Yes, it is difficult to imagine but not impossible. In fact the difficulty comes primarily from the bad mental habits. One of the hinderances for proper understanding is the dependence on our human imagination on the experiences we've gained through the bodily life. As I've said few times, we don't really appreciate how much our conceptions are formatted by sensory life. Yet in order to understand something of the higher worlds we can't at all imagine that we can stand somewhere as a bystander and observe how the hierarchies create the universe. Such a view is entirely under the influence of our sensory conceptions. Just because it seems that we are observing an objective physical world, we easily imagine that this is how things look from the creative perspective of the gods.Simon Adams wrote: ↑Tue May 18, 2021 9:11 pm However what I find difficult to imagine is this process being responsible for the foundations of order and intelligibility. The universe doesn’t seem to pop up with the foundational elements then evolving over time. The nature of carbon, of hydrogen, of the water molecule, 3 dimensional space, the very order of of the mathematical basis of nature, so much that seems so much more than anything that develops over time. I can accept the view that we just can’t understand these things yet, more so than inventing trillions of trials and errors. I assume that from your perspective all these things originated as “supersensible experiences” at some point?
Evolution of man and his consciousness is inseparable from the evolution of the environment - they are like complementary images. The difficulty is that in order to form a conception about the ancient states of development we can't use our sensory ideas. There was simply nothing of that sort at that time. I can refer here again to my short sketch of evolution (the slides) in the Deep M@L essay. The farther back we go the more we encounter the early germ of the human being, which had macrocosmic nature. Here it'll be quite impossible to get a truthful picture of things if we insist on the atomic-like conception of the human that we have because of the embodied state.
There are so many things that should be taken into account at the same time if things are to become clear. I'll try to say few words about the three-dimensionality of space, even though it will be very incomplete and running the risk to cause more confusion than explanation.
Although man has been still unconscious in these ancient times, they'll be described as if he was conscious. We can do this because today we can explore these stages in retrospect through the higher forms of consciousness. In the first eon of evolution we can't yet speak of any spatiality, only of Cosmic reflection of the deeds of hierarchies. There's no outer world but only what we today call inner world and it's Cosmic in nature. It's Cosmic-scale spiritual space filled with experiences akin to color, sound, etc., yet not pointing to anything external but to the activities of beings. We can get a faint idea of this stage if we take the perceptions of our thinking and spread them out as monolithic substance. If I imagine a moving dot I don't seek any outer world behind it. My activity explains it completely. It's similar in that stage, except that the whole World Content is of such nature - perceptions which reflect the spiritual activity of beings, similarly to the way our own ideating spiritual activity is reflected in the sound, color, etc. of the thought forms. In certain sense the whole Cosmic content of man was like a monolithic thought reflection, mirroring the activity not of a single being but a whole hierarchy of beings (man couldn't yet recognize his own activity within this amalgamation). They key (and difficulty, unless we have some spiritual training) is that there's no sensory-like perception, thinking and feeling about this World Content. It's pure Intuition - the Cosmic spiritual panorama is immediate Macrocosmic thought-like reflection of the idea-beings' essence.
As explained in the essay, in the second eon certain changes happen which make the whole Cosmic environment and men a two-level system. Now there's an extra level of abstraction over the primordial conscious volume. This makes possible more complicated forms of existence but comes at the price that the original Intuitive nature of reality is now somewhat veiled. Here we have something very important - in certain sense we lose something of the primal freedom in relation to the World Content, which now transforms in something which can be called dimensionality of consciousness. Previously man was beholding the Cosmic reflections, now he's entangled into them. This veils the previous panorama but in exchange gives the possibility to experience the potential within dimensional constraint. Let me be a little more specific. In the first eon the whole World Content can be thought of as a Cosmic Mirror. There's no life in it, no birth, no death, no thoughts, no desires. It's just a projection of the purely ideal relations of beings. In the second eon it is like this Cosmic Mirror is taken up by new forces which try to make something out of it. Now the idea of life is introduced, although still very far from what we consider life in the biological sense today. What is Life? Rhythmical process which organizes the substances such that they can reflect a harmonious unity. In the first eon this was not needed because the World Content was a pure temporal reflection of ideal relations. In the second eon certain forces begin work which can augment the nature of the Mirror 'substance', so to speak. It's like one kind of forces would introduce imperfections in the mirror, curvatures which would distort the reflection of the ideal relations. Other forces would go against these forces and try to organize the reflective substance such that it can restore its perfect qualities. The interplay of these forces produce rhythmical archetypal life. Now man is one dimensional being in a similar way that a plant is. There's only one dimension which we can call up-down. Of course we are not speaking here of geometric dimension. It's clear that we can't speak only of up-down dimension because we wouldn't be able to think about it without the other two dimensions being implicitly there. We must approach this dimension entirely qualitatively. People of old still had a good feeling about these things. God is above, the angels, the sages are above. Animals, plants, the soil of the Earth are below. Only much later did the true experience of above began to be mixed with the geometric above, and materialists started to laugh at religious people that they look for a God in the clouds. We can only grasp the true nature of this dimensionality when we reckon that it signifies spiritual relations and not spatial. So man in the second eon, not only experienced Cosmic reflections of the idea-beings but now he was entangled within a rhythmical process. As this process was taking man upwards he felt supreme bliss, the Light was penetrating his being and he could live together with the harmony of the gods. When the process would take him downwards everything would grow dimmer and darker, consciousness recedes. In this sense man led a kind of one-dimensional plant life, rhythmically alternating on one hand between the bliss of the Divine Sun that gave him Life and primordial consciousness of the Cosmic processes, and on the other hand the 'winter sleep' where he would as if distance himself from the Sun and sink into a dimmer kind of existence. Everything is of spiritual nature here, yet it's possible to speak in pictures, as long as we remember that we need to extract the spiritual-qualitative from them, and not the geometric-spatial. It's much like men felt like surrounding a Spiritual Sun from all sides and their greatest bliss were to reach towards that Sun. Away from the Sun, towards the periphery, they would feel as if left on their own, dimming down in consciousness.
We should take a moment to appreciate the significance of this. Man has lost his Cosmic Mirroring consciousness of the first eon (even though he didn't have any individual life there) but in exchange acquired inner dimension of being. This dimension in certain way veils reality, puts a level of indirection to it, but it's nevertheless an unique experience to be within the Life process which turns your consciousness to and fro the Divine. Now man has made a step towards individual Life, in exchange of the Bliss of the unitary flow with the Cosmic beings.
In the third eon something similar happens which adds another axis of dimensionality. In the second eon man is entirely a Cosmic being, he belongs to Cosmic spiritual space around the Sun. In the third eon another level of indirection is introduced which endows man with his personal reflective substance, or soul substance. It's quite difficult to form a proper picture of the previous two eons without more serious meditative work but the third eon already becomes more familiar. Now it could be more appropriate to speak of personal Imaginative substance which reflects in images the happenings of the Cosmos. Although the images are now much more personal, they are still not confused for some external world but only present the imprints of the activities of other spiritual beings. Man was now enclosed or ensouled being. In the previous stages the life of the beings resounded through man, now he has to read their actions in the imprints of his soul body. This introduces another axis of inner life, which we can call left-right (of course, again in qualitative and not spatial sense). Man is now not simply a plant-being but has inner mobility - sympathies and antipathies. Some imagery is felt to be pleasurable, other painful and the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain bring about a kind of animal life, although still in Cosmic setting. So we have a further increase in dimensionality of inner life (not only Life but now also desire), but this veils even further the spiritual reality - man now leads an inner life in personal pictures, impressions of that reality. If we need to present things in Cosmic imagery it can be said that this enclosing of man within himself (which was also rhythmical) can be described as if human beings were synchronized in this rhythm and it was as if they lived together in a realm, which from today's perspective we can call a planetary body. It is as if this realm periodically opened up towards the Sun forces, then shut itself off from them. In the Sun periods humans were inspired by the bliss of the Divine, in the other periods they were occupied with their inner reflections. This already hints at the day/night cycles characteristic to the planetary bodies in physical space, although here we still don't have truly physical space. Everything is made of soul and spiritual relations of beings.
In the fourth eon (in which we find ourselves) the third axis of dimensionality is added. Now we not only have inner imagery but this imagery can become something to be perceived and thought about. It is in this way that the axis of front-back appears or the axis of depth. The images in the souls are holographic, in the sense that they reflect the impressions of the whole Cosmic life (in various degrees of course). When they become object of our spiritual activity as we know it today, they become conceptualized. This is very simplified and doesn't reflect the sequential progress of our evolution but it will take us too far to go into details. Through the introduction of certain forces, it became possible for man to direct his desires towards the depth-fragmented soul images. In modern language we can say that this leads to a kind of quantum decoherence phenomenon. To put it simply, every reaching in for certain detail in the fragmentary picture, necessarily filters out all other possibilities that could previously exists in superposition, so to speak. In this way the soul picture was moved further and further into mineralization. The soul picture in the higher wolds could be thought as a superfluid, something that exhibits quantum tunneling but as spiritual activity interferes with the picture it makes it more 'frictious', more 'bureaucratic'. Together with the mineralization of the inner imagery, the whole Cosmos also mineralizes. What were previously relations between colonies of beings, so to speak, now accrete into their actual mineral precipitations of the celestial bodies. The mineral Cosmos is really nothing other than decohered spiritual relations - relations that went into extreme elemental 'bureaucracy' and thus the rigidity and resistance of the mineral realm. Note that there could be physical realm in the depth-experienced soul imagery, which could still be 'superfluid' and malleable by the Spirit. By superfluid it's not meant that everything is flowing but only that forms can be metamorphosed without much resistance. The word 'mineral' is used to signify that this superfluid decoheres into 'noise' and this requires whole new arsenal of tools if the Spirit is to be able to imprint its activity in this noise. Biological life is such a gradient which allows the soul imagery to be transduced to the decohered state of the physical body.
The three dimensionality of space is really the conceptualized relations which originated through the eons of evolution and are now beheld as one within the other. Our stage of evolution is the most abstract, gone through three additional levels of indirection. From the primordial Intuitive consciousness (first eon) we have today only a faint reverberation within the experience of our own thinking. Yet the contents of this thinking are within the convoluted dimensionality of our being. We need to deconvolute our being in order to experience the previous stages of existence, which is the task of the higher forms of cognition, and which will be the nature of the three future eons of evolution. In meditation, in the spiritual-scientific sense, we can walk the process of inner dimensionality in reverse. First we lose the depth axis (where our thinking is projected on the sensory perceptions) but we gain consciousness of the soul world, the Imaginative realm. Then we drop the axis of personal soul life, life in images but we gain consciousness in the spiritual world, the world of Inspiration. Finally we drop dimensionality of the up-down axis, that of Life and we find ourselves in the higher spiritual world, united with the deeds of spiritual beings.
I know that the above is a lot to take in and it's unavoidable that it 'hangs in the air' but I hope that it presents at least approximately how the supersensible experiences throw light on such deep problems which must forever remain unsolvable for the intellect spread over the sensory world.
May be God has more sense of humor than you think, no?