Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L

[Federica]

(...)

(...)

Thank you both for the help once again.
Ashvin, may I ask you how long ago you heard about Anthroposophy and spiritual science for the first time?

[AshvinP]

(...)

(...)

Thank you both for the help once again.
Ashvin, may I ask you how long ago you heard about Antroposophy and spiritual science for the first time?

The first time hearing about it I am not sure, but I only read PoF and started taking it seriously maybe 2.5-3 years ago.

[Federica]

(...)

(...)

Thank you both for the help once again.
Ashvin, may I ask you how long ago you heard about Antroposophy and spiritual science for the first time?

The first time hearing about it I am not sure, but I only read PoF and started taking it seriously maybe 2.5-3 years ago.

I know there are no conclusions whatsoever one can draw from this information, I know that very well. But today's advice feels a bit advanced to me, for me, and so it's still in a way good to hear that you haven't spent a whole life on these things. Thank you.

[AshvinP]

Thank you both for the help once again.
Ashvin, may I ask you how long ago you heard about Antroposophy and spiritual science for the first time?

The first time hearing about it I am not sure, but I only read PoF and started taking it seriously maybe 2.5-3 years ago.

I know there are no conclusions whatsoever one can draw from this information, I know that very well. But today's advice feels a bit advanced to me, for me, and so it's still in a way good to hear that you haven't spent a whole life on these things. Thank you.

Right, I get what you mean. In terms of actual meditation technique and 'results', I am probably not much more advanced than you are. Or, at least, I know now how narrow that gap really is and how much vast inner territory is still left waiting for me to explore in this current incarnation. Coming to the first 'inversion horizon', where one begins to perceive the inner volume and discern its modulation of outer spatial perception and physical life (even if not in the details), is a huge step, but it's probably closer than most people imagine.

What I am always so grateful for has been my opportunity to build up the conceptual foundation for these things - the thinking skills and habits - in advance. It is extraordinary thing when a new experience comes along and I can think, "if I had not developed the concepts first, this experience could have passed by entirely unnoticed and, not only do I notice it now, it is greatly enriched by the conceptual resonance and more easily finds its place in the holistic tapestry". So I would say that, even if the meditative technique feels advanced and somewhat remote, it is very important that you are establishing the conceptual understanding for why these things fit into a logical Whole.

Here is another excerpt from Steiner I just came across which may be helpful for you:

I will choose still one more comparison to make the matter clearer. Suppose someone is a carpenter; he has learnt carpentry and intends to make furniture. In his work as a carpenter he makes certain pieces of furniture and continues to do so for many years. This is his job. But something else happens as well; he becomes more skilful, his manipulations more effective; he acquires something else, inasmuch as his own organism becomes more skilful. This is a kind of supplementary achievement. It is the same with spiritual activities. If, as a botanist, I think and make great efforts for years in the sphere of botany, that is all to the good, but as well as this my mind becomes more flexible. That is also of help. I am better ‘drilled’ than I was some decades ago. Please do not take the expression in its ordinary trivial sense, if I say that the spiritual scientist must have been previously ‘drilled.’ He must use his drilling to make his spiritual powers more mobile, more flexible. Then, when everything that is otherwise practised in the world is placed directly in the service of self-education as happens in meditation and concentration, in the exercises that are given for the purpose of penetrating into the spiritual world — we duly prepare ourselves for this. Please take the words, ‘we prepare ourselves,’ as something infinitely important, for in reality we can never do anything more than prepare ourselves to enter the spiritual world; the rest is an affair of that world itself; the spiritual world must then come to us. It will not do so if we remain in the usual state of human beings on the physical plane. Only when we have transformed our soul-forces in the way indicated can we hope that the spiritual world will come to us. It cannot be anything like investigation in the physical world, for then we go towards the things we are investigating. We can only prepare so that when the spiritual world comes towards us, it will not escape us, but make a real impression upon us.
...
And so to the question: How can one succeed in penetrating into the spiritual world? — the answer must be: We must prepare ourselves by adopting every measure that makes our actions more skilful, more mobile, that trains our thinking, makes our feeling and perception more delicate, more full of devotion. And then: Wait, Wait, Wait! That is the golden rule — to be able to wait in restfulness of soul. The spiritual world does not allow itself to become accessible in any other way than this: individuals must make themselves worthy of it and then develop a mood of expectation in restfulness of soul. That is the essential. We acquire it in the way I have described in detail in my books, by making ourselves ready to receive the spiritual world. But we must also acquire that absolute restfulness of soul which alone makes it possible for the spiritual world to approach us.

In lectures I have used the following example. In the physical world, if we want to see something we must go to it. Those who want to see Rome must go to Rome. That is quite natural in the physical world, for Rome will not come to them. In the spiritual world it is just the reverse. We can do nothing except prepare ourselves through the methods described, in order to be worthy to receive the spiritual world: we must acquire restfulness of soul, poise where we stand ... then the spiritual world comes to us. We must wait for it in restfulness of soul — that is the essential. And this that comes to us, where is it? Of this too I have often spoken and will speak of it merely by way of introduction so that we may have a good foundation upon which to proceed.

You are all familiar with our anthroposophical literature. Where are the Elemental Beings, where are the Beings of the higher Hierarchies? They are here, everywhere — just where the table is, where the chairs are, where you yourselves are — they are around us everywhere. But in comparison with the things and processes of the external world they are so ethereal, so fleeting, that they escape the attention of men. Men pass unceasingly through the whole spiritual world and do not see it because through their constitution they are still unprepared for it.

[Federica]

The first time hearing about it I am not sure, but I only read PoF and started taking it seriously maybe 2.5-3 years ago.

I know there are no conclusions whatsoever one can draw from this information, I know that very well. But today's advice feels a bit advanced to me, for me, and so it's still in a way good to hear that you haven't spent a whole life on these things. Thank you.

Right, I get what you mean. In terms of actual meditation technique and 'results', I am probably not much more advanced than you are. Or, at least, I know now how narrow that gap really is and how much vast inner territory is still left waiting for me to explore in this current incarnation. Coming to the first 'inversion horizon', where one begins to perceive the inner volume and discern its modulation of outer spatial perception and physical life (even if not in the details), is a huge step, but it's probably closer than most people imagine.

What I am always so grateful for has been my opportunity to build up the conceptual foundation for these things - the thinking skills and habits - in advance. It is extraordinary thing when a new experience comes along and I can think, "if I had not developed the concepts first, this experience could have passed by entirely unnoticed and, not only do I notice it now, it is greatly enriched by the conceptual resonance and more easily finds its place in the holistic tapestry". So I would say that, even if the meditative technique feels advanced and somewhat remote, it is very important that you are establishing the conceptual understanding for why these things fit into a logical Whole.

Here is another excerpt from Steiner I just came across which may be helpful for you:

I will choose still one more comparison to make the matter clearer. Suppose someone is a carpenter; he has learnt carpentry and intends to make furniture. In his work as a carpenter he makes certain pieces of furniture and continues to do so for many years. This is his job. But something else happens as well; he becomes more skilful, his manipulations more effective; he acquires something else, inasmuch as his own organism becomes more skilful. This is a kind of supplementary achievement. It is the same with spiritual activities. If, as a botanist, I think and make great efforts for years in the sphere of botany, that is all to the good, but as well as this my mind becomes more flexible. That is also of help. I am better ‘drilled’ than I was some decades ago. Please do not take the expression in its ordinary trivial sense, if I say that the spiritual scientist must have been previously ‘drilled.’ He must use his drilling to make his spiritual powers more mobile, more flexible. Then, when everything that is otherwise practised in the world is placed directly in the service of self-education as happens in meditation and concentration, in the exercises that are given for the purpose of penetrating into the spiritual world — we duly prepare ourselves for this. Please take the words, ‘we prepare ourselves,’ as something infinitely important, for in reality we can never do anything more than prepare ourselves to enter the spiritual world; the rest is an affair of that world itself; the spiritual world must then come to us. It will not do so if we remain in the usual state of human beings on the physical plane. Only when we have transformed our soul-forces in the way indicated can we hope that the spiritual world will come to us. It cannot be anything like investigation in the physical world, for then we go towards the things we are investigating. We can only prepare so that when the spiritual world comes towards us, it will not escape us, but make a real impression upon us.
...
And so to the question: How can one succeed in penetrating into the spiritual world? — the answer must be: We must prepare ourselves by adopting every measure that makes our actions more skilful, more mobile, that trains our thinking, makes our feeling and perception more delicate, more full of devotion. And then: Wait, Wait, Wait! That is the golden rule — to be able to wait in restfulness of soul. The spiritual world does not allow itself to become accessible in any other way than this: individuals must make themselves worthy of it and then develop a mood of expectation in restfulness of soul. That is the essential. We acquire it in the way I have described in detail in my books, by making ourselves ready to receive the spiritual world. But we must also acquire that absolute restfulness of soul which alone makes it possible for the spiritual world to approach us.

In lectures I have used the following example. In the physical world, if we want to see something we must go to it. Those who want to see Rome must go to Rome. That is quite natural in the physical world, for Rome will not come to them. In the spiritual world it is just the reverse. We can do nothing except prepare ourselves through the methods described, in order to be worthy to receive the spiritual world: we must acquire restfulness of soul, poise where we stand ... then the spiritual world comes to us. We must wait for it in restfulness of soul — that is the essential. And this that comes to us, where is it? Of this too I have often spoken and will speak of it merely by way of introduction so that we may have a good foundation upon which to proceed.

You are all familiar with our anthroposophical literature. Where are the Elemental Beings, where are the Beings of the higher Hierarchies? They are here, everywhere — just where the table is, where the chairs are, where you yourselves are — they are around us everywhere. But in comparison with the things and processes of the external world they are so ethereal, so fleeting, that they escape the attention of men. Men pass unceasingly through the whole spiritual world and do not see it because through their constitution they are still unprepared for it.

Ashvin,
I see that you are doing your best to help me square the circle. Circles just can't be squared but I really appreciate the gesture.

[Anthony66]

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.

I must admit to struggling to understand where you were going throughout this post. It was only when I got to your very last sentence that a few of the threads came together.

So we have:
"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."
vs
"The question is whether the spiritual forces that explain the past state are brought to consciousness in our present state."

Is not being "brought to consciousness" equivalent to "reconstructed to a degree by thinking"?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,
I see that you are doing your best to help me square the circle. Circles just can't be squared but I really appreciate the gesture.

May I ask, what aspects of the relevant posts do you feel are the 'square' and 'circle' here?

[Cleric K]

I must admit to struggling to understand where you were going throughout this post. It was only when I got to your very last sentence that a few of the threads came together.

So we have:
"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."
vs
"The question is whether the spiritual forces that explain the past state are brought to consciousness in our present state."

Is not being "brought to consciousness" equivalent to "reconstructed to a degree by thinking"?

Anthony, that's OK, I really went into a direction which may be somewhat more advanced.

I wanted to touch upon something which is indeed difficult to speak of since it contradicts our Newtonian world conception. When we think of time we imagine that the past has happened in a concrete way. For example, in the morning we think that we have been either conscious while in deep sleep but simply forgot everything in the morning, or we were unconscious all along. Our modern concept of time makes it seem that it was either one or the other.

Science was forced to rethink similar conceptions. For example, the famous Bell experiment where pair of particles are generated and measured at far apart places. One would imagine (as also Einstein did in the EPR paper) that the particles must have well defined properties all along and we simply measure them. For example, if two boxes are manufactured in a factory, one containing white ball, the other - black, when you receive one of the boxes and see a white ball inside, it would be normal to imagine that this ball has travelled all the way from the factory. But Bell's inequalities were many times experimentally confirmed and it turned out that the particle is neither 'white', nor 'black' along the way. This seems absurd when seen in the light of our everyday experiences but actually something similar holds true also for the past. In certain sense the question whether we were conscious or not during sleep has no definite answer. So what really matters is the gradual integration of consciousness, expanding from the present center to grasp more and more of Time, not simply as pictures, but by merging with the living spiritual forces that shape Time.

Is not being "brought to consciousness" equivalent to "reconstructed to a degree by thinking"?

It depends on what we mean. In the light of what was said above, if I remember my past hand movement purely as a visual memory picture, this is one kind of reconstruction. But if I also manage to experience my hand will in the present, in certain sense I bring to consciousness deeper forces that overarch the states through time. So the integration we speak of is not only reconstruction of past sensations in the present but also expanding consciousness along spiritual forces that have continuity through time.

Maybe we should put that aside at this time. I admit these are more difficult topics and I certainly don't feel I'm doing a great job of putting them into words.

[AshvinP]

I must admit to struggling to understand where you were going throughout this post. It was only when I got to your very last sentence that a few of the threads came together.

So we have:
"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."
vs
"The question is whether the spiritual forces that explain the past state are brought to consciousness in our present state."

Is not being "brought to consciousness" equivalent to "reconstructed to a degree by thinking"?

Perhaps we can try to dimly conceptualize the superimposed Time-rhythms which constitute the 'now' as follows. The reason we experience linear Time-flow as we do now is because there are periods of 'blackness' in our experience, as Cleric referenced in the initial post - "It seems that nothing happened there, that we went through darkness. Probably the only thing we can recollect is that we spent time in that darkness". As soon as we endeavor to move our experience into qualities beyond the 'present moment', we must venture into increasingly grayed out pictures, dim memories. Eventually we reach a time in childhood where it plunges into complete blackness. Likewise, if we try to picture our soul-experience in upcoming hours and days, to the extent we are not simply extrapolating routine daily acts we engage, we gray out into blackness. When the Light of the 'now' seems to encompass different inner qualities, while others fade into grayness/blackness, we have the sense of linear time flow. This contrast between the present 'lightness' of the now and the surrounding blackness permeates all experience.  

We experience it in the contrast between, not only temporal relations like prenatal and postnatal existence, night and day, waking and sleeping (also at the collective pole, like prehistory and history), but also spatial relations like inner experience and outer perception, our immediate surroundings and far distant lands, the surface of the Earth and deep outer space. The similarity of these relations shouldn't be treated as metaphors - there is a direct link between the blackness of our inner volume and the blackness of outer space (which is blue during the day), as the former modulates all outer perception. Even secular science of GR tells us that, when we look out into the depths of outer space, we are peering into relatively 'faster' Time-rhythms. Because modern science is one-sided, it ignores the correspondence of this with our inner world of spirit-soul-body activity. It ignores that our nervous system, rhythmic system (blood and air), glandular system, metabolic system, all possess forces functioning according to distinct relational Time-rhythms and it fails to make the connection between that and relative Time-experience in the outer perceptual world. 

What is the soul significance of darkness or blackness? It's the thought of uncertainty and associated feelings - dread, fear, anxiety, etc (or sometimes an unknowing peace and comfort). Our experience of Time-flow is a direct manifestation of how much and how well we know, in the deep, living sense, the ideal principles and laws of the world which allow us to remember-anticipate its inner movements. The intellectual soul evolved to bring greater remembrance-anticipation to humanity of this inner dynamic, to more holistically encompass the nested Time-rhythms of our Being with our cognition, but in the modern age it has separated the inner-outer poles of existence so far from one another that they are practically felt as unrelated. It endeavored to 'tame' the darkness and reduce the fear by fitting anything and everything about the Earth and Cosmos into its tiny thought-marbles, settling for the bare minimum of light it could shed. The ontological concept of 'linear time' and existential questions which presuppose such a concept - "was I conscious or unconscious, thinking or not thinking, at this particular moment in time?" - are examples of that. Now the darkness/fear is creeping back up as the thought-marbles simply don't shed enough light on the inner dynamics.

What if the Light of cognition permeated the spatio-temporal blackness so that it was increasingly One with what we know as the 'lightness' of the present moment, the 'now'? This is the goal of the 2nd approach, which we often refer to as 'spiraling' the poles of existence together, bridging the continuity of thinking Consciousness between sleeping and waking, death and life, Cosmos and Earth, inner and outer. Of course it is a very gradual and effortful approach, but even the first steps in this approach will reveal to us the inherent meaninglessness of framing our evolving existence in terms of linear sequential moments of experience. When it comes to existential questions of our Being, we shouldn't expect such a framing to yield any meaningful answers, because it is only an artifact of the dualized intellect. The 1st approach is to practically give up at this point and say, 'I can be perfectly happy, within my merely personal limits, living in fleeting moments of Oneness and waiting for death to bring all the deeper answers', while the 2nd approach points to how we can experience new thinking skills which expand our personal sphere of interests and our living knowledge out into the higher-order Time-rhythms of the Cosmos which are always modulating the linear intellect.

[Federica]

I must admit to struggling to understand where you were going throughout this post. It was only when I got to your very last sentence that a few of the threads came together.

So we have:
"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."
vs
"The question is whether the spiritual forces that explain the past state are brought to consciousness in our present state."

Is not being "brought to consciousness" equivalent to "reconstructed to a degree by thinking"?

Perhaps we can try to dimly conceptualize the superimposed Time-rhythms which constitute the 'now' as follows. The reason we experience linear Time-flow as we do now is because there are periods of 'blackness' in our experience, as Cleric referenced in the initial post - "It seems that nothing happened there, that we went through darkness. Probably the only thing we can recollect is that we spent time in that darkness". As soon as we endeavor to move our experience into qualities beyond the 'present moment', we must venture into increasingly grayed out pictures, dim memories. Eventually we reach a time in childhood where it plunges into complete blackness. Likewise, if we try to picture our soul-experience in upcoming hours and days, to the extent we are not simply extrapolating routine daily acts we engage, we gray out into blackness. When the Light of the 'now' seems to encompass different inner qualities, while others fade into grayness/blackness, we have the sense of linear time flow. This contrast between the present 'lightness' of the now and the surrounding blackness permeates all experience.  

We experience it in the contrast between, not only temporal relations like prenatal and postnatal existence, night and day, waking and sleeping (also at the collective pole, like prehistory and history), but also spatial relations like inner experience and outer perception, our immediate surroundings and far distant lands, the surface of the Earth and deep outer space. The similarity of these relations shouldn't be treated as metaphors - there is a direct link between the blackness of our inner volume and the blackness of outer space (which is blue during the day), as the former modulates all outer perception. Even secular science of GR tells us that, when we look out into the depths of outer space, we are peering into relatively 'faster' Time-rhythms. Because modern science is one-sided, it ignores the correspondence of this with our inner world of spirit-soul-body activity. It ignores that our nervous system, rhythmic system (blood and air), glandular system, metabolic system, all possess forces functioning according to distinct relational Time-rhythms and it fails to make the connection between that and relative Time-experience in the outer perceptual world. 

What is the soul significance of darkness or blackness? It's the thought of uncertainty and associated feelings - dread, fear, anxiety, etc (or sometimes an unknowing peace and comfort). Our experience of Time-flow is a direct manifestation of how much and how well we know, in the deep, living sense, the ideal principles and laws of the world which allow us to remember-anticipate its inner movements. The intellectual soul evolved to bring greater remembrance-anticipation to humanity of this inner dynamic, to more holistically encompass the nested Time-rhythms of our Being with our cognition, but in the modern age it has separated the inner-outer poles of existence so far from one another that they are practically felt as unrelated. It endeavored to 'tame' the darkness and reduce the fear by fitting anything and everything about the Earth and Cosmos into its tiny thought-marbles, settling for the bare minimum of light it could shed. The ontological concept of 'linear time' and existential questions which presuppose such a concept - "was I conscious or unconscious, thinking or not thinking, at this particular moment in time?" - are examples of that. Now the darkness/fear is creeping back up as the thought-marbles simply don't shed enough light on the inner dynamics.

What if the Light of cognition permeated the spatio-temporal blackness so that it was increasingly One with what we know as the 'lightness' of the present moment, the 'now'? This is the goal of the 2nd approach, which we often refer to as 'spiraling' the poles of existence together, bridging the continuity of thinking Consciousness between sleeping and waking, death and life, Cosmos and Earth, inner and outer. Of course it is a very gradual and effortful approach, but even the first steps in this approach will reveal to us the inherent meaninglessness of framing our evolving existence in terms of linear sequential moments of experience. When it comes to existential questions of our Being, we shouldn't expect such a framing to yield any meaningful answers, because it is only an artifact of the dualized intellect. The 1st approach is to practically give up at this point and say, 'I can be perfectly happy, within my merely personal limits, living in fleeting moments of Oneness and waiting for death to bring all the deeper answers', while the 2nd approach points to how we can experience new thinking skills which expand our personal sphere of interests and our living knowledge out into the higher-order Time-rhythms of the Cosmos which are always modulating the linear intellect.

When the Light of the 'now' seems to encompass different inner qualities, while others fade into grayness/blackness, we have the sense of linear time flow. This contrast between the present 'lightness' of the now and the surrounding blackness permeates all experience.

That is very useful. it is possible to have some understanding of that, there are levels. Even if one cannot experience that perception, like I can't, it's still possible to have some level of understanding, by making the internal gesture that is described here. By trying, even if one does not sense it, it becomes a potentially accessible experience. Not as wishful thinking, but as a seeing. Of course, if one is skeptical that will never happen.

This was one of the most useful posts I ever read here.