Phenomenological idealism: definitions of common terms

[Ben Iscatus]

What I wrote above is probably one of the most overall and general picture of things that can be given - no convoluted thinking required.

Ah! Now I am reminded of my youngest son's girlfriend's experience a few years ago. She got her degree in a provincial university and then went to Cambridge to do her Masters in politics. Attending one of her earliest lectures, she was sitting at the back of the hall, where it was quite hard to hear, but she realised she couldn't actually understand a word of what was being said. At the end, she queried this with a fellow student, who looked at her and said, "you do realise he was speaking in Latin, don't you?".

[Cleric K]

Cleric, I agree with that. But the point is: such wholistic perspective form the standpoint of the Spirit necessarily integrates both Mystic and SS perspectives, the existential dimensions/aspects and the dimension of Idea/meanings. It can not be otherwise. But along our individual paths we can approach it from the angle of Mystic, or from the SS angle, but at some point (if we never stop and stagnate), we will come to the point/gate of integrating them. In the metamorphic path of humanity these paths (Easter-vs-Western, Mystic vs SS) have been running in parallel without much interception so far, but at some point there will inevitably be a metamorphic event of their integration. But may be we are just too far away from it at this time, and I'm jumping ahead of time too much.

To the above I would have to reply: "Great! Let's talk precisely about this integration! But not in wishy-washy way, in vague generalities. Let's talk concretely. About the way consciousness changes, how cognition changes. How perception changes. How the understanding of reality changes. How this understanding opens up completely unsuspected venues for humanity, which can make life astonishingly meaningful, and not the excuse for existence that we have today in dim Brownian motion. Let's talk about the ways the social structure will transform, how relations with planetary life will transform. How life will change when the problem of death is resolved. Let's talk about all this, deeply and concretely."

Unfortunately, to this I'll get the response above "But may be we are just too far away from it at this time". It's not a question how far we are from it. The wise have said "The journey of thousand miles starts with the first step". We can talk about this first step. The problem is that there's no desire that even the first step be seen. If it was seen, it would be clear that we've been talking about nothing but that first step all the time.

Not only that it's not too early for that step but we're actually already late. And we become more and more late with every second. Western civilization (which means the whole modern world), based of materialistic conceptions, driven by mechanical economics and satisfaction of humanized animal instincts, is already on its downward path. The fruit has already been given. What we see now is only the withering body, just like a seasonal plant withers and dies after it bears its fruit.

The problem is not that it's too early for integration but that this integration is not sought. If it was sought it would be already known that through deepening our self-knowledge and thus world-knowledge, we can make sense of all these processes that happen around us and in us. Then we can understand why we bump in furniture while we look with our blurry vision.

Something like what I wrote in the post above can be the arrived at as a completely logical conclusion by anyone who looks at life with unprejudiced eye - even if they have never heard of SS.

So it's simple as this:
Some say "we enjoy our blurry vision and don't care about anything".
Others say "It's actually possible to correct our vision, to make sense of reality, to see how the Cosmic rhythms are operating, and alleviate our situation by aligning with the Cosmic flow, instead of feeding on decaying corpses while imagining that this can last forever"
Then still others say "Well, there should be balance. Blurry vision is one-sided, but making sense of reality and aligning with the laws of reality is also one-sided. We need the integration of these two approaches but this integration is nowhere to be seen. We don't even know how to conceive what that integration might be like. After all, what does it mean to have integration between having blurry vision and not caring, and understanding the depths of the Cosmic organism and living in its symphonic rhythms? The logic that can reconcile these two things is not yet invented. It's too early. So let's just keep doing whatever we're doing, even without knowing why, and hope for the best"

[Cleric K]

What I wrote above is probably one of the most overall and general picture of things that can be given - no convoluted thinking required.

Ah! Now I am reminded of my youngest son's girlfriend's experience a few years ago. She got her degree in a provincial university and then went to Cambridge to do her Masters in politics. Attending one of her earliest lectures, she was sitting at the back of the hall, where it was quite hard to hear, but she realised she couldn't actually understand a word of what was being said. At the end, she queried this with a fellow student, who looked at her and said, "you do realise he was speaking in Latin, don't you?".

Ben
You realize that your example is irrelevant, I hope.

It's not that I speak in Latin, it's that you don't want to understand what is being said. And you said it yourself: you're worried you might fall in the wizard's thrall. And I'm not trying to put anyone in any one thrall. If you live by the credo of Anna Brown, that everything happens for no reason at all, it's completely natural that every word said here, which seeks the Ideas manifesting as reality, will be a slap in the face.

So let's at least be straightforward and not put the blame where it is not. If you're not interested in deeper meaning of reality, that's fine. But there's no need to turn this around and blame others for not being eloquent enough, while in fact you don't want to understand what they're saying in the first place.

[AshvinP]

Cleric, I agree with that. But the point is: such wholistic perspective form the standpoint of the Spirit necessarily integrates both Mystic and SS perspectives, the existential dimensions/aspects and the dimension of Idea/meanings. It can not be otherwise. But along our individual paths we can approach it from the angle of Mystic, or from the SS angle, but at some point (if we never stop and stagnate), we will come to the point/gate of integrating them. In the metamorphic path of humanity these paths (Easter-vs-Western, Mystic vs SS) have been running in parallel without much interception so far, but at some point there will inevitably be a metamorphic event of their integration. But may be we are just too far away from it at this time, and I'm jumping ahead of time too much.

So it's simple as this:
Some say "we enjoy our blurry vision and don't care about anything".
Others say "It's actually possible to correct our vision, to make sense of reality, to see how the Cosmic rhythms are operating, and alleviate our situation by aligning with the Cosmic flow, instead of feeding on decaying corpses while imagining that this can last forever"
Then still others say "Well, there should be balance. Blurry vision is one-sided, but making sense of reality and aligning with the laws of reality is also one-sided. We need the integration of these two approaches but this integration is nowhere to be seen. We don't even know how to conceive what that integration might be like. After all, what does it mean to have integration between having blurry vision and not caring, and understanding the depths of the Cosmic organism and living in its symphonic rhythms? The logic that can reconcile these two things is not yet invented. It's too early. So let's just keep doing whatever we're doing, even without knowing why, and hope for the best"

Perfect summation. I would add, at some point in discussion of Eastern-Western, Mystical-Scientific spirituality and their integration, the concrete reality of the Christ incarnation, events, and unfolding evolutionary impulse will come up. Maybe not even explicitly, but implicitly enough that people will generally know what is being spoken of, especially anyone who grew up in Western culture. And this is the major obstacle for the blurry vision crowd. There is a major unexamined antipathy of all that centers around Christ and it must be confronted and made explicit in one's awareness for it to be resolved. Mostly it is fine to avoid this topic when people are open-minded and not tied to any particular view on it, but when the suspicion of all that is Christ-centered is a core part of one's worldview, then it must be addressed very early in the process.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made, and without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of men. The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it... The true Light who gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognize Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God— children born not of blood, nor of the desire or will of man, but born of God."

[Eugene I]

So it's simple as this:
Some say "we enjoy our blurry vision and don't care about anything".
Others say "It's actually possible to correct our vision, to make sense of reality, to see how the Cosmic rhythms are operating, and alleviate our situation by aligning with the Cosmic flow, instead of feeding on decaying corpses while imagining that this can last forever"
Then still others say "Well, there should be balance. Blurry vision is one-sided, but making sense of reality and aligning with the laws of reality is also one-sided. We need the integration of these two approaches but this integration is nowhere to be seen. We don't even know how to conceive what that integration might be like. After all, what does it mean to have integration between having blurry vision and not caring, and understanding the depths of the Cosmic organism and living in its symphonic rhythms? The logic that can reconcile these two things is not yet invented. It's too early. So let's just keep doing whatever we're doing, even without knowing why, and hope for the best"

Well, I said "it's too early" being discouraged by resistance (on this forum at least) . It's not early for me, I'm on the wholistic path and will continue no matter who agrees with me and who doesn't. The challenge is that to be prepared for such integration someone needs already to sufficiently advance along both paths, not only intellectually/philosophically, but practically. As few as are those who advanced on each of the paths alone, there are probably almost nobody at this time who is advanced enough along both to be able to fully integrate them (me included). But we should not be discouraged, and, as you said, "The journey of thousand miles starts with the first step"

[Eugene I]

So it's simple as this:
Some say "we enjoy our blurry vision and don't care about anything".
Others say "It's actually possible to correct our vision, to make sense of reality, to see how the Cosmic rhythms are operating, and alleviate our situation by aligning with the Cosmic flow, instead of feeding on decaying corpses while imagining that this can last forever"
Then still others say "Well, there should be balance. Blurry vision is one-sided, but making sense of reality and aligning with the laws of reality is also one-sided. We need the integration of these two approaches but this integration is nowhere to be seen. We don't even know how to conceive what that integration might be like. After all, what does it mean to have integration between having blurry vision and not caring, and understanding the depths of the Cosmic organism and living in its symphonic rhythms? The logic that can reconcile these two things is not yet invented. It's too early. So let's just keep doing whatever we're doing, even without knowing why, and hope for the best"

I think I might be getting it, and I admit that Ashvin is correct - I was carrying the "Kantian divide" cognitive mistake all along without realizing it. I think the root cause of this divide is our unconscious implicit assumption that in reality there are "things", and there are meanings, ideas or "representations" of these "things" when we try to apply our thinking to makes sense of the "things". I don't have enough knowledge about the history of philosophy to figure out when this idea (it's an idea by the way!) appeared, possibly somewhere in Ancient Greece. Kant was just the one who developed this idea to its extreme. This implicit assumption penetrates all science, religions, spiritual traditions (including non-dual) and and most of the philosophy.

This idea is also rooted deep in the non-dual teachings, traditional and modern: there is a "thing" - Reality, or Awareness, or Being, which by itself is not a meaning/idea, and there is an idea/meaning about it when we recognize it and reflect it by cognition. Some schools, such as Zen, insist that when we realize the Awareness (Buddha's nature), it is somehow "direct experiencing" of awareness bypassing any cognitive knowing (they call it a state of "no-mind") where the Awareness and its direct experiencing have nothing to do with any ideas or meanings about it. Similarly, R. Spira teaches that there is a direct experiential Awareness of Awareness (Knowing of Knowing) apart and prior to any "thought" about it. And this is what I was also programmed to believe.

I was meditating today trying to get to the root of it and figure out what is actually going on. I started from visual sense perceptions and was trying to follow the process of the perception itself and comprehension of it by thinking. What I found that every sense perception, when experienced "directly" with attention focused, simultaneously carries a meaning of it. When we apprehend a perception/quale of "redness", we unconsciously believe that there is a quale of "redness", and then a meaning of "redness" when we comprehend such quale by cognition. But in fact, no matter how hard I tried, I could not differentiate the quale from the meaning of it. By "meaning" I don't mean any rational ideas or explanations of what the "redness" is and how it can be explained by physical laws, but I mean just a direct intuition of the pure meaning of "redness". So, as a fact of the phenomenological 1-st person experience, I can not differentiate a quale of any perception from the meaning of it, and therefore I have no reason to assume that there is any essential difference between them. The way I directly experience them is "as if" they are the same "thing". Well, to be logically rigorous, that does not automatically follow that the quale and the meaning are the same if I can not differentiate between them. So, it is still an assumption (of a metaphysical nature), but it is a very reasonable assumption because I really see no experiential evidence or rational reason to support the assumption that a quale and its meaning are in any way different. In other words, the idea that "in reality there are "things", and there are meanings, ideas or "representations" of these "things" when we try to apply our thinking to them" has been an entirely unwarranted assumption.

So, this closes the divide between the "things" and our ideas about them and explains why we are in principle able to comprehend the reality by thinking. It is simply because the reality and the meanings we comprehend about it is the same thing. When exercising comprehension, we simply "break through" into the meaning of the reality given to us. A question can be asked: if this is the case, how come we can also experience a state when we experience the "given" but not comprehend its meaning? If everything is idea, how come we can experience such "blindness" when we only experience the "appearance" of the phenomenon but not the meaning/idea of it? I don't know the answer yet, need to think.

Anyway, the same applies to the existential dimensions of Beingness and Awareness. I was then meditating on the Awareness trying to differentiate the Awareness as it is directly experienced from the meaning of it. And I just could not. The way the Awareness is aware of itself is always a meaning, I just can not differentiate between the "awareness on its own" and a meaning of it. They are inseparable, or just the same thing, the same oneness. Another way to phrase it is to say that Awareness is a self-aware (self-experiencing) meaning. This is I think what Ashvin and Cleric meant when by calling the ideas "living beings-ideas".

Nevertheless, the non-dual insight into the existential dimensions is still entirely valid - there is an existential dimension of Being and Awareness common to all idea-phenomena that "glues" all reality together into oneness. Yet, I was wrong when saying that they are not ideas. These dimensions are also ideal in essence. So, Cleric, I think this is the answer to your question about the logic of the "integration". It is not about integration of the "blurry" vision and "meaningful" vision. It is the integration of the meanings of the existential dimensions/aspects (Beingness-Awareness) into the one wholistic meaningful vision. The "blurry" vision of mystics in fact has never been blurry, it has always been meaningful all along, they just could not realize that what they are experiencing (Awareness and Suchness of the Phenomenon) is in fact the very meaning of it inseparable from the presence (suchness) and experiencing (awareness) of it.

[Cleric K]

So, this closes the divide between the "things" and our ideas about them and explains why we are in principle able to comprehend the reality by thinking. It is simply because the reality and the meanings we comprehend about it is the same thing. When exercising comprehension, we simply "break through" into the meaning of the reality given to us. A question can be asked: if this is the case, how come we can also experience a state when we experience the "given" but not comprehend its meaning? If everything is idea, how come we can experience such "blindness" when we only experience the "appearance" of the phenomenon but not the meaning/idea of it? I don't know the answer yet, need to think.

Anyway, the same applies to the existential dimensions of Beingness and Awareness. I was then meditating on the Awareness trying to differentiate the Awareness as it is directly experienced from the meaning of it. And I just could not. The way the Awareness is aware of itself is always a meaning, I just can not differentiate between the "awareness on its own" and a meaning of it. They are inseparable, or just the same thing, the same oneness. Another way to phrase it is to say that Awareness is a self-aware (self-experiencing) meaning. This is I think what Ashvin and Cleric meant when by calling the ideas "living beings-ideas".

Nevertheless, the non-dual insight into the existential dimensions is still entirely valid - there is an existential dimension of Being and Awareness common to all idea-phenomena that "glues" all reality together into oneness. Yet, I was wrong when saying that they are not ideas. These dimensions are also ideal in essence. So, Cleric, I think this is the answer to your question about the logic of the "integration". It is not about integration of the "blurry" vision and "meaningful" vision. It is the integration of the meanings of the existential dimensions/aspects (Beingness-Awareness) into the one wholistic meaningful vision. The "blurry" vision of mystics in fact has never been blurry, it has always been meaningful all along, they just could not realize that what they are experiencing (Awareness and Suchness of the Phenomenon) is in fact the very meaning of it inseparable from the presence (suchness) and experiencing (awareness) of it.

Alright, not trying to separate meaning in a completely different second order phenomenon compared to the first order pure awareness/experiencing is definitely a step forward This was the purpose of the meditation few posts ago where we tried to sense the dimension of meaning inherent and inseparable from awareness - the Goethe's Idea.

It is a fact that there's always some meaning. Even the buzzing, blooming confusion is cognized as 'something'. Now you say: "they just could not realize that what they are experiencing (Awareness and Suchness of the Phenomenon) is in fact the very meaning of it inseparable from the presence (suchness) and experiencing (awareness) of it." I see what you're trying to do here but what's the purpose, except trying to say that the mystics were not wrong after all. (BTW please note, that I've never said that the mystics of the past were wrong. Everything was completely lawful for them. They did the best that could be done at that stage of evolution). What's the logic in saying that they experienced the meaning of all but couldn't realize it? This is similar to saying that illiterate man looking at a text, experiences the meaning but doesn't realize it. This only confuses matters even more.

The reading analogy actually hints why it is justified to recognize the difference between perception and idea. Both the literate and illiterate man perceive the same geometric shapes of the letters, yet they experience vastly different meaning. The difference is that the former has performed certain work on himself. Certain development has occurred, certain centers in the brain have been rewired and currents in the subtle organization have been rearranged. In this sense we can grasp that spiritual development as a whole consists in one such development of our bodily and spiritual nature. We gain nothing by saying "yeah, the meaning is all there but somehow I don't realize it". Yes, in certain sense the meaning is truly there, we are always placed within the Divine consciousness from whose perspective the meaning is realized, but it's clear that we must make certain transformations, adjustments, we need to pull some levers, to rotate some lenses, such that everything begins to become meaningful, just as text becomes meaningful when we learn to read. This is not to say that everything that can be perceived is already in front of us and we only learn to read it. No, there are also other kinds of perceptions but we must make our way to them and their meaning.

[Eugene I]

What's the logic in saying that they experienced the meaning of all but couldn't realize it? This is similar to saying that illiterate man looking at a text, experiences the meaning but doesn't realize it. This only confuses matters even more.

The insight to the existential aspects that they realized is felt very different from the mundane discursive thoughts and ideas that we usually have. That is why the Buddhists call it a "no-mind" experience. But in fact it is the same high-order Intuition (that you have been talking about) into the existence and the meaning of these existential aspects. They did not really distilled and analyzed whether that experience is essentially a meaning or not. The point of the practice was just to get that "realization" insight without any philosophical analysis of it and without labeling it with any words, without reducing that high-order Intuition to low-order discursive/rational ideas. Yet, that insight into the existential aspects reveals very essential aspects of the Idea. Without such insight the apprehension of the Idea would be incomplete.

When we apprehend and experience the word, we never apprehend the whole meaning of it in its completeness, but only some facets of the manifold of meanings. And most often we just ignore the existential aspects of it not paying attention to their importance. When doing so, we get an insufficient and distorted picture of the world. Realization of the existential aspects/facets of the One Meaning restores the completeness and the unity of the Meaning in its fullness.

In simple words, when we experience the world, we still habitually fragment it into separated forms and "things". even if we intuit into the meanings of these forms (the meaning of a flower, the meaning of the light, etc), we still apprehend seemingly separated/different meanings/ideas. We may intuit that the Idea as a wholeness must be One, but we don't experience it as such (unless we really acquire the perspective of the One Spirit). But this is where the insight into the existential aspects help to realize the fundamental unity: every experience-meaning of every phenomenon inseparably bear the existential aspects of its presence/suchness and experiencing/awareness, and these aspects are always the same no matter how different the meanings might seem to be. These existential aspects/meanings "glue" the wholeness of the experience-meaning together into one, and when we experience these aspects-meanings, we realize the unity experientially.

[Cleric K]

The insight to the existential aspects that they realized is felt very different from the mundane discursive thoughts and ideas that we usually have. That is why the Buddhists call it a "no-mind" experience. But in fact it is the same high-order Intuition (that you have been talking about) into the existence and the meaning of these existential aspects. They did not really distilled and analyzed whether that experience is essentially a meaning or not. The point of the practice was just to get that "realization" insight without any philosophical analysis of it and without labeling it with any words, without reducing that high-order Intuition to low-order discursive/rational ideas. Yet, that insight into the existential aspects reveals very essential aspects of the Idea. Without such insight the apprehension of the Idea would be incomplete.

When we apprehend and experience the word, we never apprehend the whole meaning of it in its completeness, but only some facets of the manifold of meanings. And most often we just ignore the existential aspects of it not paying attention to their importance. When doing so, we get an insufficient and distorted picture of the world. Realization of the existential aspects/facets of the One Meaning restores the completeness and the unity of the Meaning in its fullness.

In simple words, when we experience the world, we still habitually fragment it into separated forms and "things". even if we intuit into the meanings of these forms (the meaning of a flower, the meaning of the light, etc), we still apprehend seemingly separated/different meanings/ideas. We may intuit that the Idea as a wholeness must be One, but we don't experience it as such (unless we really acquire the perspective of the One Spirit). But this is where the insight into the existential aspects help to realize the fundamental unity: every experience-meaning of every phenomenon inseparably bear the existential aspects of its presence/suchness and experiencing/awareness, and these aspects are always the same no matter how different the meanings might seem to be. These existential aspects/meanings "glue" the wholeness of the experience-meaning together into one, and when we experience these aspects-meanings, we realize the unity experientially.

Yes, and no one has denied the authenticity and experiential depth of the mystical experience. But I must bring again the blurry analogy. Understanding the totality as a meaningful whole doesn't by itself make our perspective equivalent to that of the One Spirit that speaks forth the Cosmos. As you say, it's very important realization and once we grasp it it will be with us till the end of time, so to speak. But what we grasp is really only a seed that must grow. We behold the Cosmos as differentiated. We have five fingers on each hand. Santeri would protest, he would say this is dishonest, that in reality discrete numbers don't exist. But still... we have five fingers on the hand. Blame the Universe for being dishonest and creating five distinct fingers instead of one continuous. So it's not a question to reduce the higher order into unnecessary fragments. The question is to recognize what is already differentiated. Smearing it out doesn't make it whole. We still bump in the differentiated furniture no matter if we believe it is all one. So yes, we are really developing concepts, we speak about astral, etheric body, soul organs, planetary spheres, hierarchy of beings and so on. The prejudice is that this is optional. But it's not. What is optional is breaking down matter in the LHC. This won't bring any further insight into reality. The basic facts of QM and GR already give us almost everything necessary to spiritualize science and understand everything from a higher perspective. But the situation is not the same according to higher knowledge.

Think of it thus. In other circumstances, evolution could proceed in such a way that the Spirit could pass through evolutionary arcs that would look like going through a gallery. Completely safe, without any extremes, smooth organic metamorphosis and experience of different states of being. In such a scenario there would never be any need to develop knowledge in the way we do. We must understand that knowledge for our kind of evolution is a necessity, not an option.

Imagine a complicated apparatus with many levers, potentiometers, sliders, switches and so on. Imagine the state of existence before the fall. It can be said that all these controls simply didn't exist. They existed as a potential but from the viewpoint of the Heavenly state they were completely coherent, like Bose-Einstein condensate. Delving into sin is like gradually recognizing the potential for all these controls and trying to experiment with them. Some of the levers cause strong pleasure, others pain. We begin to experiment wildly with all the controls which produces highly complicated state of being. Consider this:



(the sound may be muted because it's little painful ) This is an oscilloscope operating in XY mode. The left audio channel feeds the X axis, the right channel - Y. Practically it draws Lissajous figures. Now imagine that through our spiritual activity we modify in quite chaotic way the parameters of the apparatus (which is like wave generator for the X and Y channels) and the picture becomes increasingly complicated. It becomes so complicated, the effects so non-linear, that it is no longer possible to make any sense. We push a lever but the picture changes in very unpredictable ways. So we swim instinctively within these states and through experience learn some trick that we pass from mouth to mouth. We say "You know what, try pushing this lever and flip that switch. The picture becomes very nice". The other person tries and says "Yeah, you are right. But this has side effect. This seems to activate some longer wavelength oscillation and after a while the picture swings in the opposite direction and becomes difficult to bear."

So here we are, pushing and pulling levers, twisting potentiometers and trying to get the hang of reality (that is - perceiving, thinking, feeling and willing, if it wasn't clear already). Now there have always been those that could remember something of the state before the parameters of the apparatus were all randomized. And it was important that this memory was preserved. These became the religions. People knew that there was a state where the parameters are all very well adjusted and all religions spoke of a time that they will be once again. The main impulse for the restoration of the parameters has arrived. It acts as attractor that gives additional feedback to the process, without which every adjustment is a matter of trial and error. The attractor serves as a kind of higher intuition which manifests through the power of Love. Through that we begin to orient ourselves better about what the different levers and potentiometers do. Basically we get additional sense that tells us if some adjustment brings us closer or away from the fine-tuned state, where we no longer flow along waves that we don't understand. This knowledge becomes Wisdom. It still requires some amount of tinkering, trial and error, there's still suffering involved but the feedback mechanism helps a lot. Without it we are completely lost - there are simply too many combinations and the vast majority of them are painful and ultimately lead to pure noise. Most of these effects come with great delay and it is practically impossible to guess which lever is responsible for them. But through the accumulated Wisdom and the feedback mechanism it becomes possible.

Such is our situation today. We have the Love impulse and we are in position to gain the needed Wisdom about the ways we must operate the apparatus. No one is going to do that work for us. We're only provided with the means. It is up to us to find the proper way. And this is the most amazing, most artful, most scientific work that lies before us. Only if people realized it! We need to reverse-engineer the Cosmos, to understand what each lever does, what each potentiometer affects. We don't need this as some vain curiosity. It is vital knowledge. We need that knowledge because we must begin to operate these controls in full consciousness. Everyone is fully responsible for operating their controls with Wisdom and Love. As the controls are more and more finely tuned, the picture reveals Truth.

The Spirit had to find its way into the parametric chaos of the apparatus in order to be forced to learn through experience how to fix it. The Spirit would never need such knowledge if everything was going on smoothly along the Heavenly currents. Today we need the knowledge because it is up to us to understand how to fine tune the parameters and evolve towards Truth.

[Soul_of_Shu]

And once again as serendipity would have it, Cleric might just as well have offered his 'Jerobeam Fenderson - Nuclear Black Noise (oscilloscope / lissajous music)' post in the Patterns and Meaning in Music thread.