(Short) The Idolatry of Space

[AshvinP]

“The maxim is this: that the antidote to excessive indulgence is development, not restraint. When the young psychologist feels that he is getting altogether too abstract, too intellectualistic; that he is taking logic too seriously and forgetting ‘Life’, let him meet the situation by – taking logic a little more seriously still! Only this time let him do so of his own free will.”

-Owen Barfield, Psychology and Reason


We discussed in a previous post how, polarly opposed to the force of Gratitude, there is the force of pride. Pride is the inevitable consequence of mistaking one's own creations for the functional equivalent of Reality itself. This conflation of one’s own creations with Reality results from our lack of knowledge and our fear of uncertainty. Specifically, the fear of confronting, and therefore knowing, our own limitations. Our conscious awareness of these limitations, and the possibility of overcoming them, manifest in our experience as Gratitude, while our unconsciousness and epistemic pessimism manifest as pride. The prideful conflation of one’s own creations for Reality itself is what spiritual traditions also refer to as "idolatry". Many of us will claim to 'believe' in a Reality beyond our current experience and knowledge. We will say that we have not idolized any of our own immediate perceptions or conceptions of the Cosmos. These outward representations, however, are never the pragmatic standard by which we test claims to knowledge. Instead, we measure them by their inner meaning, i.e. how the concepts underlying the claims function in our perceptions, thoughts, and reasoning; how they practically influence those things as we go about our lives.

The most challenging aspect of idolatry in the modern age is that, when one idol is sacrificed at the altar of Gratitude, another idol immediately materializes from the summit of pride to take its place. This ‘mysterious’ regeneration of idols is deeply woven into our intuitive experience of abstracted spatial dimensions. We should first understand how the dimensions of space function in our experience. One helpful clue is embedded in Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, which mathematically demonstrated that our experience of Time is inseparably bound to our relative ‘motion’ through space. That is, our 1st-person experience of Time is always related to purposes and goals of living agencies in relation to the objects of our thoughts, feelings, or desires; the telos they are moving towards. Spatial dimensions reflect what purposes we or others want to accomplish and how we or others want to accomplish them. For a more thorough exploration of this dynamic, one could refer to my essay on a phenomenology of mechanism. This relativistic understanding of Time-experience, in relation to our own meaningful activity, is practically beyond dispute across all fields of modern science which have studied the relation of space and time.


“[Schopenhauer and Schelling] did not see that intellectualized time is space, that the intelligence works upon the phantom of duration, not on duration itself, that the elimination of time is the habitual, normal, commonplace act of our understanding, that the relativity of our knowledge of the mind is a direct result of this fact, and that hence, to pass from intellection to vision, from the relative to the absolute, is not a question of getting outside of time (we are already there); on the contrary, one must get back into duration and recapture reality in the very mobility which is its essence.”

- Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind


Space, then, is the way in which the intellect eliminates Time to fix phenomena in ‘place’ for measurement and analysis, thereby moving us closer to various purposes and goals embedded within our ideations. When I wake up in the morning and have the idea - “go make coffee to help me stay awake” - the mobile duration of this idea, and all ideas nested within it, is abstracted into spatial dimensions which assist me to fulfill the intention of the idea. These abstract dimensions allow me to link, through my thinking activity, objects to other objects, “causes” to “effects”,  in ways which reliably manifest a cup of coffee for me to drink. We are habitually eliminating Time with space in this way when remaining within the confines of intellectual perception. It should be clear that such a mental habit was absolutely necessary for the maturation of our Ego-“I” who freely thinks and analyzes phenomena for precise content of perception. Just as a child must eventually evolve his “I” into a subject capable of confronting the world content to win his independence, so too must the individual human during the course of his day, and so too must all of humanity during the unfolding of its collective history.


“To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.” – Johann Gottfried Herder


When we idolize space, however, we have cut ourselves off from the evolutionary path which would also allow our intellectual cognition to overcome its own spatial limitations. That is especially the case in our age of modern perceptual-enhancing technologies, which act as a synthetic substitute for naturally evolved cognition, freed from the shackles of abstract space-time. Nature politely requests, or sometimes rudely demands, that we begin training our vision on the evolving target of cognitive development and maturity, which allows us to rediscover the depth structure of meaning underlying her appearances – the True imaginations (thoughts), the Beautiful inspirations (feelings), and the Good intuitions (desires) which weave through her body and make her fragmented appearances whole again; resurrecting them into a richly meaningful and eternal life. Modern technology, however, fixes our sight within the spatial construct and keeps it trained on the same old materialistic goals of money, sex, and power.

This modern idolatry of space encompasses ideologies of all variations in the modern age – rationalism, scientism, materialism, post-modernism, post-[insert ‘ism’ here], mysticism, and religious fundamentalism. It is an idolatry which overarches all other forms of idolatry, and that is exactly what makes it so difficult to perceive and address. Religious and spiritual people will especially fall into this trap because they feel that they have already overcome idolatry via their intellectual understanding of it. When we feel that we have overcome idolatry is precisely when we are most vulnerable to it, because we have lost all incentive and motivation to search out the deeper currents of idolatry through which our thinking is still flowing. The devout and dogmatic religious will especially balk at the notion that they engage in idolatry, because it undermines the pride they take in strict adherence to their religious faith. Yet the scripture of that faith could not be any more clear in its warning against the ever-present temptation of idolatry.


“You shall not make for yourself a graven image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." - Exodus 20:4


Space is the graven image of intellectualized Time which undergirds all other graven images. Once cannot even think or speak of “heaven above”, “earth beneath”, or “water under the earth” without also presupposing the abstraction of spatial dimensions. To be clear, I am not asserting that the ancient Hebrews were expected to overcome spatial abstractions at the time of Moses. Rather, I am suggesting that the Ten Commandments marked the beginning of the Divine preparation of His ‘temple’ on Earth, so that His will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. The Christian spiritual tradition recognizes Christ incarnate as the archetypal fulfillment of the fully human and fully Divine temple on Earth, and further encourages us to perceive how each individual alive on Earth today can be transfigured from the image of idols into the image of Christ over our meaningful Time-experience. It is now well past Time that modern man sacrifices abstract space and begins preparing his own ‘temple’ for the Christ within; to realize the fruit expressed in the immemorial words of Saint Paul, “it is no longer ‘I’ who live, but Christ who lives in me”.


“What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God.” -2 Corinthians 6:16


All that is required for this preparation of our temple, at first, is our own spiritual thinking activity. It is this activity which can begin forming constellations of ideas which are in harmonic relation to each other, and which also act as symbols pointing towards even more harmonic relations yet to be discovered. By remembering that these ideal constellations are symbols, we proactively ward off the force of spatial idolatry. One form of this idolatry, which is seldom noticed by those within the Western religious traditions, is related to the notion of an eternal soul. Most spiritual traditions accept the reality of an eternal soul, but fail to perceive any of its activity before incarnating into the spatial world or disincarnating from the spatial world. The most fanciful speculations end up filling this gap in our spatial perception. Perhaps these souls are waiting in a ‘storage bin’ for souls before and after they incarnate into their single spatial lifetime, and, in the meantime, they have fallen fast asleep with their soul-eyes closed.

It is the idolatry of space which convinces many people that such childish speculations are necessary, since, in their minds, it is simply inconceivable for souls to be existing, perceiving, desiring, feeling, or thinking through content of a non-spatial realm. It is inconceivable that knowledge from the non-spatial realm can be brought back to the spatial realm for the benefit of the incarnate souls. All of that is despite the doctrine of God’s Incarnation, which is the clear archetypal image of such a positive feedback of soul-experience occurring. Everything beyond the horizon of intellectually spatialized vision is simply converted into a black hole of experience for the modern soul; a blank canvas onto which its own unexamined desires can be projected. “Heaven”, the “afterlife”, “purgatory”, and similar abstract concepts become fictitious corporate entities which are functioning as the alter-ego of the individual. The alter-ego is what Jung also referred to as the “shadow”-self who harbors all our darkest, i.e., most unexamined, thoughts, feelings, and desires.


"I suffer my agony between two madmen. I enter the truth if I descend. Become accustomed to being alone with the dead. It is difficult, but this is precisely how you will discover the worth of your living companions. What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection."

- Carl Jung, Liber Novus


Other spiritual worldviews of a more mystical persuasion have concluded the answer to this spatial idolatry is to deny the existence and utility of space altogether as absolute "Maya"; to write off human endeavors occurring within space - endeavors aimed at precisely knowing the existential sources of our existence - as mere fantasies of the ‘personal’ mind. This mystical mindset is yet another, albeit harder to notice, manifestation of spatial idolatry. It does not mistake the spatial world for Reality itself, but it condemns human knowing to the spatial world for our entire lives within it. Therefore, the only world we can systematically perceive, know, evaluate, or even speak logically and coherently about is the spatial world. It is easy to discern how this roundabout idolatry, for all intents and purposes, once again worships the graven images of space and denies the knowledge of non-spatial spiritual realms. It seeks to explain away the need to explain the soul's immortality; to absolve itself from the 'care of the dead' and from the work they demand of us.

As Barfield observed at the outset of this essay, we will only overcome the idolatry of space through space itself, and that is only IF we do not arbitrarily cease our reasoning through spatial phenomena whenever we reach our desired conclusions. By logically reasoning back through the shadowy idols of spatial dimensions, we can begin to perceive the ideal sources of Light who cast them with ever-increasing clarity. Once we come to realize space itself as the overarching idol of our current stage of cognitive metamorphosis, it will be much easier to perceive how all phenomena occurring within these spatial dimensions are also potential idols. If Reality is durational, rather than spatial, in its mobile essence, then all such spatial phenomena are reflecting moments of an organic and cosmic Unity. The latter is then seen as a living organism who is evolving through our own ideational activity. To cease our logical reasoning through these moments - to fix them in space and idolize them - is nothing less than inviting stagnation, decay, and death.


"And in this I give advice: It is to your advantage not only to be doing what you began and were desiring to do a year ago; but now you also must complete the doing of it; that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have. For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have." - 2 Corinthians 8:10-12

[Cleric K]

...

Thanks Ashvin!
Things are really spiraling towards a core here. It turned out I'm writing about quite the same thing, from another angle. Check out the new TCOTCT. The post can be seen as an illustration of everything that is spoken of here.

[Federica]

(...)

Ashvin,

Although the topic of Space-Time has been abundantly addressed on this forum, I thought I would attempt to revive it once again. I have three reasons - beyond personal interest, a couple of larger considerations are emerging as well. I would seize the opportunity of your essay to speak of these here:

1. I hope I will understand Space-Time
2. Time-suffering is an overarching idea, hence a key entry point to present the living thinking path
3. Space-Time is also the key angle to debunk certain harmful non-dualism

I'd like to delve into the specific insights of the essay too, but better in a later post. Now to my three reasons to revive Space-Time.


The correct understanding of Space-Time has become for me the most pressing of all the Ideas I wish I could become acquainted with. Lacking it, I realize how central it is, and also that it can’t be sped up. Some substantial work has to be done first, and in the meantime of doing such work, I have been trying my intellectual hands at the question. But even that has proven difficult. The only progress I can report is, I have developed a feeling of trust that I will eventually understand it, and I have become practically neutral towards the feelings of stress, distress, and overstress commonly associated with the passing of time. It seems like, nowadays, harboring dark feelings in this respect, from regret to anxiety, has become the norm, and those who say they are exempt, are probably simply sinking the whole question below their horizon. At the same time as these time-related preoccupations are becoming a kind of hell on Earth for the many, time efficiency, time boxing, time-balance, timelines, time-to-whatever, all sorts of time-management approaches are escalating into excruciating global obsessions. All aspects of life are concerned. Reflecting on the extent of this trend, and bringing together my current development trajectory with what I observe in the world at large, I have come to think that one effective way to present people with the width of the living thinking path would be to start with time, rather than with perception. Not only because time has become such a pain-point today, but also because we feel so confident and secure in our sensory perceptions, while time is admittedly a much more frightening and disturbing beast, in the present-day. As you recently observed:

Much of the siren song which distracts us from the supra-sensory reality of thinking comes from the temporal gap between our inner effort and the results of that effort. We simply don't have the attention span, memory, and, therefore, living interest to discern the lawfulness which occurs over these longer time-frames. That's why most people will start tuning out as soon as it is mentioned about things like Karma, reincarnation, and how what we think-do in one lifetime feeds into another, etc.

Beyond the personal and general explanatory needs the concept of Space-Time could address, I see at least one more reason (n. 3) to once again consider this question. Could it be that, on first approach, Time is the most effective angle to distinguish the path of living thinking from other contemporary paths within and without idealism, first off the direct path of non-duality? Indeed, the most striking issue with some of these philosophies is their unwitting dualism, so it seems logical to point it out first, but it’s extremely difficult to succeed with such an argument. It’s just too much in the face - unbearable. Thinking back to my personal journey, and keeping in mind what I am learning these days, I would imagine that Time is perhaps a more clarifying way in. I'll try to illustrate how.


This adds more depth to my n. 2, also. I remember when, still trapped in a dualistic response to reality, I was looking for new angles to approach time in a balanced, holistic way. Having put aside the ambition to understand the mystery of time, my reasonable aim was to uncover and rationalize the common bipolar behavior, where many oscillate between, on one side, acting (or failing to) as if death would never come, and running a harrowing rat race on the other, always in between the guilty feelings of time waste, and the desperate attempts to win the perpetual battle against time, by means of obsessive efficiency methods, and drastic prioritizing. We perpetually ask: what is really, really meaningful in life, and how to achieve it more resource-efficiently than ever before? Looking at how we tackle such questions in our societies today, I am under the impression that some of todays major global trends, such as a certain self-help spirituality, mindfulness as antidote to mental-health issues, the rise of studio-yoga and other body-mind physical disciplines, minimalism in its many variations, and even some larger impulses to identify in societal causes, are in fact the diverse expressions of a unitary attempt to deal with the problem of time, and to respond to the fundamental and painful dysfunctions it triggers in us.


And here the siren song of some spiritual teachers of non-duality comes in. There is indeed a certain relief from extreme time-suffering to be found there. Those teachers offer a sleek, and rather appealing way to understand time: past and future only exist as thoughts, the Now alone is luminous and real. In other words, time-stress and time-anxiety are thought forms that can be dismissed, because time itself is one, which, for this very reason, should be dismissed as illusory production of the individual's separate self. And there comes the Now, welcoming us with comfort and respite. In peaceful stillness, we quit all time-illusions, and open up to spaciousness instead, where our preoccupations cease all at once. Today, after some months of thorough, guided reflections on the nature of all reality, I realize the extreme denial of time (stillness) and the extreme idolatry of space (spaciousness) popularized by this approaches. Still, I remember the appeal these views were exerting on me. I was sensitive to the fact that a crucial issue was being addressed, instead of pushed under the rug. Moreover, such understanding seemed to bring some practical benefits at first, in terms of peace of mind, and pacified, harmonious relations with the next person. But what felt like progress at first, later became a numbing, ultimately alienating dead end. I see today that the Now is alienating, because those benefits are achieved through severing all hopes and yearnings for knowledge and understanding. The huge price to pay is to give up, to understand that we cannot understand. In the confinement of the Now that we are lured into, we find ourselves erecting self-mortifying barricades against the unknown, and we become the epitome of abdication, and ultimately desertion from our human nature.


In summary, taking today’s global phenomenon of time angst as a starting point, either we accept a slow death in time-hell, or we have the choice to move in two opposite directions. One explores and tackles the time issue, the other denies its existence. Either we take the path of living thinking, where we trustingly develop our spiritual faculty of thinking, to attain the higher worlds of Love in the supra-sensory, time-ordered spheres of reality, where space dimensions vanish at once with the sensory veil, or we take the direct path. Here we cut our arduous but glorious human quest short, begging for peace and happiness at the expense of our most precious qualities: our inherent longing for knowledge, that we give up, and our distinctive faculty of thinking, that we agree to vilify. And key to observe, the practical process to operate such transactions is the denial of time. One has to enter the confinement of the no-time-zone first, the realm of Now. In the Now-loop, there is only one consolation left to attempt: to dwell in idolized pure spaciousness, hoping to forget the epic losses in the multiplicity of sensory perceptions.


That's how I would imagine that, by hearing of these two radically opposite approches to time and their respective consequences, people could perhaps be better alerted to the risks and asks of non-duality, and become more open to the path of livign thinking. For my part, even if I can't claim that I understand time, even if I fail to grasp the longer time-frames and their interplay with karma, freedom, and sensory perceptions, I’m much less aggravated today by anything that time seems able to end, break, or force, and most of all, I can intuit that a path of understanding lies ahead. There is a possibility. The stakes are high, and the limitations are my limitations. This makes all the difference, and I will never be thankful enough for having been granted the possibility to access a universal, integral understanding of Time, that does not scorn some of our most precious human qualities and impulses, namely our Thinking and our thirst for Knowledge and Truth.

[AshvinP]

(...)

Ashvin,

Although the topic of Space-Time has been abundantly addressed on this forum, I thought I would attempt to revive it once again. I have three reasons - beyond personal interest, a couple of larger considerations are emerging as well. I would seize the opportunity of your essay to speak of these here:

1. I hope I will understand Space-Time
2. Time-suffering is an overarching idea, hence a key entry point to present the living thinking path
3. Space-Time is also the key angle to debunk certain harmful non-dualism

I'd like to delve into the specific insights of the essay too, but better in a later post. Now to my three reasons to revive Space-Time.


The correct understanding of Space-Time has become for me the most pressing of all the Ideas I wish I could become acquainted with. Lacking it, I realize how central it is, and also that it can’t be sped up. Some substantial work has to be done first, and in the meantime of doing such work, I have been trying my intellectual hands at the question. But even that has proven difficult. The only progress I can report is, I have developed a feeling of trust that I will eventually understand it, and I have become practically neutral towards the feelings of stress, distress, and overstress commonly associated with the passing of time. It seems like, nowadays, harboring dark feelings in this respect, from regret to anxiety, has become the norm, and those who say they are exempt, are probably simply sinking the whole question below their horizon. At the same time as these time-related preoccupations are becoming a kind of hell on Earth for the many, time efficiency, time boxing, time-balance, timelines, time-to-whatever, all sorts of time-management approaches are escalating into excruciating global obsessions. All aspects of life are concerned. Reflecting on the extent of this trend, and bringing together my current development trajectory with what I observe in the world at large, I have come to think that one effective way to present people with the width of the living thinking path would be to start with time, rather than with perception. Not only because time has become such a pain-point today, but also because we feel so confident and secure in our sensory perceptions, while time is admittedly a much more frightening and disturbing beast, in the present-day. As you recently observed:

Much of the siren song which distracts us from the supra-sensory reality of thinking comes from the temporal gap between our inner effort and the results of that effort. We simply don't have the attention span, memory, and, therefore, living interest to discern the lawfulness which occurs over these longer time-frames. That's why most people will start tuning out as soon as it is mentioned about things like Karma, reincarnation, and how what we think-do in one lifetime feeds into another, etc.

Beyond the personal and general explanatory needs the concept of Space-Time could address, I see at least one more reason (n. 3) to once again consider this question. Could it be that, on first approach, Time is the most effective angle to distinguish the path of living thinking from other contemporary paths within and without idealism, first off the direct path of non-duality? Indeed, the most striking issue with some of these philosophies is their unwitting dualism, so it seems logical to point it out first, but it’s extremely difficult to succeed with such an argument. It’s just too much in the face - unbearable. Thinking back to my personal journey, and keeping in mind what I am learning these days, I would imagine that Time is perhaps a more clarifying way in. I'll try to illustrate how.


This adds more depth to my n. 2, also. I remember when, still trapped in a dualistic response to reality, I was looking for new angles to approach time in a balanced, holistic way. Having put aside the ambition to understand the mystery of time, my reasonable aim was to uncover and rationalize the common bipolar behavior, where many oscillate between, on one side, acting (or failing to) as if death would never come, and running a harrowing rat race on the other, always in between the guilty feelings of time waste, and the desperate attempts to win the perpetual battle against time, by means of obsessive efficiency methods, and drastic prioritizing. We perpetually ask: what is really, really meaningful in life, and how to achieve it more resource-efficiently than ever before? Looking at how we tackle such questions in our societies today, I am under the impression that some of todays major global trends, such as a certain self-help spirituality, mindfulness as antidote to mental-health issues, the rise of studio-yoga and other body-mind physical disciplines, minimalism in its many variations, and even some larger impulses to identify in societal causes, are in fact the diverse expressions of a unitary attempt to deal with the problem of time, and to respond to the fundamental and painful dysfunctions it triggers in us.


And here the siren song of some spiritual teachers of non-duality comes in. There is indeed a certain relief from extreme time-suffering to be found there. Those teachers offer a sleek, and rather appealing way to understand time: past and future only exist as thoughts, the Now alone is luminous and real. In other words, time-stress and time-anxiety are thought forms that can be dismissed, because time itself is one, which, for this very reason, should be dismissed as illusory production of the individual's separate self. And there comes the Now, welcoming us with comfort and respite. In peaceful stillness, we quit all time-illusions, and open up to spaciousness instead, where our preoccupations cease all at once. Today, after some months of thorough, guided reflections on the nature of all reality, I realize the extreme denial of time (stillness) and the extreme idolatry of space (spaciousness) popularized by this approaches. Still, I remember the appeal these views were exerting on me. I was sensitive to the fact that a crucial issue was being addressed, instead of pushed under the rug. Moreover, such understanding seemed to bring some practical benefits at first, in terms of peace of mind, and pacified, harmonious relations with the next person. But what felt like progress at first, later became a numbing, ultimately alienating dead end. I see today that the Now is alienating, because those benefits are achieved through severing all hopes and yearnings for knowledge and understanding. The huge price to pay is to give up, to understand that we cannot understand. In the confinement of the Now that we are lured into, we find ourselves erecting self-mortifying barricades against the unknown, and we become the epitome of abdication, and ultimately desertion from our human nature.


In summary, taking today’s global phenomenon of time angst as a starting point, either we accept a slow death in time-hell, or we have the choice to move in two opposite directions. One explores and tackles the time issue, the other denies its existence. Either we take the path of living thinking, where we trustingly develop our spiritual faculty of thinking, to attain the higher worlds of Love in the supra-sensory, time-ordered spheres of reality, where space dimensions vanish at once with the sensory veil, or we take the direct path. Here we cut our arduous but glorious human quest short, begging for peace and happiness at the expense of our most precious qualities: our inherent longing for knowledge, that we give up, and our distinctive faculty of thinking, that we agree to vilify. And key to observe, the practical process to operate such transactions is the denial of time. One has to enter the confinement of the no-time-zone first, the realm of Now. In the Now-loop, there is only one consolation left to attempt: to dwell in idolized pure spaciousness, hoping to forget the epic losses in the multiplicity of sensory perceptions.


That's how I would imagine that, by hearing of these two radically opposite approches to time and their respective consequences, people could perhaps be better alerted to the risks and asks of non-duality, and become more open to the path of livign thinking. For my part, even if I can't claim that I understand time, even if I fail to grasp the longer time-frames and their interplay with karma, freedom, and sensory perceptions, I’m much less aggravated today by anything that time seems able to end, break, or force, and most of all, I can intuit that a path of understanding lies ahead. There is a possibility. The stakes are high, and the limitations are my limitations. This makes all the difference, and I will never be thankful enough for having been granted the possibility to access a universal, integral understanding of Time, that does not scorn some of our most precious human qualities and impulses, namely our Thinking and our thirst for Knowledge and Truth.

Thanks for revisiting this topic here, Federica. As it so happens, I have been working on a space-time essay for the last few weeks, but it's progressing very slowly. I am resisting my normal urge to simply cut short my efforts and put it out 'as is', instead taking a more disciplined approach to wait for inspiration and thereby flesh it out as much as possible, with hopefully more benefit to not only myself but those who read it. So I hope you don't mind waiting some more time for a full response on this issue. In the meantime, of course, responses from others here would be welcome.

I will also list a few preliminary points which are relevant to your post:

- I think you are correct that Time-experience is a very effective way to approach the issue of living thinking. At the most basic level, the outer world of perception is mostly spatial while the inner world of soul-experience is entirely temporal for normal consciousness. If we understand qualitative inner activity to be a priori to outer spatial perception, then it only makes sense to trace back into the depth structure of the inner temporal rhythms to unearth the living thinking which structures our waking experience. Another way to think of it is, that outer space is a means by which we manifest the simultaneity of nested temporal thought-rhythms along the spiritual depth gradient. All that we perceive spatially speaks to us of these varied Time-rhythms residing within our shared subconscious which, through that spatial perception, we can perceive simultaneously.

It is good to take your start from the time which you experience in your own soul. Ask yourself how you experience time in your own soul? Let me speak more clearly. I do not ask you to think of time as you see it on the clock; there you only compare your inner experience with outer processes. I want you now to put right out of your mind all reading of the clock and other outer events. Consider only how does the time relationship express itself in your soul? Ponder over it as deeply as you will, and you will find that you can think of nothing as a standard for time but the following: you can grasp a thought when it is aroused in you by some external perception. You are looking at something, and a thought or idea arises in your soul. When you enquire more exactly into the relationship between yourself and the idea or the thought, you have to answer: While I have the thought, I myself am actually the thought. Try and think the thing over to the very end and you will say: While I am engrossed in the thought, then I am, in my innermost being, the thought. It would be mere prejudice to say that together with this concept you had also the idea of the “I am.” The “I am” is not there while you have surrendered yourself to the thought. You are yourself the thought. Without a certain practical training you cannot be something else simultaneously with the thought which you hold.

Firstly then, man is in the thoughts and feelings which are directly given to him. Suppose you let this piece of chalk incite you to a thought; then, if you exclude everything else, if you are absorbed in the idea that has been stimulated in you by the perception of chalk, your inmost being is one with the idea of chalk. But now suppose you have grasped this idea and all at once you remember that yesterday you also saw chalk; and you compare the idea of chalk that has been given you by direct perception with what you experienced yesterday. And you will be aware that though you are completely identified with the chalk observed to-day you cannot identify yourself with the chalk of yesterday. This latter is a memory picture and must remain so. You have truly become one with the chalk of to-day, but the chalk of yesterday has become something external for you. The chalk observed to-day is identified with your own inner being of to-day; your memory picture is, to be sure, something upon which you look back, but in comparison with the other it is objective and external. And it is the same with everything you have experienced in your soul with the exception of the present moment. The present moment is for the moment your inner being; everything that you have experienced — you have rid yourself of, it is already outside you. You may imagine, if you wish to have a picture of it, that the present moment with your concepts is a snake, and what you put outside you is the cast-off skin of the snake. And as the snake casts its skin again a second and a third time so you can have ever so many cast-off ideas which are for you something external in comparison with your temporary present inwardness. That is to say, as far back as you can remember, you have continually been making outward what was first inward. The idea of the chalk, for example, which you now have, the very next moment you have made it external to you, while you yourself have passed on to something else. That is to say, you are working at a continual exteriorisation. You are perpetually creating something within you and then leaving it behind; this innermost that you have in you at once becomes an outer, just like a sloughed skin. Our soul-life consists in this — that the inner is continually becoming an outer; so that within our own being, within this inner spiritual process, we are able to distinguish between the real innermost and the outer within the inner. We are all the time within our own being, but we have there to distinguish two parts: first, our real inwardness, and secondly, the part of our inwardness which has become an outer.

- I think you are also correct that the popular non-dual traditions address a crucial issue of 'Time-suffering', and validly link it to our own inner activity of consciousness. But, as you also imply, what happens is that their intellectual conception of the 'Now' is idolized, so the 'past' and 'future' still operate as externalized sequential frames in linear timelines, all imbued with only superficial conceptual significance from within the current mind-container, and thereby the link to higher knowledge and understanding is severed, and the creative responsibility which would naturally accompany such higher knowledge. 

You state it very nicely here - "In the confinement of the Now that we are lured into, we find ourselves erecting self-mortifying barricades against the unknown, and we become the epitome of abdication, and ultimately desertion from our human nature... In the Now-loop, there is only one consolation left to attempt: to dwell in idolized pure spaciousness, hoping to forget the epic losses in the multiplicity of sensory perceptions."

- You make a very strong case for how all these things have the utmost practical-moral implications for the trajectory of our individual lives and, in polar correspondence, the life of humanity as a whole. Ultimately all these idolizing world-outlooks serve to justify an innate tendency to dwell in passive, consumptive, convenient, self-circumscribed thinking habits. They serve to halt vertical movement into the Cosmic depth structure which eventually becomes an accelerating backsliding under the power of its own inverse momentum. Why is it that all these outlooks are so firmly rooted in past modes of being-thought, simply regurgitating things which were expressed by philosophers, poets, and prophets many centuries and even millennia ago (and expressed much more artfully)? The illusion of novelty only comes from the fact that new conceptual terminology has precipitated from scientific-technological evolution and cast into infinitely varied combinations. As you correctly observe, it's because the outlooks invariably idolize the world of spatiality-perception, which is synonymous with the 'past'. It is not only we who suffer from this past fixation, but the entire Earth kingdoms and spiritual Cosmos which is awaiting in eager anticipation our wise and loving forays into the temporal unknown in search of Truth and Freedom.  

[Federica]

Thanks for revisiting this topic here, Federica. As it so happens, I have been working on a space-time essay for the last few weeks, but it's progressing very slowly. I am resisting my normal urge to simply cut short my efforts and put it out 'as is', instead taking a more disciplined approach to wait for inspiration and thereby flesh it out as much as possible, with hopefully more benefit to not only myself but those who read it. So I hope you don't mind waiting some more time for a full response on this issue. In the meantime, of course, responses from others here would be welcome.

I will also list a few preliminary points which are relevant to your post:

- I think you are correct that Time-experience is a very effective way to approach the issue of living thinking. At the most basic level, the outer world of perception is mostly spatial while the inner world of soul-experience is entirely temporal for normal consciousness. If we understand qualitative inner activity to be a priori to outer spatial perception, then it only makes sense to trace back into the depth structure of the inner temporal rhythms to unearth the living thinking which structures our waking experience. Another way to think of it is, that outer space is a means by which we manifest the simultaneity of nested temporal thought-rhythms along the spiritual depth gradient. All that we perceive spatially speaks to us of these varied Time-rhythms residing within our shared subconscious which, through that spatial perception, we can perceive simultaneously.

It is good to take your start from the time which you experience in your own soul. Ask yourself how you experience time in your own soul? Let me speak more clearly. I do not ask you to think of time as you see it on the clock; there you only compare your inner experience with outer processes. I want you now to put right out of your mind all reading of the clock and other outer events. Consider only how does the time relationship express itself in your soul? Ponder over it as deeply as you will, and you will find that you can think of nothing as a standard for time but the following: you can grasp a thought when it is aroused in you by some external perception. You are looking at something, and a thought or idea arises in your soul. When you enquire more exactly into the relationship between yourself and the idea or the thought, you have to answer: While I have the thought, I myself am actually the thought. Try and think the thing over to the very end and you will say: While I am engrossed in the thought, then I am, in my innermost being, the thought. It would be mere prejudice to say that together with this concept you had also the idea of the “I am.” The “I am” is not there while you have surrendered yourself to the thought. You are yourself the thought. Without a certain practical training you cannot be something else simultaneously with the thought which you hold.

Firstly then, man is in the thoughts and feelings which are directly given to him. Suppose you let this piece of chalk incite you to a thought; then, if you exclude everything else, if you are absorbed in the idea that has been stimulated in you by the perception of chalk, your inmost being is one with the idea of chalk. But now suppose you have grasped this idea and all at once you remember that yesterday you also saw chalk; and you compare the idea of chalk that has been given you by direct perception with what you experienced yesterday. And you will be aware that though you are completely identified with the chalk observed to-day you cannot identify yourself with the chalk of yesterday. This latter is a memory picture and must remain so. You have truly become one with the chalk of to-day, but the chalk of yesterday has become something external for you. The chalk observed to-day is identified with your own inner being of to-day; your memory picture is, to be sure, something upon which you look back, but in comparison with the other it is objective and external. And it is the same with everything you have experienced in your soul with the exception of the present moment. The present moment is for the moment your inner being; everything that you have experienced — you have rid yourself of, it is already outside you. You may imagine, if you wish to have a picture of it, that the present moment with your concepts is a snake, and what you put outside you is the cast-off skin of the snake. And as the snake casts its skin again a second and a third time so you can have ever so many cast-off ideas which are for you something external in comparison with your temporary present inwardness. That is to say, as far back as you can remember, you have continually been making outward what was first inward. The idea of the chalk, for example, which you now have, the very next moment you have made it external to you, while you yourself have passed on to something else. That is to say, you are working at a continual exteriorisation. You are perpetually creating something within you and then leaving it behind; this innermost that you have in you at once becomes an outer, just like a sloughed skin. Our soul-life consists in this — that the inner is continually becoming an outer; so that within our own being, within this inner spiritual process, we are able to distinguish between the real innermost and the outer within the inner. We are all the time within our own being, but we have there to distinguish two parts: first, our real inwardness, and secondly, the part of our inwardness which has become an outer.

- I think you are also correct that the popular non-dual traditions address a crucial issue of 'Time-suffering', and validly link it to our own inner activity of consciousness. But, as you also imply, what happens is that their intellectual conception of the 'Now' is idolized, so the 'past' and 'future' still operate as externalized sequential frames in linear timelines, all imbued with only superficial conceptual significance from within the current mind-container, and thereby the link to higher knowledge and understanding is severed, and the creative responsibility which would naturally accompany such higher knowledge. 

You state it very nicely here - "In the confinement of the Now that we are lured into, we find ourselves erecting self-mortifying barricades against the unknown, and we become the epitome of abdication, and ultimately desertion from our human nature... In the Now-loop, there is only one consolation left to attempt: to dwell in idolized pure spaciousness, hoping to forget the epic losses in the multiplicity of sensory perceptions."

- You make a very strong case for how all these things have the utmost practical-moral implications for the trajectory of our individual lives and, in polar correspondence, the life of humanity as a whole. Ultimately all these idolizing world-outlooks serve to justify an innate tendency to dwell in passive, consumptive, convenient, self-circumscribed thinking habits. They serve to halt vertical movement into the Cosmic depth structure which eventually becomes an accelerating backsliding under the power of its own inverse momentum. Why is it that all these outlooks are so firmly rooted in past modes of being-thought, simply regurgitating things which were expressed by philosophers, poets, and prophets many centuries and even millennia ago (and expressed much more artfully)? The illusion of novelty only comes from the fact that new conceptual terminology has precipitated from scientific-technological evolution and cast into infinitely varied combinations. As you correctly observe, it's because the outlooks invariably idolize the world of spatiality-perception, which is synonymous with the 'past'. It is not only we who suffer from this past fixation, but the entire Earth kingdoms and spiritual Cosmos which is awaiting in eager anticipation our wise and loving forays into the temporal unknown in search of Truth and Freedom.  

Thank you Ashvin, for the very useful comments and quote
I rejoyce at the idea that you are writing on the topic, being reminded of this recent post on the same question:

(...)

No doubt you will find the exactly right moment to release the essay : )

[Federica]

Ashvin,
In my search for ‘data-points for triangulation’ and proper navigation of the idea of Time, I have come across the work of an Australian psychologist, John C. Woodcock. Since yesterday, I could only very briefly browse a few of the numerous essays available. Although not all the views expressed seem to align, including his philosophical perspective on Einstein, there are some nicely expressed ideas, and various interesting, maybe less known (or maybe it’s only me!) references - such as for example physicist and philosopher Herbert Dingle - so I thought I would report some time-related thoughts here.



From EINSTEIN AND BERGSON: A Debate That Shaped Our World (2021):

“I had not known about a momentous debate between Einstein and Bergson in 1922 with its decisive effects on the direction Western culture would take subsequently until I recently stumbled onto a book, The Physicist and the Philosopher by historian Jimena Canales.
…
Henri Bergson who was at the time more famous than Einstein for his work on the nature or phenomenon of time. This debate initiated a controversy that split philosophy from science, i.e. between Bergson’s highly favoured notion of lived time and Einstein’s proposal of an absolute time.
…
Scientists and philosophers lined up to defend or attack the opposing side in subsequent decades following 1922, many focussing directly on Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity and its notion of time. One of the staunchest defenders of Bergson’s criticisms of this theory was philosopher Herbert Dingle who wrote an Introduction to Bergson’s book Duration and Simultaneity. He was well aware of the stakes in this dispute as Western reality became more and more mathematised:

“The fact that a piece of algebra corresponds to a piece of geometry is sufficient to guarantee the tenability of a theory; what the algebraic symbols or the geometrical figures mean in terms of experience, of observation, is irrelevant… After years of effort I am forced to conclude that attempts within the scientific world to awaken it from its dogmatic slumber are vain. I can only hope that some reader of these pages, whose sense of reality (my italics) exceeds that of the mathematicians and physicists and who can command sufficient influence, might be able from the outside to enforce attention to the danger before it is too late.”

Dingle wrote this dark counsel in 1965 after showing, in his Introduction to Bergson, how his well thought-out arguments against the theory of Special Relativity had been stone-walled or ignored.
…
Prof. Dingle was one philosopher who, like Bergson, saw the supreme danger of privileging a mathematical reality over lived experience. He sensed the dire dangers of this cultural move—to no avail. This danger also broke into general public awareness with the publication of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures in which he describes the gap between the world of scientific knowledge and the lives of ordinary people.
…
Canales here rather tentatively proffers a solution of our simply getting on as if the multitude of opposites subsequently generated from the Einstein-Bergson debate of 1922, now intensifying and tearing our world culture and maybe planet apart, could simply dissolve into a postmodern “living with differences” style of living. Some dissolution of hierarchy, of privileging one pole of a binary over the other does seem to be happening today. We only have to think of the social issue of sexuality to see a collapse of the male-female binary. This will no doubt continue across the spectrum of cultural forms. At the same time, there is, as a direct consequence of the Einstein-Bergson debate, an overwhelming presence of scientific reality with its notion of time dominating all other narratives re: climate change, public health, technology and so on. This dominance certainly will not dissolve. A brief glance at the enormous investments that USA, Russia, China and Europe are making in the area of Quantum Computers should convince us that “Einstein” is not going anywhere soon.
…
Prof. Dingle in 1965 saw that Bergson and the living world that he advocated for his entire life—i.e. an ever-changing world in which human beings participated creatively—was on the edge of an abyss.
…
We can safely say that there is now only a trace of such a world—a trace to be found only on dusty library shelves labelled “the occult” or marginalised cultural practices. By privileging scientific or Einstein’s clock time, we are accelerating our efforts towards a technologically driven world resting as it does on a mathematised time that pays no attention to the experience of human beings.


From SERPENT LOVE: Embraced in Time (2016):

We are outside everything today. We stare only at the surface of things, from the “outside”. We have learned to perceive their spatial depth, having been trained to do so by chiaroscuro and perspectival art.
But the appearances no longer have any intrinsic depth of meaning. They no longer have a hold over us, binding us to the truth of their being. We are psychologically independent of the things of the world. All meaning must now stem from the human subject and impose itself on an otherwise inert world…This we know as (spatial) materialism and we also know that such materialism is killing us and everything else too.
As well as the well-known spatial materialism, is there a temporal materialism too—i.e. one in which we treat Time as objective, independent of us, just as the appearances are regarded? Can we be outside Time too in the same way that we psychologically stand outside the spatial things of the world? And, if so, what is the cost of this psychological stance of externality vis-à-vis Time?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,
In my search for ‘data-points for triangulation’ and proper navigation of the idea of Time, I have come across the work of an Australian psychologist, John C. Woodcock. Since yesterday, I could only very briefly browse a few of the numerous essays available. Although not all the views expressed seem to align, including his philosophical perspective on Einstein, there are some nicely expressed ideas, and various interesting, maybe less known (or maybe it’s only me!) references - such as for example physicist and philosopher Herbert Dingle - so I thought I would report some time-related thoughts here.



From EINSTEIN AND BERGSON: A Debate That Shaped Our World (2021):

“I had not known about a momentous debate between Einstein and Bergson in 1922 with its decisive effects on the direction Western culture would take subsequently until I recently stumbled onto a book, The Physicist and the Philosopher by historian Jimena Canales.
…
Henri Bergson who was at the time more famous than Einstein for his work on the nature or phenomenon of time. This debate initiated a controversy that split philosophy from science, i.e. between Bergson’s highly favoured notion of lived time and Einstein’s proposal of an absolute time.
…
Scientists and philosophers lined up to defend or attack the opposing side in subsequent decades following 1922, many focussing directly on Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity and its notion of time. One of the staunchest defenders of Bergson’s criticisms of this theory was philosopher Herbert Dingle who wrote an Introduction to Bergson’s book Duration and Simultaneity. He was well aware of the stakes in this dispute as Western reality became more and more mathematised:

“The fact that a piece of algebra corresponds to a piece of geometry is sufficient to guarantee the tenability of a theory; what the algebraic symbols or the geometrical figures mean in terms of experience, of observation, is irrelevant… After years of effort I am forced to conclude that attempts within the scientific world to awaken it from its dogmatic slumber are vain. I can only hope that some reader of these pages, whose sense of reality (my italics) exceeds that of the mathematicians and physicists and who can command sufficient influence, might be able from the outside to enforce attention to the danger before it is too late.”

Dingle wrote this dark counsel in 1965 after showing, in his Introduction to Bergson, how his well thought-out arguments against the theory of Special Relativity had been stone-walled or ignored.
…
Prof. Dingle was one philosopher who, like Bergson, saw the supreme danger of privileging a mathematical reality over lived experience. He sensed the dire dangers of this cultural move—to no avail. This danger also broke into general public awareness with the publication of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures in which he describes the gap between the world of scientific knowledge and the lives of ordinary people.
…
Canales here rather tentatively proffers a solution of our simply getting on as if the multitude of opposites subsequently generated from the Einstein-Bergson debate of 1922, now intensifying and tearing our world culture and maybe planet apart, could simply dissolve into a postmodern “living with differences” style of living. Some dissolution of hierarchy, of privileging one pole of a binary over the other does seem to be happening today. We only have to think of the social issue of sexuality to see a collapse of the male-female binary. This will no doubt continue across the spectrum of cultural forms. At the same time, there is, as a direct consequence of the Einstein-Bergson debate, an overwhelming presence of scientific reality with its notion of time dominating all other narratives re: climate change, public health, technology and so on. This dominance certainly will not dissolve. A brief glance at the enormous investments that USA, Russia, China and Europe are making in the area of Quantum Computers should convince us that “Einstein” is not going anywhere soon.
…
Prof. Dingle in 1965 saw that Bergson and the living world that he advocated for his entire life—i.e. an ever-changing world in which human beings participated creatively—was on the edge of an abyss.
…
We can safely say that there is now only a trace of such a world—a trace to be found only on dusty library shelves labelled “the occult” or marginalised cultural practices. By privileging scientific or Einstein’s clock time, we are accelerating our efforts towards a technologically driven world resting as it does on a mathematised time that pays no attention to the experience of human beings.


From SERPENT LOVE: Embraced in Time (2016):

We are outside everything today. We stare only at the surface of things, from the “outside”. We have learned to perceive their spatial depth, having been trained to do so by chiaroscuro and perspectival art.
But the appearances no longer have any intrinsic depth of meaning. They no longer have a hold over us, binding us to the truth of their being. We are psychologically independent of the things of the world. All meaning must now stem from the human subject and impose itself on an otherwise inert world…This we know as (spatial) materialism and we also know that such materialism is killing us and everything else too.
As well as the well-known spatial materialism, is there a temporal materialism too—i.e. one in which we treat Time as objective, independent of us, just as the appearances are regarded? Can we be outside Time too in the same way that we psychologically stand outside the spatial things of the world? And, if so, what is the cost of this psychological stance of externality vis-à-vis Time?

Federica,

To be honest, I am not sure it will be helpful to consult anyone who is not firmly within a Western esoteric stream in order to triangulate the vertical depth hierarchy of Time-consciousness. Even when it comes to a thinker like Bergson, although I greatly enjoyed the insights he shared in his last work, The Creative Mind, it is clear he did not develop Imaginative+ cognition which can awaken in deeper layers of the subconscious organism (etheric, astral, ego). It is a similar situation with Jung (despite his advocacy of 'active imagination'). I think their insights can be useful for limited purposes of 'comparing and contrasting' certain crystallized conceptual forms of the intuitive landscape, and of course it is helpful to contemplate their overall placement in the stream of 20th century spiritual evolution, but the actual content of their writings will simply pale in comparison to what can be gleaned from esoteric scientists who developed the higher cognitive faculties and, therefore, experienced consciously the inner perspective of Be-ings who are thinking the Time-consciousness gradient into existence. The best bet will probably be to delve more into spiritual scientific writings and become familiar with the depth structure of the human organism, as it has been evolving throughout various nested Time-rhythms of consciousness, life, and form through the activity of the higher hierarchies (I think I shared a chart of this evolution with you previously).

That being said, I am interested to hear what perhaps you have taken away from this reading which has helped you triangulate with what Steiner, Cleric, etc. have expressed on Time-consciousness. Personally I could not locate anything of much significance in what you excerpted above.

[Federica]

Federica,

To be honest, I am not sure it will be helpful to consult anyone who is not firmly within a Western esoteric stream in order to triangulate the vertical depth hierarchy of Time-consciousness. Even when it comes to a thinker like Bergson, although I greatly enjoyed the insights he shared in his last work, The Creative Mind, it is clear he did not develop Imaginative+ cognition which can awaken in deeper layers of the subconscious organism (etheric, astral, ego). It is a similar situation with Jung (despite his advocacy of 'active imagination'). I think their insights can be useful for limited purposes of 'comparing and contrasting' certain crystallized conceptual forms of the intuitive landscape, and of course it is helpful to contemplate their overall placement in the stream of 20th century spiritual evolution, but the actual content of their writings will simply pale in comparison to what can be gleaned from esoteric scientists who developed the higher cognitive faculties and, therefore, experienced consciously the inner perspective of Be-ings who are thinking the Time-consciousness gradient into existence. The best bet will probably be to delve more into spiritual scientific writings and become familiar with the depth structure of the human organism, as it has been evolving throughout various nested Time-rhythms of consciousness, life, and form through the activity of the higher hierarchies (I think I shared a chart of this evolution with you previously).

That being said, I am interested to hear what perhaps you have taken away from this reading which has helped you triangulate with what Steiner, Cleric, etc. have expressed on Time-consciousness. Personally I could not locate anything of much significance in what you excerpted above.

I don't know Bergson well, but you often quote it, and it was on your list of the 10 most helpful modern books. I know Jung a little better. As much as I appreciate his works, I know I will not find insights about time there. This jungian psychologist I found through a reference to Barfield and philology in one of your older posts, and he seems to explore language with Barfield, time, poetry, and a long series of other esoteric topics in his work (as it seems, based on the many titles of essays/books, some of which I am certainly interested in taking a look at.) I am also interested in contemporary work. I would like to find something of relevance that is being written right now, besides what Cleric and Max Leyf are writing of course. I was certainly not blown away by the quotes reported here, as I said above, but I found them promising and I wanted to signal the list of essays. I should have been more diligent in reading through more thoroughly, instead of immediately sharing the first ideas I had come across.


However, the main things I am reading to understand time are elsewhere: the old essays here, and I am reading PoF again. I previously said that starting with time rather than with perception could be a more effective way of 'explaining Steiner' but I realize it doesn't make much concrete sense, the two are indissolubly bound... Therefore I wanted to retrace the process of cognition as illustrated in PoF. About charts, I don't remember any chart of the depth structure of the human organism. The only one I remember is this one:

[AshvinP]

Federica,

To be honest, I am not sure it will be helpful to consult anyone who is not firmly within a Western esoteric stream in order to triangulate the vertical depth hierarchy of Time-consciousness. Even when it comes to a thinker like Bergson, although I greatly enjoyed the insights he shared in his last work, The Creative Mind, it is clear he did not develop Imaginative+ cognition which can awaken in deeper layers of the subconscious organism (etheric, astral, ego). It is a similar situation with Jung (despite his advocacy of 'active imagination'). I think their insights can be useful for limited purposes of 'comparing and contrasting' certain crystallized conceptual forms of the intuitive landscape, and of course it is helpful to contemplate their overall placement in the stream of 20th century spiritual evolution, but the actual content of their writings will simply pale in comparison to what can be gleaned from esoteric scientists who developed the higher cognitive faculties and, therefore, experienced consciously the inner perspective of Be-ings who are thinking the Time-consciousness gradient into existence. The best bet will probably be to delve more into spiritual scientific writings and become familiar with the depth structure of the human organism, as it has been evolving throughout various nested Time-rhythms of consciousness, life, and form through the activity of the higher hierarchies (I think I shared a chart of this evolution with you previously).

That being said, I am interested to hear what perhaps you have taken away from this reading which has helped you triangulate with what Steiner, Cleric, etc. have expressed on Time-consciousness. Personally I could not locate anything of much significance in what you excerpted above.

I don't know Bergson well, but you often quote it, and it was on your list of the 10 most helpful modern books. I know Jung a little better. As much as I appreciate his works, I know I will not find insights about time there. This jungian psychologist I found through a reference to Barfield and philology in one of your older posts, and he seems to explore language with Barfield, time, poetry, and a long series of other esoteric topics in his work (as it seems, based on the many titles of essays/books, some of which I am certainly interested in taking a look at.) I am also interested in contemporary work. I would like to find something of relevance that is being written right now, besides what Cleric and Max Leyf are writing of course. I was certainly not blown away by the quotes reported here, as I said above, but I found them promising and I wanted to signal the list of essays. I should have been more diligent in reading through more thoroughly, instead of immediately sharing the first ideas I had come across.


However, the main things I am reading to understand time are elsewhere: the old essays here, and I am reading PoF again. I previously said that starting with time rather than with perception could be a more effective way of 'explaining Steiner' but I realize it doesn't make much concrete sense, the two are indissolubly bound... Therefore I wanted to retrace the process of cognition as illustrated in PoF. About charts, I don't remember any chart of the depth structure of the human organism. The only one I remember is this one:

Don't get me wrong, I will share/quote passages from Jung, Bergson, Teilhard, and many others here if I feel it it will be helpful, which it often will be for people just beginning to approach a philosophy of spiritual activity. But in the case of the TC spectrum, for someone with your current level of understanding and 'readiness to engage', I think the esoteric scientific writers will be much more helpful. Also, when I created that list, I had not yet discovered some of the recent books I have been quoting, such as the ones by Scaligero and Klocek. I think you would find the Klocek book, The Seer's Handbook, very helpful and perhaps more approachable than Steiner. It is sort of a summary/distillation of Steiner's work but in more modern style and terms. Klocek is still alive and writing today.

The chart I was referring to is this one below. Maybe I didn't share it before. It's just a tool to use for reference whenever you begin investigating the Cosmic evolutionary progression of humanity. Each planetary condition has all the lower sevenfold structures of development nested within them, as the sevenfold planetary conditions are nested within our whole Solar evolution. These are the archetypal layers through which the TC spectrum has manifested.

[Federica]

Don't get me wrong, I will share/quote passages from Jung, Bergson, Teilhard, and many others here if I feel it it will be helpful, which it often will be for people just beginning to approach a philosophy of spiritual activity. But in the case of the TC spectrum, for someone with your current level of understanding and 'readiness to engage', I think the esoteric scientific writers will be much more helpful. Also, when I created that list, I had not yet discovered some of the recent books I have been quoting, such as the ones by Scaligero and Klocek. I think you would find the Klocek book, The Seer's Handbook, very helpful and perhaps more approachable than Steiner. It is sort of a summary/distillation of Steiner's work but in more modern style and terms. Klocek is still alive and writing today.

The chart I was referring to is this one below. Maybe I didn't share it before. It's just a tool to use for reference whenever you begin investigating the Cosmic evolutionary progression of humanity. Each planetary condition has all the lower sevenfold structures of development nested within them, as the sevenfold planetary conditions are nested within our whole Solar evolution. These are the archetypal layers through which the TC spectrum has manifested.

Thank you Ashvin,

I got the Seer's Handbook. I only wish I could read much faster! For some reason I am fairly convinced I could read quite fast until I was 10 or 11, but later lost that capacity. Anyway, now it's really a pain But I have started reading. Thank you also for the chart - you did share it before, I just hadn't paid enough attention to it then, thus it had remained rather incomprehensible. Now it's better, although I know I'm still not seeing it rightly...