The Time-Consciousness Spectrum

[Stranger]

I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them.

I wish it could work. It can work! I wish that, not for the reasons that you might be formulating, but because I think that your thirst for knowledge and assiduity deserve that, and can lead you there, beyond the spiritual-political view, an into the truth of reality.

The truth of reality is that it is fundamentally nondual, so nondual path is simply staying with the truth no matter what. The dualistic path is "provisionally" allowing for a deviation from the nondual truth to allow for certain venues of evolutionary development.

Regarding the penetration into those layers, as Ashvin himself admitted, we have no access to them in human form and should not expect to penetrate there. Penetrating into those layers is only a technical issue, it has nothing to do with dual or nondual perception. As I said before, the dual and nondual modes of perception do not occur at the level of precipitation of sense percepts.

But I'm offering a peace agreement here. Let's just lay our arguments in a positive way without demeaning each other's views and practices, and let other people decide for themselves which path to subscribe to. (And I think we already did vocalize most of our possible arguments, so not much point to repeat them again and again).

[Federica]

(...)

I would like to hear your comments specifically on this (if possible, of course):

within a higher state it is in fact possible to have experiences of self-reflecting quality that are not thought themselves but precede thoughts. A common metaphor for this kind of experiences is to picture regular thoughts as standing wave forms within a deeper stratum of spiritual activity. Many meditators would readily agree with such a metaphor but will fiercely oppose the idea that there's a kind of spiritual activity of a self-reflective quality within the deeper stratum. But this opposition is not based on some kind of certain experience that shows beyond any doubt that it's impossible for such a kind of spiritual activity to exist within deeper reality.

[Stranger]

I would like to hear your comments specifically on this (if possible, of course):

within a higher state it is in fact possible to have experiences of self-reflecting quality that are not thought themselves but precede thoughts. A common metaphor for this kind of experiences is to picture regular thoughts as standing wave forms within a deeper stratum of spiritual activity. Many meditators would readily agree with such a metaphor but will fiercely oppose the idea that there's a kind of spiritual activity of a self-reflective quality within the deeper stratum. But this opposition is not based on some kind of certain experience that shows beyond any doubt that it's impossible for such a kind of spiritual activity to exist within deeper reality.

Cleric is right, this is how it actually happens. Most often this pre-though activity happens in subconscious and we do not notice it. but in meditation we can go through this process mindfully and track the activity of thought development starting from a willing gesture and intuitive "seed" that further precipitates into a thought-form. Any spiritual activity is fundamentally self-reflective, but we usually do not notice it in our "mundane" human mode of consciousness.

[AshvinP]

So this is all still the very bubbling surface of consciousness. The depth layers of these final products, in which I include our intuitive sense of "me", i.e. the nested imaginative, inspired, intuitive activities of higher beings, are quite unimaginable for ordinary sense-based cognition, except by way of analogies and illustrations such as Cleric and Steiner have provided. Those forces reside in the genuine supra-conscious and structure the substances-processes of the subconscious, i.e. the physical, life, and soul processes, at individual and collective scales. Our given conscious aperture is always mediating between these two spheres of ideal forces and perceptual outer-inner phenomena, sort of like a porous membrane through which they flow and swirl into a vortex we experience as 'present I-state of being'.

This is exactly right, the intuitive sense of "me" is indeed buried in the depths of the lawful structures of the human organism nested in the activities of dualistic higher beings. This is all a dualistic hierarchical structure of the dualistic domain. Don't get me wrong, I'm not demonizing the dualistic realm, it has its own evolutionary path, and human organism is designed by the dualistic higher order beings exactly for this dualistic evolutionary path. But this is why for any soul who chooses the nondual path, being in the human form and embedded in the hierarchy of the dualistic realm is not suitable, it would be living in a continuous dissonance with the lawful structures of the human composition and higher-order structures in which it is nested.

It's a rough analogy, but it's like if you worked in the structure of the Democratic party and then converted to being a Republican, you just cannot work for the Democrats anymore without being in a continuous cognitive dissonance, the Dems party structure becomes a wrong place for you to remain in. Just like in US politics ("as above so below"), in the Cosmic organism there are two parties: "duals" and "nonduals", and they have their own structures and realms extending to higher-order levels. Each party has its own evolutionary path and program, its own arguments why their program/path is better, and so on. And, just like in human politics, each soul decide for themselves which evolutionary path and program they subscribe to.

The dualism living in the thinking-perspective which wrote the above post is staring us in the face, Eugene. It's interesting because, if we look at modern conservatism and liberalism as polar opposites rooted in temperamental tendencies (indeed, as there is polar rhythmic structure above, there is polar rhythmic structure below), then you have created a dualism from the unified polarity in the political domain and then projected that duality right into the spiritual domain with the analogy. "For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God." When I point this out to you, the response will be, 'no these are unified domains, all part of the Divine Self, but they have their own evolutionary paths, etc. etc.'. In other words, you will paper over the dualism living in the depths your current thinking with intellectual abstractions. That is what the intellect does to insulate itself from confronting the inner contradiction which is otherwise obvious to any unprejudiced reader.

As I mentioned to Federica, the circle of concrete knowledge and spiritual evolution is drawn around your current thinking perspective, bounded towards the subconscious below and the supra-conscious above. Everything outside this circle, you claim can only be inferred by our best intellectual guesses based on fragmented data points and instinctive feelings/preferences. The veil will only be lifted from this circle of our current aperture after death, you say. But that is Maya - the threshold of death is a porous membrane, continuous with and permeating the domain of incarnational life, so the veil has already been lifted for anyone who takes responsibility for developing their living thinking which traverses the entire spectrum. We already know there is no "dualistic hierarchical structure of the dualistic domain", as you are intending it. Moreover, we know why this hard limit speculation is dogmatically held. Because you view the highest wisdom as that in which Earthly human souls in their atomistic state can do whatever their heart desires, but this is foolishness in the eyes of the higher Self across the threshold, the Divine "I", who doesn't only live for or by itself, but the Cosmos as a whole.

The more we spiral the living knowledge of our higher Self into our Earthly state, the more our current heart's desires can be transmuted into those of the Cosmic Heart. Then we begin to realize how it is exactly our 'designed human organism' which reflects the loftiest forces of the Cosmic symphony, and is gifted to us as support for our creative evolution into the Cosmos. The 'nondual mystic' is similar to the materialist transhumanist, in that he views his lower organism as something belonging to his personal nature which needs to be discarded for good, done away with. He looks upon it with disdain, instead of the reverence and sense of immense responsibility it deserves.

Something of outstanding significance and importance follows from this. While a man is going about on Earth, he regards his physical body and his etheric body — of which he knows little, but at least he feels it in his powers of growth, and so on — as his own body, but he has no right to do so. Only his Ego and his astral body are his. Everything present in his physical body and etheric body — even while he is on Earth — is the property of the divine-spiritual Beings who live and weave within them, and continue their work while the man is absent in sleep. It would go badly with anyone if he had to care for his own etheric and physical bodies in continual wakefulness between birth and death. Time and time again he is obliged to hand over his physical and etheric bodies to the Gods — especially during childhood, for then sleep is the most important thing of all. Later in life sleep works only as a corrective; the really fructifying sleep is the sleep that comes to a child in the first years of its life. Thus the human being has continually to be yielding up both physical and etheric bodies to the care of the Gods.

In past ages of human evolution this was so clearly perceived that the body was called the temple of the Gods, for so was its wonderful structure experienced. And in all architectural work — this can best be seen in oriental buildings, but also in those of Egypt and of Greece — the laws of the physical body and the etheric body were followed. In the very way the Cherubim are set on the temples of the East, in the attitude of a sphinx, or in the placing of pillars — in all this the work of divine-spiritual Beings in the human physical and etheric bodies has been made to live again. In the course of evolution, consciousness of this has been lost; and to-day we refer to the physical body as our own — with no notion of how unjustified this is — whereas as an earthly creation it belongs in reality to the Gods. Hence, when anyone to-day talks of “my body”, when he speaks of the healthy functioning of his body as due to himself, it is just an instance of the prodigious arrogance of modern man — a subconscious pride, certainly, expressed with no awareness of it, but none the less deplorable. It shows how in speaking of their bodies as their own, people are really laying claim to the property of the Gods, and this pride is embodied in their very speech.

Regarding the penetration into those layers, as Ashvin himself admitted, we have no access to them in human form and should not expect to penetrate there.

Not only was this not admitted, but the exact opposite was being suggested if you continued reading the post. "Nevertheless, that bubbling surface will lead us into the depths if we don't arbitrarily abstract it, chop it up, or otherwise restrict it to what will support our desired conclusions about the depths."

I could have taken your 'this is exactly right' as a complement and remarked how we finally reached 'agreement', but this would be disingenuous. Because clearly you were only using my comment as a springboard to rehash your desired dualistic conclusions about the spiritual depths, while chopping up my post into the tiny bit which seemed to support that conclusion, exactly as I said we should avoid doing.

[Stranger]

As I mentioned to Federica, the circle of concrete knowledge and spiritual evolution is drawn around your current thinking perspective, bounded towards the subconscious below and the supra-conscious above. Everything outside this circle, you claim can only be inferred by our best intellectual guesses based on fragmented data points and instinctive feelings/preferences. The veil will only be lifted from this circle of our current aperture after death, you say. But that is Maya - the threshold of death is a porous membrane, continuous with and permeating the domain of incarnational life, so the veil has already been lifted for anyone who takes responsibility for developing their living thinking which traverses the entire spectrum. We already know there is no "dualistic hierarchical structure of the dualistic domain", as you are intending it. Moreover, we know why this hard limit speculation is dogmatically held. Because you view the highest wisdom as that in which Earthly human souls in their atomistic state can do whatever their heart desires, but this is foolishness in the eyes of the higher Self across the threshold, the Divine "I", who doesn't only live for or by itself, but the Cosmos as a whole.

OMG, let's not go through this circle again of misinterpreting my words and switching to personal blames. Never I said that it is not possible to remove the veil in the human state. On the opposite, nondual realization is in fact removing the veil of dualistic perception. The only thing I said is that I am not interested in penetrating deeper in the dualistic structures and getting deeper involved in the dualistic hierarchies because I do not belong to this path anymore. You can go through this cycle again in your usual manner, but I will stop here. Existence of different evolutionary paths is not duality, it is diversity (if you don't know what the difference is, that means you also do not understand what nonduality is).

The key to understand here is that the sense of "me" is one of the most essential features of the dualistic path, and that is why the higher-order hierarchies of the dualistic domain embedded it so deeply in the human psyche and organism structure. You admitted that and thank you for being honest. So, the human organism structure was deliberately designed for the dualistic path and so it is authentic and organic for this path. However, one of the key hallmarks of the nondual path is that it is the evolutionary path without relying on the sense-idea of "me". Therefore, the human form is completely inorganic and incompatible for the nondual path. And there is no point to change it because changing it would be contrary to the intention and plan of the higher-order hierarchies that designed the structures to fit the dualistic path. so, the souls that switch to the nondual path, after leaving the human body, simply reincarnate in different forms (nested in nondual hierarchies) which are more fit for the nondual path where the sense of "me" in not embedded in the structure.

[Federica]

I would like to hear your comments specifically on this (if possible, of course):

within a higher state it is in fact possible to have experiences of self-reflecting quality that are not thought themselves but precede thoughts. A common metaphor for this kind of experiences is to picture regular thoughts as standing wave forms within a deeper stratum of spiritual activity. Many meditators would readily agree with such a metaphor but will fiercely oppose the idea that there's a kind of spiritual activity of a self-reflective quality within the deeper stratum. But this opposition is not based on some kind of certain experience that shows beyond any doubt that it's impossible for such a kind of spiritual activity to exist within deeper reality.

Cleric is right, this is how it actually happens. Most often this pre-though activity happens in subconscious and we do not notice it. but in meditation we can go through this process mindfully and track the activity of thought development starting from a willing gesture and intuitive "seed" that further precipitates into a thought-form. Any spiritual activity is fundamentally self-reflective, but we usually do not notice it in our "mundane" human mode of consciousness.

I would imagine you would say that the above is not in opposition with this:

I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them.

Could you explain?

[Stranger]

Cleric is right, this is how it actually happens. Most often this pre-though activity happens in subconscious and we do not notice it. but in meditation we can go through this process mindfully and track the activity of thought development starting from a willing gesture and intuitive "seed" that further precipitates into a thought-form. Any spiritual activity is fundamentally self-reflective, but we usually do not notice it in our "mundane" human mode of consciousness.

I would imagine you would say that the above is not in opposition with this:

I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them.

Could you explain?

In the latter statement I was referring to the percepts and certain kind of thoughts that seem to undeliberately pop up from subconscious layers where the mechanism of their precipitation usually remains hidden from our conscious attention. To be more precise, in meditation with the right concentration it is actually possible to penetrate deeper in subconscious and become aware of the though-development process even for those "popping-up" thoughts, but it is quite an effort usually. But I was never able to do that kind of penetration with sensual percepts, and as Ashvin admitted, we should not expect to have access to this process of percepts' precipitation while we are in the human form. We can still intuitively sense the ideas behind the percepts (like the idea of a "flower") but cannot access the exact mechanics of how this "flower" ideation produces the sense percepts.

But the former statement was about the thinking process on a higher completely conscious and transparent level where we, with full awareness of all steps, start from the willing gesture and intuitive "seed" on the intuitive level, and deliberately unfold this "seed" to bring it to the final form of a thought bearing all spectrum of its meanings. So, this refers to the mechanism of fully mindful and deliberate thinking.

[AshvinP]

As I mentioned to Federica, the circle of concrete knowledge and spiritual evolution is drawn around your current thinking perspective, bounded towards the subconscious below and the supra-conscious above. Everything outside this circle, you claim can only be inferred by our best intellectual guesses based on fragmented data points and instinctive feelings/preferences. The veil will only be lifted from this circle of our current aperture after death, you say. But that is Maya - the threshold of death is a porous membrane, continuous with and permeating the domain of incarnational life, so the veil has already been lifted for anyone who takes responsibility for developing their living thinking which traverses the entire spectrum. We already know there is no "dualistic hierarchical structure of the dualistic domain", as you are intending it. Moreover, we know why this hard limit speculation is dogmatically held. Because you view the highest wisdom as that in which Earthly human souls in their atomistic state can do whatever their heart desires, but this is foolishness in the eyes of the higher Self across the threshold, the Divine "I", who doesn't only live for or by itself, but the Cosmos as a whole.

OMG, let's not go through this circle again of misinterpreting my words and switching to personal blames. Never I said that it is not possible to remove the veil in the human state. On the opposite, nondual realization is in fact removing the veil of dualistic perception. The only thing I said is that I am not interested in penetrating deeper in the dualistic structures and getting deeper involved in the dualistic hierarchies because I do not belong to this path anymore. You can go through this cycle again in your usual manner, but I will stop here. Existence of different evolutionary paths is not duality, it is diversity (if you don't know what the difference is, that means you also do not understand what nonduality is).

The key to understand here is that the sense of "me" is one of the most essential features of the dualistic path, and that is why the higher-order hierarchies of the dualistic domain embedded it so deeply in the human psyche and organism structure. You admitted that and thank you for being honest. So, the human organism structure was deliberately designed for the dualistic path and so it is authentic and organic for this path. However, one of the key hallmarks of the nondual path is that it is the evolutionary path without relying on the sense-idea of "me". Therefore, the human form is completely inorganic and incompatible for the nondual path. And there is no point to change it because changing it would be contrary to the intention and plan of the higher-order hierarchies that designed the structures to fit the dualistic path. so, the souls that switch to the nondual path, after leaving the human body, simply reincarnate in different forms (nested in nondual hierarchies) which are more fit for the nondual path where the sense of "me" in not embedded in the structure.

We need to get serious, Eugene. These things can't be analyzed from a safe distance indefinitely. We need to livingly discern how the nondual realms, the Divine Self, always manifests through our first-person soul life and thinking perspective. The reason why you feel you are being personally criticized or blamed is because you are keeping these apart. You are dissociating your core being more and more from the 'inorganic human form' with every comment, but this feeling of distance only lives in the intellect. Only the lower organism which sheaths the Divine Self can feel like it is being criticized or being blamed when asked to investigate its own deeper reality, so there is yet another living proof that there are always deeper arrows conditioning our current state of intuitive becoming, even with our nondual realization or our higher cognition. These arrows need to be confronted openly, humbly, and honestly, with prayerful courage, if we are to start investigating them from the inside-out, moving towards the Center, instead of endlessly circumambulating around their periphery. We can't start with opinions, preferences, and theories about the higher hierarchies and their 'dualistic structures', which conveniently demotivate us from any deeper investigation into their inner workings. These are exactly what need to be unwound in the course of our living phenomenology of spiritual activity.

[Stranger]

We need to livingly discern how the nondual realms, the Divine Self, always manifests through our first-person soul life and thinking perspective.

Most of the answer to this is here. The Divine Self always manifests through its individuated spiritual activities. But the manifestation/activity of the Divine Self can go roughly in two modes. The difference is that in one mode there is experiential first-person realization that its very first-person subjective and thinking perspective IS the very first-person subjective perspective of the Divine Self, and in the other mode this realization is absent and instead there is an illusion/belief that their subjective first-person perspective is somehow "separate" from the subjective perspectives of other souls and from the Divine (and such separate perspective is felt as a sense of "separate me", "my own subjectivity"). In a way, the latter it is the Divine Self dreaming itself as if it is a separate character and separate subjective experiencer, and the former is the Self that wakes up from this dream of "separate me" and recognizes Itself within each of its individuated streams of spiritual activity (souls).

These two modes do not mix, the Self cannot directly/experientially know Itself as Itself from its own first-person perspective in its soul life activity, and simultaneously hold a belief that it is a "separate me" with its own subjectivity separate from the Self. It is only one or the other (in other words, these states are "orthogonal" and mutually exclusive).

You are dissociating your core being more and more from the 'inorganic human form' with every comment, but this feeling of distance only lives in the intellect.

You just claimed yourself in another message that "The depth layers of these final products, in which I include our intuitive sense of "me", i.e. the nested imaginative, inspired, intuitive activities of higher beings". In other words, the sense of "me" is embedded in the nested activities of higher beings in the depths of the "human form" structure. But this "sense of me" is incompatible with the state of being where the Self recognizes Itself within its individuated activity (soul), in which case the sense of "me" would be gone like waking up from a dream. But this sense of "me" still remains embedded in the human form, as you just said. So then, how could the human form with such embedded sense of "me" be compatible (or "organic") with the nondual realization of the Self as Itself?

[AshvinP]

We need to livingly discern how the nondual realms, the Divine Self, always manifests through our first-person soul life and thinking perspective.

Most of the answer to this is here. The Divine Self always manifests through its individuated spiritual activities. But the manifestation/activity of the Divine Self can go roughly in two modes. The difference is that in one mode there is experiential first-person realization that its very first-person subjective and thinking perspective IS the very first-person subjective perspective of the Divine Self, and in the other mode this realization is absent and instead there is an illusion/belief that their subjective first-person perspective is somehow "separate" from the subjective perspectives of other souls and from the Divine (and such separate perspective is felt as a sense of "separate me", "my own subjectivity"). In a way, the latter it is the Divine Self dreaming itself as if it is a separate character and separate subjective experiencer, and the former is the Self that wakes up from this dream of "separate me" and recognizes Itself within each of its individuated streams of spiritual activity (souls).

These two modes do not mix, the Self cannot directly/experientially know Itself as Itself from its own first-person perspective in its soul life activity, and simultaneously hold a belief that it is a "separate me" with its own subjectivity separate from the Self. It is only one or the other (in other words, these states are "orthogonal" and mutually exclusive).

You are dissociating your core being more and more from the 'inorganic human form' with every comment, but this feeling of distance only lives in the intellect.

You just claimed yourself in another message that "The depth layers of these final products, in which I include our intuitive sense of "me", i.e. the nested imaginative, inspired, intuitive activities of higher beings". In other words, the sense of "me" is embedded in the nested activities of higher beings in the depths of the "human form" structure. But this "sense of me" is incompatible with the state of being where the Self recognizes Itself within its individuated activity (soul), in which case the sense of "me" would be gone like waking up from a dream. But this sense of "me" still remains embedded in the human form, as you just said. So then, how could the human form with such embedded sense of "me" be compatible (or "organic") with the nondual realization of the Self as Itself?

Is a rain drop incompatible with the atmospheric forces which produces the rain? The trap to watch out for is really simple - as soon as we say two perspectives which obviously exist are "incompatible" or "mutually exclusive" or something similar, we have created a dualism and a hard problem. The intellect will always do this until it begins inflowing imaginative ideational forces which can e compass polar dynamics. The intuitive sense of me is the Divine Self experiencing itself from a unique relational perspective in the dream layers. The Divine Self also simultaneously experiences itself from within awakened layers of the dream. Forces of the actualized Past and the potential Future are experienced simultaneously in the Present state of intuitive becoming. The latter is always being constituted through unique, relationally evolving constellations of those forces.

What is experienced between birth and death as the seperate me, for the average soul today, is the polar opposite of what is experienced between death and rebirth, when we expand our self into the Cosmic expanses. This is a higher-order perception-thinking hysteresis rhythm, in which our momentary, daily, etc. rhythms are nested. The incarnational experience is the outer physiognomy of the death-rebirth experience, just like the smile on a person's face is the outer physiognomy of the inner state of happiness. These are not incompatible or mutually exclusive. They are radically different from one another when viewed from the outer perceptual-conceptual perspective, but their lawful continuity is discerned more and more easily as we ascend the gradient of the inner perspective, i.e. the perspective of the higher Self. The intuitions, inspirations, imaginations are like ideal tuners which attune fragmented notes (percepts-concepts) and instruments, i.e. the instrument of our soul - the intuitive sense of me - to Cosmic rhythms of the Divine Self. Only then can we begin to make sense of where our sense of me fits into the morally perfecting telos of the holistic Cosmic symphony, and it most assuredly fits.