Philosophical Speculations

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 6:38 pm In most cases, these mental rehearsals have an iterative character. It is like exploring a “what if” scenario. This is very clearly experienced in games like chess. Here in the background hovers our ideal – to win the game. Now, of all the possible moves we could make, we are only interested in those that close the gap between our present state and the desired future state. So before we make our next move, we begin mental rehearsals. We imagine a succession of mental images (a branch of the tunnel), whose metamorphosis is constrained by the ruleset. Then we may reach a state that we realize doesn’t fit well with our overall goal of winning. For example, in this rehearsal, we may have left some pieces exposed, giving the opponent an advantage. So we dismantle this stack of memory images, like we collapse a card tower; we backtrack the tunnel, and start over, trying a different fork. Notice that not only the compounding intuition of the currently explored branch of stacking mental images should be retained, but after dismantling each stack, something of it should also remain compounded in our state, if we are not to keep rehearsing branches that we have already explored². It is quite the same process in all our thinking, except that the ruleset is not that clear. Through our life experiences, we have developed some intuition of what goes together with what. The rules consist of relations with people, how one would react if we do or say so and so, how animals, plants, rocks, and technical appliances behave, what happens if we interact with them, and so on. We keep iterating through such “what if” life scenarios. We build a stack of imagined life events by pipelining them according to our existential intuitions and see whether the resulting movie clip rings in resonance with our ideals and desires. If it doesn’t, we collapse the stack and start a new iteration until we feel satisfied with the resulting imagined state and decide to make it the active flow-curvature within which our bodily will should unfold.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 11, 2026 2:32 pm Thank you, Cleric, for another great installment on the journey. The Chess caricature and animation for our imaginative process was a brilliant stroke on the canvas! Hopefully, readers will heed your consistent cautions and not try to understand these things as some literal mechanisms of our thinking life that we can behold as output and cast into some theory of 'how it works', but as only symbols for what the inner process feels like in various circumstances along the IO gradient.

I have a feeling that you have not exhausted the use of the Chess metaphor yet  

There are so many aspects of the game that can help us attune to our inner process if we diligently reflect upon what we are inwardly doing as the game unfolds. For example, the phases of the game can help us attune to the overlapping operational, tactical, and strategic IO flows, and how one recedes into the background as we focus on the others. At the opening, we are mostly focused on moving all our pieces to certain squares, where they are set up for harmonious coordination with one another in relation to the opponent's configuration (of course, there are exceptions if our opponent or we are playing very aggressively out of the opening). Our strategic intent hovers above and makes sense of all the moves of the pieces. This strategic flow fits within the intuitive context of winning the game. In the middle game, we may start to focus more on one particular area of the board where we tactically shift the pieces around to unfold an attack. Yet, for us novice players, we often then lose sight of what we did with all the other pieces when unfolding our strategic flow. We may forget that we left a piece unprotected on the other side of the board, for example.

Reflecting on simple things like that can help us attune to the thinking process that becomes absorbed with mental images tearing from the horizon, related to our myopic tactical flow, without sufficient intuitive resonance with what was previously imprinted as the strategic context of that flow. It is an image of the intellect that continually neglects to feel how its present knowing state of the board is only possible when informed through the reverberations of all previous imaginative states that were iterated and have faded into the background of experience. In that sense, we can orient toward the chaotic context shifting that habitually unfolds for our inner process. Much of the time, we are in octant VIII, actively focused on imaginative bifurcation chains related to short-term intuition of the tactical flow. When we experience a blunder, like losing an unprotected piece, we shift more into octant II or III, feeling how the neglected context has come back to bite us and ruin our strategy for winning the game. We may then begin to realize that 'becoming a good chess player' (like becoming a good anything) is synonymous with bringing the contextual IO flows into greater musical resonance at the ever-present horizon of thinking.

Overall, what you have presented thus far has been extremely helpful in highlighting the Divine simplicity of the inner flow, when that flow is viewed from a more selfless cognitive perspective, i.e., a phenomenological perspective that is more interested in what the inner process has to teach us about the lawful alignments of the reality over which it is modulated, through the most varied metaphorical illustrations that support long-term intutition of those supersensible dynamics, than in what our imaginative rehearsals can do for us in moving from the fulfillment of one myopic sensory-constrained goal state to another. These are truly the keys to the Kingdom within.

Kaje977 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:19 pm Thank you very much, Cleric, for Part 5! I can also see the similarities between Chess and the way how proving a mathematical theorem works. Although not the same, there's also this certain intuitive activity, the imagination, that plays through the different "inner movements" allowed within a certain calculus.

I will get more into detail after a while.

Lydia / Sacred Maths wrote: (see the pictures in the original post)

...
Triangles - The Bigger Picture

When we say “the angles of a triangle add to 180 degrees,” it sounds like a rule about a shape drawn on paper. But that is almost a misdirection. What is really being named is a relationship between straightness, turning and the space in which the turning happens. A triangle is not primarily a thing. It is an event. You walk straight, you turn, you walk straight again, you turn again, and after the third turn you return to where you began. The total amount of turning required for that return is fixed. In flat space, it is exactly 180 degrees. This is the domain of Euclidean geometry, the geometry that describes flat space where straight lines behave predictably and parallel lines do not meet, first systematised by Euclid.

Because the Earth is very large, its curvature is negligible at everyday scales. For small triangles drawn or measured on its surface, space behaves as if it were flat, which is why Euclidean geometry applies so successfully and the angle sum appears to be 180 degrees with very high accuracy. Only when triangles become large enough for the Earth’s curvature to matter does the underlying bending of space reveal itself. On a sphere, such as the Earth taken as a whole, you can walk three straight paths, turn three times, and return to your starting point having turned more than 180 degrees in total. Nothing has gone wrong with the triangle; space itself has demanded more turning. On a saddle shaped surface, the opposite happens: space offers less resistance, the turning required shrinks, and the angle sum falls below 180 degrees. In every case, the triangle faithfully records the character of the space it inhabits.

Seen this way, the theorem is not about geometry as a human invention. It is about orientation. It is about how direction behaves when you try to remain faithful to straightness. The triangle becomes a measuring instrument for reality itself. Without knowing it, the student who first meets this theorem is already touching a profound idea: that space is not an empty container but an active participant in form.

Philosophically, this matters because it dissolves the idea that mathematics is a set of rules imposed from above. The triangle does not obey the 180 degree sum because we decree it so. It does so because of a deeper agreement between straightness and flatness. Where that agreement changes, the mathematics changes. The world leads. Mathematics listens.

There is also something existential hiding here. The triangle is the simplest closed act of return. You leave, you turn, you leave again, you turn again, and eventually you come home. The fact that this return has a precise measure in flat space tells us that our world is locally coherent. It does not fold unpredictably under our feet. It allows orientation, memory, and navigation. That reliability is not abstract. It is what makes building, walking, drawing, and even thinking possible.

So when a person encounters the 180 degree sum, they are not just learning a fact. They are encountering the trustworthiness of the space they live in. They are seeing that the world has an inner order that can be met, tested, and known. Mathematics, at its best, is the language of that meeting.
...

From: Before Insight: The Four Intelligences and the Courage to Not Know, by Lydia / Sacred Maths

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 6:38 pm

The Game Loop
Part 5
In Search of the Fundamental Inputs II

Google Doc version (easier to follow footnotes)

Part 1 Mental Pipelines
Part 2 Interleaved IO Flows I
Part 3 Interleaved IO Flows II
Part 4 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs I
Part 5 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs II

Previously, we saw that by trying to pin down the way in which we interact with the game flow, we were led to the elusive ‘event horizon’, where it feels as if our instinctive, yet intuitively oriented, willful pushing toward a future state (input) seems tightly correlated with the lighting up mental images (output), which then quickly fade away. Getting a more intimate experience of this elusive interface is not easy, primarily because it’s hard to overcome our familiar thinking habits. We continue to insist on seeing this event horizon as some output phenomenon in our field of consciousness. In other words, we insist on seeing in the output our ‘mental hand’ as an image that shapes other mental images. However, the reality of this process is precisely the tearing precipitating from the true horizon, which we cannot encompass as some mental or perceptual output but can only experience when we strive to sense how our dim intuitive inputs have something to do with the continuously precipitating mental images. Unlike the event horizon of a black hole, here we are not speaking of a spatial boundary but of a temporal one – the threshold between what could be our next state of existence and what has already become. Gaining clear awareness at this threshold requires new inner skills, normally not even hinted at in the traditional curricula, thus it’s worth trying to approach these realms of inner experience more gradually.

Consider the following caricature:

Unless we are a good chess player, it may have taken us a few seconds to get the joke. For many people, the mental process may have taken more or less the following sequence. When we first glance at the board and see the checkerboard and the knight, the intuitions related to chess stand out – we simply know what we see even without trying to analyze it. If we know nothing of chess, we see only a picture that evokes the intuitions of “checkerboard”, “horse statue”, and “carrots”. Since the horse is a herbivorous animal, it might occur to us that it must somehow reach the carrots to eat them. Now, if we have at least some basic experience with chess, what is also evoked is the intuition about how this output may transform. Then we begin applying in our imagination the gamma-shaped (Γ) move of the knight, and soon we think, “Wait a second, this is going nowhere. No matter how I move the knight (as long as the rules are respected), I can’t reach the middle square.” We can express this process symbolically:

Obviously, we do not see such stacking of mental images in our imagination. The animation only aims to symbolize a fact of our inner experience. It is like a first-person version of the cathode-ray tube analogy – mental images light up at maximum intensity across the horizon and immediately fade away, leaving only intuitive traces. Consider how in the first move we may feel a sort of enthusiasm, as if we say, “This is easy, I’ll solve it right away.” Now, imagine that on the second move, we have already forgotten about the previous, as if the images immediately dissolve without an intuitive trace. We now may feel the same enthusiasm and readiness to solve the puzzle. This can go on and on, as long as every move feels as if we have just started, like it could be if we suffer from anterograde amnesia. If we are mentally healthy, however, we soon feel that things are going nowhere. So there must be something changing in our experience from ‘frame to frame’ besides the momentary image of the board (the current move). It’s not only that we experience a momentary picture with the knight at a certain position, but the intuitive and feeling context also changes. When we look at the animation above, we see how the places where the knight has moved look like a well-trodden path, while the central square looks hollow. There’s something analogous that seems to happen in our inner flow. Even though we do not see stacking images, the possibility of remembering the chain of prior moves still reverberates as a kind of knowing embedded in the context of our experience. There’s something that intuitively feels like: “For some time now, I have imagined the knight in all these squares but never in the central one.” Note that we are not proposing any mechanism that ‘explains’ this effect. We are only stating facts of inner experience that anyone can survey for themselves.

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the nature of the animation above and the way we have used it. We are clear that such receding images – mental or perceptual – are nowhere to be found while we try to solve the puzzle. Nevertheless, if the reader has understood what the animation aims to convey (and it is really something very simple), it is grasped as a kind of art form, as if it metaphorically conveys facts of our inner experience. Facts that are trivial to intuitively grasp but cannot be discovered as an arrangement of perceptual outputs in the way we are used to behold outputs of the bodily spectrum (senses). If the reader objects that in science it is not admissible to use such metaphorical expressions and we should always be firmly grounded only in what can be beheld as perceptual outputs, they are encouraged to see if they can come up with an expression that conveys what the animation represents, in a way that is perceptually literal. Just because we do not grasp the ‘thickening’ of our intuition of past states as some literal color, sound, or tactile output, it doesn’t mean that we cannot be intuitively conscious of this process, and we are not allowed to express it in some way. We must repeat – this expression does not depict the supposed mechanism that lies behind our experience but expresses how the experience feels from within. This is something that needs to be internalized well because this mode of phenomenological expression will be primary to us.

As we think through the puzzle-solving process, each next first-person ‘frame’ of our mental flow seems to be largely suggested by our present experience of the output and intuitive context. Of all the innumerable states that could become the next state, the fact that we behold the output of the board and live in certain intuitions related to it, seems to greatly narrow down the possibilities. It is as if our mental flow is constrained within a tunnel that continuously bifurcates into two, since there are two possible moves at each step (one of which actually goes back to the previous position).

We are not concerned whether we are somehow ‘free’ when we choose which branch to take next or there are some hidden factors that determine the direction while we experience the illusion of making a choice. Nor do we suggest fantasizing that the not-taken tunnels exist somewhere ‘out there’ in parallel universes¹. There are two facts of inner experience to survey from this. First, notice that each successive state is shown as stacking all the previous. This corresponds to our experience. If each state is experienced only as the momentary board configuration, this would correspond to the case where, as we make a move, we immediately forget the previous (as in anterograde amnesia). Normally, we take for granted that as we move through the tunnel, we should remember how we’ve reached our present position, but here this is symbolized explicitly. Thus, we should always remember that the intuitive context within our present state is enriched by the reverberations of all prior states. We are not implying that the past somehow influences our present out of some speculative time dimension of reality. We are fully centered in the here and now. It is the intuitive context of our ever-present flow that enriches as the game state metamorphoses. For this reason, although we presented the flow above as spatial tunnels, it would be better to grasp our flow of existence in its directly given nature – as a continually metamorphosing first-person phenomenological state within which we are always centered. Expressing our intuition about the sequence of metamorphosis as a path or a tunnel is, once again, only an art form. The branch of the tunnel that we have trodden is only a symbol for the recursively updated intuitive context of our ever-present state. Or, otherwise stated, the tunnel is our attempt to decompose our compounded present intuition over a spatial picture. Just like in video feedback (camera capturing its own output on a screen), the past images are not ‘in the past’ but are displayed by the presently illuminated screen pixels, so in our inner experience, when we remember the past, we are illuminating phenomenological pixels in our present based on the compounded intuition.

Second, we should feel how every state metamorphoses into the next based on some intuitive compatibility. For example, in the above example, every next move makes sense because it fits our overall intuition of chess rules. We may say that our present state is like a snowflake kernel that grows by accommodating new water vapor.

There’s a two-way relationship here. On one hand, the way the snowflake grows depends on its present structure. New crystal growth can only occur at the appropriate places, just like a blossom can bloom only where there has been prior vegetative growth. On the other hand, however, the new growth is not completely determined by the already existing structure – the qualities of the incoming vapor, its temperature, humidity, and chemical composition also play a part in what the new growth will look like. With this metaphor we are not implying that the game state builds up as some rigid crystal structure, but only trying to point attention to the dual nature of the process. We can pick many other metaphors that convey this fact, for example, the riverbed is not unitarily shaping the river flow, but the flow also erodes and transforms the riverbed; matter/energy flux doesn’t unitarily tell spacetime how to curve, but spacetime also tells matter/energy how to move, the phonograph needle is not only agitated by the wax groove but the needle can also impress its vibrations into it, and so on. Additionally, we are not trying to suggest that our future states condense from some speculative ‘state-matter’ (as the snowflake condenses from the surrounding vapor), but only to bring attention to this peculiar threshold of becoming – the event horizon that we speak of, which can only be grasped through this dual nature: that the next experiential state cannot be seen as proceeding completely deterministically from the prior, but nor the next state that we push toward can be completely arbitrary.

This simple example can help us better understand the place of thinking in our life. Consider what we do with the chess puzzle – we start by developing a certain intuitive ideal. In this case, it is a very concrete ideal – we seek to experience a mental state where the knight is at the central square. We set that ideal as a background intent, like an intuitive atmosphere that we seek to bring our mental images in resonance with (just like we seek to unfold our operational, tactical, and strategic IO flows within the overarching intuitive plot for winning the game). We begin transforming the mental images of the board according to the rules, as if we seek a path of metamorphosis that will close the gap between the intuition inherent in the momentary state and the background intuition of our goal state. Please note: the intuition of the goal is not ‘in the future’. It is also in the present moment as a kind of intuitive anticipation and guiding principle for our more detailed IO gestures. If we are vigilant, we’ll see that this is the nature of all thinking. When thinking, we seek the mental puzzle piece that will click snugly with the intuitive contextual flow set by the goal. However, it would be better to consider this puzzle piece not simply as a spatial form, but as a ‘clip’ of first-person phenomenal existence – we seek the mental movie segment that fits within an overarching plot, as if to fulfill it.

Thinking seems like something complicated only when we become tangled in mental pipelines that aim to represent it as some mechanism contained entirely in the output field, where we can do no more than picture the rippling output relations. From within our living experience, however, things are much more straightforward. Unless we are simply free-falling through existence, passively dragged by the flow, we always have some background attractor – whether it is something that we intuitively focus on or simply the compulsion of a feeling or a desire. Then, our mental flow is either like a more detailed explication of the attractor (we cast down the general intuition into more detailed mental images) or like an imaginative rehearsal of possible paths of experience that can transform our present flow into the dimly felt flow-shape of the ideal. These mental rehearsals are of the nature of a stream of memory images, except that we try to ‘remember’ something that has not yet happened. Nothing supernatural is implied in this; we’re not saying that we access the future located in some exotic time dimension of reality. When we remember the past, it is as if we gather mental images that fit our presently compounded intuition of existence. Unless we want to lapse into fantasy, we are very diligent in that we summon only images that fit very snugly into our intuitive context. If we do not feel this snug fit, we say, “I’m not sure, I can’t remember exactly.” The flow of thinking is as if trying to fantasize memory images, but in such a way that they still feel more or less in resonance with our compounded intuition of existence. In other words, we strive for our fantasized memories of the future to be ‘realistic’. This doesn’t guarantee that what we rehearse in this way can be realized in the wider output. Our images of the future are only as good as our presently developed intuition of the existential flow. And the same holds for memories. Just because we feel a snug fit between a memory image and our intuition, it is not guaranteed that we’re not mistaken. Maybe we do not take into account certain life events that have compounded our intuitive context in such a way that we get the false impression that a given mental image corresponds to our own experience, while it may simply be something we heard about.

In most cases, these mental rehearsals have an iterative character. It is like exploring a “what if” scenario. This is very clearly experienced in games like chess. Here in the background hovers our ideal – to win the game. Now, of all the possible moves we could make, we are only interested in those that close the gap between our present state and the desired future state. So before we make our next move, we begin mental rehearsals. We imagine a succession of mental images (a branch of the tunnel), whose metamorphosis is constrained by the ruleset. Then we may reach a state that we realize doesn’t fit well with our overall goal of winning. For example, in this rehearsal, we may have left some pieces exposed, giving the opponent an advantage. So we dismantle this stack of memory images, like we collapse a card tower; we backtrack the tunnel, and start over, trying a different fork. Notice that not only the compounding intuition of the currently explored branch of stacking mental images should be retained, but after dismantling each stack, something of it should also remain compounded in our state, if we are not to keep rehearsing branches that we have already explored². It is quite the same process in all our thinking, except that the ruleset is not that clear. Through our life experiences, we have developed some intuition of what goes together with what. The rules consist of relations with people, how one would react if we do or say so and so, how animals, plants, rocks, and technical appliances behave, what happens if we interact with them, and so on. We keep iterating through such “what if” life scenarios. We build a stack of imagined life events by pipelining them according to our existential intuitions and see whether the resulting movie clip rings in resonance with our ideals and desires. If it doesn’t, we collapse the stack and start a new iteration until we feel satisfied with the resulting imagined state and decide to make it the active flow-curvature within which our bodily will should unfold.

We should really feel how the intuitive rules and the field of their application are not two separate domains of experience. Like the flow and the riverbed, everything that we think, feel, and do immediately compounds in the new game state, which is compatible with corresponding new paths of metamorphosis, and so on. We wouldn’t be solving the chess puzzle if, at some prior point in our flow of metamorphosis, we did not compound the intuition of the knight’s Γ-move. As such, we should feel how, at any momentary point of our existence, we actually have far less control than we often imagine. Most of the willful transformations of our states follow the curvatures of intuitions that we can recall integrating into our existential flow at some point in our lives. There are also curvatures that feel unknown, as if we are pushing into an unexplored territory. Nevertheless, we should also feel how our present intuitive pushing continuously augments the game context. Like building a house, we can’t simply transition from a state of ‘no house’ to one of ‘house’. Instead, we pass through a whole gradient of intermediary states where we tediously lay each brick. Each of these momentary acts seems insignificant compared to the whole endeavor, yet when they are all aligned with the intuitive curvature of our overarching goal of ‘building a house’, then they slowly build up and lead into new states that can themselves accommodate corresponding new states. For example, the flow of experience corresponding to ‘constructing the roof’ only becomes a viable fork in the tunnel if we have guided the game state through experiences of building the walls. These are all childishly simple observations, but it is astounding how often we fail to apply their conclusions to our practical life.

All of this can turn into a very valuable exercise that we can perform at any moment of our daily flow, granted that we at least for a moment snap out of the usual existential free fall. We can pay attention to even the tiniest movements of our body or the thoughts that pass through our mind, and try to feel what is there in our compounded intuitive context that makes them meaningful. For example, we flip a light switch. We can immediately try to feel how this act only makes sense because throughout our life we have seen others do that, and also we have done it countless times. The act is made meaningful through the intuition that relates two outputs – the flipping of the switch and illumination. But we can go even further. We can try to feel how the need for illumination fits in whatever we are presently doing. Maybe we are walking in the basement to get a tool that we need for our tactical garden work. The garden work fits in some way into our strategic life goals. There’s no need to philosophize about any of this. It takes only a split-second to become feelingly aware of these interleaved IO flows. It’s not about explicating them in words but simply to become aware of “I know how this fits in my intent to push toward a certain future state, and I know how everything compounded up until this moment makes this life situation sensible.”

It can be noted how we have gradually shifted the nature of our quest for knowledge. Traditionally, we feel that to know reality is to make a comprehensible picture of it, to construct a replica of its supposed potato pipeline. In that case, all our thinking is absorbed in an IO flow weaving intuitions and mental pictures about reality. Through what we have described so far, however, our thinking comes to feel more and more like an inseparable texture of the actual flow of reality. It is indispensable that we grasp this difference – in the first case, we’re completely absorbed in the IO flow of mental images, which are like the symbolic meaning read out from the display of the Minecraft computer (MC). We forget about the primary flow (of which the MC is woven) and live entirely in the symbolic meaning that it supposedly represents. In that way, our intellectual life feels to be virtual – true reality remains somewhere on the ‘other side’. On the other hand, when we begin to recognize the metamorphosis of our mental states as an intrinsic aspect of the existential flow, we snap out of the virtual flow and live in the primary experiential flow of metamorphosis. This is not to say that our mental images and bodily perceptions are now to be taken as some fundamental building blocks of reality. It’s only about the fact that we can now explore from within our experience how our IO flow is compounded, and how this, in turn, opens corresponding new forks of metamorphosis. Now our thinking process is not one of building a mental pipeline replica of the game process (MC) but of artistically, yet scientifically rigorously, expressing how the primary flow feels like, how we can orient within it and navigate it, and how we recognize the effects of our dim intuitive inputs within the primary output field. In the next part, we’ll see how the experience of this process can become even more focused.

Keynotes:

The thinking aspect of our existential flow can be depicted as a continuous stacking of output mental images in response to our instinctive, yet intuitively oriented, pushing toward a goal state.

Such stacking of images is not a literal visual output but an attempt to convey how our intuition continuously compounds. In our phenomenological studies, all concepts, images, metaphors, analogies, and so on must be grasped as scientifically rigorous art forms conveying the facts of our inner experience of becoming.

Every next state grows organically from the so far compounded state, yet within our willful inputs there’s always something that cannot be traced as a strict cause-and-effect chain of past phenomena.

Our thinking is like an iterative exploration of clips of existence that we seek to harmonize with the overarching IO flow of more encompassing goals, intents, desires, and so on.

With images like the stacking chess frames, we aim not merely to philosophize about our thinking process, but to approach a more intimate experience of it – what it means to intuitively navigate through the metamorphoses of inner imagery. As we learn to experience our thinking in this way, we become more and more aware that we are not a thinking entity standing outside of reality and philosophizing about it, but our mental sub-flow, is inseparable from the primary phenomenal flow. In other words, the tight feedback between intuitive inputs and receding mental images now becomes in itself the central experience of the game flow, and not only a dreamy instinctive activity through which we assemble models of the primary flow within the picture-in-picture sub-flow. Our scientific mood shifts from “Thinking about the game flow by arranging mental images of its supposed pipeline” to “How my intuitive activity directs the metamorphosis of the game flow experienced in its phenomenal totality, including the mental sub-flow.”


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¹ A position held by the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
² Another way of looking at this is by imagining that we do not really move back through the tunnels. We always move forward. Collapsing our currently explored mental branch is like moving forward into a new one presenting similar pathways as in a prior junction. However, all states gone through so far are still stacked. In such a metaphor, it is clearer why the intuition of the previously explored forks remains as part of our current path. We’ll elaborate on this in one of the next parts.

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 6:38 pm Previously, we saw that by trying to pin down the way in which we interact with the game flow, we were led to the elusive ‘event horizon’, where it feels as if our instinctive, yet intuitively oriented, willful pushing toward a future state (input) seems tightly correlated with the lighting up mental images (output), which then quickly fade away. Getting a more intimate experience of this elusive interface is not easy, primarily because it’s hard to overcome our familiar thinking habits. We continue to insist on seeing this event horizon as some output phenomenon in our field of consciousness. In other words, we insist on seeing in the output our ‘mental hand’ as an image that shapes other mental images. However, the reality of this process is precisely the tearing precipitating from the true horizon, which we cannot encompass as some mental or perceptual output but can only experience when we strive to sense how our dim intuitive inputs have something to do with the continuously precipitating mental images. Unlike the event horizon of a black hole, here we are not speaking of a spatial boundary but of a temporal one – the threshold between what could be our next state of existence and what has already become. Gaining clear awareness at this threshold requires new inner skills, normally not even hinted at in the traditional curricula, thus it’s worth trying to approach these realms of inner experience more gradually.

Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jan 16, 2026 3:17 pm

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 6:38 pm Previously, we saw that by trying to pin down the way in which we interact with the game flow, we were led to the elusive ‘event horizon’, where it feels as if our instinctive, yet intuitively oriented, willful pushing toward a future state (input) seems tightly correlated with the lighting up mental images (output), which then quickly fade away. Getting a more intimate experience of this elusive interface is not easy, primarily because it’s hard to overcome our familiar thinking habits. We continue to insist on seeing this event horizon as some output phenomenon in our field of consciousness. In other words, we insist on seeing in the output our ‘mental hand’ as an image that shapes other mental images. However, the reality of this process is precisely the tearing precipitating from the true horizon, which we cannot encompass as some mental or perceptual output but can only experience when we strive to sense how our dim intuitive inputs have something to do with the continuously precipitating mental images. Unlike the event horizon of a black hole, here we are not speaking of a spatial boundary but of a temporal one – the threshold between what could be our next state of existence and what has already become. Gaining clear awareness at this threshold requires new inner skills, normally not even hinted at in the traditional curricula, thus it’s worth trying to approach these realms of inner experience more gradually.

What a great demonstration of how to address the main difficulty of bridging between ordinary and living thinking - the paradox of the path to higher cognition, as GK called it. This inspires me a few thoughts about the nature of this difficulty, or paradox, which finds a marked path of resolution in this essay series.

The paradox is that in any essays, art works, or live presentations, the presenter and the receiver have to communicate through mental pictures, be them expressed as written thoughts or as other sense-accessible representations, such as a graph, a drawing, a digital animation. However, this omnipresent modality of our modern consciousness - the flow of mental pictures - is here meant to work in an unusual way. It's intended to evoke something that, on the one hand, is experienceable in full consciousness and presence, but on the other, doesn't dawn to consciousness in the usual form of a mental picture. It’s not thought, feeling, or action. Before we can truly and consciously experience this unfamiliar ‘something’, a series like this contextualizes and familiarizes us with the intuition that such experiences actually exist. Later, this can be verified consciously, but not easily at first, since we are so culturally conditioned to thrust all our desire for knowledge in the articulation of sequences of mental pictures.

In ordinary modern consciousness, forming mental pictures is the closest we get to knowing reality, to the point that - for lack of a better way - we attribute full reality to the pictures we form. We from a flow of atom-pictures, for example, and say: “This is it, that’s the reality of atomic behavior”. Even if we are able to distinguish between atomic behavior and our scientific study of it (we make distinct picture-flows of the two processes) for all intent and purposes, the only knowledge of atomic behavior we recognize is entirely made of pictures, and nothing other than pictures. We say: “The real atoms are this, and do that”, where "this" and "that" are inevitably pictures that we form and handle in our minds. We do not imagine any other way of knowing atoms, except by iteratively stacking and operating pictures in our minds. Our powerful sense is that the reality we are seeking is to be grasped as those pictures - and it becomes those pictures. On the one hand, we strongly objectify reality, while on the other, we are unable to go beyond the mere representations we perceive in our brains. That’s the paradox.

In mainstream science and philosophy, there is literally nothing else beyond mental picturing that's admitted as knowledge. And this picture of knowledge (yet another picture) holds us captive. Even when we make concrete use of the pictures, to develop technology and to reap its results, this is also entirely experienced within that same closed realm of mental pictures: we operate atomic pictorial flows, then pictures of us interacting with matter, and then result-pictures, and then pictures of our proud self. It’s all entirely mediated within the closed realm of representations building upon one another. And when we encompass our analytical, explanatory processes, it’s again through additional flows of representations. The business of gaining knowledge and experience invariably involves turning the crank of the picture-making machine, on and on and on, all life long.

Still, mental pictures do not exhaust the realm of the experienceable. As the essays evoke, there exist experiences that live outside our representational posture of consciousness. This means that, by nature, they are also forever irrepresentable: it’s not possible to represent them in the form of pictures and treat them, and exchange them, as we are used to in ordinary cognition. In fact, that these experiences are not mental pictures and are unpicturable, are one and the same thing. They don’t share in our parallel world of representations, that is they are forever irrepresentable, otherwise we would fall back into the usual business of knowledge, forming a picture to represent something whose only consistency would be nothing other than the representation itself. To be noticed, in all this there is nothing Kantian, because these experiences are still accessible in full consciousness. There is a barrier, or horizon, but it can be consciously crossed.

And so, building an effective bridge in essay form is very challenging because, as said, the realm of representations is a relatively impermeable realm, and an essay inevitably follows its rules, speaks that language. Therefore, no direct link can be built between an experienceable ‘something’, which lives outside that realm, and anything of representational nature. Real knowledge, higher knowledge, can’t be bridged and expanded in that way, and that’s all the difficulty. As this series demonstrates, the best bridges cannot model higher cognition, but use representations not to merely crank the picturing machinery, but to encourage the reader to set off for a personal discovery, a venture in unchartered territory, through personal inner gestures of a new quality. This hitherto unknown activity will lead to breaking free from the circle of representations. Although all this must be learned by doing, not by reading, reading is decisive. Through the readable content, the entire human being is agitated - the intellect, the feelings, the will - until everything hopefully cooperates so that, finally, ‘something’ is born out of ‘nothing’.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 16, 2026 4:24 pm Very well stated, Federica. It's interesting to note that yesterday was the anniversary of the death of GK in 2006. I didn't realize this until after we started discussing him again here.

I am now reviewing his book, "Stages of Consciousness," which contains some very insightful passages on this elusive event horizon between the representational flow of what has already become and the unrepresented potential of what can be, the intimation of which is the basis of all human cognitive striving, and which intersects in our concentrated experience of pure intuitive thinking. For example:

Georg Kühlewind was born in 1924 in Hungary.
In a letter destined for his volume 'Stages of Consciousness', he writes of himself, in English, as follows:


My first interests, at the age of fifteen, were psychoanalysis, Jung, and the history of religions and culture. At seventeen, I became a student of Karl Kerenyi. My tendency was to become a classical philologist in his sense and to learn Latin and Greek. Freud and Jung convinced me that life was not to be understood rationally. I studied economics. I tried to erase all habits, traditions and conventionality in me. I succeeded. There remained only a desert. (At the age of five, I had a very powerful experience of being an I – an experience like Jean Paul's, described by Steiner in Theosophy.)

I first met Anthroposophy at the age of eighteen. My feeling was: ”That's interesting, but I know it all – it's alive in me.” After the War, there came a second meeting: Truth and Science and Goethe's World Conception. Following this, the cycle of lectures on St. John's Gospel (given in Hamburg) inspired me. I began to read one book after another. And continued to do so for about ten years. Then I felt: this is sterile, I'm not succeeding on the path of inner work (praxis), and this ”pile” of knowledge I've been amassing only seems to be a ballast – as indeed it was!

At this point, I nearly threw out the whole of Anthroposophy, but I had a significant dream, and I remembered one of Steiner's books which I knew I had not understood – the Philosophy of Freedom. And so I began to study this book and all of Steiner's other epistemological works. I wanted to give these ”a last chance.” Strictly without looking into the more esoteric works, I wanted to understand these epistemological works by themselves alone. After about half-a-year, I knew what direction I had to take. I saw the errors I had made and the misunderstandings (felt as understandings) I had committed. I realized that the level of real understanding is not the level used in the other sciences but is, minimally, the level of living, experienced thinking, i. e., the process not the thought. From this moment on (about 1958), I slowly began on the path of inner schooling. In 1969, I met Massimo Scaligero, the Italian anthroposophical thinker. As a matter of fact, our real and effective meeting did not occur personally, but only through his books after personal acquaintance. Out of this, a deep and helpful friendship emerged which still lasts after his death – he died in 1980 – although there was more than one question on which we did not agree. Our agreement was perfect, however, concerning questions of knowing and the inner path.

Beginning in 1965, I began to work with groups of friends and, in 1966, I began to lecture in Austria, Switzerland and Germany.

I should mention one other great and, for me, important friendship. In 1979 I made the acquaintance by mail of the eminent French anthroposophist, Mme S. Rihouet-Coroze. Our acquaintance began when, at eighty-eight years of age, she decided to translate into French my book, Becoming Aware of the Logos. Our friendship lasted only two-and-a-half years on earth: she died in 1982.

From the beginning my interest in Anthroposophy has been in the study of consciousness and related themes. Very soon, therefore, I was led to the idea of the Logos. For the past twenty or twenty-two years the Prologue to St. John's Gospel has been my central meditation. Hence, all the books I have written have to do with this theme.
After the War, I had to decide to study something, but it was unclear what I should choose. I made my decision by looking towards those subjects with which, at that time, I had no relation. In this way, I chose natural science and, in particular, chemistry. I became a physical chemist and worked for thirty years in a Technical University, teaching physical chemistry - especially colloid chemistry – and doing research in the fields of adsorption, catalytic processes, surface chemistry and chemical engineering. I also have some inventions to my credit.

At the age of fifty-seven, I retired. I am now working mostly in the fields of linguistics, psychology and epistemology. These I consider to be the characteristic sciences of the consciousness soul. I am happy to have had the opportunity to have studied natural science. One can certainly learn thereby to think scientifically – and to constructs a true science of the spirit such thinking must clearly be at work. Spiritual science, as sketched by Steiner, still awaits scientists able to practice science on a higher level than the known sciences. I feel it to be my task in life to convey the fundamentals of this new science.

When I way young, I studied music – the piano – and wanted to be a musician. But this has remained only a wish. My greatest musical experience has been to hear Kathleen Ferrier sing – alas, I never heard her sing when she was alive! Among composers, excluding those of the classical and romantic periods, Bartok is most important to me. For me, he represents the music of the consciousness soul. In literature, I learned a great deal from Aldous Huxley – perhaps things he did not intend – but I have, anyway, a great inborn sympathy with him. As for poets: Hölderlin, Rilke, above all, and then Celan, with a special love for Dante, to read whom I learned Italian – which led me to Rome and to the meeting with Scaligero.

About 1967, I met Zen Buddhism – a meeting which affected my life most powerfully. I think Anthroposophists could learn much from ancient and Japanese Zen. About the contemporary Zen of the White Man, however, I think differently.

Finally, let me mention two other authors who have influenced me: Tolkien and Michael Ende, whom I know personally. Of course, I have read everything that any seeker reads – philosophy, the esoteric traditions, linguistics, mythology, ethnology, history of religions, etc. - but I don't think any of it has had a special influence on me as I am today.

Anything else? This is the largest and most important question but it is precisely the one that I cannot answer here. My consolation is that I am not alone in this. A bird singing and sitting in my window, the snow glittering in the garden, the sea on a stormy morning, the sound of a hawk, the smile beginning on a beloved face, the first caress of a hand, surely all of this and so many other ”small” events had perhaps a greater bearing on my life than all that I could say. You the readers must be contented with the results. I am grateful for your interest.



Georg Kühlewind

13 March 1984

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 10, 2026 6:38 pm

Obviously, we do not see such stacking of mental images in our imagination. The animation only aims to symbolize a fact of our inner experience. It is like a first-person version of the cathode-ray tube analogy – mental images light up at maximum intensity across the horizon and immediately fade away, leaving only intuitive traces. Consider how in the first move we may feel a sort of enthusiasm, as if we say, “This is easy, I’ll solve it right away.” Now, imagine that on the second move, we have already forgotten about the previous, as if the images immediately dissolve without an intuitive trace. We now may feel the same enthusiasm and readiness to solve the puzzle. This can go on and on, as long as every move feels as if we have just started, like it could be if we suffer from anterograde amnesia. If we are mentally healthy, however, we soon feel that things are going nowhere. So there must be something changing in our experience from ‘frame to frame’ besides the momentary image of the board (the current move). It’s not only that we experience a momentary picture with the knight at a certain position, but the intuitive and feeling context also changes. When we look at the animation above, we see how the places where the knight has moved look like a well-trodden path, while the central square looks hollow. There’s something analogous that seems to happen in our inner flow. Even though we do not see stacking images, the possibility of remembering the chain of prior moves still reverberates as a kind of knowing embedded in the context of our experience. There’s something that intuitively feels like: “For some time now, I have imagined the knight in all these squares but never in the central one.” Note that we are not proposing any mechanism that ‘explains’ this effect. We are only stating facts of inner experience that anyone can survey for themselves.

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the nature of the animation above and the way we have used it. We are clear that such receding images – mental or perceptual – are nowhere to be found while we try to solve the puzzle. Nevertheless, if the reader has understood what the animation aims to convey (and it is really something very simple), it is grasped as a kind of art form, as if it metaphorically conveys facts of our inner experience. Facts that are trivial to intuitively grasp but cannot be discovered as an arrangement of perceptual outputs in the way we are used to behold outputs of the bodily spectrum (senses).

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 03, 2026 6:11 pm