The Center of the Central Topic (Part 3)

[Cleric K]

Connecting to the Central Topic

Here we'll connect once again with the Central Topic and what we spoke with Mike here. There we more or less arrived at the terms 'funnel' and 'tunnel'. In the current context we can roughly relate them to the X and Y axes. The Y axis corresponds to the continuous stepping out of the movie, revealing more and more of the funnel, trying to grasp it more and more objectively, to be aware of the full spectrum of reality. The tunnel is when we're flowing in the narrow subjective, linear time-flow down the funnel, without much meta cognition of what we're doing. I said that simply backing up from the movie, can lead us only to an extent. As Mike puts it, at that point things become difficult to put into words. This is where we're pressing our back at the veil. From what we said here, it should be already clear why this is the case. When we step out from the movie in order to grasp as much as possible, we put aside our thinking voice and try to expand awareness. Yet as we said, there's still something missing here. Practically all that we can be aware of in this way has the nature of memory images. Furthermore, we can only be aware of things which we can make sense of. This is such an important point and yet it is almost universally neglected. It is imagined that when awareness expands and objectifies everything, this should automatically make it meaningful too. But this is simply not the case. We understand only that which can be grasped by our thinking in (T). What does it really mean to grasp something? If we're moving on the surface of the Earth it looks flat. Then an alien ship beams us onboard and we see the curvature of the planet. Suddenly we experience new kind of geometry within which our previous sensory experiences fit. It is similar with thinking. When we're working on a problem we're struggling as within a labyrinth. When we find the solution it is as if we attain to a bird's eye position and we can then understand all our previous thoughts. We can see where we were very close to the solution but then took the wrong turn, we can see where we were hitting our head against the wall of a dead end. In this sense, when we hit the veil, the panorama within awareness makes sense only as far as we can grasp its meaningful geometry. All of that is part of a higher order labyrinth but we can't comprehend it by simply wanting to perceive it as we perceive things that we're familiar with. Instead we say "I feel it is there, I sense it with all my being, I'm living and moving within it but there are simply no words to describe it. It's inexplicable". There are no words because the gap between the thinking gestures that trace the higher order geometry and those which we use in everyday life, is too wide. Similarly, when we walk upon Earth we also trace curved path but we don't notice it. In the same way, without building the gradient of cognition, we simply haven't developed spiritual gestures which have the right 'wavelength' to resonate with the higher order labyrinths. This is where mysticism generally gets stuck and declares that the full picture will be beheld only after death. Alas, the conditions to build the gradient of cognition are here while we still have the firm support of our body on Earth. After death we live in the understanding that we have prepared here. Without this understanding, consciousness will indeed expand into Cosmic space but it faces us as an inexplicable panorama, of which we can make sense only as far as we've developed spiritual conceptions on Earth. It is as expecting that one will learn to read automatically as soon as he sees the hieroglyphs. But this is not how it works. We'll pass through a Grand Cosmic 'Trip' in hieroglyphic space where we'll have a 'breakthrough' and when we 'come down' we'll find ourselves growing up in a different body, where we'll continue to learn to read.

The hierarchy of living temporal contexts

The building of the gradient of cognition is not developed in the ordinary sense, as simple accumulation of theories and data. We need living understanding. When we're detaching from (T) (extreme Y axis), we're missing something. We're missing the fact that we're trying to gain pure awareness while, however, ignoring the fact that we're living as a human being on Earth. This is something which we should have learned by now. Quantum mechanics hints that there's no measurement without disturbance. The pursuit of pure awareness takes too much for granted. It imagines that as consciousness becomes more and more detached, it can behold reality as invisible observer. However, the more we try to emancipate ourselves in this way from our human condition, the more we lose any means to be conscious of how this human condition might be shaping the experience that we imagine to be pure awareness. This state really corresponds to extreme polarization. We dissociate from all conscious phenomena and behold them as a panorama. Any hint of subjectivity is thrust down into the panorama immediately. But then what means do we have to understand if what we experience in this way is really some pure awareness? If an alien with different consciousness does the same meditation, would its pure awareness be the same as ours? We don't really know. The reason is that we don't try to understand how our human condition shapes consciousness. We simply want to polarize and thrust everything on one side, while we believe to be living in pure awareness on the other. We can only gain true insight into our human condition if we begin to investigate how it shapes our conscious experience. We're in particular epoch of evolutionary development where certain level of consciousness is present. We live in concrete body placed in complicated context of social interactions. We have certain ideas, desires. We make limited sense of our aperture of consciousness. All these living contexts are generally not reflected when we simply try to step out of the movie. As a matter of fact, we're pressing our back precisely at all these temporal layers but we don't know the spiritual gestures which can match their geometry. Instead, we only behold what is compatible with our current knowledge. Our ordinary thinking gestures (condensed into concepts) act as a filter for what we can understand from the panorama of experiencing.

We're constantly becoming. When we do the vowels exercise we experience this becoming in a very clear way - we experience most tightly how we're guiding the metamorphosis of the conscious content. The latter is quite limited - it's only sound. This in itself may case doubt that such exercises have any value at all. It's obvious that we're missing the whole other world when we concentrate in this way. In certain sense this is true. We do constrict our expansive awareness into focused sound. But we must also realize something else. We would never be doing that exercise if the constellation of all those living factors listed above were not what they were. If we had different interests we would be doing something else in this moment. So the small temporal ripples of our thinking are embedded into larger time-waves, which are embedded within even larger waves and so on. These waves are living, dynamic and we live along their full spectrum but we currently understand only the geometry of the ripples. We're moving through everything else as within an invisible labyrinth but we don't grasp its more encompassing geometry.  Our attention span is too narrow to grasp the larger curvature.

The thing is that we can't grasp that geometry by simply stepping more and more out of the movie. This would work if that geometry was similar to something we already know. But it isn't. And this is the great difficulty when speaking of these things. We need a dose of humility that no matter how much we see of the movie, unless we can experience the spiritual activity behind the panorama, we'll never be able to reconstruct the higher geometry from combinations of the lower. In the same sense no amount of rearranging 2D shapes in a plane, can produce a 3D form.

Approaching the higher order

In the Central Topic I tried to hint at the higher order curvature within which our state of being unfolds. It was said that we can glimpse at the direction of that curvature if we think about our beliefs, ideas, opinions, desires, sympathies, antipathies. All of these we know by experiencing certain thinking gestures and then abstracting concepts. This holds true not only for sensory perceptions but for everything. For example, if we want to conceptualize the feeling of joy, we perform a thinking gesture which tries to remember the feeling. This gesture is then abstracted as 'joy'. With the Center of the Central Topic, hopefully we've pinpointed at the special point where temporal meaning becomes perception (T). This would correspond to the center of the hourglass-shaped figure in the Central Topic. If we keep this in mind we can now understand in a more living way what, for example, sympathy means. If we think of sympathy in the way we think about attracting electric charges, we still have only external, objectified understanding. We're only thinking the movement of images. We need living understanding. For example, if we have performed the vowels exercise, this means that the unfolding of our states of being has happened in certain way. But we may also have not performed it. What's the difference? We were on a cross road - to do it or not to do it. One road felt more sympathetic than the other so we allowed our spiritual states to unfold along the more pleasant road. This is the way we should deal with these things. As long as we objectify all of this within our mind, we're dealing with abstract models. We can think them but they reflect back nothing about our living thinking which thinks them. On the other hand, when we meditate in such a way that instead of simply stepping back of the movie, we concentrate our spiritual activity, then gradually we begin to understand more and more of the temporal context.

Why is this so? Because we're concentrating on something which is intimately embedded into its meaningful context. For example, in the vowels exercise we're producing sounds which are not very meaningful in themselves. Yet there's implicit meaningful context within which we produce the sound. Imagine that you simply hear the sound 'a' in your mind, out of nowhere. It's like the fly - we have no means to understand its temporal unfoldment. But when we do the exercise it is different. Even though the sound is the same, the whole meaningful context is different. There's implicit knowing embedded in the periphery of our state, so to speak. We know that we've read about the exercise, we know that we decided to do it. We further know that we read it only because over the years we felt interest for such matters. All of these things are interconnected with million others, so the sound 'a' that I pronounce today, even though seemingly the same as the one I can produce tomorrow, is still embedded in unique temporal context of meaning. I used recently an analogy with the Mandelbrot set here. The point of concentration of our spiritual activity is only the tip of a complicated living being spreading in time. The way this tip evolves through time is a function of all the above factors which steer the 'wave function' from which we manifest our activity at the surface. These factors can't be known in purely intellectual Freudian way - we must open for them in prayer-like humility and be willing to see ourselves in new light. When we gain consciousness of a sympathy we immediately understand why previously we have thought, felt, done some things instead of others. Trying to back up from the movie may also lead to such insights but only quite accidentally. When we concentrate our spiritual activity it is like we begin at the finger tip and grow in consciousness towards the whole body. We've always been preoccupied with the finger tip but have never known that all we have done has been in the context of the wrist, elbow, shoulder and the whole body. If the wrist has unknowingly developed some unhealthy movement habits, our finger activity will always be in their context even if we don't know it. If we simply try to step out of the finger, we may as well behold the body but only as inexplicable panorama, which can hardly tell us why our everyday finger (our ordinary life of thinking, feeling, willing) behaves in the way it does.

To sum up ...

To summarize all this we should point once again at the critical importance of (T). Through exercises as with the vowels, we learn to spiral the hysteresis process into unity. As explained, the hysteresis manifests because what we do with our spiritual activity doesn't reflect back the nature of the activity itself but points away at an object. There's always something of the spiritual activity which evades perception and remains merged in the blind spot. 

Let's look again at the Fourier metaphor. There's very intuitive explanation of it by 3Blue1Brown. There's no need to watch the whole video. For our purposes the first two minutes are enough:



(Just for something extra, at the 21:54 mark it may be interesting to see how the increase of the number of arrows increases the details)

So we can take the tip of the cascade of arrows to represent our current state of being - all perceptions, thoughts, feelings, will. This continually metamorphoses. Returning to the hysteresis, the X axis would correspond to full merging with the unfoldment of the states. If this goes to extreme we'll be complete automaton, practically unconscious. Thanks to our ability to objectify the time flow, we can behold it as space-like panorama. Yet if this is taken to extreme we become completely detached spectator of conscious phenomena no different from flies.

Of course, there's always some combination of these aspects. Even in the deepest mystical observation of conscious phenomena, our state still unfolds in time. Some readers may have sensed that what we speak of is practically the uncertainty principle very well known in wave mechanics (or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics). So the X and Y axes are like the two poles of the principle. The more we have of the one, the less we have of the other.

Normally we're being carried along this process and oscillating between its aspects. Spiraling the hysteresis process into unity doesn't seek static equilibrium. Instead, it is the starting point from which we can begin to penetrate the depth of the process. We can portray this in the following way. Along the X axis we experience the unfoldment of the states of being in time. It is as if we flow together with the arrow tip in the video. The Y axis increases the view of the overall picture but this happens at the expense of experiencing time flow from within. We observe panorama of highly complicated conscious phenomena but we have no understanding for the laws which govern them. They become as the fly for us. We simply sense that they are highly interrelated and we can call that dependent arising. Finding the unity of the hysteresis process allows consciousness to gradually grow in both directions. We're firmly within the time flow but we begin to gain consciousness of more and more arrows which give us direct knowledge for the complicated patterns through which our states of being unfold.

These deeper levels of the arrows shouldn't be taken as some abstract model of reality. We should also seek the reality to which metaphors point. As said so many times, we can take the slower arrows to symbolize a sympathy, antipathy, traits of our character or temperament, traits of the nation that we're part of and so on. As long as don't have depth of consciousness, we live in the hysteresis process, where we flow in the unfoldment of states. We think, we do things but don't question them. For example, in the vowels exercise we feel completely in harmony with our random choices of sounds but in certain sense this choice is only the tip of the cascade of arrows. We call it random largely because we don't know what has led us to one choice or another. It is like identifying with the drawing tip in the video, while having no consciousness of the arrows, and imagining that what we draw is our original creation. Sam Harris is actually quite correct to point out that we're much less free than we imagine. Where he's incorrect is to dismiss that we can penetrate into the deeper processes in full consciousness. This is what freedom is in the sense of PoF. It's not about arguing endlessly if the spiritual activity on the surface is our original creation or is fully determined. It's about the possibility that we can deepen our consciousness into the arrow rhythms and from there understand the laws which govern our ordinary unfoldment of states. Of course this deepening is relative. There are always deeper arrows which we're not conscious of but even they will be revealed in the course of evolution. The important thing is to understand that we're not free when we simply flow at the tip of the cascade of arrows. We're not free also if we simply try to objectify conscious phenomena by trying to step outside of them. We must realize that even this stepping outside is part of our conscious conduct as a human being on Earth and it is still governed by deeper arrows. That's why we need to be active because it is only in spiritual activity that we can gradually begin to perceive the images also of the deeper layers. If we simply step out of the movie, we're prematurely trying to circumvent the cascade of arrows that corresponds to our Earthly personality. Simply declaring the latter illusionary does nothing more than polarizing us across the Y axis. Instead, we should realize that even our spiritual activity which detaches us from our objectified personality, is only a level of the arrow cascade. Then we can begin to make discoveries. We'll understand that even though we deidentify with the personality, we're still being carried by at least one subconscious arrow - the desire to feel above and independent of the personality. When we gain consciousness of that arrow we realize that we're still within the cascade. This leads us to the only logical conclusion - that there are no shortcuts. We should simply spiral the hysteresis process into unity and begin gradually revealing the depth of the cascade. This we can accomplish only by starting from (T). The deeper rhythms are not revealed as abstract intellectual thoughts. When we speak a thought we feel its sound to be completely shaped by the intended meaning. When the (T) experience deepens, our thinking intents are additionally experienced as shaped by the deeper aspects of our being. But now these aspects are not external forces but are experienced as expression of spiritual activity extended holistically in time. Only in this way we begin to gain real self-knowledge. The deeper we go, the more we understand that the arrows there, modulate more and more shared aspects of reality and not simply our personal traits. Thus by going deeper, gradually self-knowledge becomes world-knowledge. And this is not difficult to understand. Only in our thoughts and feelings related to our body we're distinct. As we go deeper we encounter desires, needs which are not unique to ourselves but are shared also with our fellow human beings. All of this is mirrored in the common structure of the human body that we all share. Even further than this we encounter depth rhythms which are mirrored in life in man, animals and plants. Further we find the Cosmic rhythms, the planetary bodies, mirrored in the mineral element which is shared by all kingdoms. So the cascade of arrow rhythms is really a slice of all these worlds and exist along a gradient from universal common processes towards more and more differentiated and unique for each human body.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that this is only an analogy and we should guard against making a rigid model from it. Nevertheless, it is a very faithful Imagination for the way we're placed within the spectrum of our existence. One of the most critical questions is how to relate within ourselves to the rhythms which lie deeper beneath the threshold of consciousness. For example, if our behavior is shaped by our desires, national feelings, religious feelings, these are deeper arrows that modulate the unfoldment of our states. There are many other things which we don't really have any idea that our drawing tip of thinking is being modulated by. Simply increasing awareness along the Y axis doesn't guarantee that these rhythms will ever enter our consciousness. They may remain deeply buried, just like the desire to detach from our personality is. But even if we have the most sincere wish that our consciousness may grow in depth, how do we do that? How can we gain consciousness of something which we don't even know what it is, we don't know in what direction to search for it? Here comes what I've called elsewhere the inversion of our scientific disposition. We must realize that we need inner stance which is completely neglected by current science and philosophy. It's the prayer-like openness for what stands higher/deeper than our surface intellectual self. We should realize that no amount of brute force can ever bring the deeper rhythms to light. The reason is that we must sacrifice precisely that part which wants to gain deeper insight, yet remain the same. This is impossible. Every step towards the deeper rhythms reveals not some abstract theory but immediate consciousness of the higher order labyrinth within which we were hitherto moving. This inevitably changes our self-image.

We must get in the habit that there're always strata of our higher self beyond the threshold of our current consciousness. For all goals and purposes, this higher self is an independent being. We simply don't have control over it. A turning point in one's life is reached when we understand with our thinking that the higher strata of our being embodies our best interest in ways which we may not even conceive at this time. As a matter of fact, the whole Earthly drama is hidden within the secret of this hysteresis process. Consciousness circumambulates around the center, alternating between subjective time flow and objective space/memory perception but never perceiving the image of the actual spiritual activity. In both cases we're living at some level of the cascade of rhythms. Whether we believe in that or not, whether we call it brain and laws of physics, whether we call it dependent arising, whether we call it God created soul, our unfoldment of states is experienced at the tip of the cascade. By denying/resisting/free-flowing with that process, we ensure that we can't gain consciousness of the deeper layers. We perpetuate the hysteresis process. As long as we're afraid that our higher being will somehow restrict us, we prefer to live on the surface of consciousness. Of course, logically this makes no sense. There's no way we can be more free without understanding how we're drawn to the things that we think and desire. Yet this is the nature of the human situation. There are certain irrational feelings which keep us away from the direction where we can grow in consciousness and freedom.

When we concentrate our spiritual activity in a stable center and at the same time open our soul in loving surrender to the higher order rhythms, we prepare the possibility to gain consciousness of our true being. We can connect that with the funnel metaphor. Our concentrated activity anchors the center of the funnel. It is as if our being flows from the periphery towards the center. The far periphery we're not conscious of. It comes from infinity. It passes through the horizon of consciousness and sinks down the funnel into memory. No matter how we expand the funnel, there will always be periphery. There're are always deeper process which we don't encompass, which carry us on their rhythmic arrows and we can contribute to them only as they cross our current horizon. We can't forcefully expand and become aware of more and more of the periphery. This presupposes completely mechanistic understanding. The periphery is the deeper layers of our own being, our desires, ideas, beliefs. These are the curvature within which the drawing tip of our states unfolds. To become conscious of them means to understand something of the way our conscious life works and this necessarily changes our self-image. The funnel flow is the flow of Time. Whether we like it or not, we're constantly changing, more and more periphery passes through us and recedes into memory. We have changed since childhood.  But if we depend only on Time to change us, there's no guarantee where this will lead us. We're moving with our back turned to the future (the periphery of the funnel). We need the mood of prayer to seek the rhythms of our higher self and yearn to raise to their level.

Here we stumble on some of the limitations of this metaphor. It's not really a simple cascade of rhythms. At any level it is interfering with other cascades. The deeper we go, the more unified they are but as we move away from the core, they become more and more differentiated and interfere with each other (basically the Deep MAL picture). That's why the curvature which guides the unfoldment of our states is not determined only by our higher self. There are other forces too which steer it in one way or another. These forces for example, perpetuate the hysteresis cycle. The experience of freedom is that it is entirely through our own free determination on the surface to choose whether to be blindly guided by the rhythms in the depths or seek with prayer-like openness the consciousness of our higher being which reveals the rhythms and gives us the possibility to guide the unfoldment of our states with greater creative freedom.

Science of today in one way or another reaches the concept of state and seeks the laws which transform it from frame to frame. The most important step that we should take today is to realize that the actual state and its transformation are to be found in (T). It is not what we objectify and speculate about with abstract laws. It's not what we objectify and detach from. It's the living conscious images in which we feel creatively involved. This is the tip of the World Process. Understanding the laws through which this process unfolds in time requires us to gain consciousness of the deeper arrow rhythms which underlie it. These can't be attained to through abstract models but must become conscious degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity.

[AshvinP]

Let's look again at the Fourier metaphor. There's very intuitive explanation of it by 3Blue1Brown. There's no need to watch the whole video. For our purposes the first two minutes are enough:

...

(Just for something extra, at the 21:54 mark it may be interesting to see how the increase of the number of arrows increases the details)

So we can take the tip of the cascade of arrows to represent our current state of being - all perceptions, thoughts, feelings, will. This continually metamorphoses. Returning to the hysteresis, the X axis would correspond to full merging with the unfoldment of the states. If this goes to extreme we'll be complete automaton, practically unconscious. Thanks to our ability to objectify the time flow, we can behold it as space-like panorama. Yet if this is taken to extreme we become completely detached spectator of conscious phenomena no different from flies.

...

We must get in the habit that there're always strata of our higher self beyond the threshold of our current consciousness. For all goals and purposes, this higher self is an independent being. We simply don't have control over it. A turning point in one's life is reached when we understand with our thinking that the higher strata of our being embodies our best interest in ways which we may not even conceive at this time. As a matter of fact, the whole Earthly drama is hidden within the secret of this hysteresis process. Consciousness circumambulates around the center, alternating between subjective time flow and objective space/memory perception but never perceiving the image of the actual spiritual activity. In both cases we're living at some level of the cascade of rhythms. Whether we believe in that or not, whether we call it brain and laws of physics, whether we call it dependent arising, whether we call it God created soul, our unfoldment of states is experienced at the tip of the cascade. By denying/resisting/free-flowing with that process, we ensure that we can't gain consciousness of the deeper layers. We perpetuate the hysteresis process. As long as we're afraid that our higher being will somehow restrict us, we prefer to live on the surface of consciousness. Of course, logically this makes no sense. There's no way we can be more free without understanding how we're drawn to the things that we think and desire. Yet this is the nature of the human situation. There are certain irrational feelings which keep us away from the direction where we can grow in consciousness and freedom.

Cleric,

The cascading Fourier transform was fascinating to watch! It really shows how higher understanding can make the fragmented, tangled up world of complex phenomena easier to concretely perceive and cognize if we allow it to work within us, without prejudice by way of abstraction.

As I watched the Sun rise over the horizon of the water this morning, I had a distinct sense of the above. I tried to stare directly at it for as long as possible, but after it was more than halfway risen, this became very difficult. I had to begin squinting and eventually turn away from it. The inner moral meaning of this process we are all taught as children is quite obvious, but unfortunately it is only the outer form we are taught to obsess over as we grow up. I imagine the ancient Hebrews concretely sensed this same moral dimension of meaning in relation to the tabernacle/temple and the Holy of Holies. I also spotted the Moon, still very much shining until the break of dawn, and still clearly visible after the Sunrise. It has grown quite confident at this time of year. But the days of Sunlight are also growing longer and the Light of higher laws than our own are once again beginning to shine through into our consciousness, IF we are gracious enough to invite them in.

Thank you for this excellent trilogy of essays!

[mikekatz]

Hi Cleric,
Thanks yet another time! I need some time to digest and experiment.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

The cascading Fourier transform was fascinating to watch! It really shows how higher understanding can make the fragmented, tangled up world of complex phenomena easier to concretely perceive and cognize if we allow it to work within us, without prejudice by way of abstraction.

As I watched the Sun rise over the horizon of the water this morning, I had a distinct sense of the above. I tried to stare directly at it for as long as possible, but after it was more than halfway risen, this became very difficult. I had to begin squinting and eventually turn away from it. The inner moral meaning of this process we are all taught as children is quite obvious, but unfortunately it is only the outer form we are taught to obsess over as we grow up. I imagine the ancient Hebrews concretely sensed this same moral dimension of meaning in relation to the tabernacle/temple and the Holy of Holies. I also spotted the Moon, still very much shining until the break of dawn, and still clearly visible after the Sunrise. It has grown quite confident at this time of year. But the days of Sunlight are also growing longer and the Light of higher laws than our own are once again beginning to shine through into our consciousness, IF we are gracious enough to invite them in.

Thank you for this excellent trilogy of essays!

Thank you Ashvin!

I'm glad you found the illustrations useful. Practically the essays are nothing more than an attempt to make the core of PoF and Bergson's quote that you post, a little more approachable. I can only guess if it was of use to anyone else. In any case, unless one delves into the intimate experience of the thinking process, no amount of words can make a difference.