The Time-Consciousness Spectrum

[Stranger]

But what about the fact that we can speak of an "outside" in so far as we have no creative responsibility for certain phenomenal appearances, such as the 'blue sky', and an "inside" in so far as we do, such as our own thought-forms, at any given time in our process of intuitive becoming? Once we bring the material reductionist abstractions into the light of consciousness and realize they are incoherent with phenomenological experience, where do we go to investigate the lawful, hierarchical gradient between these domains, thereby bringing them into closer experiential unity (rather than abstractly postulating that they are One, despite gaining no greater creative responsibility for higher-order processes)?

Right, but there are also phenomena that appear to be "inside us" for which we also seem to have no creative responsibility, for example, feelings of pains or other "internal" physical sensations, some uncontrolled emotions etc. So, as a fact of the phenomenal experience, the differentiation is not whether they are "inside" or "outside", but whether or not our individuated agency of thinking has "creative responsibility" for such phenomena. This consideration alone should be enough to refute this abstract idea of dividing the world into "inside" and "outside". But even that consideration cannot be considered as a legitimate criterium or a reason to "split" the phenomenological reality in two separate domains - those phenomena that are within the creative responsibility of our individuated thinking agency, and those that are not. This is because, by their nature, all phenomena are the phenomena of the same Thinking activity everywhere, but they do bear different qualities to them: some of them are of being more responsive to our individuated creative responsibility, and some of them are less or much less responsive. Likewise, some of them have quality of percepts, others of feelings, others of imaginations, others of ideas, etc. The key is that this variety of qualities of the phenomena does not break the fundamental unity of the phenomenal content of Consciousness: the fact that all phenomena are equally formed and experienced by the same Thinking and within the same Thinking, and never ever exist in any way separately from the Thinking.

PS: Also, in light of the Cleric's essay, the "border" between the phenomena that we have creative responsibility for and those that we don't is not a "hard border", but it is a flexible border and it is actually defined by our current state of consciousness and its ability to bring to consciousness the unconscious parts of the Time-Consciousness spectrum.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

You have a really interesting way of presenting and responding to arguments, I will give you that!

Thank you!

Whenever I challenge your points, it must be because I didn't read them carefully or feel motivated to actually address them Of course that is possible, but then I would expect the response to be more of a measured clarification than a defensive reaction and dismissal of everything written.

Ashvin, of course I want to continue the discussion. The reason why I haven’t taken another round to clarify my points really was to spare you that (and everyone else) and I felt you replied as a politeness. Now, it seems I was wrong, and that you expected a measured clarification. I’m glad to provide that!

Also, my message was not in the least dismissal, and I thought I made it clear I agreed with you. It's not been very difficult, basically in your initial reply you said: that WFT is useful; that the rules of transformation of thinking are under our responsibility; that karma and soul preferences influence our becoming, and that the exact mechanism by which our will is transferred to the body is unconscious. So with the exception of the article you shared, that I suspect you would also disagree with (I have noted now the reason you linked it) we were in agreement.

Now, in your latest reply you are more direct, which is good. I see Cleric also has replied, so I think I will integrate responses to his post and to your latest reply in one post. But before I go, may I try to give back some of the good mood you put me in with the average Joe sixpack I was wondering, why is average Joe supposed to be fit and trained, until google told me it's actually a sixpack of beer

Fair enough, Federica, I look forward to the integrated response, although I will probably let him reply before continuing. I will say, it is humbling to witness the gap between my superficial, mostly abstract response to you and the level of depth Cleric took it too with concrete first-person examples. In that sense, I can see why mine would seem more of an evasive, half-hearted, and perhaps even irrelevant, reply in comparison. His responses speak more directly to the underlying place where the questions are coming from. There is also a certain slackness in my lack of accompanying the reasoning with concrete examples, although that also relates to my lack of imaginative development. I could probably improve on that if I took more time crafting the response. Nevertheless, I would say my points in response were superficial veneer which were pointing to the same points he elaborated in much greater phenomenological depth and clarity. It all comes down to maintaining the living connection between real-time spiritual activity and its manifestations across the elemental-archetypal gradient of our experience.

[Stranger]

As we know, we first observe that our given experience consists of sense perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, as conscious phenomena (in more reasoned-out terms, it consists of thought-pictures of sense perceptions, thought-pictures of feelings, and other thought-pictures).
Then the tripartite categorization Will-Feeling-Thinking is introduced, which I have become so used to now. However, from an experiential perspective, this triad seems external. Looking closely, it appears that WFT is not a direct element of the given, and I believe it can blur understanding, especially when it comes to the Will. The Will doesn’t seem to be given, as a category of conscious phenomena. Rather, what's exactly given is our thought-picture of the intent “I will now walk to the table” and later the thought-pictures of all sensory perceptions connected to the flow of becoming that follows. Thus the Will seems to be a concept that unites certain type of thoughts with certain type of metamorphoses (meaningful series of sense percepts), in this case, a physical action of walking to the table. So the first question is: what is gained by starting the static-form observation of the given with the WFT supporting framework, when the Will inevitably points to transformation, or is in itself transformation already?

First, I agree with Cleric and Ashvin that all phenomena are always part of the given, no matter whether they are (or appear to be) the percepts or results of further conceptual processing of percepts. But this living process of the temporal interplay between some phenomena and their consequent processing by cognition is indeed complex and mysterious. Thinking builds new though-ideas as "reflections" of previously experienced phenomena (those can be precepts, feelings, acts of will, or other thought-ideas), and then the newly formed ideas can be in certain degrees of coherence with the phenomena that they reflect upon (sometimes they are completely incoherent, sometimes they are more coherent). It is worth noting that the "reflection" idea of a phenomenon is never fully equivalent to the original phenomenon, but it is always some kind of a transmuted form of it. That does not mean that there is no shared ideal content. Nevertheless, all of these phenomena always remain an inseparable part of the "given" which is a living content of Consciousness.

But I agree that dividing WFT into such categories is somewhat "artificial", and that it is a result of ideational reflection of thinking experiencing itself and its own functioning and capacities. Yet, I think such division has some ground and usefulness because it reflects different "qualities" of the thinking aspects and aspects of the phenomena it produces. It is practically useful to differentiate between these aspects and qualities, while always remembering that such differentiation is a result of the cognitive "reflection" of thinking experiencing itself.

But we are now approaching a mystery-question whether the "reflection" of Thinking when it experiences itself can be entirely equivalent to Thinking itself, or if it always remains a "reflection", a content of an ideation only. Which comes to a key question of the phenomenological idealism: is Thinking fully equivalent to its Idea of itself (by Idea I mean phenomenologically experienced Idea, not a "metaphysical" one)? For example, think about this mystery: Thinking certainly exists and it knows it, and we all know it (otherwise we would not be thinking), and knowing it means that Thinking has an idea of its own existence. But is the idea of Thinking's own existence fully equivalent to the existence itself (which is the same as to ask: is the existence an idea and only and idea)? A while ago I was confident that existence is not only an idea, and I argued for this conviction on this forum, but now I'm not so sure anymore, it remains a mystery for me at this point. Perhaps is it more appropriate to say that it is in fact the Idea that includes its own existence (in other words, self-causing Idea). As a phenomenological fact, existence is a directly knowable reality, Thinking (Consciousness) directly phenomenally knows that it exists, and in that sense this knowledge is equivalent to existence. Same applies to all other aspects of Consciousness such as awareness/experiencing, willing, thinking, feeling etc.

[Cleric K]

Cleric, first my applauds to your essay, you mastered your writing style and made it more clear, concrete and accessible for an average Joe like me. I'm kind of reluctant to say that I agree with it (but I actually do), because I will be again beaten to death by Ashvin for saying that. But I just have a few comments.

Thank you! Actually it is from 2021. Maybe it didn't do much impression on you at that time

Well, to me this assumption does not seem to be supported by phenomenological facts. There is no doubt that many of the unconscious rhythms can be brought into awareness, and that this process is part of the evolution of our cognition. However, in our human form we experience certain limitation in getting access to certain rhythms and levels of the Global Consciousness. Some of these limitations may indeed be overcome, but we have no ground to claim that all of them can be overcome. This does not mean that we need to claim the opposite - that there is a hard limit for the human form. I think it is better to remain practical and assume that we can just continue the process of "pushing the envelope" as much as we can without making any unsupported claims whether there is or there is no hard limit.

This is precisely the point - to realize that we're lifelong students on Earth and not only on Earth. Our whole existence is continual discovery. All that matter is to simply remove any expectations for achievements in this lifetime. It is clear there are many obstacles that will prevent us to reach many of the deep secrets of reality in this lifetime but at no point we should say "There's no reason even to start because I won't have enough time in this life to fulfill the goal." This is what we must protect from.

The great prejudice here would be that our efforts are wasted if we don't reach some spectacular results. But this is simply not the case. All our honest efforts change something in our subtle structure even if the noise of our bodily environment is too deafening to notice that. The most important thing is that these subtle changes remain with us after death. I think that I've given this example before. The details of our efforts, as we encompass them from beyond the threshold, are like the fluctuations of the point of Big Bang which determines the clumping of galaxies and filaments. In a similar way, all efforts actually give their most significant fruit after death. All those things which we may have not experienced fully but strived to reach, are like lines of forces that expand and give structure to our disincarnate state. This is how we have consciousness of the higher worlds after death. Otherwise, if we have passed our Earthly life believing that everything necessary will be attained magically after death, we pass through the Heavens like in a higher order dream, where our whole being floats spread over Cosmic space as an astronaut that is helplessly drifting. We simply have no point of support. Then actually we carry the memory of our Earthly stage and yearn for the the support that it provided us. This is our true present goal in the Earthly existence - to use the support of the physical body, which helps us center our worldline of becoming around a stable personality and unveil that center to really be the Cosmic Singularity of all. If we succeed to find the stable point of our existence within the Cosmic "I", the Solar singularity, then after death we continue to have a center of being, a point of reference from whence our existence makes sense. It is not that we contain that point as something personal but the Life of the Solar singularity gives us the stability and clarity of existence after death. Without this center of existence we feel as spilled over the Cosmos, overwhelmed by inexplicable oneness and no longer having clear consciousness of coherent being.

This is a good consideration. So, when we differentiate form identification with race, we are no longer limited by such identification and can move to other countries to contribute to the development of their nations if we consider it appropriate. Or, in our next incarnation, we may decide to incarnate in some other country different from the one of our previous incarnation, because we no longer identify ourselves with that nationality. For example, it may be beneficial not even for a person, but for the evolution of the nation, to move out from a dictatorship (like North Corea or Russia) and influence the further evolution of the nation from outside due to the access to more resources and more freedom from some governmental restrictions. Or one can decide that their talents are more appropriate to contribute to the development of some other nation which would more efficiently utilize these talents.

This is actually the case. Steiner and other esoterists have explained how for example people who have great disdain for another nation create a very strong bond with the Folk Spirit of that nation and after death that bond swallows them, thus they incarnate in the very nation that they hated. So we can see how Karma is really weaved of such rhythmic interactions, as communicating vessels that are entangled in pendulum-like ebb and flow. Our evolutionary study consists of learning about these rhythms and consciously navigating them. Think of a two-man saw. There should be certain harmony between the persons if the job is to be done. When one pulls the other must push and vice versa. The chaos in the Earthly realm is that we have absolutely no awareness of these fractal layers of entanglement and we act as lumberjacks that push and pull randomly without any concern that the majority of our efforts conflict. The thing to beware of is not to imagine these entanglements as something mechanical. These are living relations of our spiritual life. In fact, the physical world can be conceived as such condensed form of spiritual Karma, where elemental beings are entangled in very rigid elastic relations.

The important thing though, is that when our spirit liberates its intuitive core from the cocoons of nation, race, gender and so on, we don't become some free electron that can do whatever it pleases. Such a view is even more difficult to support after death. Then we live in these nested Cosmic rhythms which are non-local Intelligences, yet they still have coherent identities. The key here is to understand that when we pass the soul (astral) world where we're still purifying our personal desires, we become infinitely conscientious so to speak. The whole Cosmos is like a board of wise beings that work on a common Cosmic project. Then the words "I decide to incarnate here or there" don't at all have the meaning that we imagine in our Earthly state, where we imagine that to be some absolutely free decision of an atomic being. But in the higher world our decision is like steering through the objective truth of reality (much of this truth can be still veiled if we haven't worked upon our subtle organism while on Earth). In any case, there can't be some self-centered decision "I'll do this or that". The oneness of all things is much more overwhelming at that stage. It is as if we could immediately preconceive how any decision would ripple through the Cosmic fabric and what that will lead to. Thus our existence there is like constant communion with this board of Intelligent beings and we together seek creative solutions to the overall becoming of the Cosmic context.

When seen in this way, we know that on Earth we shouldn't be concerned with whether we'll incarnate again or not but with developing the organs and spiritual faculties that will give us the needed consciousness in the non-local state in order to commune and participate creatively in the common work. Otherwise we simply pass through these regions as in a Heavenly but quite inexplicable dream. We feel flowing in Cosmic orbits without any control and we return to Earthly existence to continue mastering this control.

[Stranger]

The important thing though, is that when our spirit liberates its intuitive core from the cocoons of nation, race, gender and so on, we don't become some free electron that can do whatever it pleases. Such a view is even more difficult to support after death. Then we live in these nested Cosmic rhythms which are non-local Intelligences, yet they still have coherent identities. The key here is to understand that when we pass the soul (astral) world where we're still purifying our personal desires, we become infinitely conscientious so to speak. The whole Cosmos is like a board of wise beings that work on a common Cosmic project. Then the words "I decide to incarnate here or there" don't at all have the meaning that we imagine in our Earthly state, where we imagine that to be some absolutely free decision of an atomic being. But in the higher world our decision is like steering through the objective truth of reality (much of this truth can be still veiled if we haven't worked upon our subtle organism while on Earth). In any case, there can't be some self-centered decision "I'll do this or that". The oneness of all things is much more overwhelming at that stage. It is as if we could immediately preconceive how any decision would ripple through the Cosmic fabric and what that will lead to. Thus our existence there is like constant communion with this board of Intelligent beings and we together seek creative solutions to the overall becoming of the Cosmic context.

I agree, there is always a certain continuity of our consciousness state and its interconnection with and the role in the Cosmic content. "Bypassing" is not possible, but transmutations into different forms through spiritual metamorphosis are possible.

[Cleric K]

But we are now approaching a mystery-question whether the "reflection" of Thinking when it experiences itself can be entirely equivalent to Thinking itself, or if it always remains a "reflection", a content of an ideation only. Which comes to a key question of the phenomenological idealism: is Thinking fully equivalent to its Idea of itself (by Idea I mean phenomenologically experienced Idea, not a "metaphysical" one)? For example, think about this mystery: Thinking certainly exists and it knows it, and we all know it (otherwise we would not be thinking), and knowing it means that Thinking has an idea of its own existence. But is the idea of Thinking's own existence fully equivalent to the existence itself (which is the same as to ask: is the existence an idea and only and idea)? A while ago I was confident that existence is not only an idea, and I argued for this conviction on this forum, but now I'm not so sure anymore, it remains a mystery for me at this point. Perhaps is it more appropriate to say that it is in fact the Idea that includes its own existence (in other words, self-causing Idea). As a phenomenological fact, existence is a directly knowable reality, Thinking (Consciousness) directly phenomenally knows that it exists, and in that sense this knowledge is equivalent to existence. Same applies to all other aspects of Consciousness such as awareness/experiencing, willing, thinking, feeling etc.

This is resolved when we conceive that the idea which thinking has of itself, is only a very specific evolutionary instance of the living Idea of the limitless potential. That's why it's valuable to keep in mind something as the turning torus. We continually discover our true essence anew. The idea that thinking has of itself is shed like a skin and something even more incredible is born. The previous idea was not wrong but it was simply the best possible intuition that within certain constraints. This doesn't mean that we'll always feel dissatisfied that we always live in partial truths. This is overcome when we embrace the actual process of becoming. We can only feel dissatisfied if we maintain the desire to pin our present understanding and imagine that we have the full picture.

[AshvinP]

But what about the fact that we can speak of an "outside" in so far as we have no creative responsibility for certain phenomenal appearances, such as the 'blue sky', and an "inside" in so far as we do, such as our own thought-forms, at any given time in our process of intuitive becoming? Once we bring the material reductionist abstractions into the light of consciousness and realize they are incoherent with phenomenological experience, where do we go to investigate the lawful, hierarchical gradient between these domains, thereby bringing them into closer experiential unity (rather than abstractly postulating that they are One, despite gaining no greater creative responsibility for higher-order processes)?

Right, but there are also phenomena that appear to be "inside us" for which we also seem to have no creative responsibility, for example, feelings of pains or other "internal" physical sensations, some uncontrolled emotions etc. So, as a fact of the phenomenal experience, the differentiation is not whether they are "inside" or "outside", but whether or not our individuated agency of thinking has "creative responsibility" for such phenomena. This consideration alone should be enough to refute this abstract idea of dividing the world into "inside" and "outside". But even that consideration cannot be considered as a legitimate criterium or a reason to "split" the phenomenological reality in two separate domains - those phenomena that are within the creative responsibility of our individuated thinking agency, and those that are not. This is because, by their nature, all phenomena are the phenomena of the same Thinking activity everywhere, but they do bear different qualities to them: some of them are of being more responsive to our individuated creative responsibility, and some of them are less or much less responsive. Likewise, some of them have quality of percepts, others of feelings, others of imaginations, others of ideas, etc. The key is that this variety of qualities of the phenomena does not break the fundamental unity of the phenomenal content of Consciousness: the fact that all phenomena are equally formed and experienced by the same Thinking and within the same Thinking, and never ever exist in any way separately from the Thinking.

PS: Also, in light of the Cleric's essay, the "border" between the phenomena that we have creative responsibility for and those that we don't is not a "hard border", but it is a flexible border and it is actually defined by our current state of consciousness and its ability to bring to consciousness the unconscious parts of the Time-Consciousness spectrum.

What we are saying, though, is that the outer-inner experiential distinction is a phenomenal manifestation of Thinking which has only awakened to some limited aperture of creative responsibility within the total unified spectrum. The 'inner' consists in our soul-life, i.e. WFT experiences, which we generally intuit that there is an ability to reach with our spiritual activity and bring into light of consciousness (depth psychology is based on this principle). The 'outer', including our physical bodies and everything in them, are felt to be beyond our capacity and therefore belong to the sphere of 'nature'. So we can only address the root cause of the outer/inner (natural/spiritual) split, not with theories or mystical revelations of Oneness, but through the enlivening of thinking and the purification of will, so that there is both the means and the motivation to adopt more and more creative responsibility for the World Process. Once that is done and the outer/inner 'border' begins to be concretely experienced as fluid, pliable, permeable, then the fundamental unity of spiritual activity and its manifestations will be livingly understood. This understanding will precipitate into all manner of Earthly cultural endeavors like art and science, economics and politics, etc.

It is true that there are inner phenomena which feel to be more outside our creative control than our thought-forms, like our feelings, emotions, impulses, etc., as well as biological processes. By the time we get to the latter, we practically transfer them into the 'outer' sphere. Cleric gave the example of breathing in the essay - many people would say this is a biological process which is beyond conscious control, unfolding according to immutable 'laws of nature', but we here know differently since we are familiar with meditative practice. I suppose most people now know that in the abstract as well. But we can imagine a time previously when people would have said it is 'deluded' to think our spiritual activity can take hold of biological processes like breathing. There is no warrant for us to assume that we are in any different position now with respect to processes buried even deeper in the subconscious, since they are all decohered reflections of spiritual forces. It is all reachable by our spiritual activity in principle, even if it will take many more incarnations than we have already travelled through to completely spiritualize our bodies and the Earthly kingdoms.

[Stranger]

What we are saying, though, is that the outer-inner experiential distinction is a phenomenal manifestation of Thinking which has only awakened to some limited aperture of creative responsibility within the total unified spectrum. The 'inner' consists in our soul-life, i.e. WFT experiences, which we generally intuit that there is an ability to reach with our spiritual activity and bring into light of consciousness (depth psychology is based on this principle). The 'outer', including our physical bodies and everything in them, are felt to be beyond our capacity and therefore belong to the sphere of 'nature'. So we can only address the root cause of the outer/inner (natural/spiritual) split, not with theories or mystical revelations of Oneness, but through the enlivening of thinking and the purification of will, so that there is both the means and the motivation to adopt more and more creative responsibility for the World Process. Once that is done and the outer/inner 'border' begins to be concretely experienced as fluid, pliable, permeable, then the fundamental unity of spiritual activity and its manifestations will be livingly understood. This understanding will precipitate into all manner of Earthly cultural endeavors like art and science, economics and politics, etc.

Notice that there is a "mish-mash" of the actual percepts of the "natural" phenomena and the idea about them as if they come from the "outside natural world". Notice that this is exactly what materialists do - they create an abstract idea of "external material world outside" existing outside of their consciousness, and they "project" this abstract idea onto reality imagining and believing that such "external material world" indeed exists, while in actuality it only exists as a content of their abstract idea. Likewise, in our case what we in fact have in a given experience is a flow of phenomena in our individuated stream of global Thinking where the so-called "external" and "internal" percepts are in fact inseparable and are parts of the same given stream/flow of phenomena, but then we create an abstract idea that there is a "natural external world" from where the "external" percepts originate. The only difference from materialists is that we no longer assume that this "external world" is material. But we have no evidence whatsoever that such "external natura world" exists at all, it is only a projection of our abstract idea. So, we are still half-way from materialism. As a fact of our phenomenal experience, all individually experienced phenomena are equally part of the "given" and are equally experienced by the same individual thinking (whether they are classified as "outside" or "inside"). Likewise, all phenomena of the World are equally experienced by the same Thinking, and from its Cosmic perspective there is no such thing as "outside" or "inside" whatsoever. The ideas of higher-order beings (as individuated activities of Thinking) directly precipitate as precepts in our individuated activity of Thinking), it must be a directly phenomenon-to-phenomenon causal relationship, there is no "outside world" that is somehow exists "out there" independent of the thinking activity of sentient beings and Thinking in general, as if it is a "media" through which the ideations of higher-order beings precipitate into the precepts we experience.

So, once we recognize that the idea of the "outer" and "inner" worlds is an abstraction, and that the idea that our thinking agency resides "inside" the boundary between the outer and inner is likewise an abstraction, we refute and drop these ideas and then take as a given the direct experience of the reality/world as it is given without "lensing" them through those abstractions. And once this happens, we can phenomenally experience the state (that we linguistically point to as "Oneness") where no boundary between "me as a separate thinking agency inside" and "the rest of the world outside" exists, and the whole flow of phenomena is experienced within the same Thinking (even though through its individuated activities one at a time). This is when "Oneness" becomes not an abstraction from the Biblical quote anymore, but a living phenomenal experience.

"The Kingdom is inside you, and outside you. ...
The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it...
It is I who am the light (that presides) over all. It is I who am the entirety: it is from me that the entirety has come, and to me that the entirety goes. Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there....
When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Father's domain."
(Gospel of Thomas)

[AshvinP]

What we are saying, though, is that the outer-inner experiential distinction is a phenomenal manifestation of Thinking which has only awakened to some limited aperture of creative responsibility within the total unified spectrum. The 'inner' consists in our soul-life, i.e. WFT experiences, which we generally intuit that there is an ability to reach with our spiritual activity and bring into light of consciousness (depth psychology is based on this principle). The 'outer', including our physical bodies and everything in them, are felt to be beyond our capacity and therefore belong to the sphere of 'nature'. So we can only address the root cause of the outer/inner (natural/spiritual) split, not with theories or mystical revelations of Oneness, but through the enlivening of thinking and the purification of will, so that there is both the means and the motivation to adopt more and more creative responsibility for the World Process. Once that is done and the outer/inner 'border' begins to be concretely experienced as fluid, pliable, permeable, then the fundamental unity of spiritual activity and its manifestations will be livingly understood. This understanding will precipitate into all manner of Earthly cultural endeavors like art and science, economics and politics, etc.

Notice that there is a "mish-mash" of the actual percepts of the "natural" phenomena and the idea about them as if they come from the "outside natural world". Notice that this is exactly what materialists do - they create an abstract idea of "external material world outside" existing outside of their consciousness, and they "project" this abstract idea onto reality imagining and believing that such "external material world" indeed exists, while in actuality it only exists as a content of their abstract idea. Likewise, in our case what we in fact have in a given experience is a flow of phenomena in our individuated stream of global Thinking where the so-called "external" and "internal" percepts are in fact inseparable and are parts of the same given stream/flow of phenomena, but then we create an abstract idea that there is a "natural external world" from where the "external" percepts originate. The only difference from materialists is that we no longer assume that this "external world" is material. But we have no evidence whatsoever that such "external natura world" exists at all, it is only a projection of our abstract idea. So, we are still half-way from materialism. As a fact of our phenomenal experience, all individually experienced phenomena are equally part of the "given" and are equally experienced by the same individual thinking (whether they are classified as "outside" or "inside"). Likewise, all phenomena of the World are equally experienced by the same Thinking, and from its Cosmic perspective there is no such thing as "outside" or "inside" whatsoever. The ideas of higher-order beings (as individuated activities of Thinking) directly precipitate as precepts in our individuated activity of Thinking), it must be a directly phenomenon-to-phenomenon causal relationship, there is no "outside world" that is somehow exists "out there" independent of the thinking activity of sentient beings and Thinking in general, as if it is a "media" through which the ideations of higher-order beings precipitate into the precepts we experience.

So, once we recognize that the idea of the "outer" and "inner" worlds is an abstraction, and that the idea that our thinking agency resides "inside" the boundary between the outer and inner is likewise an abstraction, we refute and drop these ideas and then take as a given the direct experience of the reality/world as it is given without "lensing" them through those abstractions. And once this happens, we can phenomenally experience the state (that we linguistically point to as "Oneness") where no boundary between "me as a separate thinking agency inside" and "the rest of the world outside" exists, and the whole flow of phenomena is experienced within the same Thinking (even though through its individuated activities one at a time). This is when "Oneness" becomes not an abstraction from the Biblical quote anymore, but a living phenomenal experience.

"The Kingdom is inside you, and outside you. ...
The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it...
It is I who am the light (that presides) over all. It is I who am the entirety: it is from me that the entirety has come, and to me that the entirety goes. Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift a stone, and you will find me there....
When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the Father's domain."
(Gospel of Thomas)

Eugene,

We know all that. What the TC spectrum phenomenology points to is the deeper reasons why all of what you wrote above happens. In other words, it points towards why we habitually project our thought-abstractions into the configuration spaces of the elemental and archetypal spectrums of spiritual activity (lower and higher beings), thereby deriving the externalized concepts of 'outer' and 'inner' or 'nature' and 'soul/spiritual', etc. It all relates to how much creative responsibility we have adopted through our living thinking. But this doesn't only happen to the material reductionist, but also the mystical reductionist. The latter tries to reduce the lawful dynamics of the elemental-archetypal spectrum to its own current consciousness, forgetting that consciousness is still within the hierarchy of lawful dynamics. That leads to what Cleric wrote - "we maintain the desire to pin our present understanding and imagine that we have the full picture." In this case, the full picture of 'Oneness'.

It is very hard for the intellect to detect when it jumps from one set of metaphysical abstractions - (1) there is 'outer world' and 'inner world' divided from each other - to another set of metaphysical abstractions - (2) the blue sky outside is only what appears in me as awareness-experiencing-thinking activity. It oscillates from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. These are the material and mystical polarizations we always speak of. They both result from a lack of careful attention to how our real-time thinking unfolds in relation to the lawfully nested hierarchy of the perceptual spectrum (including our inner experiences). The physical human kingdom is nested within the animal kingdom, which is nested within the plant kingdom, which is nested within the mineral kingdom (we can imagine physical humans disappearing while the other ones remain, but not the other way around). Macrocosmically, the Earth is nested within the solar system, the solar system within the galaxy, the galaxy within the Zodiac.

These outward appearances all point to a nested relation of inner spiritual forces - mineral forces, life forces, soul forces, thinking forces, and higher-order archetypal forces - which are responsible for the perceptible kingdoms and in which the average modern human only has creative responsibility over a small segment, i.e. thinking forces. Yet the spiritual reality is the inverse, the polar opposite, of the outward appearances - the forces of the lower kingdoms are all nested within the human kingdom, so they can certainly be influenced by our spiritual activity. All of these relations need to be investigated precisely and scientifically by living thinking if we want to make any progress towards a concrete understanding of spiritual reality and the ways in which we participate in manifesting that reality across incarnations. If we want to avoid polarizing to the other extreme of mystical reductionism (the perceptual spectrum can be reduced to simple awareness-experiencing-thinking), then we need to explore the lawful and living gradient of the TC spectrum within us, through which all subject-object type distinctions arise.

These distinctions are not intellectual assumptions but experiential facts engendered by the rhythmic polar structure of our intuitive becoming. No mystical realization can completely bypass this polar structure, through which unmanifest living Ideas continually incarnate into the manifest spectrum so that they are enriched and perfected (logically, aesthetically, and morally). That happens at the level of particular thoughts, of our daily incarnation into the sensory spectrum, of seasons, years, 7-year periods of of life, full lifetimes, and even up to planetary incarnations through which the Earth has passed. So we are dealing with a vast Cosmic landscape of lawful rhythms nested within lawful rhythms. The capacities needed to carefully navigate and harmonize this nested rhythmic structure must be developed during our Earthly incarnations, as Cleric illustrated so well a few comments up, so that we can gradually take more and more fully conscious creative responsibility for the World Process from the archetypal realms.

[Stranger]

Eugene,

We know all that. What the TC spectrum phenomenology points to is the deeper reasons why all of what you wrote above happens. In other words, it points towards why we habitually project our thought-abstractions into the configuration spaces of the elemental and archetypal spectrums of spiritual activity (lower and higher beings), thereby deriving the externalized concepts of 'outer' and 'inner' or 'nature' and 'soul/spiritual', etc. It all relates to how much creative responsibility we have adopted through our living thinking. But this doesn't only happen to the material reductionist, but also the mystical reductionist. The latter tries to reduce the lawful dynamics of the elemental-archetypal spectrum to its own current consciousness, forgetting that consciousness is still within the hierarchy of lawful dynamics. That leads to what Cleric wrote - "we maintain the desire to pin our present understanding and imagine that we have the full picture." In this case, the full picture of 'Oneness'.

I agree that the "mystical reductionist" approach is as wrong as "materialist reductionist". By "Oneness" I never meant such reductionist picture, there is definitely the structure and spectrum of dynamics of which our individuated stream of consciousness is only part of. The key is to know that all this spectrum is still and always a phenomenal content of the same Consciousness that has the same fundamental aspects: abilities to Will, Think, Feel, Experience and Exist. These fundamental abilities are the same everywhere, in our individuated stream of consciousness as well as in all other individuated streams as well as in the Cosmic stream of Thinking-Consciousness. It is the same Willing-Thinking-Feeling-Experiencing-Being everywhere. Simultaneously, the layers of lawful structures (that are ideational phenomena as well) shaping the inter-related flow of phenomena pervade this universe of Consciousness, there is no question about that. So, discarding Oneness based on its twisted interpretation by "reductionist mystics" is like beating a strawman.

It is very hard for the intellect to detect when it jumps from one set of metaphysical abstractions - (1) there is 'outer world' and 'inner world' divided from each other - to another set of metaphysical abstractions - (2) the blue sky outside is only what appears in me as awareness-experiencing-thinking activity. It oscillates from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak. These are the material and mystical polarizations we always speak of. They both result from a lack of careful attention to how our real-time thinking unfolds in relation to the lawfully nested hierarchy of the perceptual spectrum (including our inner experiences). The physical human kingdom is nested within the animal kingdom, which is nested within the plant kingdom, which is nested within the mineral kingdom (we can imagine physical humans disappearing while the other ones remain, but not the other way around). Macrocosmically, the Earth is nested within the solar system, the solar system within the galaxy, the galaxy within the Zodiac.

These outward appearances all point to a nested relation of inner spiritual forces - mineral forces, life forces, soul forces, thinking forces, and higher-order archetypal forces - which are responsible for the perceptible kingdoms and in which the average modern human only has creative responsibility over a small segment, i.e. thinking forces. Yet the spiritual reality is the inverse, the polar opposite, of the outward appearances - the forces of the lower kingdoms are all nested within the human kingdom, so they can certainly be influenced by our spiritual activity. All of these relations need to be investigated precisely and scientifically by living thinking if we want to make any progress towards a concrete understanding of spiritual reality and the ways in which we participate in manifesting that reality across incarnations. If we want to avoid polarizing to the other extreme of mystical reductionism (the perceptual spectrum can be reduced to simple awareness-experiencing-thinking), then we need to explore the lawful and living gradient of the TC spectrum within us, through which all subject-object type distinctions arise.

These distinctions are not intellectual assumptions but experiential facts engendered by the rhythmic polar structure of our intuitive becoming. No mystical realization can completely bypass this polar structure, through which unmanifest living Ideas continually incarnate into the manifest spectrum so that they are enriched and perfected (logically, aesthetically, and morally). That happens at the level of particular thoughts, of our daily incarnation into the sensory spectrum, of seasons, years, 7-year periods of of life, full lifetimes, and even up to planetary incarnations through which the Earth has passed. So we are dealing with a vast Cosmic landscape of lawful rhythms nested within lawful rhythms. The capacities needed to carefully navigate and harmonize this nested rhythmic structure must be developed during our Earthly incarnations, as Cleric illustrated so well a few comments up, so that we can gradually take more and more fully conscious creative responsibility for the World Process from the archetypal realms.

So here we come to this picture:
- There indeed exists the polar structure of spiritual forces pervading different levels of reality. Only a certain part of it is accessible to our individuated spiritual activity in our current state, but the "boundary" of the accessible range of phenomena and forces is flexible and it is possible to extend it to encompass more levels "below" and "above" in the hierarchy.
- At the same time all these forces and ideations and their hierarchical structure are nothing else than the ideational phenomenal content of the same spiritual activity of Consciousness created by its universal aspects of Willing-Thinking-Feeling-Experiencing-Being. Each individuated spiritual activity (what we call a "sentient being") has full access to experience and recognize these universal aspects within its own phenomenal experience as Thinking knowing itself directly in each individuated spiritual activity. In this way we can realize that in reality there is no such thing as "me as an observer inside" experiencing the "world outside", but rather it is the same Consciousness experiencing itself through its ideations and phenomena everywhere.

So, if we again take the above as a phenomenal experience rather than an abstract model, we come to the experiential realization that the structural content of forces and ideas on all levels of hierarchy simultaneously exist as simply phenomena and ideations of the same Consciousness created and experienced by the same Willing-Thinking-Feeling-Experiencing-Being. We can call it "Oneness in its hierarchical diversity". In this way we avoid the "mystical reductionism" without discarding the actual experience of Oneness.

And another key is, once these dualistic abstractions ("inside" and "outside", "separate me" etc) are refuted, and experiential oneness is realized (without discarding the reality of the hierarchical structure of forces), it substantially changes the perception of the world and the dynamics of the development of individuated streams of consciousness as they become functioning in a different "non-egoic" mode. The extent of the conscious participation and creative responsibility for the World Process substantially enhances since we no longer separate ourselves from the rest of Reality and no longer focus on pursuing our egoic goals associated with our sense of "separate me". That is because the sense of "separate me inside" is a force existing within our individual consciousness that activates and maintains the ancestral egoic survival mechanisms that do not concern in a least about the "World Process" and only preoccupied with the individual prosperity and survival within the content of individual human existence. At the evolutionary phase of humanoids this was a progressive and lawful force as it helped humanoids to survive in the wild, but at the current stage of humanity it became a de-evolutionary force that needs to be disengaged and left behind. Letting go of the sense of "separate me" removes the catalyzing force that maintains these egoic survival mechanisms so that they can be gradually disentangled from the structures of our consciousness.

But we can still use these abstract ideas of "outside" and "inside" in an utilitarian way in our everyday life without believing that they refer to any actual realities, just like engineers use abstract ideas from modern physics in engineering practice as practical recipes. I know as a spiritual practitioner that such thing as "current of electrons" may not refer to any actual phenomenal reality, yet without this abstract idea of "current of electrons" no electrical engineering practice would be possible (and the computers through which we communicate on this forum, and the forum itself, would not exist).