we can approach the holistic soul organism directly by starting smoothly, slowly, and patiently from where our inner content is already in phase with the interfering intents that shape it. When we have a sore back, we struggle to intuit the reasons for this experiential state - perhaps it is due to bad sitting posture, perhaps we sprained it during an exercise, perhaps it is a kidney stone, or any number of other unintuitive and unsuspected reasons. When we are experiencing the flow of thoughts in our active inquiries, on the other hand, the reason for that flow is clear - it is the very fact that we are thinking. Why we shape those thoughts into certain content and relate them in certain ways is not as intuitively clear, but the imaginative experience of such flowing thoughts is entirely in phase with our intent to think. If we stopped thinking through a mathematical calculation, for example, the imaginative flow would cease. Thus, in our imaginative process, we experience an exceptional point of the World process where the intuitive streamlines of meaning are perfectly attuned to their reflected images.
Starting from this exceptional point of in-phase relations is what we have been doing in these essays when leveraging our symbolic concepts to live through the immanent dynamics of our imaginative process, and it is a path that can be taken much further into the interfering depths through imaginative concentration exercises. The shower exercise is already an example of the latter, but we can also learn to concentrate within the streaming flow of inner meaning without the support of any bodily sensations. Although we can’t stay in the shower and hold our breath for too long, we can concentrate on the imagination of flowing water (or any other archetypal meaning) for much longer and intuit the constraints on our concentrated state as they try to ‘nudge’ it in this or that direction. Those constraints span everything from the interfering intents we dimly know as ‘sympathies and antipathies’ to those that shape the collective destinies of nations, civilizations, and epochs. All of these overlapping constraints contribute to the meaning of our concentrated state in variable qualities and intensities according to their phase relations.
When we concentrate on a unitary and archetypally significant image for a prolonged duration, our attention expands out from its normal erratic movements, and the meaning at the center of our inner flow begins to ‘densify’, filling the volume of our inner space. Normally, our inner space is characterized by highly ‘chopped up’ fragments of intuitive meaning, which we switch our attention between in a semi-random fashion and painstakingly try to piece together. The imaginative form of concentrated meditation, on the other hand, brings the soul into more coherent states of the meaningful flow that feel frictionless and monolithic. When our attentional ‘yoke’ becomes easy in this way, we can attain panoramic flashes of insight into our isolated state within the intellectual cube and practical methods of gradually expanding the boundaries of that cube to overlap with the living intuitive dynamics of the wider Cosmic organism. In a certain sense, we condense the meaning we would explore through chopped-up intuitive fragments over long durations, perhaps even months and years, into holistically scaled imaginations. We can metaphorically depict this stabilizing meditative process with the following animation:
Our concentrated state stabilizes and becomes the kernel around which the intuition of the meaningful interfering flows expands and integrates. The ‘psychedelic patterns’ are only intended to symbolize these invisible interfering streams that shape our inner space and impress into that space as intuitive nudges and holistic flashes of insight. Hopefully, such a visualization, and these essays in general, help emphasize that the redemption of the meaning crisis is something that should unfold in the innermost depths of each soul. The modern isolated soul can stabilize its erratic flow and zoom out into deeper scales of meaning when it is inspired by the impulse of Love for all other soul streams that interfere in its inner space, and the burning desire for Freedom from all that lower conditioning which binds this loving impulse in chains. It is truly Love, as a spiritual force, that allows the soul to accommodate the perspectives of other beings in its inner space and to co-experience the shared intuitive process with such perspectives. Love allows the soul to set aside its narrow interest in the personal meaning of its inner content, and experience what its very structure and life mean to the holistic soul organism.
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” (2)
As we grow into the deeper scales of meaning with our imaginative process, we also become more creatively responsible for the happenings at those scales. We learn to know the interfering intents within our psychic scale, for example, by participating in their perspectives and viewing our soul patterns objectively, as a lawful aspect of the evolutionary process that modulates its outcomes to some greater or lesser extent. The content of what we think and feel is no longer felt to be only a private concern, but is seen in its reverberations within the shared experiential flow, i.e., in how it shapes the space of potential from which that flow condenses. The apparent boundaries of our private inner space evaporate once we can feel responsible for our inner gestures and corresponding content in the same way we do for our outer actions. Then the meaning of our intellectual experience no longer distances us from the inner process of other living souls, but helps us triangulate how the ‘white light’ of our shared intuitive process comes to unique expression in such souls, as if filtered through a prism. The outer appearances no longer conceal, but reveal the Divine life that yearns to be reborn and radiate outward from within the infinitely contracted point of the modern soul.
CITATIONS:
(1) Hueck, Christoph J. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time: An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought
(2) Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Rediscovering the ‘Interference Patterns’ of the Experiential Flow
In the previous part, we imaginatively rehearsed ‘zooming out and in’ along the spectrum of scales that contextualize our experiential state at any given time. We tried to feel how our experiential state can be ‘thickened’ into a superposition of qualitative potential, and conversely, is filtered along a gradient of that potential until it manifests in our consciousness as particular perceptions which recede as memory, i.e., as symbolic replicas that we manipulate sequentially in our intellectual pursuits. When we say the potential filters “until” manifesting in our conscious state, we shouldn’t imagine some process that we can follow with our consciousness as a linear temporal progression, like the filtering possibilities of a crossword puzzle or game of chess. The experience of such a linear progression is itself the effect of the intuitive filtering process. Only when we awaken within the already filtered intellectual scale do we experience the ‘ticking’ of sequential states, most clearly experienced in the sequences of our inner voice. If we contemplate our dream scale of experience, for example, we can sense how such a linear flow is absent. Nevertheless, we can still feel that the intuited potential leads and attracts our fully filtered experiential states in some sense, acting as a ‘carrier wave’ for the latter.
The outcome of the meaning crisis depends entirely on whether human souls attain a more refined and vivid feeling for this contextual and narrative structure of their first-person experiential flow. We should start to feel like our every state is a critical ‘frame’ in the movie flow of existence, which is being filtered and attracted into certain ‘plotlines’ by interfering intents. At the same time, the soul is actively contributing to this flow, which is experienced mostly clearly in our imaginative process. Depending on how intuitively conscious we become of the interfering intents that constrain our perspective, we can feel ourselves more or less responsible for contributing certain ‘lines of dialogue’ to the movie script of existence through our inner activity. This dialogue then feeds back into the deeper scales and modulates the direction of their unfoldment. As a simple example, when we become more conscious of the ideas expressed in a technological device, such as our computer, we can then understand ways to modulate the computational states and steer them toward certain outputs (for example, by learning a programming language).
All of these symbolic images should begin to feel like they speak of concrete experiential facts and relations that we have lived through. We can no longer expect to attain satisfaction by merely theorizing about the plotlines of existence, any more than we would expect to attain such satisfaction from seeing a sketched diagram of a movie plot instead of living through its scenes. The concepts and illustrations we use here serve their proper function only when they help us attend more vividly to the lawful experiential flow we live through each day in our imaginative, emotional, and volitional activity. The lawfulness of this flow is not something mechanical or computational, but such a device can serve as a symbol for how our living intuitions help us steer the flow more effectively. After all, the computational device originally precipitated from our organic inner activity. Everything ‘inorganic’ or ‘mechanical’ in nature and culture was once in a state of living flux, woven out of interfering intuitive intents.
The interfering intents of our existential plot are trivial to notice in the cultural sphere, i.e., the formative influences of family, education, economic activity, social pressures, technology, and so on. They are more difficult to recognize in the natural rhythms of life, such as the seasonal or daily cycle, the water cycle, the patterns of climate and natural disasters, our bodily rhythms, etc. Yet all such influences are mediated by our ghostly imaginative replicas that recede as memory, confined to our headspace, while only our momentary sensory state seems to possess immediacy and concreteness. We can imagine the last time we had a stinging headache or toothache. If we tried to think through the meaningful depth of the evolutionary process in such a state, our attention would be constantly diverted back to the painful sensation. Something similar is continuously happening in our imaginative life whenever we try to focus our cognitive activity within the meaningful depth of existence, only it’s usually less noticeable because the ‘pain’ is diffused across many sensations over time.
For that reason, even the cultural waves of interference that shape the imaginative process are felt as insubstantial and mostly ignored. We can dimly survey them in our memory pictures, but it isn’t clear how exactly those influences structured our temperament, language, habits, knowledge, opinions, and so forth. Each atomic soul thus feels alone in its private space, in sole possession of its inner content, which is hidden from all other souls, while only immediate sensory content is shared. As we saw, the solution to this isolated state is not to abandon the ghostly replicas (which would be impossible, even if we wanted to), but to delve even deeper into the imaginative process through which they take shape; to make that process feel more immediate and substantial by leveraging the replicas as imaginative anchor points within the transpersonal flow. Through metaphors, illustrations, examples, and associated lines of reasoning, we can start to feel the inner contours by which our intellectual state takes shape and gradually expand from there into more expansive domains of the evolutionary process.
Our intellectual scale only exists because the interfering influences are ‘sucked into’ the neurosensory organism and reflected as a stream of ghostly imaginative pictures that recede as memory and grow increasingly ‘out of phase’ with our present state. We then gradually recall a tiny portion of these pictures and manipulate them in our inquiries to try and piece together the once-holistically experienced patterns of the expansive scale spectrum, i.e., to remember their regularities and anticipate how they are attracting our state. That is practically the birth of all philosophy, religion, science, art, and technology. Through these disciplines, we have been instinctively piecing back together the holistic patterns in the form of laws, principles, archetypes, doctrines, etc. All of our vocations, hobbies, family life, and daily tasks can also be seen as more indirect ways of recovering intuitive orientation to the holistic patterns that shape our metamorphosing states. These activities feel more related to immediate bodily and emotional concerns, but underneath the layers of varnish, they are still ways of navigating the existential questions posed by life. Even clipping our fingernails is a decohered expression of such an intuitive orienting process.
Yet, no matter how thoroughly we fashion the principles that elucidate the experiential flow, they remain just as ghostly as our imaginative pictures and feel like something orthogonal to the ‘true reality’ that they are supposed to elucidate. No matter how cleverly we organize our communities and nations, we still feel as atomic souls with access to only our private experience of mental pictures, while everything else impresses upon the ‘wax’ of our imaginative space as a mysterious and unknowable seal. As the intellectual soul bumps up against the walls of this seemingly hopeless condition, the pessimistic mood of alienation takes hold and spawns mental outlooks that seek to justify the condition. From here emerges the whole spectrum of modern philosophies, theologies, and scientific theories that maintain an unbridgeable distance between the imaginative content of our thinking and the interfering intents that are implicit in shaping that content. The intellectual soul becomes invested in maintaining its crippled state because such a state seems to relieve it of responsibility for its inner process.
Thus, it is only at this intellectual scale that we feel alone with our seemingly ‘private’ inner states, while the implicit meaningful context of existence feels to exist on the opaque [unintuitive] side of such states. The interfering patterns of many living beings then confront our consciousness as belonging to the ‘external environment’, or to use a previous metaphor, as the background conversation of ‘other tables at the restaurant’. That is, the inner lawfulness of such patterns feels like dimly meaningful noise, similar to the tingling sensations of our sleeping limbs. The chasm between the two became so extreme in the last few centuries that the intellectual soul felt like its now unquestioned ghostly pictures only exist to theoretically model the opaque patterns, casting the latter into rigid and universal ‘laws’ that can only remain as pictures plastered to the soul wall. This tapestry of mental pictures undoubtedly participates in the interfering waves of activity, but it only grasps the lowest common denominator of such interference patterns. They are all merged as a ‘standing wave’ of rigid spatial experience and corresponding thought-replicas.
We briefly discussed in Part I how both our physical and mental domains of experience, as individuals and collectives, take shape from these interfering waves of activity. We can also intuit this state of interference by contemplating how we reach more and more shared experiential qualities the more we go ‘up’ along the spectrum, accommodating unknown domains of intuitive potential, or ‘down’, encompassing the already finished facts of experiential states. Not only our emotions and temperaments, but also our biological and physical structure approach sameness as we descend from organs and tissues to proteins, molecules, atoms, and sub-atomic particles. These are fully finished products of previous spiritual activity, which are easiest to experience in the way our habits of thinking have taken shape (for example, the habit of using receded mental pictures to ‘explain’ the real-time inner process from which they precipitated). On the upper side, the soul opens into the space of potential ideas and ideals, noble feelings and virtues, and impulses of conscience. These waves are also most clearly experienced in our active thinking, which strives for truthful understanding and ethical orientation within the flow of existence.
If we imagine the interfering influences as overlapping Moire patterns, then our isolated intellectual self-perspective arises as an ‘imploding vortex’ of condensing potential. As the potential storylines are filtered through the contextual constraints (as in the crossword metaphor), they take shape as our concrete impulses, feelings, thoughts, and sensations, which then recede as memory images. The latter provides a sense of conscious continuity, the capacity to think, and, over many years, shapes our stable personality traits, desires, habits, preferences, skills, intellectual outlooks, etc. These memory impressions also shape our bodily structures and processes (for example, the neural pathways of our brain). In a certain sense, our psychic and bodily life can be experienced as woven out of distinct temporal layers that are superimposed, like accumulated tree rings or geological strata. For example, we could trace some neural pathways to a strata in childhood when we imitated gestures and learned to speak, some physical scars to a strata in adolescence when we acted recklessly and suffered a bad injury, some physical traits to the strata of our genetic ancestors, and so on. The same principle applies to our habits, mannerisms, skills, and knowledge.
Leveraging the Imploded Patterns For New Inner Degrees of Freedom
These superimposed layers all testify to previous patterns of spiritual activity across the scale spectrum, which now exist simultaneously at our intellectual scale and provide its meaningful context. At the same time, these imploded patterns provide a foundation from which the soul can accommodate new potential. For example, the trauma we experienced in a childhood accident may have provided the foundation for us to become more vigilant and resilient in the face of unexpected circumstances, which then makes us more adaptive to our environment as adults. Likewise, our ingrained emotional patterns may make us more acutely sensitive to opportunities for developing skills that we may otherwise pass by. Every imploded bodily and psychic pattern is not only a finished product, in that sense, but also a potential seed of some new quality or capacity that can blossom in the soul; an opportunity for new imaginative degrees of freedom to be integrated. When we fail to use that opportunity, on the other hand, the imploded patterns continue to attract our inner states into their gravity wells, and we experience them as forces of oppressive fate in our bodily and psychic lives.
Once again, this is experienced most clearly in our imaginative process, where every pattern of imploded symbolic replicas either enslaves our soul life to obstinate prejudices, opinions, assumptions, rigid beliefs, and so on, or provides an anchoring foundation from which we can intuit new domains of meaning to steer our thinking through. Whether the former or the latter prevails depends on our conscious orientation to this imaginative process and its function within the flow of life experience. The more conscious we remain, the more we can leverage the imploded patterns for lucid ideals instead of being leveraged by them for shadowy aims. We can contemplate the Mandelbrot set to get a better feel for this rhythmic process in our imaginative life and thereby improve our conscious orientation. The set is a fairly simple calculation that we can theoretically perform in our imagination; however, we would need to do it for every point in the complex plane and mark the result (whether the iterated value stays bounded or flies to infinity). The first image of the set looked something like this:
Mandelbrot wrote a program that calculated a rough grid of points and used the printer to type a symbol or space depending on the result. That resulted in a map of what his imaginative process could have been if he had calculated each point in his mind. The moment his eyes saw that image, his inner activity could steer through the domain of mathematical intuition in slightly different ways, and correspondingly different thoughts began condensing against the newly imploded patterns. The imploded map of printed thoughts acted as a seed point from which his inner activity could steer into new intuitions of the lawfulness within mathematical experiential space. These are imaginative degrees of freedom which may have otherwise never been integrated; the insights would likely not have emerged from a stepwise progression of mental calculations. This same principle applies to all the thought-maps humanity has progressively inscribed into the imploded World state over the millennia, whether in oral tradition, stone inscriptions, papyrus, printing, digital signals, or otherwise. They are all potential seeds from which our intuition of the scale spectrum and its lawful dynamics can grow.
We can also sense that there is a fractal-like structure of rhythmic patterns that is preserved across the imploded ‘tree rings’ of the scale spectrum, from our bodily and personality constellation to those that modulate the life trajectory of many other beings. As a simple example, we can think of Ernst Haeckel’s principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. For our purposes, we can say that each organism experiences the same transformations in its individual development as those experienced by its line of ancestry in its historical development. In that sense, each organism carries the whole history of natural evolution on Earth in its usually subconscious memory stream. These self-similar patterns exist not only at the biological and morphological scales, but in the rhythms of psychic and cultural evolution as well. For example, each human individual traverses the instinctive modes of consciousness from infancy to adulthood that were traversed by the human species over many millennia. At the biological scale, such a rhythm manifests in the dynamic between DNA and proteins:
(1)The DNA is the past-preserving molecular memory of the cell, from which individual ‘information’ in gene expression is recalled, as it were, on the current occasion. The genetic stream of heredity corresponds to the stream of memories in the time cross of the consciousness. Remembering and inheriting are related processes. Just as at any given moment only a portion of the genetic ‘information’ for the synthesis of proteins is realized, so at any given moment we are aware of only a portion from the sum of the images we carry within us.
Unlike linear DNA, in which one ‘unit of information’ follows another, proteins are spatial entities, and their functionality is based on their three-dimensionality. It is through structured surfaces and interiors, depressions and pockets that proteins become biochemically active. Proteins are dynamic molecules. They act like active tools, like hands that can grab a substance, reshape it, and let it go.
In that sense, what happens at the deeper biological scale, reflected in the relationship between DNA and proteins, projects into our intellectual scale as the relationship between imploded thought-replicas and the intuitive will that leverages those replicas to navigate potential pathways of imaginative experience. We could go on endlessly with such patterns, for example, in the respiratory and circulatory rhythms, which paint an image of the feedback process between the intuitive center of potential and the perceptual periphery of finished forms. The body’s substances are continually renewed through these rhythms, just as the soul’s cognitive life is continually renewed through its imaginative rhythm. The analogical Hermetic principle of ‘as above, so below’ only works to bring insight into the meaningful foundations because this fractal self-similarity exists across the scales and implodes into perceptual patterns. That is why we can leverage our symbolic replicas to construct metaphors and imaginatively rehearse the experience of more integrated scales along the spectrum.
Adopting this participatory perspective on our experiential flow already brings us to a much deeper appreciation of the language through which we communicate meaning to ourselves and others. Our words are not simply abstract signs for mysterious independent realities on the opaque side of existence, but anchor points for a spectrum of experiential states that all exist on the ‘same side’ of our current imaginative perspective, stretched across overlapping scales of intuitive depth. By becoming conscious of the characteristic qualities and dynamics of our imaginative life, we also become more attuned to the characteristic dynamics of the wider World evolutionary process across the kingdoms and over many ages. In that sense, existence can be imagined as a Mobius strip, i.e., there is only ‘one side’ to it which is experienced as the shared unity of intuited ideas-ideals or the shared sameness of perceived physical forces and particles, depending on whether we ‘look up or down’. At deeper scales of meaning, these two are increasingly unified as lawful curvatures of destiny.
(Painting by Claude Heiland-Allen)
The whole diversity of relative first-person experiential states exists on this same side and unfolds between the poles of pure intuitive will (white) and pure thought-perception (dark) in self-similar patterns that project into our intellectual scale. The reality of other beings who shape the existential flow is not to be found on the ‘other side’ of our fragmented mental pictures any more than we can break a mirror into pieces and expect to discover the reality of the reflected objects behind the mirror. Rather, the reality of the ‘beings-themselves’ is to be found in the implicit constraints that shape and guide our reflective thought-pictures along the mirrored surface. By inwardly feeling out the bends and curves of that surface (such as sympathies and antipathies), we can begin intuiting the nature of the ‘geodesics’ along which the mental pictures flow. Such geodesics are the interfering intents of various agencies that are active along the scale spectrum. Our sympathies and antipathies are not random feelings, but can be discerned as living forces that ‘bias’ our states in certain directions, toward subconsciously purposive outcomes.
Feeling Our Way Into the Holistic Soul Organism
It can help stimulate our intuition of this filtering process through which we reached the current isolated condition if we stretch our imagination into the holistic Cosmic (Intuitive) state. In this state, there is only a single attractor of existence: pure becoming. It is a process of continually outgrowing the present state and trying to encompass its qualities, thus leading to the experience of a stream of becoming. There is only ever experience of a present state, an eternal ‘now’, yet the effect of trying to continuously integrate the qualities experienced in the present state is the feeling of a metamorphosis through states. The perspective-in-becoming knows itself in its imploding memory states, which perfectly reflect its inner striving and imbue it with infinite Wisdom. This state of pure becoming is present across all scales of existence as the fundamental carrier wave, including our intellectual scale. It is what we are always experiencing within our innermost core, and we can attain a glimpse of its presence through proper concentration.
For example, we can try a brief exercise the next time we are in the shower. We gently hold our breath and place our face in the warm stream. We use the face since it is one of the most sensitive parts of the body to our inner gestures. Now we are immersed in a unitary sensation, imbued with the meaning of ‘propulsive refreshing wetness’. When we hold our breath, it should be easier to quiet distracting thoughts from intruding and also defocus all other sensations, since inhalation is associated with inner activity being sucked into the intellectual-sensory scale. We let all such thoughts and sensations relax into the periphery, out of focus, and remain centered within the pure stream of becoming through ‘refreshing wetness’. Of course, we should only attempt such an exercise if we have no conditions related to dizziness, fainting, etc., when holding our breath. All such exercises should only be tried in the safest possible conditions. The aim is to live with our imaginative activity as much as possible, for at least a few moments, within the inner meaningful flow of our metamorphosing state.
Even a few moments of breathless focusing into the meaningful water stream should help us attain an intimation of a deeper scale of soul activity, characterized by the quality of ‘pure becoming’. Our meaningful state of refreshing wetness continually implodes as memory states with perfectly self-similar quality. Each new present state embeds the reverberations of previous self-similar states as a perfectly laminar flow. There are no chaotic desires, emotions, sensations, or thoughts pulling our attention, but only a continuous outgrowing of the ‘old self’ into something qualitatively new. The characteristic experience of this inner stream of pure becoming is the same for all coherent perspectives. Thus, it is not something that belongs to our private conscious state, like our momentary perceptions and thoughts, but is a foundational lattice for the possibility of experience as such. It is as if all possible perspectives are concentrically organized around and superimposed over this central axis of the inner flow. Our relative perspectives take shape as specific modulations of this axis along the scale spectrum.
If we translate such an inner flow to the Cosmic scale, we have the superimposed experience of all possible relative perspectives of the Whole, all possible first-person qualities of experience that can compress into an integrating (lawful) memory stream. We can imagine this primordial soul superposition as perfectly communicating vessels. It is as if, as soon as one soul vessel expresses an impulse-idea, all other souls resound in resonance and provide meaningful feedback on how this impulse-idea fits into the holistic soul organism. All members of this organism possess an inherent trust in the symphonic and shared inner process, such that they remain perfectly receptive and responsive to the feedback. A shadow of such a smooth and shared inner process can be experienced if we try to vividly remember a time when we were engrossed in conversation with another soul, as if ideas were flowing within and through one another with zero friction, i.e., without misunderstandings, confusions, uncertainties, awkward pauses, etc. These rare types of experience provide fleeting glimpses of our existence at deeper scales of activity, which are always overlapping our present intellectual state and sometimes ‘trickle’ into it.
We can also use a comparison to team-building exercises to get a better sense of this original ‘Edenic’ state. For example, each soul may be responsible for contributing only one scene or line of dialogue to a story before passing the story on to another soul who contributes another scene. The overall lesson here is that no single soul can direct the story process on its own. We can't add the scenes by expecting that the story will go in our intended direction, and when our turn comes again, we will be able to continue our personally preferred storyline. Instead, a sense of cooperation must be cultivated where each soul radiates out an idea and completely lets go, trusting that idea to the ‘periphery’ of other souls. Then others develop it, and when it gets back to us, we need the humility to work on something that is not entirely ours. In ideal circumstances, this shared process would result in a contextually layered and intuitively harmonious storyline. Each team member feels partially contributing to this storyline through their faithful receptivity to the impulse-ideas of other members.
Each new stage of development from this Edenic state adds a mirror, so to speak, which is a symbol for the more complexified oscillations of interfering spiritual activity. Once we begin breathing and lose our centering within the flow of refreshing wetness in the shower, for example, it’s as if several mirrors are introduced into our consciousness, and we begin bouncing between their reflections. Now our attention oscillates between the most varied sensations and thoughts; between thinking about pre-shower experiences and desiring post-shower experiences, between feeling slightly depressed or uplifted, between moving in this or that direction, and so on. The inner flow of pure becoming is still there like a carrier wave for our experiential states, but it is obscured by the complex mirroring dynamics. We start to feel like we can only infer the inner flow and theorize about it with our symbolic pictures. Thus, a few levels of indirection are introduced between the inner flow and our reflective pictures. Our modern feeling of isolation and alienation results from our sensory-conditioned mental pictures being reflected or ‘folded up’ several times over within the Mobius strip of transpersonal reality.
As the superimposed soul state gets folded in on itself, the waves of spiritual activity begin to work at cross-purposes to one another, generating ‘friction’ and decohering the superfluid transpersonal flow. The thread between interfering waves of inner activity and their reflected perceptual content becomes increasingly out of phase. We can imagine if, instead of trusting the team storytelling process, some participants began to ignore the others and continue generating their preferred scenes. Some other participants then begin to shout over their fellow storytellers when it’s not their turn to contribute. These frictional relations then lead to a state where each storytelling perspective feels entangled in a narrative with convoluted details and scenes that make very little intuitive sense. All of the interfering waves now meet us as an objective external environment. This objective environment provides the thought-maps that can kindle our intuitions, as discussed before, but it also carries the risk of objectifying other souls as mere utilitarian tokens for our myopic aims. That is, if we become enchanted with the folded state and fail to retrace our maps back through the filtering-folding process from which they took shape.
As another metaphor to phase relationships, we can imagine standing in front of a mirror and waving our hand. The reflected hand movement in the mirror ordinarily manifests nearly simultaneously with our inner will gestures. That is the in-phase relationship of the Edenic state. Now we can imagine that the reflection only manifests after some delay, corresponding to folded states. After some threshold of ‘phase delay’, we would feel like the thread connecting our inner will gestures and the mirrored images is 'severed'. The reflected hand would feel like it's barely moving under our control. Eventually, it would feel like it’s completely moving on its own, as some foreign object obeying mysterious laws. Then we would feel forced to 'explain' the hand movement abstractly, by connecting the mirrored images with various thoughts that feel ‘logical’. That is the phase relation between our ordinary intellectual scale and the 'outer world' of images. By the time our inner movements come back to meet us in the reflected images of the natural kingdoms and most cultural phenomena (including even our mechanical creations), we lose sight of the elastic thread linking the two domains and thus mistake the images for independent realities that we can only theoretically model with our ghostly thoughts.
The phase delay in our folded-up state means that our ghostly thoughts can normally only elucidate what is long past, what has already been accomplished in the evolutionary process. In such thoughts, we only contemplate the World in its process of decaying and dying, rather than the possibilities of existence which can be reborn from out of its ashes. This out-of-phase relationship between inner activity and reflected images is why we feel like what other souls experience beyond our immediate spatial vicinity doesn’t relate to or influence our inner experience at any given time. We imagine these souls and their inner process could be ‘switched off’ and it wouldn’t change any aspect of our inner lives. It is no wonder, then, that we feel so isolated and alienated. As a metaphorical comparison, that is like imagining we can move around individual molecules in a volume of water without disturbing the entire medium. The central axis of the inner flow is the ‘medium’ through which all souls experience their becoming, yet the varied phase relationships within that flow make us feel like we are only crafting our personal inner content and following personal trajectories toward our personal aims.
The religious impulses of all ages have been centered around unfolding the convolutions of this folded structure into which the human soul's experience has been filtered, i.e., what it experiences as its ‘external’ psychic and bodily environment; the institutions of Culture, the kingdoms of Nature, and their complex interrelations. Through the most varied mythic images, devotional poetry, carefully orchestrated rituals, and so on, such impulses helped the soul accommodate instinctive insights into the superimposed soul organism in which its life is embedded and unfolds. It helped souls become sensitive to unfamiliar inner content, trajectories, and aims that go beyond the confines of their myopic perspective. Yet, in the last few millennia and especially the last few centuries, the intellectual soul has developed a scientific way of thinking, and this new way of interfacing with meaningful reality cannot be bypassed. Our symbolic intellectual replicas must now become instrumental in mediating our religious impulses and unfolding the Möbius strip. Put another way, the sacred life that was characteristic of the ancient religious impulse should be reintroduced into our normally dead, yet lucid, philosophical-scientific thoughts.
In Part I, we explored how modern souls attempt to reintroduce life into their imaginative process through the most varied intellectual theories, artistic and religious pursuits, and forms of entertainment. These forms of sensory-conditioned theorizing, entertainment, and technology are essentially subsensible substitutes for the inner movements and degrees of freedom that are more faithfully experienced and cultivated through spiritual practices that expand ‘resonance’ with the interfering intents animating and shaping our inner content. With these substitutes, the intellect rushes to restore the holistic experience by squeezing the soul through many levels of indirection. Then we are like the drivers on the road who keep accelerating and decelerating, swerving in and out of lanes, in the middle of heavy traffic. We imagine we are ‘saving time’ and ‘reaching our destination faster’, but after some time, we either get in an accident or realize that we have only ended up behind the fellow drivers that we started next to, who patiently and harmoniously moved with the flow of traffic.
Like the latter drivers, we can approach the holistic soul organism directly by starting smoothly, slowly, and patiently from where our inner content is already in phase with the interfering intents that shape it. When we have a sore back, we struggle to intuit the reasons for this experiential state - perhaps it is due to bad sitting posture, perhaps we sprained it during an exercise, perhaps it is a kidney stone, or any number of other unintuitive and unsuspected reasons. When we are experiencing the flow of thoughts in our active inquiries, on the other hand, the reason for that flow is clear - it is the very fact that we are thinking. Why we shape those thoughts into certain content and relate them in certain ways is not as intuitively clear, but the imaginative experience of such flowing thoughts is entirely in phase with our intent to think. If we stopped thinking through a mathematical calculation, for example, the imaginative flow would cease. Thus, in our imaginative process, we experience an exceptional point of the World process where the intuitive streamlines of meaning are perfectly attuned to their reflected images.
Starting from this exceptional point of in-phase relations is what we have been doing in these essays when leveraging our symbolic concepts to live through the immanent dynamics of our imaginative process, and it is a path that can be taken much further into the interfering depths through imaginative concentration exercises. The shower exercise is already an example of the latter, but we can also learn to concentrate within the streaming flow of inner meaning without the support of any bodily sensations. Although we can’t stay in the shower and hold our breath for too long, we can concentrate on the imagination of flowing water (or any other archetypal meaning) for much longer and intuit the constraints on our concentrated state as they try to ‘nudge’ it in this or that direction. Those constraints span everything from the interfering intents we dimly know as ‘sympathies and antipathies’ to those that shape the collective destinies of nations, civilizations, and epochs. All of these overlapping constraints contribute to the meaning of our concentrated state in variable qualities and intensities according to their phase relations.
When we concentrate on a unitary and archetypally significant image for a prolonged duration, our attention expands out from its normal erratic movements, and the meaning at the center of our inner flow begins to ‘densify’, filling the volume of our inner space. Normally, our inner space is characterized by highly ‘chopped up’ fragments of intuitive meaning, which we switch our attention between in a semi-random fashion and painstakingly try to piece together. The imaginative form of concentrated meditation, on the other hand, brings the soul into more coherent states of the meaningful flow that feel frictionless and monolithic. When our attentional ‘yoke’ becomes easy in this way, we can attain panoramic flashes of insight into our isolated state within the intellectual cube and practical methods of gradually expanding the boundaries of that cube to overlap with the living intuitive dynamics of the wider Cosmic organism. In a certain sense, we condense the meaning we would explore through chopped-up intuitive fragments over long durations, perhaps even months and years, into holistically scaled imaginations. We can metaphorically depict this stabilizing meditative process with the following animation:
Our concentrated state stabilizes and becomes the kernel around which the intuition of the meaningful interfering flows expands and integrates. The ‘psychedelic patterns’ are only intended to symbolize these invisible interfering streams that shape our inner space and impress into that space as intuitive nudges and holistic flashes of insight. Hopefully, such a visualization, and these essays in general, help emphasize that the redemption of the meaning crisis is something that should unfold in the innermost depths of each soul. The modern isolated soul can stabilize its erratic flow and zoom out into deeper scales of meaning when it is inspired by the impulse of Love for all other soul streams that interfere in its inner space, and the burning desire for Freedom from all that lower conditioning which binds this loving impulse in chains. It is truly Love, as a spiritual force, that allows the soul to accommodate the perspectives of other beings in its inner space and to co-experience the shared intuitive process with such perspectives. Love allows the soul to set aside its narrow interest in the personal meaning of its inner content, and experience what its very structure and life mean to the holistic soul organism.
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” (2)
As we grow into the deeper scales of meaning with our imaginative process, we also become more creatively responsible for the happenings at those scales. We learn to know the interfering intents within our psychic scale, for example, by participating in their perspectives and viewing our soul patterns objectively, as a lawful aspect of the evolutionary process that modulates its outcomes to some greater or lesser extent. The content of what we think and feel is no longer felt to be only a private concern, but is seen in its reverberations within the shared experiential flow, i.e., in how it shapes the space of potential from which that flow condenses. The apparent boundaries of our private inner space evaporate once we can feel responsible for our inner gestures and corresponding content in the same way we do for our outer actions. Then the meaning of our intellectual experience no longer distances us from the inner process of other living souls, but helps us triangulate how the ‘white light’ of our shared intuitive process comes to unique expression in such souls, as if filtered through a prism. The outer appearances no longer conceal, but reveal the Divine life that yearns to be reborn and radiate outward from within the infinitely contracted point of the modern soul.
CITATIONS:
(1) Hueck, Christoph J. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time: An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought
(2) Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning