Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L

[AshvinP]

Thanks Cleric. That all makes sense.

One of the most prolific topics for reflection is to consider the following. Without any doubt, we can be conscious only of what we can think of. There simply isn't such a spiritual experience for which we can say "I experienced that but I can't think of it". It is true that we may not have clear cut concepts about the experience but we can certainly think about it by saying for example "I went through this inexplicable state. I don't know what it is but it was incredible." So if we introspect closely what we're doing when we think like that, we'll observe that when we say "I went through this inexplicable state" we really summon the memory of that state. We try to fill our soul with the the perceptual and feeling content, as if to reconstruct the mystical state.

One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here. The mystic with years of meditative experience would claim that he reaches states of pure stillness and serenity, devoid of thinking. I have had glimpses of this state through my meditative practice. Certainly one can look back and bring to memory such as experiences and describe it using the mechanism of thinking. But it would seem that in the moment, thinking can cease.

Yet another simple way to formulate the problem with the above, which stems from what Cleric and Federica have nicely elaborated already, is that you would never be able to say, "I have had glimpses of this state", if the continuity of your "I" thinking-memory had ceased.

The reason why thinking is so casually discarded by the mystic who has this experience is because it is "I" which is felt to be illusionary. Why? Let's notice that the sense of "I", like its inherent activity of willing and thinking (in contrast with passivity), is always associated with responsibility. We intuit this in the law when we feel it is just that an infant under a certain age, or the adult with an infantile mind, or the intoxicated or insane person under certain conditions, should not be held criminally responsible for acts they commit. These people seem to lack the continuity of thinking consciousness which allows them to say "I did this act", at the time of the act.

So our clear and intimate spiritual experience from day to day, as well as our more dim intuitions expressed through culture, all point to the undeniable and evolving reality of this thinking "I". The only possibility left for the intellectual mystic is to have recourse to metaphysics and create a dualism, in which this thinking "I" pops into existence from 'pure awareness/nothingness/etc.' like mind pops into existence from mindless matter or the Universe from nothing, for the materialist. In the realm of purely abstract thought, such a conclusion can be rationalized - that's why there are dualist philosophers in the world - but as soon as we attempt to move back to the realm of living experience, i.e. the first person inner perspective of will, feeling, thought, it breaks down again.

[Cleric K]

One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here. The mystic with years of meditative experience would claim that he reaches states of pure stillness and serenity, devoid of thinking. I have had glimpses of this state through my meditative practice. Certainly one can look back and bring to memory such as experiences and describe it using the mechanism of thinking. But it would seem that in the moment, thinking can cease.

Yes, this defining proves to be quite tricky. Federica and Ashvin gave great examples.

Let's try to approach matters from yet another angle - let's try less philosophical and more experiential perspective. When we introspect I guess most people would agree that we feel thoughts as something relatively small contained into something large. In other words, we vaguely feel that container we call consciousness which is like a field of experience and thoughts are only tiny ripples in that field. This is a very common metaphor and one which is quite easy to intuit.

Now the idea is that all these thought-ripples consume all our attention and we completely lose awareness of the field. For this reason it is almost the default understanding that meditation's goal is to diffuse all the ripples so that awareness can expand into the whole field, which is experienced as pure stillness devoid of thinking - we can say that thinking ceases. And this is the important point for which you say "One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here." Indeed, the successions of ripples (thought trains) cease. Not only in Eastern meditation but also in Western. The difference is how this is accomplished and even more importantly - how we proceed from there.

If we choose to reach the sea of serenity by diffusing our thought-ripples, we don't enter head on combat with them. We’ll quickly be overwhelmed. Instead, we step back and try to simply observe thoughts detachedly. We allow the trains of thought to pass through but we don’t engage with them. With much practice we learn not to be distracted at all by these thoughts. It’s much like in life when there’s this annoying kid that constantly teases us, the more we react and fight back, the more it continues. Instead, when we show that we’re not moved at all by its insults, it gradually loses interest and goes somewhere else. This is the basic method of diffusing thoughts. We simply detach from them and show that we’re not interested in their games. Then gradually the thought trains subside and we find ourselves in the sea of serenity.

Contrast this with the method of meditation which has evolved in the last two millennia. Here we don’t push away thoughts as some illusionary and annoying phenomena. Instead, we cultivate the strength to form a thought of our own making, place it in the center of our consciousness and let go of the rest. We don’t try to control the whole world. We control only a single thought-image (and it's immediate feeling context) but we do it well. The most various sensations, memories, automatic thoughts, etc. try to distract us but our spiritual activity stays focused as a laser. Gradually we once again find ourselves in the sea of serenity but with a great difference - we’re fully self-conscious of our spiritual activity because we never pushed it away. We mastered a certain aspect of it. Feel the difference: in the first case we let go of the thoughts and hopefully they leave us alone and serene, in the second we master the flow of thoughts and simply control them into a point (thus the sea around the point becomes apparent).

Now we arrive at the question of higher order spiritual activity (which often is termed Thinking here but in more precise terms we speak of degrees - Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition). The thing is that these higher order degrees are not simply more clever and faster intellectual thinking, which indeed ceases. We’ll never grasp this unless we try to feel the hierarchical depth of our spiritual activity. We can attempt to approach this if we extend the metaphor in the following way.

So in both cases we can reach the sea of serenity. There are no more trains of ripples to distract us - thinking ceases. For the Oriental mystic this also marks the highest achievement - pure consciousness. One merges with the field. But remember that this is achieved at the expense of giving away our self-conscious spiritual activity. Now imagine that this sea of serenity is not completely homogenous but there are certain tidal waves. The field pulsates, cycles through colors, but does that in a very smooth, serene way. We’re only experiencing this. Later we can symbolize all this with ripple-thoughts, we can say words as “My consciousness expanded into the Cosmos, everything was One and pulsated smoothly, cycled through colors.” Eugene would say that this is what spiritual sciences misses - it is actual ‘experiencing’, no thought ripples, which are only like fractal fragments - self-similar to but of lower order compared to the pulsating One consciousness. Note that there’s no notion of spiritual activity in this state - there’s no willing of anything - be it body or waves in the fields. We’re simply riding the pulses of Schop’s blind will - it does the pulsing, and there’s only ‘experiencing’ of them.

Contrast this with the second approach. When we reach the sea of serenity while keeping a fully awake focus of our spiritual activity something very peculiar happens. We begin to sense that our spiritual activity has levels, fractal layers. In our ordinary state through our meaningful intents we create thought-ripples. It’s like our spirit is the wind and it makes ripples on the sea. When we gain fully conscious control over this blowing of ripples, we come to know that the ripples are only certain forms at a certain level of the fractal. We find out that our wind can blow in a much more holistic way and then we find ourselves responsible for some of the tidal waves, some of the color pulses. This kind of blowing is at a different ‘scale’. Of course this is only a way to symbolize these things, the forms of spiritual activity don’t differ simply by spatial scale. It’ll take us too far to go into details but many things change as we move through the fractal levels. A rich topic for meditation is music. Music is not simply the sum total of sounds. Rhythm, melody, harmony - these things are completely new spiritual phenomena extended in time. They are higher fractal levels. Similarly, higher cognition is not simply the sum total of thought-ripples - it leads us to formerly inconceivable forms of spiritual activity that weave through the Cosmos and are responsible for everything in the dreamscape.

I hope this makes it clearer. The key point is that simply diffusing our spiritual activity can lead us at most to the sea of serenity that we simply ‘experience’. We can never go further than this - and how could we, when we have forsaken all ‘going’. On the other hand, by overcoming the intellectual chaos by mastering the thinking forces such that we can focus them at will, at a point, as a laser beam, we once again attain to the sea of serenity but now we’re also fully awake and find the higher fractal level of activity which moves the tidal waves. For the mystic these waves are simply the inexplicable nature of the One consciousness but for us they proceed from the fully conscious spiritual activity of the most varied beings.

As a last note I would like to point out that the sea of serenity doesn’t mean laminar featurelessness. This may indeed be the case for the mystic but when we enter these states with our lucid spiritual activity we also understand how our ordinary thought-ripples are embedded in the higher order waves. The feeling for serenity comes from the fact that we flow through these higher order streams (which can be highly dynamic by the way) but at the same time these streams are filled with exquisite details, as if we grasp the meaningful density of a whole book. This is not something to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Actually what we initially behold in this way is first and foremost the structure of our own being, the waves of our ideas, sympathies, antipathies, beliefs, etc. yet not as some psychoanalytical categories but as actual living flows in the deeper soul world. Our ordinary consciousness simply ripples on the surface of all this.

[Anthony66]

One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here. The mystic with years of meditative experience would claim that he reaches states of pure stillness and serenity, devoid of thinking. I have had glimpses of this state through my meditative practice. Certainly one can look back and bring to memory such as experiences and describe it using the mechanism of thinking. But it would seem that in the moment, thinking can cease.

Yes, this defining proves to be quite tricky. Federica and Ashvin gave great examples.

Let's try to approach matters from yet another angle - let's try less philosophical and more experiential perspective. When we introspect I guess most people would agree that we feel thoughts as something relatively small contained into something large. In other words, we vaguely feel that container we call consciousness which is like a field of experience and thoughts are only tiny ripples in that field. This is a very common metaphor and one which is quite easy to intuit.

Now the idea is that all these thought-ripples consume all our attention and we completely lose awareness of the field. For this reason it is almost the default understanding that meditation's goal is to diffuse all the ripples so that awareness can expand into the whole field, which is experienced as pure stillness devoid of thinking - we can say that thinking ceases. And this is the important point for which you say "One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here." Indeed, the successions of ripples (thought trains) cease. Not only in Eastern meditation but also in Western. The difference is how this is accomplished and even more importantly - how we proceed from there.

If we choose to reach the sea of serenity by diffusing our thought-ripples, we don't enter head on combat with them. We’ll quickly be overwhelmed. Instead, we step back and try to simply observe thoughts detachedly. We allow the trains of thought to pass through but we don’t engage with them. With much practice we learn not to be distracted at all by these thoughts. It’s much like in life when there’s this annoying kid that constantly teases us, the more we react and fight back, the more it continues. Instead, when we show that we’re not moved at all by its insults, it gradually loses interest and goes somewhere else. This is the basic method of diffusing thoughts. We simply detach from them and show that we’re not interested in their games. Then gradually the thought trains subside and we find ourselves in the sea of serenity.

Contrast this with the method of meditation which has evolved in the last two millennia. Here we don’t push away thoughts as some illusionary and annoying phenomena. Instead, we cultivate the strength to form a thought of our own making, place it in the center of our consciousness and let go of the rest. We don’t try to control the whole world. We control only a single thought-image (and it's immediate feeling context) but we do it well. The most various sensations, memories, automatic thoughts, etc. try to distract us but our spiritual activity stays focused as a laser. Gradually we once again find ourselves in the sea of serenity but with a great difference - we’re fully self-conscious of our spiritual activity because we never pushed it away. We mastered a certain aspect of it. Feel the difference: in the first case we let go of the thoughts and hopefully they leave us alone and serene, in the second we master the flow of thoughts and simply control them into a point (thus the sea around the point becomes apparent).

Now we arrive at the question of higher order spiritual activity (which often is termed Thinking here but in more precise terms we speak of degrees - Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition). The thing is that these higher order degrees are not simply more clever and faster intellectual thinking, which indeed ceases. We’ll never grasp this unless we try to feel the hierarchical depth of our spiritual activity. We can attempt to approach this if we extend the metaphor in the following way.

So in both cases we can reach the sea of serenity. There are no more trains of ripples to distract us - thinking ceases. For the Oriental mystic this also marks the highest achievement - pure consciousness. One merges with the field. But remember that this is achieved at the expense of giving away our self-conscious spiritual activity. Now imagine that this sea of serenity is not completely homogenous but there are certain tidal waves. The field pulsates, cycles through colors, but does that in a very smooth, serene way. We’re only experiencing this. Later we can symbolize all this with ripple-thoughts, we can say words as “My consciousness expanded into the Cosmos, everything was One and pulsated smoothly, cycled through colors.” Eugene would say that this is what spiritual sciences misses - it is actual ‘experiencing’, no thought ripples, which are only like fractal fragments - self-similar to but of lower order compared to the pulsating One consciousness. Note that there’s no notion of spiritual activity in this state - there’s no willing of anything - be it body or waves in the fields. We’re simply riding the pulses of Schop’s blind will - it does the pulsing, and there’s only ‘experiencing’ of them.

Contrast this with the second approach. When we reach the sea of serenity while keeping a fully awake focus of our spiritual activity something very peculiar happens. We begin to sense that our spiritual activity has levels, fractal layers. In our ordinary state through our meaningful intents we create thought-ripples. It’s like our spirit is the wind and it makes ripples on the sea. When we gain fully conscious control over this blowing of ripples, we come to know that the ripples are only certain forms at a certain level of the fractal. We find out that our wind can blow in a much more holistic way and then we find ourselves responsible for some of the tidal waves, some of the color pulses. This kind of blowing is at a different ‘scale’. Of course this is only a way to symbolize these things, the forms of spiritual activity don’t differ simply by spatial scale. It’ll take us too far to go into details but many things change as we move through the fractal levels. A rich topic for meditation is music. Music is not simply the sum total of sounds. Rhythm, melody, harmony - these things are completely new spiritual phenomena extended in time. They are higher fractal levels. Similarly, higher cognition is not simply the sum total of thought-ripples - it leads us to formerly inconceivable forms of spiritual activity that weave through the Cosmos and are responsible for everything in the dreamscape.

I hope this makes it clearer. The key point is that simply diffusing our spiritual activity can lead us at most to the sea of serenity that we simply ‘experience’. We can never go further than this - and how could we, when we have forsaken all ‘going’. On the other hand, by overcoming the intellectual chaos by mastering the thinking forces such that we can focus them at will, at a point, as a laser beam, we once again attain to the sea of serenity but now we’re also fully awake and find the higher fractal level of activity which moves the tidal waves. For the mystic these waves are simply the inexplicable nature of the One consciousness but for us they proceed from the fully conscious spiritual activity of the most varied beings.

As a last note I would like to point out that the sea of serenity doesn’t mean laminar featurelessness. This may indeed be the case for the mystic but when we enter these states with our lucid spiritual activity we also understand how our ordinary thought-ripples are embedded in the higher order waves. The feeling for serenity comes from the fact that we flow through these higher order streams (which can be highly dynamic by the way) but at the same time these streams are filled with exquisite details, as if we grasp the meaningful density of a whole book. This is not something to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Actually what we initially behold in this way is first and foremost the structure of our own being, the waves of our ideas, sympathies, antipathies, beliefs, etc. yet not as some psychoanalytical categories but as actual living flows in the deeper soul world. Our ordinary consciousness simply ripples on the surface of all this.

Once again, thank you for providing such rich material for reflection.

Your earlier statement, "we can be conscious only of what we can think of", must only be true in a "holistic sense". By this I mean that "in the moment", one can be in a state devoid of thought where the ripples have ceased and all is serene. However, a necessary condition for the serene state to be a conscious state is that when thinking is re-engaged, the serene state can be brought into memory and reconstructed to a degree by thinking.

[AshvinP]

Once again, thank you for providing such rich material for reflection.

Your earlier statement, "we can be conscious only of what we can think of", must only be true in a "holistic sense". By this I mean that "in the moment", one can be in a state devoid of thought where the ripples have ceased and all is serene. However, a necessary condition for the serene state to be a conscious state is that when thinking is re-engaged, the serene state can be brought into memory and reconstructed to a degree by thinking.

Anthony,

When Cleric wrote - "We begin to sense that our spiritual activity has levels, fractal layers. In our ordinary state through our meaningful intents we create thought-ripples. It’s like our spirit is the wind and it makes ripples on the sea. When we gain fully conscious control over this blowing of ripples, we come to know that the ripples are only certain forms at a certain level of the fractal. We find out that our wind can blow in a much more holistic way and then we find ourselves responsible for some of the tidal waves, some of the color pulses. This kind of blowing is at a different ‘scale’."

Do you interpret this to say, with the 2nd approach, we are adding depth to our spiritual activity which previously wasn't there? Because that's certainly not what he intended.

We often speak of the 2nd approach as becoming more conscious of what everyone is going through unconsciously. Your spirit is already blowing in more a holistic way, subconsciously, regardless of whether you choose to keep that spiritual activity in relative obscurity with the 1st approach or endeavor to illuminate it more with the 2nd approach. From the more philosophical angle, we can sense all the various problematic poppings in-and-out of existence which would need to take place within our activity if it were otherwise. Nothing is being added or subtracted in any absolute sense with these approaches, only remaining concealed or unconcealed within our holistic consciousness to lesser or greater degrees. None of us could be here on the forum philosophizing if the entire hierarchical depth structure of spiritual activity wasn't constituting our philosophical thought-ripples.

Another way to put that is in terms of our evolving Being as a Time-organism. There are no isolated 'moments' in reality - every 'moment' only has meaning in the context of the hierarchical Time-rhythms which 'interfere' to constitute them in our experience. This is why I mentioned earlier that, only in pure abstract thought, can certain conclusions take on any meaning, like "'in the moment', one can be in a state devoid of thought where the ripples have ceased and all is serene." If we examine what we are doing with our thinking to make this conclusion (and we are presumably making the conclusion because we feel it has meaningful implications for reality), we can sense how we are chopping up reality into little bits which don't exist. That is our normal habit of thinking - we feel that the musical notes are 'real' and the rhythm, melody, and harmony are conglomerations of those notes from the 'bottom-up', but the 2nd approach reveals that it is actually the other way around. The rhythms are always there even if we don't resonate enough to hear the particular notes.

[Federica]

I thought I would seize the opportunity that Anthony has revived this thread, and that additional advice has been offered on meditation, to speak of some of my recent attempts at that. It seems we are now a few actively trying it out, or intending to try it out, so I hope others will also share how it’s going, and that we can learn and improve through any exchange that might follow. As far as I am concerned, and although I already received incredibly valuable and specific advice on how to go about it, here and here in the Whirlpool thread, I have been running into some difficulties. It’s been a week or so since I have committed to making daily serious attempts at meditation. Previously I had some interesting experiments here and there, but predominantly I had been in a self-talk of the kind “let’s not rush it, that wouldn’t be wise, I should progressively ease into it, and take the time to set it right”. Then I noticed this mindset was working as an excuse to replace meditation with some more reading, some more philosophizing, some more getting lured by and embarked on random tourist trains of thought.

So I decided to make a daily effort. I do it early in the morning, because if I leave it for the evening the substratum is less good and there’s a bigger risk of ending up touring on the tourist train, or even falling near to asleep. I also try to neutralize the body as much as possible, so no sitting, no striving for any special supposedly yogic alignment of the body, not even the shavasana type, that I find too active and ‘calling’. As a mental image I have chosen the Electric Sheep screensaver that Cleric suggested in the posts linked above. I like the animation and its fractal depth, but it’s been difficult to concentrate on it with eyes closed. First, I felt some heaviness, or intensity, emanating from the deep red tones, so I imagined the same picture in bright and light green-blue tones. It’s not been of much help. The difficulty is that I cannot really focus on such a complex image in an all-encompassing way. Therefore I selected the central, squarish form and its details. That was doable, but is it ok to single out that section and to put it in motion, like in the animated screensaver? it's much easier with motion, but is this defeating the purpose?

I found myself inclined not only to set it in motion, but also to descend in the ‘mechanism’ as if I was a drone in a 3D field so to speak, coming close to the gears, looking at them from different angles, very close. That way it becomes way easier to remain in the picture, just as the water element meditation is ten times easier for me. But I guess it defeats the purpose? In the water meditation, I am moved by the flow of water. It's not only an ideal movement, but also an emotion, an awe. I feel like there is a chance that I can merge with the element, coming closer and closer to it. Similarly, if I can come closer to the frames of the screensaver, as they turn, I have a chance to stay with the image and remain focused. But if I have to stay still focusing on its center square frame, I can only do it for a few seconds, before the tourist train comes and takes me away. In other words, the water meditation I recently mentioned, that Cleric said was a good idea (end of the This Forum thread), feels very different from the concentration effort. Are the two approaches complementary? Is concentration on a fixed image to be preferred?

In the effort of concentration, there are only two things I have noticed, apart from the regular calls of the sightseeing train (which I don’t know how to fight other than by setting the frames in motion). First, a sensation/thought akin to having a very low-flying aircraft passing overhead. One can get that impression at small airports, where one can stand very close to taking-off or landing airplanes. This has happened a few times. It’s a kind of forceful and abrupt mood change. The second thing that has happened, only once, is the sudden appearance and disappearance of a fixed cartoonish face, overlapping the screensaver image. It didn’t look particularly friendly. I will end here, hopefully before I disoblige conciseness too much. Thanks for reading.

[Cleric K]

Once again, thank you for providing such rich material for reflection.

Your earlier statement, "we can be conscious only of what we can think of", must only be true in a "holistic sense". By this I mean that "in the moment", one can be in a state devoid of thought where the ripples have ceased and all is serene. However, a necessary condition for the serene state to be a conscious state is that when thinking is re-engaged, the serene state can be brought into memory and reconstructed to a degree by thinking.

Let's consider things from one more angle. Ashvin noted that it's important to be open for the fact that the structure of the Cosmic organism is already 'there'. This should protect us from falling into self-satisfaction in some quiet state and believe that we have reached the tower top of reality.

As long as we remain entirely in the abstract intellect, we'll always stumble upon irreconcilable contradictions, much like our intellect rebels at something like the train/lightning paradox of special relativity. Yet we need to develop this ever moving, fluid thinking in order to navigate such things because the different states of consciousness present us with similar paradoxes when considered rigidly by the intellect.

As an example, we can consider the following, which some of the readers here with experience in psychedelics may find familiar. We all know from reports that people claim most of the experiences can't be put into words. Our intellect is forced into a state where the convenient conceptual handles that we have forged within the sensory spectrum become inadequate. The inner mobility of the etheric body drags our spiritual activity in unfamiliar patterns. Note that these are not simply visual patterns. If that was the case people wouldn't claim that they can't be put into words. For example, if we look at a masterpiece of art, we may be fully aware that we don't have the skills to produce it ourselves but probably we won't say that it can't be put into words (not in the sense that words can fully exhaust the art content but simply that we can reasonably well think and communicate about the art form). The reason most things in the psychedelic state can't be put into words is that our spiritual gestures themselves are forced into unfamiliar patterns (not similar to the patterns which resonate well with words). These patterns are experienced as shapes of meaning - thus the universal claim that the psychedelic states feel to be deeply meaningful - yet these shapes simply don't translate to our regular shapes of meaning (concepts forged while interacting with the sensory spectrum and associated soul life). This is also another reason why psychedelics are unfit as a tool for developing higher cognition. The psychedelic patterns are a strange hybrid of intellectual habits and slightly higher patterns in the etheric body. Thus not only we chop up the flows of our higher organization but we don't even feel the impetus to grow our spiritual activity out of the sensory shapes of meaning into the higher order shapes, simply because we never reached the chopped up patterns with our own forces in the first place - our intellect was simply forced there. As long as we expect that the spiritual world will force itself upon us, we simply don't understand that it is our own spiritual activity that must transform in order to resonate and live fully consciously with the higher order flows. Only in this way we also build the bridge through which the intellect is found to lie on a fractal gradient of spiritual activity, thus we also find the way to translate between the levels.

Anyways. The point is that, as those experienced very well know, almost immediately after the psychedelic state subsides, we already have trouble to remember those more exotic patterns of spiritual activity. We remember how it felt, we remember the things that can be described as colors, shapes and so on, but the truly bizarre forms of cognition become only a dim memory that something peculiar had happened. Few months later we may even completely forget about these more exotic states. But if we take a trip again something interesting may happen - we may remember episodes of our previous trip. So we had to reach again a state of exotic cognitive patterns in order to remember past such patterns.

Another interesting example is the state we enter soon after death. Similarly to the psychedelic state, we begin to live in spiritual patterns that are somewhat familiar. We realize that we have lived through these patterns each night in sleep (although not in exactly the same way because we were still connected with the bodily spectrum). Yet every morning as we wake up and enter the slots of our sensory perceptions and concepts, any experience of the sleep world simply passes unregistered, like a EM waves pass through antenna designed for other frequencies.

Now the question is: "Alright, then have I or have I not been conscious last night? I understand that now I don't have the proper slots to remember these experiences but did I have the experiences at all? Was I really conscious in sleep but then forgot it in the morning or I have never been conscious and I'm only now (after death or through spiritual development) filling details from my current perspective?" These are the kinds of questions that can bring one to mental breakdown if we can't find the right perspective (re: Nietzsche, Cantor, etc. - not saying that they thought about exactly these things, but there's something archetypal in these paradoxes). It is a kind of conflict between the intellectual soul which we all have developed and the spiritual soul that only now is being born. It is like having 2D pictures of a tree from different angles but not having consciousness of 3D and struggling to comprehend how these pictures can really be one.

So we should be really careful when we employ our intellectual habits formed in the last few centuries to the states of being. The question "Had I been conscious last night, even though I don't remember anything?" simply doesn't make sense in the face of reality, similarly to seeking singular answer that fits all observers in the train/lightning paradox. It's really difficult to speak of these things precisely because of the tendency of the intellect to get convoluted within itself but we should gradually learn to focus on the actual process of integration of consciousness and not trying to patch together through the intellect, snapshots of being.

On an even larger scale the same holds for the whole incarnational rhythm. As we descend in the sensory patterns it becomes impossible to be conscious of/remember the higher order flows within which we live between Earthly lives. As we expand after death we later begin to grasp also past patterns of our spirit that goes through incarnations.

The key here is not to imagine something like "I was conscious in that past state" but to realize that what really matters is the integrative process of Time. We should be careful about the alleys that something like "However, a necessary condition for the serene state to be a conscious state is that when thinking is re-engaged, the serene state can be brought into memory and reconstructed to a degree by thinking." can take us. Imagine the following. You meditate but you enter a state similar to deep sleep then get back. You don't remember anything. According to the definition above it turns out that the mystical state has not been conscious. But imagine that you do remember something few days or few months later. So what now, the mystical state suddenly becomes conscious, even though until recently we considered it unconscious? So what really matters is the integrative process. We simply can't speak in realistic manner about some past state lifted in itself and asking whether it was a conscious of unconscious state. The question is whether the spiritual forces that explain the past state are brought to consciousness in our present state.

[Cleric K]

I thought I would seize the opportunity that Anthony has revived this thread, and that additional advice has been offered on meditation, to speak of some of my recent attempts at that. It seems we are now a few actively trying it out, or intending to try it out, so I hope others will also share how it’s going, and that we can learn and improve through any exchange that might follow. As far as I am concerned, and although I already received incredibly valuable and specific advice on how to go about it, here and here in the Whirlpool thread, I have been running into some difficulties. It’s been a week or so since I have committed to making daily serious attempts at meditation. Previously I had some interesting experiments here and there, but predominantly I had been in a self-talk of the kind “let’s not rush it, that wouldn’t be wise, I should progressively ease into it, and take the time to set it right”. Then I noticed this mindset was working as an excuse to replace meditation with some more reading, some more philosophizing, some more getting lured by and embarked on random tourist trains of thought.

Hi Federica, I would like to go into details here but I'm struggling to organize the time-slices for finishing an essay to be posted here. I'll try to focus on the essay first. I'll just throw few things real quick. Yes, the reading and meditative exercises truly complement each other. As far as the meditations, remember that ultimately the goal is to become more and more conscious of the gradient of spiritual activity. Imagine that you hold a Rubik's cube and wave it around. You may focus on the colors, on the geometry but the real benefit is that you gradually come to know your willing that acts through the hand. In a similar sense through the meditative exercises you come to know the 'fingertips' of thinking that imagine the tunnel. The tunnel is only an image. Then what are the 'joints' of that thinking 'arm', which are symbolized by the periphery of the tunnel? Take something like your thoughts "let’s not rush it, that wouldn’t be wise, I should progressively ease into it". Through these words (which also come out through the 'fingertips' of thinking as sounds/words) you actually express the soul strata of the 'elbow' or 'shoulder'. It's a deeper soul level which weaves in the active idea 'to do a meditative exercise'. This level of spiritual activity supervises the exercise, it lives in the implicit knowing of who you are, where you are in your life, how you have at all come to the point that you want to do such exercises, how this exercise fits in the landscape of reality and so on. Try to sense how by saying "Let's not rush it" you're really expressing a deeper intuition about how the exercise is temporally nested within a greater flow of development. You intuitively sense the landscape of this flow, similarly to the way you sense how when riding on a train you can move around the cars but the train itself also moves. From geometric perspective it doesn't make sense to push yourself in the front or the back of the train's composition. So thoughts like yours are already feeling the temporal structure of the flow of being and how it should be nicely and harmoniously nested, as a proper symphony should be (imagine some of the instruments rushing ahead of the common rhythm. But of course, lagging behind is also not advisable).

For me personally the most exciting transformations began when I started to realize that it is actually precisely these layers of being that as they become more and more conscious, consist into actually seeing in the spiritual. So this gives us a way to make a flat picture as the tunnel into a symbol for something living. It's not only about imagining it through our thinking fingertips but understand that there's a living hierarchy of our being, nested rhythms of our whole Earthly destiny, that together form a musical composition. Meditating on the tunnel is not so much about achieving some technical proficiency at the fingertips through which we expect something else to happen but about our deep desire to organize our depth of being into a musical hierarchy. Obviously we can't do that in the way we organize our desk because we don't perceive our being in front of us in the way we can see the image of the tunnel. The deeper rings of the tunnel may initially be felt in the way you have felt something hovering above you. In time this will be felt not as something hovering externally but as something weaving in the tidal waves present at the elbow, shoulder level so to speak, within which our thinking fingertips are embedded. So at this point it becomes necessary to find our conscious attitude towards the deeper rings. These rings are not a simple linear cascade but more like an interference of various intelligent forces that work at the different levels. And here's the place where our mood of prayer comes into play. Since we can't mechanically organize these forces (as we organize our desk), as they are on the 'inside-out' side of our surface consciousness, we need the inversion of our spiritual activity, through which we yearn to unite with the positive forces greater than us that also seek Love, Wisdom, Freedom and Truth. To put that into a more childish form, instead of feeling uneasy by low passing aircraft, we should consciously seek unity with the positive spiritual currents that weave in our depths. This is a very intimate point of our growth because it raises the question to our intellectual self: "Can I have the faith that there are layers of Intelligence within which I'm embedded, which actually understand much better my own structure and which can guide me into the organization of my depth gradient?" It's not about letting go and having someone else take control of our life. These forces won't and can't do what can only be done at our level of being. It is about our self-determination - with what kind of forces we would like to associate ourselves, even though we don't see these forces on our desk but they serve as our depth context?

[AshvinP]

I thought I would seize the opportunity that Anthony has revived this thread, and that additional advice has been offered on meditation, to speak of some of my recent attempts at that. It seems we are now a few actively trying it out, or intending to try it out, so I hope others will also share how it’s going, and that we can learn and improve through any exchange that might follow. As far as I am concerned, and although I already received incredibly valuable and specific advice on how to go about it, here and here in the Whirlpool thread, I have been running into some difficulties. It’s been a week or so since I have committed to making daily serious attempts at meditation. Previously I had some interesting experiments here and there, but predominantly I had been in a self-talk of the kind “let’s not rush it, that wouldn’t be wise, I should progressively ease into it, and take the time to set it right”. Then I noticed this mindset was working as an excuse to replace meditation with some more reading, some more philosophizing, some more getting lured by and embarked on random tourist trains of thought.

So I decided to make a daily effort. I do it early in the morning, because if I leave it for the evening the substratum is less good and there’s a bigger risk of ending up touring on the tourist train, or even falling near to asleep. I also try to neutralize the body as much as possible, so no sitting, no striving for any special supposedly yogic alignment of the body, not even the shavasana type, that I find too active and ‘calling’. As a mental image I have chosen the Electric Sheep screensaver that Cleric suggested in the posts linked above. I like the animation and its fractal depth, but it’s been difficult to concentrate on it with eyes closed. First, I felt some heaviness, or intensity, emanating from the deep red tones, so I imagined the same picture in bright and light green-blue tones. It’s not been of much help. The difficulty is that I cannot really focus on such a complex image in an all-encompassing way. Therefore I selected the central, squarish form and its details. That was doable, but is it ok to single out that section and to put it in motion, like in the animated screensaver? it's much easier with motion, but is this defeating the purpose?

I found myself inclined not only to set it in motion, but also to descend in the ‘mechanism’ as if I was a drone in a 3D field so to speak, coming close to the gears, looking at them from different angles, very close. That way it becomes way easier to remain in the picture, just as the water element meditation is ten times easier for me. But I guess it defeats the purpose? In the water meditation, I am moved by the flow of water. It's not only an ideal movement, but also an emotion, an awe. I feel like there is a chance that I can merge with the element, coming closer and closer to it. Similarly, if I can come closer to the frames of the screensaver, as they turn, I have a chance to stay with the image and remain focused. But if I have to stay still focusing on its center square frame, I can only do it for a few seconds, before the tourist train comes and takes me away. In other words, the water meditation I recently mentioned, that Cleric said was a good idea (end of the This Forum thread), feels very different from the concentration effort. Are the two approaches complementary? Is concentration on a fixed image to be preferred?

In the effort of concentration, there are only two things I have noticed, apart from the regular calls of the sightseeing train (which I don’t know how to fight other than by setting the frames in motion). First, a sensation/thought akin to having a very low-flying aircraft passing overhead. One can get that impression at small airports, where one can stand very close to taking-off or landing airplanes. This has happened a few times. It’s a kind of forceful and abrupt mood change. The second thing that has happened, only once, is the sudden appearance and disappearance of a fixed cartoonish face, overlapping the screensaver image. It didn’t look particularly friendly. I will end here, hopefully before I disoblige conciseness too much. Thanks for reading.

Federica,

In the context of Cleric's reply, you may find the below discussion from Steiner helpful as well. Personally, I found it somewhat more easier to feel my way into the depth structure of my spiritual activity when working with sounds rather than images - namely Cleric's vowel exercise and mantras, such as this:

"More radiant than the Sun,
Purer than the Snow,
Finer than the Ether,
Is the Self.
The Spirit in my Heart,
I am this Self,
This Self am I."

(we can also include images for the above, but we should resist trying to intellectually reflect on the meaning of the verses while doing the meditation)

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA013/Engli ... 05-06.html

When we meditate upon the Rose Cross we have before us a picture, the component parts of which are derived from the sense-world — the black color of the cross, the roses, and so forth. But the assembling of the parts to form the Rose Cross is a deed the origin of which is no longer in the sense-world. If now the pupil of the Spirit will try to let the black cross and also the red roses — pictures, both of them, of objects real in the world of the senses — disappear completely from his consciousness, retaining there nothing but the spiritual activity which brought the parts together, in this activity he has the substance of the kind of meditation that can lead him, in course of time, to Inspiration. He should look into his own soul and ask himself: What was I doing when I brought cross and roses together to form a symbolic picture? What I was doing — the process I was bringing about in my soul — that will I now hold fast; the picture itself I will let disappear from consciousness. And now, without letting the picture rise up before me, I will feel what my soul was doing to produce the picture. I will for the time being live a completely inward life, living solely in my own activity that created the picture. I will enter, that is, into deep contemplation, not of any picture, but of my own picture-creating activity.
...
To begin with, the pupil will not find it altogether easy to be quite clear in his mind as to how he is to set about an exercise of this nature. If he has been accustomed to let his inner life be determined by external impressions, then, when he wants to develop in his soul an inner life that has broken loose from all connection with external impressions, then, when he wants to develop in his soul an inner life that has broken loose from all connection with external impressions, then, he will be at a loss how to proceed. Hence on the path to Inspiration it will be still more essential than before to accompany the given exercises with all those precautionary measures that were recommended to him when setting out to attain Imagination — measures for ensuring stability and confidence, alike in his powers of discrimination, in his life of feeling and in his conduct and character. If he succeeds with these, the pupil will find they have a twofold effect upon him. He will not run the risk of losing his balance when he attains to vision of the supersensible; and he will also become capable of fulfilling quite exactly and faithfully the demands made upon him by the new exercises. The pupil will need to develop here a specific mood and disposition of soul, with the feelings that rightly belong to it; till he has done so, he may well find the exercises difficult. If however he will patiently and perseveringly cultivate within him the qualities of soul that are favorable to the birth of supersensible cognition, it will not be long before he finds himself able to understand the exercises and also to carry them out. Let him make a habit of communing often with his own soul — but not with a view to musing upon himself! Rather should he set out before his mind's eye the successive experiences he has met with in life and consider them quietly. The effort will be well rewarded. He will find that his thought and ideas, and also his feelings, are enriched by bringing these experiences into relation with one another. He will come to realize how true it is that we gain new experience not only by having new impressions or undergoing new events in life; but also by letting the old work on within us. The pupil who really succeeds in letting his experiences — yes, and even the opinions he had gained — play upon one another, as though he himself, with his sympathies and antipathies, his personal interests and feelings, were in no way concerned, will be preparing within him particularly good ground for the growth of the faculty of supersensible cognition. He will in very truth develop what one may call a rich inner life.

To be clear, I am not suggesting one should skip over imaginative exercises and 'extinguish' the images right away, but rather that the above gives an indication of the deeper context Cleric is pointing to, in which our intellectual and imaginative activity is always taking place.

[lorenzop]

There is an advantage to calling reality as it appears FALSE.
The chair we see is not really an independent chair.
By calling reality as it appears FALSE, then must then be a TRUTH. If the chair is really a chair then there is really nothing to aspire to.
What Cleric/Steiner and etc are offering is a higher order of FALSITY - the ultimate golden calf.
For example the Christian notion of Heaven is simply moving from economy class to first class.

[Cleric K]

There is an advantage to calling reality as it appears FALSE.
The chair we see is not really an independent chair.
By calling reality as it appears FALSE, then must then be a TRUTH. If the chair is really a chair then there is really nothing to aspire to.
What Cleric/Steiner and etc are offering is a higher order of FALSITY - the ultimate golden calf.
For example the Christian notion of Heaven is simply moving from economy class to first class.

We agree in that there's a ultimate mystical Unity of existence. The appearances of reality are like reflections of a mirror shattered in uncountable pieces. So you rightly say - the kaleidoscopic configuration of glimmers is false, true reality is the unbroken Divine Light.

Now your objection is that we gather the sparkles of appearances and progressively repackage them into greater categories. We take sparkles and put them into boxes, boxes are put into bags, bags into crates and so on, trying to build the ultimate package of appearances. In this I would fully agree that we have created the ultimate golden calf.

But consider an alternative. As a great simplification imagine that the original unbroken mirror is first shattered in two, then the two pieces themselves split in two - becoming four total - and so on until we have countless shards. Now suppose for a second that what we're saying is not meant to repackage the shards into man made categories but that we seek the reverse process - to transform existence (not theoretically but in actuality) by gradually restoring the original unity of the mirror pieces by investigating the hierarchical way in which they were originally produced and seeking through evolutionary spiritual development to put them together. Not mechanically repackaging them but restoring the true unbroken cosmic mirror (I repeat that this metaphor is a great simplification and misleading in certain ways).

Now, assuming that you understand that we don't seek higher degrees of falsity by repackaging the fragments into an artificial hierarchy of categories, it will be nice if you can support your view that it is enough to simply close our eyes for the shards and only dream about the unbroken unity of the Light (we only dream since even in a mystical state we still experience only a very personal manifestation of it). What gives you the confidence that you can safely ignore this shattered glimmer and assume you'll simply become the holistic Divine Light after death? We can and many times we have given explanations how everything clicks into place when we consider this great evolutionary work of putting the Cosmic Mirror back together. Religion, science, art - everything becomes truly comprehensible and meaningful in this way. Not only as some satisfaction of intellectual curiosity but as an open evolutionary path for the whole organism of humanity, realizing in the process the ideal of Love, Wisdom, Truth, Justice and Freedom.

Other than feeling this to be too much uninteresting work and hoping that it is unnecessary since after death the mirror fragments will simply evaporate and you'll be one with the Light even without moving a finger on Earth, what gives you the confidence that this is how things stand? Or you would agree that it is a gamble and you have simply decided for yourself to play all-in?