Q & A with Kastrup on 'Seeking i' channel

[ItayNagar]

[AshvinP]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention! I asked a question which was asked and tried to type BK's response as he said it. I will post it here later.

[Soul_of_Shu]

This is perhaps the first time that I've heard BK address in some detail the question about veridical OBE events that at least somewhat resonates with my experiences in that regard, and also seems relatively consistent with Tom Campbell's take on an explanation, whose experimentation involving such OBE events since the early days of the Monroe Institute from the 70s is about as comprehensive as it gets. Yet another example of how idealism at least can offer the possibility of a researchable explanation, as opposed to materialism that cursorily dismisses it as impossible, and therefore not even worthy of studious consideration, never mind explanation.

[AshvinP]

My question to BK - what do you make of Steiner's critique of Schopenhauer, as expressed in this quote?

- "The foregoing arguments show that it is senseless to look for any common element in the separate entities of the world other than the ideal content that thinking offers us. All attempts to find a unity in the world other than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain by a thoughtful contemplation of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a humanly personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (Schopenhauer), can be valid for us as a universal world unity. All these entities belong only to limited spheres of our observation. Humanly limited personality we perceive only in ourselves; force and matter in external things. As far as the will is concerned, it can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking the bearer of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real. This philosopher believes that we can never approach the world so long as we regard it as “external” world.
...
Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to find in the human body the “objectivity” of the will. He believes that in the activities of the body he feels an immediate reality — the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments it must be said that the activities of our body come to our consciousness only through percepts of the self, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by a thinking investigation, that is, by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas."

BK's response (most but not all of it):

Schopenhauer is addressing Kantian starting point - we never have direct access to noumenon; an image of something is not itself the thing. Schopenhauer's insight was that, if we were to be in a sensory deprivation chamber, 'the world is Will, and I am part of the world, so therefore I have direct access to the noumenon since there is something there is like to be me even in the sensory deprivation chamber'. Willing is the archetypal example of an endogenous experience, because you can will inside the sensory deprivation chamber. Schopenhauer lists a number of ordinary feelings as examples, such as fear. In the absence of all phenomena, there is still the noumenon.

Next Schopenhauer realized, if the thing-in-itself is the Will, and if the 'matter' of my body and 'matter' of the world is the same, the noumenon 'out there' presents itself as matter in the world, then the noumenon within me also presents as will (Ashvin: I did not quite follow this). Steiner is taking a jab at Schopenhauer's idea that the Will is unitary, (something about principle of "individuation" and not in the Jungian sense), "you can only say two things are different if they have different volumes in space and in time". Schopenhauer follows Kant in saying space-time itself belongs in the realm of phenomenon, not noumenon. That is a very plausible assertion - our subjective experience of time is proven highly subjective from neuroscience. Einstein's theory of general relativity also supports that. Loop quantum gravity theories. Schopenhauer's assertions and conclusions are more plausible than ever before. His intuition was very close to the bullseye.

[Cleric K]

My question to BK - what do you make of Steiner's critique of Schopenhauer, as expressed in this quote?

- "The foregoing arguments show that it is senseless to look for any common element in the separate entities of the world other than the ideal content that thinking offers us. All attempts to find a unity in the world other than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain by a thoughtful contemplation of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a humanly personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (Schopenhauer), can be valid for us as a universal world unity. All these entities belong only to limited spheres of our observation. Humanly limited personality we perceive only in ourselves; force and matter in external things. As far as the will is concerned, it can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking the bearer of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real. This philosopher believes that we can never approach the world so long as we regard it as “external” world.
...
Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to find in the human body the “objectivity” of the will. He believes that in the activities of the body he feels an immediate reality — the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments it must be said that the activities of our body come to our consciousness only through percepts of the self, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by a thinking investigation, that is, by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas."

BK's response (most but not all of it):

Schopenhauer is addressing Kantian starting point - we never have direct access to noumenon; an image of something is not itself the thing. Schopenhauer's insight was that, if we were to be in a sensory deprivation chamber, 'the world is Will, and I am part of the world, so therefore I have direct access to the noumenon since there is something there is like to be me even in the sensory deprivation chamber'. Willing is the archetypal example of an endogenous experience, because you can will inside the sensory deprivation chamber. Schopenhauer lists a number of ordinary feelings as examples, such as fear. In the absence of all phenomena, there is still the noumenon.

Next Schopenhauer realized, if the thing-in-itself is the Will, and if the 'matter' of my body and 'matter' of the world is the same, the noumenon 'out there' presents itself as matter in the world, then the noumenon within me also presents as will (Ashvin: I did not quite follow this). Steiner is taking a jab at Schopenhauer's idea that the Will is unitary, (something about principle of "individuation" and not in the Jungian sense), "you can only say two things are different if they have different volumes in space and in time". Schopenhauer follows Kant in saying space-time itself belongs in the realm of phenomenon, not noumenon. That is a very plausible assertion - our subjective experience of time is proven highly subjective from neuroscience. Einstein's theory of general relativity also supports that. Loop quantum gravity theories. Schopenhauer's assertions and conclusions are more plausible than ever before. His intuition was very close to the bullseye.

As I wrote few posts ago, today we can no longer afford to think about the riddle of reality without taking thinking itself into the picture. Analogously, quantum mechanics had to include measurement into the picture.

Kant wanted to put philosophy on secure foundations by avoiding the kinds of metaphysics which speculated from points of view which could never become human experience. This was the positive contribution of Kant. Unfortunately he also postulated that it is in principle impossible to know the noumenon (thing-in-itself) in its reality. This didn't stop future philosophy and science to speculate from unnatural points of view. Actually, Kant's philosophy legitimized that - all that was needed is to annex one's ideas with "it's just a model, a representation". The divorce between phenomena and noumena is well known. But there's something which still goes under the radar even to this day. Kant's philosophy introduced a blind spot in consciousness. I'm talking about thinking activity. After philosophers accepted that it's all just representations in the mind, that's where they focused their efforts - to find the best correlating model. Even thinking could only be approached through a model of it (because its supposed reality also exists in the inaccessible noumenon). And this is where the blind spot becomes effective. We've become so focused on the contents of thinking that the actual spiritual activity which produces the thoughts moved in the back of our head, so to speak.

What do we have in the sensory deprivation chamber? Perceptions, phenomena. The outer senses fade out but we still have our inner bodily senses and also our soul life - thinking, feeling, willing. In such a chamber, in absence of external stimuli, it's quite natural to approach a visionary state, similar to a mild psychedelic one. Within this state we have perceptions that come and go - shapes, colors, etc. - completely outside our control. We can also have our thoughts which add themselves to the world of perceptions but with the difference that we know why these perceptions exist - because we will them into existence. Now Schopenhauer basically says "All shapes and colors, and their movements (i.e all phenomena) are caused by will. It's just that in some limited domain this will has become self-conscious. That's the part of the World Will that I experience as mine. The shapes and colors produced from my activity are of the same willed-nature, with the exception that I know that I'm responsible for their presence." But how do we really know that? What kind of cognitive activity we perform in order to reach this realization? Simple - we think that out. Here we have the blind-spot at its fullest. The only will that we ever know is our own will. Declaring that the whole reality is of nature of will (that will is the noumenon) is very compelling but we should never forget that we arrive at that idea through philosophical judgment. This idea is not something directly perceptible in the given - we add the idea over the given with our thinking, in the hope of explaining it. We can't arrive at Kant's ideas, neither at Schopenhauer's ideas without thinking. So thinking is the real point of departure for any endeavor to know. It is also the only place where we find true unity of phenomena and noumena. The perceptions of thoughts are the only perceptions that don't require explanation. For everything else we can ask "What's the meaning of this? Why I perceive this? What stands behind this?" But for our thoughts these questions are irrelevant - they are answered through the very nature of thinking. I know what they mean because it's my idea that is projected into thought perception. I know why I perceive them because I will the thoughts. I know what stands behind the thoughts - it's my own ideating activity! In this way we have found within the World content a point of contact between the phenomenon and noumenon. The former is the thought-perception, the latter is the idea that I will into the thought-form. To this may be habitually objected that it could be possible to explain thinking in other ways - neurons, energies, vibrations, etc. In other words it's suggested that the noumenon is still inaccessible and ideas are only representational phenomena, having nothing to do with the 'thing-in-itself'. Yet this is exactly how the blind-spot plays out. All of these models are still the product of our real thinking. They're like hair and nails growing and separating from my living spiritual activity and now I try to combine this dead material in the most ingenious ways and produce the living activity from them. This I can never do. And if scientists and philosophers still insist to explain thinking in such ways it's only because their true spiritual activity, which produces the dead theory, is entirely in their blind-spot of consciousness. The key is to realize that there's nothing in the given which says that the reality of thinking and ideas is only representation of a thing-in-itself. This very idea is already a product of thinking. In other words, thinking postulates its own reality to lie somewhere where by definition it can't reach. We can picture this as climbing on a tree, cutting the branch on which we sit and declaring that this branch can never know the reality of the tree (that is, the tree becomes the thing-in-itself).

When thinking is experienced in its true reality it becomes for us a center, a point of implosion where phenomena (perceptions) and noumenon (ideas) flow and fuse into each other through our spiritual activity. This paints a different picture than that of the blind will. The will is really there, Schopenhauer was right about that. Where he was mistaken was that the will is blind. This can never be certain knowledge because the only kind of will that we know is that imbued with idea. It's entirely a conjecture of thinking to postulate that will without the experience of idea is at the grounds of reality. Through the higher forms of cognition we really find Schopenhauer's will everywhere but we also find together with it the the ideas of spiritual beings. So not only the world is willed but it's willed with fully conscious ideal intent.

All the above is not to criticize neither Kant, nor Schopenhauer. We shouldn't fall for thoughts like "Only if Kant was never born, the world could have been completely different today". If it wasn't Kant it would be someone else. These things have much deeper origins. It has been historically inevitable that these (or other) philosophers should have flown these ideas into the world. The important thing is that nothing stays the same. We shouldn't look on Kant's and Schopenhauer's ideas as failed philosophies but only as milestones along humanity's cognitive evolution. It's our task keep the metamorphic process going, to recognize the shortcomings of previous ideas by finding where they clash with the facts, and then find a higher synthesis.

[AshvinP]

My question to BK - what do you make of Steiner's critique of Schopenhauer, as expressed in this quote?

- "The foregoing arguments show that it is senseless to look for any common element in the separate entities of the world other than the ideal content that thinking offers us. All attempts to find a unity in the world other than this internally coherent ideal content, which we gain by a thoughtful contemplation of our percepts, are bound to fail. Neither a humanly personal God, nor force, nor matter, nor the blind will (Schopenhauer), can be valid for us as a universal world unity. All these entities belong only to limited spheres of our observation. Humanly limited personality we perceive only in ourselves; force and matter in external things. As far as the will is concerned, it can be regarded only as the expression of the activity of our finite personality. Schopenhauer wants to avoid making “abstract” thinking the bearer of unity in the world, and seeks instead something which presents itself to him immediately as real. This philosopher believes that we can never approach the world so long as we regard it as “external” world.
...
Schopenhauer considers himself entitled by these arguments to find in the human body the “objectivity” of the will. He believes that in the activities of the body he feels an immediate reality — the thing-in-itself in the concrete. Against these arguments it must be said that the activities of our body come to our consciousness only through percepts of the self, and that, as such, they are in no way superior to other percepts. If we want to know their real nature, we can do so only by a thinking investigation, that is, by fitting them into the ideal system of our concepts and ideas."

BK's response (most but not all of it):

Schopenhauer is addressing Kantian starting point - we never have direct access to noumenon; an image of something is not itself the thing. Schopenhauer's insight was that, if we were to be in a sensory deprivation chamber, 'the world is Will, and I am part of the world, so therefore I have direct access to the noumenon since there is something there is like to be me even in the sensory deprivation chamber'. Willing is the archetypal example of an endogenous experience, because you can will inside the sensory deprivation chamber. Schopenhauer lists a number of ordinary feelings as examples, such as fear. In the absence of all phenomena, there is still the noumenon.

Next Schopenhauer realized, if the thing-in-itself is the Will, and if the 'matter' of my body and 'matter' of the world is the same, the noumenon 'out there' presents itself as matter in the world, then the noumenon within me also presents as will (Ashvin: I did not quite follow this). Steiner is taking a jab at Schopenhauer's idea that the Will is unitary, (something about principle of "individuation" and not in the Jungian sense), "you can only say two things are different if they have different volumes in space and in time". Schopenhauer follows Kant in saying space-time itself belongs in the realm of phenomenon, not noumenon. That is a very plausible assertion - our subjective experience of time is proven highly subjective from neuroscience. Einstein's theory of general relativity also supports that. Loop quantum gravity theories. Schopenhauer's assertions and conclusions are more plausible than ever before. His intuition was very close to the bullseye.

As I wrote few posts ago, today we can no longer afford to think about the riddle of reality without taking thinking itself into the picture. Analogously, quantum mechanics had to include measurement into the picture.

Kant wanted to put philosophy on secure foundations by avoiding the kinds of metaphysics which speculated from points of view which could never become human experience. This was the positive contribution of Kant. Unfortunately he also postulated that it is in principle impossible to know the noumenon (thing-in-itself) in its reality. This didn't stop future philosophy and science to speculate from unnatural points of view. Actually, Kant's philosophy legitimized that - all that was needed is to annex one's ideas with "it's just a model, a representation". The divorce between phenomena and noumena is well known. But there's something which still goes under the radar even to this day. Kant's philosophy introduced a blind spot in consciousness. I'm talking about thinking activity. After philosophers accepted that it's all just representations in the mind, that's where they focused their efforts - to find the best correlating model. Even thinking could only be approached through a model of it (because its supposed reality also exists in the inaccessible noumenon). And this is where the blind spot becomes effective. We've become so focused on the contents of thinking that the actual spiritual activity which produces the thoughts moved in the back of our head, so to speak.

What do we have in the sensory deprivation chamber? Perceptions, phenomena. The outer senses fade out but we still have our inner bodily senses and also our soul life - thinking, feeling, willing. In such a chamber, in absence of external stimuli, it's quite natural to approach a visionary state, similar to a mild psychedelic one. Within this state we have perceptions that come and go - shapes, colors, etc. - completely outside our control. We can also have our thoughts which add themselves to the world of perceptions but with the difference that we know why these perceptions exist - because we will them into existence. Now Schopenhauer basically says "All shapes and colors, and their movements (i.e all phenomena) are caused by will. It's just that in some limited domain this will has become self-conscious. That's the part of the World Will that I experience as mine. The shapes and colors produced from my activity are of the same willed-nature, with the exception that I know that I'm responsible for their presence." But how do we really know that? What kind of cognitive activity we perform in order to reach this realization? Simple - we think that out. Here we have the blind-spot at its fullest. The only will that we ever know is our own will. Declaring that the whole reality is of nature of will (that will is the noumenon) is very compelling but we should never forget that we arrive at that idea through philosophical judgment. This idea is not something directly perceptible in the given - we add the idea over the given with our thinking, in the hope of explaining it. We can't arrive at Kant's ideas, neither at Schopenhauer's ideas without thinking. So thinking is the real point of departure for any endeavor to know. It is also the only place where we find true unity of phenomena and noumena. The perceptions of thoughts are the only perceptions that don't require explanation. For everything else we can ask "What's the meaning of this? Why I perceive this? What stands behind this?" But for our thoughts these questions are irrelevant - they are answered through the very nature of thinking. I know what they mean because it's my idea that is projected into thought perception. I know why I perceive them because I will the thoughts. I know what stands behind the thoughts - it's my own ideating activity! In this way we have found within the World content a point of contact between the phenomenon and noumenon. The former is the thought-perception, the latter is the idea that I will into the thought-form. To this may be habitually objected that it could be possible to explain thinking in other ways - neurons, energies, vibrations, etc. In other words it's suggested that the noumenon is still inaccessible and ideas are only representational phenomena, having nothing to do with the 'thing-in-itself'. Yet this is exactly how the blind-spot plays out. All of these models are still the product of our real thinking. They're like hair and nails growing and separating from my living spiritual activity and now I try to combine this dead material in the most ingenious ways and produce the living activity from them. This I can never do. And if scientists and philosophers still insist to explain thinking in such ways it's only because their true spiritual activity, which produces the dead theory, is entirely in their blind-spot of consciousness. The key is to realize that there's nothing in the given which says that the reality of thinking and ideas is only representation of a thing-in-itself. This very idea is already a product of thinking. In other words, thinking postulates its own reality to lie somewhere where by definition it can't reach. We can picture this as climbing on a tree, cutting the branch on which we sit and declaring that this branch can never know the reality of the tree (that is, the tree becomes the thing-in-itself).

When thinking is experienced in its true reality it becomes for us a center, a point of implosion where phenomena (perceptions) and noumenon (ideas) flow and fuse into each other through our spiritual activity. This paints a different picture than that of the blind will. The will is really there, Schopenhauer was right about that. Where he was mistaken was that the will is blind. This can never be certain knowledge because the only kind of will that we know is that imbued with idea. It's entirely a conjecture of thinking to postulate that will without the experience of idea is at the grounds of reality. Through the higher forms of cognition we really find Schopenhauer's will everywhere but we also find together with it the the ideas of spiritual beings. So not only the world is willed but it's willed with fully conscious ideal intent.

All the above is not to criticize neither Kant, nor Schopenhauer. We shouldn't fall for thoughts like "Only if Kant was never born, the world could have been completely different today". If it wasn't Kant it would be someone else. These things have much deeper origins. It has been historically inevitable that these (or other) philosophers should have flown these ideas into the world. The important thing is that nothing stays the same. We shouldn't look on Kant's and Schopenhauer's ideas as failed philosophies but only as milestones along humanity's cognitive evolution. It's our task keep the metamorphic process going, to recognize the shortcomings of previous ideas by finding where they clash with the facts, and then find a higher synthesis.

Thank you for this extremely insightful response, Cleric! I am also exploring spiritual activity of thinking in final part of metamorphoses essay and may try to incorporate some of your points above and/or other posts (if you don't mind).

I will also tweet this response to BK and see if we can get it on his radar for some further dialogue. I believe this Schopenhauer-Steiner dialogue is a very important illustration of how idealism can artificially stop short of what makes it the most meaningful (and accurate, which is one and the same with meaningful if spiritual activity is taken seriously) to ever-increasing number of people abandoning the materialist-dualist paradigm.

[Eugene I]

The only will that we ever know is our own will. Declaring that the whole reality is of nature of will (that will is the noumenon) is very compelling but we should never forget that we arrive at that idea through philosophical judgment. This idea is not something directly perceptible in the given - we add the idea over the given with our thinking, in the hope of explaining it.

You are right, Cleric, this is exactly what happens.

The problem is this: in the same way our thinking produces a number of similar ideas: the whole reality is of the nature of spiritual activity, or Being, or Awareness, or God, or matter, or Tao, or "neutral base", or any combination of those. We similarly arrive at those ideas by thinking by abstracting them from the facts of our own conscious reality. We are trying to make sense of this flow of reality where everything is mixed together - thinking, thoughts and ideas, perceptions, feelings, experiencing, will, awareness. The way we try to make sense of it is typically by trying to abstract from it some sort of "fundamental", some "ontic nature", but there is so many ways to do that, so how do we know which one is correct? We arrive at a multitude of ideas about reality, each idea being part of reality themselves. True, we never experience will apart from thinking, likewise we never experience thinking activity apart from will, as well as apart from experiencing/awareness. IMO trying to assign any "priority" or a status of "fundamental" to one of the aspects of reality is futile. We see in this reality certain causal relations and patterns, which science studies, and also the fact that some aspects of this reality are permanent (thinking activity, will, awareness, beingness) and some others are impermanent (which does not mean that the permanent aspects are any more "fundamental").

[Cleric K]

You are right, Cleric, this is exactly what happens.

The problem is this: in the same way our thinking produces a number of similar ideas: the whole reality is of the nature of spiritual activity, or Being, or Awareness, or God, or matter, or Tao, or "neutral base", or any combination of those. We similarly arrive at those ideas by thinking by abstracting them from the facts of our own conscious reality. We are trying to make sense of this flow of reality where everything is mixed together - thinking, thoughts and ideas, perceptions, feelings, experiencing, will, awareness. The way we try to make sense of it is typically by trying to abstract from it some sort of "fundamental", some "ontic nature", but there is so many ways to do that, so how do we know which one is correct? We arrive at a multitude of ideas about reality, each idea being part of reality themselves. True, we never experience will apart from thinking, likewise we never experience thinking activity apart from will, as well as apart from experiencing/awareness. IMO trying to assign any "priority" or a status of "fundamental" to one of the aspects of reality is futile. We see in this reality certain causal relations and patterns, which science studies, and also the fact that some aspects of this reality are permanent (thinking activity, will, awareness, beingness) and some others are impermanent (which does not mean that the permanent aspects are any more "fundamental").

First we need to understand what kind of priority we're talking about. If we are speaking about determining the truly fundamental - yes, this is not something that is immediately accessible to thinking. We can speak about thinking (the fusion of perception and idea) as the foundation, as far as man is a knowing being. Probably this excerpt from PoF will help:

I have spoken until now about thinking without taking any account of its bearer, human consciousness. Most philosophers of the present day will object that, before there can be a thinking, there must be a consciousness. Therefore consciousness and not thinking should be the starting point. There would be no thinking without consciousness. I must reply to this that if I want to clarify what the relationship is between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it. I thereby presuppose thinking. Now one can certainly respond to this that if the philosopher wants to understand consciousness, he then makes use of thinking; to this extent he does presuppose it; in the usual course of life, however, thinking arises within consciousness and thereby presupposed it. If this answer were given to the world creator, who wanted to create thinking, it would without a doubt be justified. One cannot of course let thinking arise without having brought about consciousness beforehand. For the philosopher, however, it is not a matter of creating the world, but of understanding it. He must therefore seek the starting point not for creating, but rather for understanding the world. I find it altogether strange when someone reproaches the philosopher for concerning himself before all else with the correctness of his principles, rather than working immediately with the objects he wants to understand. The world creator had to know above all how he could find a bearer for thinking; the philosopher, however, must seek a sure basis from which he can understand what is already there. What good does it do us to start with consciousness and to subject it to our thinking contemplation, if we know nothing beforehand about the possibility of gaining insight into things through thinking contemplation?

We must first of all look at thinking in a completely neutral way, without any relationship to a thinking subject or conceived object. For in subject and object we already have concepts that are formed through thinking. It is undeniable that, before other things can be understood, thinking must be understood. Whoever does deny this, overlooks the fact that he, as human being, is not a first member of creation but its last member. One cannot, therefore, in order to explain the world through concepts, start with what are in time the first elements of existence, but rather with what is most immediately and intimately given us. We cannot transfer ourselves with one bound to the beginning of the world in order to begin our investigations there; we must rather start form the present moment and see if we can ascend from the later to the earlier. As long as geology spoke of imagined revolutions in order to explain the present state of the earth, it was groping in the dark. Only when it took as its starting point the investigation of processes which are presently still at work on the earth and drew conclusions about the past from these, did it gain firm ground. As long as philosophy assumes all kinds of principles, such as atoms, motion, matter, will, or the unconscious, it will hover in the air. Only when the philosopher regards the absolute last as his first, can he reach his goal. This absolute last, however, to which world evolution has come is thinking.

The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: III Thinking in the Service of Apprehending the World

As long as we consider the role of thinking as something complete in itself that must recreate a self-contained model of the world in thoughts, we are placing our endeavor for knowledge on arbitrary foundation. When thinking (spiritual activity) itself is investigated, we find there the actual center of the metamorphic view. It's the apex of the vortex through which MAL implodes and integrates, so to speak. What implodes can be called memory or time. This imploding process is partially guided by our spiritual activity and partially through forces that are unknown to us. We can either align with the macrocosmic flow, in order to use our freedom in the best possible way, or call 'freedom' the possibility to resist the flow, even though we can do this only until we are completely exhausted.

As long as thinking is considered only as some appendage to the alter, that helps him orient in the environment, true thinking remains in the blind spot. When thinking understands itself as an actual World process, as a real seed-point from which the Divine grows (or within which the Divine incarnates), we find our true bearings, within the metamorphic mandala.