Cardenio wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 7:16 pm
The prospect of stopping periodically to reflect on the temporal context in which one's present activity is embedded makes perfect sense, intellectually at least. I wonder, Cleric, if you would be willing to expand a little bit and perhaps offer further guidance on how one can work with this. You described, in your case, a sort of epiphany that seems to indicate an
experience together with an
understanding. I can see the truth of these superimposed rhythms that you are pointing to but I have the sense that there is more to comprehend with this.
This way of relating to time seems almost "synchronic" or "panoramic." You have, I believe, alluded to a "diachronic" or phenomenological approach to time which you characterized as something like "the ability to integrate prior states in consciousness." I can also see the truth of this. I wonder if you have any recommendations for how to work with this aspect of time.
Finally, perhaps you would be willing to explain how these two aspects of time can be integrated with one another. Clearly they are not exclusive but I find myself challenged to grasp their unity.
Thanks and blessings to all.
Hi Cardenio!
Sorry for the delayed response!
It's a great joy for me to see how deeply you have gone in following the living experience of our spiritual activity.
As a bit of warning, we must gradually get in the habit of discerning what we're trying to do with our intellect. I'm saying this from my own experience too. For quite some time my intellect used to want to build better and better
mental picture of the Time being. This can quickly lead to mental exhaustion. Actually it can become even worse. People here are probably familiar with the documentary "
Dangerous Knowledge". It's about the mental breakdowns of several prominent mathematicians and scientist who struggled with infinities. And if we try to grasp spiritual reality entirely with out intellect we face nothing but infinities! This is also connected with Nietzsche's breakdown.
When we think about the Time rhythms entirely with intellectual concepts, it's like we're trying to build a picture of Lego blocks. It's tempting to imagine that the more of these pieces that we stack, the more comprehensive and complete the picture will become. But as we do that, we quickly become crushed by the weight of our own concepts. It is well known that our working memory can hold only about seven discrete things at a time. Higher cognition is
not attained by increasing the amount of things we can juggle with our intellect. The more Lego pieces we try to carry, the more overwhelming it becomes, since they must be mechanically kept together by our own effort.
I can use an analogy for this. The most widespread type of RAM (random access memory) used today in computers, phones, etc., is of the type DRAM (Dynamic RAM). What is characteristic to it is that the bit-cells (usually a transistor-capacitor pair) quickly leak their charge. For this reason a continuous procedure is needed called 'memory refresh'. Many times a second the cells are continuously recharged. If this process stops the cells will quickly lose their states. It's somewhat similar with out intellect when we try to build complicated mental panoramas. Our thinking must continuously walk over all the elements of our intellectual imagination and 'refresh' them. The moment we stop, the images quickly fade away. This is an overwhelming task. Not only that in the end run it is
not proper higher cognition (the mechanically stitched sum total of the intellectual cells is
less than the higher order curvature within which the cells flow), but if we stubbornly insist on creating reality out of intellectual cells we face a very real danger for our mental health.
The key to this is simple. The higher Time order is not something that we can build out of intellectual cells. Instead we must first find it in the (T) experience (as in the Central Topic). We simply must embark on thinking contemplation and follow the flow of our ordinary thinking. It's not
what we think but simply being conscious of the time-extended stream of thinking and how we're actively shaping it. Probably Ashvin's example with Beat Saber from his VR essay can be used as an illustration.
Another illustration can be the visualization that I recently posted
here. Here we can see from another angle the difference in Time experience. Our DRAM analogy can be likened to the first phase of the visualization where our thinking moves erratically from cell to cell. The naive conception would be that this refreshing must become so fast that it can light up our whole field of consciousness, not unlike a cathode-ray tube (CRT). This is also the vision of the super intellect which is principally the same as the ordinary but becomes faster and faster. We know how the electron ray in CRT TV/monitors, energizes only a tiny patch of phosphorescent elements. As the ray moves further the previous patch already starts to fade out. It's only because of the inertia of our retina response that the after image of the illuminated pixels stays long enough until the ray visits them again. Without this inertial effect of our eye, CRT displays would look like
this.
So we should
not imagine that we can attain to the higher order time cognition by making our intellect incredibly fast, such that we can keep refreshing all the cells of our field of consciousness. Instead, as presented in the visualization, it is really that we do the opposite - we center our thought on a single image and gradually the Imaginative world grows from there. There's no longer movement of our thinking-cathode ray in the intellectual sense. Instead it is like the cathode ray expands from a ray into a cone and energizes the whole panorama
all at once. Now once again there's movement and dynamics but they are not that of the intellectual cathode ray - the latter is completely expanded and monolithic. Yet the monolithic flow itself has a deeper
texture which is in constant metamorphosis. Initially we must learn to simply behold the panorama, even though it seems quite incomprehensible. But gradually we find new degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity, which are normally hidden behind the movement of our ordinary thinking cathode ray. I can approximately describe this as a kind of spiritual
steering. Higher cognition is in a sense technically simpler than the intellectual, even though meaningfully richer. We don't need to hold elements in our working memory and manipulate them. Instead, our working memory has expanded as an Imaginative panorama which is simply there, there's no need to support it mechanically through refreshing. We only need to support our centered, expanded and monolithic thought-ray (that is, avoid reverting to the cathode ray erratic movement of the intellect) and smoothly steer within the higher order landscape.
This landscape is not simply visual - it is weaved of the (T) experiences which give us immediate consciousness of the lawfulness through which things are flowing. It is here, for example, that we can clearly observe how the cathode ray of the intellect is flowing within the meaningful curvature of desire, interests, beliefs, prejudices. Not simply as Freudian psychoanalytical model (which is still jumping of the thinking ray) but as actual contemplation of the soul.
The question about the feeling of the speed of passage of time is tricky. It's one that can easily become lost in its own recursions. So far I can't find a way to address it properly. It's difficult because when we think about it intellectually we always anchor ourselves within a relative coordinate system so to speak. Just as in special relativity, if we anchor ourselves in a different coordinate system we can speak quite differently. This in part explains why there's no agreement on the passage of time. Some say that when they were engaged with something interesting they hardly noticed how the whole day has gone by. Others report that a single day has been so rich that it felt like a week worth of experiences. So it's really a complicated interplay between thinking, feeling, willing. To simplify it, we can say that we'll have one experience if we anchor ourselves in feeling and experience how thinking goes by, or if we anchor ourselves in thinking and experience how feeling goes by. This is quite vaguely put but it hints about the complexity of the topic and the importance of not simply trying to have absolute opinion on the flow of time but livingly experience the contextual way our spiritual activity works.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 1:58 am
So, returning back to Time-consciousness, I think it's safe to say there is no spiritual being gradually cobbling together this overarching idea of "modern materialistic philosophy of the last 200 years" over what feels like 200 years to it. Perhaps it only feels to it what feels like "10 minutes" to us in normal waking cognition. I have not actually read this directly from Cleric or Steiner or anyone else, as far as I can remember, so take this all tentatively, but I am pretty confident it is at least moving in the right direction and is implicit in their various writings, as well as my own first-person experience of moving along the Time-consciousness spectrum.
This is actually a perfect example for how our intuitive thinking is fully capable to touch its way through the invisible landscape and how it is really only a more aliased experience of the
same invisible landscape, that can be grasped in a more holistic manner through higher cognition.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory, ch.xiii: The Earth and Its Future wrote:
A fact which will play a certain role in the following essays will be briefly indicated here. This concerns the speed with which the development on the different planets takes place. For this is not the same on all the planets. Life proceeds with the greatest speed on Saturn, the rapidity then decreases on the Sun, becomes still less on the Moon and reaches its slowest phase on the earth. On the latter it becomes slower and slower, to the point at which self-consciousness develops. Then the speed increases again. Therefore, today man has already passed the time of the greatest slowness of his development. Life has begun to accelerate again. On Jupiter the speed of the Moon, on Venus that of the Sun will again be attained. The last planet which can still be counted among the series of earthly transformations, and hence follows Venus, is called “Vulcan” by mystery science.
Of course even the above should be taken in the relative sense. We can get some intuition of this by surfing through the Mandelbrot set. Anyone can give it a try
here, for example. Click-hold and drag to pan, use the mouse wheel to zoom. Try zooming at some part and then try panning. Imagine how long it will take if you are to reach from one end of the Mandelbrot set to the other at that zoom level! It's something similar in our middle Earthly stage of evolution. We're very much zoomed in the Time fractal, and it takes a lot of experienced time to traverse the landscape in this way. The future states of evolution can be said to present a more zoomed out picture of the Cosmic potential and as such time doesn't feel to be constrained into the slow flow. But I must warn that this is only an analogy. It's quite impossible to reach the proper understanding of vertical Time by simply arranging Lego blocks of the intellect. This is what I've elsewhere called the inability to escape the Newtonian clock. The Newtonian clock is the feeling we have from the erratic movement of our thinking cathode ray. These movements are like the ticks of that Time experience. When the ray is centered, the ticking also stops. The mystics erroneously call this 'going outside of time' - this only makes it utterly impossible to reason about higher consciousness. Instead, when the ticking of the ray ceases, we become conscious of a higher order time flow, which meaningfully (T) metamorphoses the whole landscape.
When we can't escape the Newtonian ticks of the intellect - the jerky movements of the cathode ray - this gives us the subconscious feeling for what time is. Then if we simply translate this naively to a higher state (like the Vulcan state) we imagine that we feel quite similar to now but only time flows more quickly because we grasp more of the holistic logic of the Whole. This wouldn't be quite correct. It's the main reason for objections such as those that Eugene and Steve have raised. They are worried that when we approach eternity, we'll feel utterly bored because it will be the end of the journey. One can only object in this way when the Newtonian clock of the intellect acts completely below the threshold of consciousness. Then one imagines that this implicit feeling of time is absolute. Then one imagines that even if they rise above all eternal potential, it will look like a pile of Lego block which consciousness in the background must observe as the absolute Newtonian clock ticks by. This of course threatens to be frightfully boring and only urges one to descend in the blocks again.
Alas, there's no easy way to explain these things. It belong to the individual path of each one of us to attain to these deep Intuitions. I attempted to say something about this with the
fishes example, but I admit that it's simply not possible to approach these deepest mysteries easily.
