Whirlpool's core/first motion

[AshvinP]

Basically I was trying to say, don't worry if the details are hard to follow now, especially in my posts (because I include a bunch of details that are not particularly helpful). It's not a reflection on your lack of ability to keep up, i.e. it's not "foolishness", but simply on the nature of what we are exploring. Even when I thought I had grasped many concepts in this stream, I later found out they had quite a different significance than what I had thought from an earlier perspective.
Also, I didn't realize I had already shared the Barfield quote.

That’s much easier to read, thanks for the thought, and for clarifying Ashvin! To be fair about the Barfield quote, I am not sure you already shared it to me specifically, you probably didn’t. It’s just not a new quote for me on this forum.

No problem.

re: Barfield quote - I will just say here, from our hundreds of interactions on this forum, and our own personal experience, it never hurts to be reminded of the thinking-perceiving polarity, because the intellect simply cannot grasp it for very long. Thinking inevitably gets set up against perceiving, experiencing, awareness, is-ness, etc. People tend to feel "dualism" is simply a metaphysical theory which we can choose to accept or reject, but really it's an ingrained mental habit which has swamped Western culture for hundreds of years now. It will always resurface in our psyche, so all we can do is remain vigilant and remind ourselves not to divide them as much as possible when considering any new line of inquiry.

On a side note, about the nature of the exchanges entertained here. Having not the least idea who you all are, what your contexts are (not exactly accurate anymore, now that Shu mentioned age, and your profession, but almost) and having no clue either what brought you to philosophy or spirituality, the only indicators I can navigate by are your ideas - which I am learning - and then the tone and intention through which they are conveyed, to the extent these are transparent to me in a language that, if it wasn’t enough, is unevenly shared. For example, I use the word ‘foolishness’, still I’m not quite sure how it lands on your side. It's a dead precipitation on my plate even more than on yours, if you will.
For myself I find it all quite interesting, still these are well known traps inherent to this kind of correspondence. Now I have no idea what Initiates can gather from thinking imaginatively about it, but for me, all I can make sense of is in your words, so yes, informal language would be best : )

Sure, I will try to keep this in mind.

The higher spiritual capacities of the human individual have been known for many millennia by the Mystery schools and their Initiates. The latter really founded all the major religions and philosophies - for ex. Krishna, Confucius, Lao-Tsu, Zarathustra, Hermes, Buddha, Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus. They have been preserved in various esoteric streams from the time of Jesus, and Steiner was an Initiate of one such stream who also integrated the Wisdom traditions with Western philosophy and science in a comprehensive way. I don't want to bog you down in more details about the various epochs right now. Suffice to say, spiritual (cognitive) evolution follows a rhythmic pattern where later epochs recapitulate earlier ones (not repeat, since there is truly novel progression). What was experienced mostly subconsciously and instinctively is experienced more consciously. What was revealed from without is produced from within. After considering this, you may start to notice how much in modern culture expresses things familiar from ancient Egypt. I have lived near DC for some time now but just recently began to consider how much of its design imitates Egyptian architecture. Which goes to show how much what we know in a living way feeds back into what we can perceive and take notice of. Much more can be said on this topic, but we can leave that for a later time - I will provide a graph from Barfield for now.

Alright. May I say this sounds slightly mindboggling (another word I’m throwing in, let’s see how it bounces back).
Just please tell me the next slide is not going to point to another galaxy, because it’s something in that fashion I think I read around, somewhere at the intersection of ancient Egypt, clairvoyance, spirituality and present day world order, if I remember correctly.


Well, on second thought, what major difference could that even make at this point... : )

It's always a fine line when people ask about these things - I will never distort the truth of the matter as I know it, or completely blow off the question, but it is probably wise not to throw in too many details without the holistic context. Even that graph was too much, it seems, looking back on it and your response. When we speak of the logical structure underlying both outer and inner experience, we mean it very literally - there is a lawful relation underlying absolutely every experience we can imagine. Others have commented on this particular pattern before:


"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce." (Marx)


But the above is very abstract and broad. If there is a lawful structure to historical and cultural progression, then we should be able to discern it with precise detail, if we avoid inserting dualities and discontinuities which block the capacity of human reason.

Speaking of galaxies, here's another favorite quote of mine. It's important to remember that spatial dimension as most people currently experience is intellectualized Time-experience. This is an ontological conclusion, but I think we can all agree on it for purposes of discussion. If not, I am happy to provide more argument.

[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

[Federica]

re: Barfield quote - I will just say here, from our hundreds of interactions on this forum, and our own personal experience, it never hurts to be reminded of the thinking-perceiving polarity, because the intellect simply cannot grasp it for very long. Thinking inevitably gets set up against perceiving, experiencing, awareness, is-ness, etc. People tend to feel "dualism" is simply a metaphysical theory which we can choose to accept or reject, but really it's an ingrained mental habit which has swamped Western culture for hundreds of years now. It will always resurface in our psyche, so all we can do is remain vigilant and remind ourselves not to divide them as much as possible when considering any new line of inquiry.

That's true, and I see it in myself (plus the times when I don't see it)

It's always a fine line when people ask about these things - I will never distort the truth of the matter as I know it, or completely blow off the question, but it is probably wise not to throw in too many details without the holistic context. Even that graph was too much, it seems, looking back on it and your response.

Ashvin,

I was trying to be humorous for some reason, which was surely not very wise on my part, just after speaking of straightforward language. If it felt inappropriate on your side I understand, and I apologize. Please know that I take this graph seriously. I see very well how it is consistent with everything I have been reading from you and Cleric here. It's just that for a moment I was dazed by how serious and focused I have found myself to be over the last month or so, here on this forum, so I wrote a silly thing and it was wrong.

Speaking of galaxies, here's another favorite quote of mine. It's important to remember that spatial dimension as most people currently experience is intellectualized Time-experience. This is an ontological conclusion, but I think we can all agree on it for purposes of discussion. If not, I am happy to provide more argument.

[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 as intellectualized time... would you please provide one more insight on that?

[AshvinP]

re: Barfield quote - I will just say here, from our hundreds of interactions on this forum, and our own personal experience, it never hurts to be reminded of the thinking-perceiving polarity, because the intellect simply cannot grasp it for very long. Thinking inevitably gets set up against perceiving, experiencing, awareness, is-ness, etc. People tend to feel "dualism" is simply a metaphysical theory which we can choose to accept or reject, but really it's an ingrained mental habit which has swamped Western culture for hundreds of years now. It will always resurface in our psyche, so all we can do is remain vigilant and remind ourselves not to divide them as much as possible when considering any new line of inquiry.

That's true, and I see it in myself (plus the times when I don't see it)

It's always a fine line when people ask about these things - I will never distort the truth of the matter as I know it, or completely blow off the question, but it is probably wise not to throw in too many details without the holistic context. Even that graph was too much, it seems, looking back on it and your response.

Ashvin,

I was trying to be humorous for some reason, which was surely not very wise on my part, just after speaking of straightforward language. If it felt inappropriate on your side I understand, and I apologize. Please know that I take this graph seriously. I see very well how it is consistent with everything I have been reading from you and Cleric here. It's just that for a moment I was dazed by how serious and focused I have found myself to be over the last month or so, here on this forum, so I wrote a silly thing and it was wrong.

There is no need to apologize, Frederica. Actually yours is a very healthy reaction to what you are encountering - it shows you actually understand its significance on deep level. Many times people feel we are conveying nothing new, nothing unusual, things explored by many other philosophers and spiritual teachers, and that's exactly when I know it is being considered in complete abstraction. Cleric and I have remarked before how awakening to this path of knowledge was like entering into a fairy tale, too good to be true, Alice in Wonderland, realizing we are in the Truman show, taking the red pill... there is no shortage of initiatory metaphors in popular culture, but at the same time those depictions become a way to avoid the actual path of Initiation.

I want to echo Cleric's sentiment from the other thread - thank you for the efforts to stick with it and my caution against dualism before may be unwarranted, because the strict phenomenological approach is precisely how we ward that habit of thinking off.

Space as intellectualized time... would you please provide one more insight on that?

I apologize in advance because this got pretty long, and I know you are taking in a lot from both Cleric and myself. Also, if you feel the quotes take away from your understanding, I have absolutely no problem leaving them out. I like reading these sorts of things with a few quotes sprinkled in, but that's just me.

Cleric made a great post on this which went way too unnoticed. It was a metaphor to VR games in which non-standard math is used to give the player an experience of going vast distances, moving through corridors, up and down elevators, etc. while simply walking around in a small segment of their room. Many of us are really only traveling around in tiny circles with our spiritual activity, yet we are given the experience of moving about in unfolded spatial dimensions. It was not so in bygone epochs. Life in space was more of a rhythmic Cosmic journey which we see reflected in myths and legends. Gebser actually traced the full unfolding of the 3rd dimension to the time of Petrarch in the late middle ages, and this unfolding coincides with human spiritual activity, and later physical activity, becoming much more out of sync, disharmonized, from Cosmic and Earthly rhythms.

There is a document extant that unforgettably mirrors this gain and loss, this surrender and beginning; in a few sentences it depicts the struggle of a man caught between two worlds. We refer to the remarkable letter of the thirty-two year old Petrarch to Francesco Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro in 1336 (the first letter of his Familiari, vol. 4),13 in which he describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux. For his time, his description is an epochal event and signifies no less than the discovery of landscape: the first dawning of an awareness of space that resulted in a fundamental alteration of European man’s attitude in and toward the world.
...
Here, the Gnostic tradition had encouraged investigation of the world and placed greater emphasis on knowledge than on belief; here, the tradition of the Troubadours, the Cathari, and the Albigensi remained alive... Petrarch’s letter is in the nature of a confession; it is addressed to the Augustinian professor of theology who had taught him to treasure and emulate Augustine’s Confessions. Now, a person makes a confession or an admission only if he believes he has transgressed against something; and it is this vision of space, as extended before him from the mountain top, this vision of space as a reality, and its overwhelming impression, together with his shock and dismay, his bewilderment at his perception and acceptance of the panorama, that are reflected in his letter. It marks him as the first European to step out of the transcendental gilt ground of the Siena masters, the first to emerge from a space dormant in time and soul, into “real” space where he discovers landscape.
...
It may well be that with this event a part of the spiritual, divine formative principle of heaven and earth (and nature in its all-encompassing sense) was conveyed to man. If this is indeed so, then from that day of Petrarch’s discovery onward man’s responsibility was increased. Yet regarded from our vantage point, it is doubtful whether man has been adequate to this responsibility. Be that as it may, the consequences of Petrarch’s discovery remain unaltered; we are still able to sense his uneasiness about his discovery, and the grave responsibility arising from it as documented in his letter.

Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin . Ohio University Press. Kindle Edition.

Now space and time, like all polar opposites, are more and more spiraling together. If we look at someone's GPS map, for ex., it will generally be a small area they are driving around most of the time. Modern life ensnares us within these small spaces, mostly looking down at our phones instead of up to the Heavens. That VR game is a great example of how people will forsake actually traveling through Cosmic realms (with ideal activity) for the dim facade of going to far away places physically in the game. Here we have another example of the natural evolving into the cultural which then evolves into the spiritual. The ideas of the higher Self seeded nature, we evolved culture through it (mostly instinctively) and now, by becoming more conscious of this holistic process, we can participate in rebirthing the spiritual with the cooperative effort of that same higher Self. But that only happens if we freely orient our moral compass towards true North and sacrifice the transient material conveniences and pleasures, otherwise we risk doing irreperable damage. Notice how quickly human ideas precipitate into the perceptual landscape through technology at an accelerating pace.

Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.

It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating.

We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.

Space provides the arena for bottom-up maturation and ascension if navigated ethically and creatively, and Time is how forces of our 'future' - the Divinities - meet us from the top-down to lend a helping hand. Of course that's not nearly their full significance, but I find it a useful way to think of it. We develop moral virtues through our trials and tribulations in space which could not have developed otherwise. This is critical from the perspective of higher worlds, as Cleric also alluded in that post. On the physical plane, our interactions with the Maya perceptions give us pretty immediate feedback - if we walk onto a busy street without looking, there is a good chance life will teach us not to do that again (if we survive). But seemingly our inner ideal activity has little to no consequences. We can live in lies and errors for most of our life, none the better or wiser. But we only feel that way because we are ignoring the other spiritual pole of existence, one-half of reality.

It is not so on the spiritual plane. There our impurities, lies, and errors carry great consequences for ourselves and for all beings. That is why the threshold between physical and spiritual must be 'guarded' closely. This is not an ontological threshold, but one that arises naturally from discontinuity of consciousness - we are always in the higher worlds, but we cannot be consciously creative there until certain virtues are developed, by way of truth and conscience. Humans in their moral state today would cause all sorts of havoc within the higher worlds if allowed creative ideational power. This also relates to our flawed modern mental habits i.e. abstract thinking - we feel there are no stakes to our ideas from the Maya perspective, so we go on speculating around infernal loops and life doesn't seem to notice or care. The higher worlds, however, definitely notice and care. I don't mean they are like judges up there watching and waiting to punish, but rather this entire moral feedback process unfolds according to higher order Logic, which is reflected in what esoteric streams know as the laws of Karma and reincarnation (this is not typical vague understanding of Karma, but highly scientific).

I will end it there for now.

[Cleric K]

Thanks ... I feel we're finding more points of convergence. I still struggle with the idea of 'frequency', and how it relates to 'thinking'. Is this more of a metaphor, rather than some kind of frequency as it is generally understood in physicalist terms, such as the frequency of wavelengths?

Well, I went along with the 'frequency' only because you mentioned it. Other than that, one God knows what newagers imagine when they speak of frequencies. I would say any feeling of being more in-the-flow, more connected with everything, more happy, is seen as raised frequency (Burning Man included )

The struggle that you speak of is real and it is one of those contradictions that should motivate us to go further and further. The problem is when concepts remain floating in the air. We can understand frequency very immediately when we look at a pendulum. Then the concept of frequency relates directly to 'how frequent' or how rapidly the pendulum swings. It's a concept that directly unites with the dynamics of our perceptions. When we speak of sound, things become more obscured because we don't really sense anything oscillating. We perceive pure tone (example of sine sweep from 20Hz to 20kHz). So here the concept of frequency applies only because of our thinking understanding that vibrating objects agitate the air and transmit sound waves. Otherwise these oscillations are too rapid for our eye to see individually. It's like a pendulum which swings so fast that we don't see the weight now here, then there but instead we see something like stationary fan-shaped object.

For newagers it is very difficulty to find any such thinking connection between perceptions. It all remains floating abstraction. Some energies, dimensions and so on are imagined but all this remains as floating pictures in the mind, just like superstrings are only floating mathematical objects in the physicist mind.

For me, the concept of frequency has very real application when it is used in the way described in the Time-Consciousness essay. As long as we try to understand these things from the third-person perspective it all remains abstract. We try to understand not how these things play out in our own cognition, but instead we move our cognition in the background and then imagine some other theoretical mind from the outside, and we think from the background how that theoretical mind works, in the way we try to understand a clock. Even if we conceptualize the frequencies of the gears of this mind-clock, they'll still remain a theoretical model and it won't be seen how they may apply to the real mind that philosophizes from the background.

The solution is that thinking itself must see itself as inseparable part of the living first-person World Process. Then like Federica did in the last post, one begins to intuit how our supersensible weaving in meaning is being shaped by the actual rhythmic processes within which we live. We begin to sense how we're flowing in pendulum-like dynamics, how our cognitive states often follow Lissajous-like patterns. We don't think about theoretical 'negative feelings' but we experience the real negative feelings that force us into loops. We don't speculate how some abstract forces rule the theoretical mind but observe how our ideas, beliefs, inclinations, preferences, likes, dislikes, on every step guide the unfoldment of our cognition. This the main thing and the most resisted. Science and philosophy have become way too comfortable with this thinking hidden in the background which theorizes about the world, the mind, MAL and so on, while it remains forever disconnected from the reality it seeks to speculate about.

I don't usually use terms like 'raising the frequency', precisely because it's quite unclear what this should mean. Yet if I try to connect this expression to something experiential, I would say it's something like the aliasing metaphor and like Ashvin's Liminal Spaces.

Now raising the frequency sounds like everything should become made of only high-pitched squeaky experiences. That's why such expressions can be confusing. On the other hand, when it's spoken about the greater Time rhythms, it seems that everything will become sluggish and our inner experience will move with the pace of a glacier. But this is not so. Instead, it's an integration of the two. On one hand we grasp the greater rhythms but at the same time we feel within them, with infinite fractal resolution, the states that fit within that Time.

Limited version of this may be known to cannabis users when listening to music. It seems like that in our normal state, our thinking attention jumps in very coarse manner across perceptions, practically aliasing the liminal spaces in the process. Cannabis may lead to a state of deeper relaxation where we no longer jump hectically through time but instead expand to grasp a segment of music more holistically. Then it feels as if fractally rich perceptions begin to fill the space between our ordinary music appreciation habits.

Yes, this may come as a surprise to some but just like everything else, music is not some pure phenomenon that we simply perceive in its is-ness. Music entrains our thinking and leads it. Imagine that music is our dancing partner and she leads us. But imagine also that we have a problem with our leg and we're limping. This would be the is-ness of our experience of dancing. It's the same with music appreciation. The fact that two persons are subject to the sound waves of the same music doesn't mean that they'll experience the same is-ness. If the thinking skills of one person are like limping wandering, then this is how much he'll get from it. The cognitive skills act as filter which alias the rich spectrum of the sound into thinking gestures that the person knows.

What I said above about cannabis is not an advocacy because there're too many other pitfalls that outweigh any of these more valuable experiences. Furthermore, everything is perfectly achievable through our own forces, even though it requires certain effort. As an example, we can try listening to music by concentrating and trying to hold perfectly centered and still. Instead of moving along the song with our limping thinking gestures, we make ourselves into a calm lake, focus all our attention in a stable point and allow the sound impress into it, without allowing it to entrain our thinking - that is, without breaking our concentration. When this is done, we begin to feel how the liminal spaces begin to open up and completely new musical gestures begin to fill our consciousness. Of course, most of the times this is so interesting and amazing that we quickly forget about our concentration and begin analyzing the new cognitive dimension, rapidly chopping them down into limping again. So as with everything, it takes many iterations. We shouldn't be discouraged but give thanks for every little opening of the cracks that we attain to. Through experiences like these we get much first-person experiential substance of which we can speak in pictorial ways, even utilizing concepts as rhythms, frequencies, liminal spaces, etc. So the real struggle shouldn't be to gain understanding in itself but seek also the living experiences to which we can unite the understanding.

[Soul_of_Shu]

The struggle that you speak of is real and it is one of those contradictions that should motivate us to go further and further. The problem is when concepts remain floating in the air. We can understand frequency very immediately when we look at a pendulum. Then the concept of frequency relates directly to 'how frequent' or how rapidly the pendulum swings. It's a concept that directly unites with the dynamics of our perceptions. When we speak of sound, things become more obscured because we don't really sense anything oscillating. We perceive pure tone (example of sine sweep from 20Hz to 20kHz). So here the concept of frequency applies only because of our thinking understanding that vibrating objects agitate the air and transmit sound waves. Otherwise these oscillations are too rapid for our eye to see individually. It's like a pendulum which swings so fast that we don't see the weight now here, then there but instead we see something like stationary fan-shaped object.

For newagers it is very difficulty to find any such thinking connection between perceptions. It all remains floating abstraction. Some energies, dimensions and so on are imagined but all this remains as floating pictures in the mind, just like superstrings are only floating mathematical objects in the physicist mind.

For me, the concept of frequency has very real application when it is used in the way described in the Time-Consciousness essay. As long as we try to understand these things from the third-person perspective it all remains abstract. We try to understand not how these things play out in our own cognition, but instead we move our cognition in the background and then imagine some other theoretical mind from the outside, and we think from the background how that theoretical mind works, in the way we try to understand a clock. Even if we conceptualize the frequencies of the gears of this mind-clock, they'll still remain a theoretical model and it won't be seen how they may apply to the real mind that philosophizes from the background.

The solution is that thinking itself must see itself as inseparable part of the living first-person World Process. Then like Federica did in the last post, one begins to intuit how our supersensible weaving in meaning is being shaped by the actual rhythmic processes within which we live. We begin to sense how we're flowing in pendulum-like dynamics, how our cognitive states often follow Lissajous-like patterns. We don't think about theoretical 'negative feelings' but we experience the real negative feelings that force us into loops. We don't speculate how some abstract forces rule the theoretical mind but observe how our ideas, beliefs, inclinations, preferences, likes, dislikes, on every step guide the unfoldment of our cognition. This the main thing and the most resisted. Science and philosophy have become way too comfortable with this thinking hidden in the background which theorizes about the world, the mind, MAL and so on, while it remains forever disconnected from the reality it seeks to speculate about.

I don't usually use terms like 'raising the frequency', precisely because it's quite unclear what this should mean. Yet if I try to connect this expression to something experiential, I would say it's something like the aliasing metaphor and like Ashvin's Liminal Spaces.

Now raising the frequency sounds like everything should become made of only high-pitched squeaky experiences. That's why such expressions can be confusing. On the other hand, when it's spoken about the greater Time rhythms, it seems that everything will become sluggish and our inner experience will move with the pace of a glacier. But this is not so. Instead, it's an integration of the two. On one hand we grasp the greater rhythms but at the same time we feel within them, with infinite fractal resolution, the states that fit within that Time.

Limited version of this may be known to cannabis users when listening to music. It seems like that in our normal state, our thinking attention jumps in very coarse manner across perceptions, practically aliasing the liminal spaces in the process. Cannabis may lead to a state of deeper relaxation where we no longer jump hectically through time but instead expand to grasp a segment of music more holistically. Then it feels as if fractally rich perceptions begin to fill the space between our ordinary music appreciation habits.

Yes, this may come as a surprise to some but just like everything else, music is not some pure phenomenon that we simply perceive in its is-ness. Music entrains our thinking and leads it. Imagine that music is our dancing partner and she leads us. But imagine also that we have a problem with our leg and we're limping. This would be the is-ness of our experience of dancing. It's the same with music appreciation. The fact that two persons are subject to the sound waves of the same music doesn't mean that they'll experience the same is-ness. If the thinking skills of one person are like limping wandering, then this is how much he'll get from it. The cognitive skills act as filter which alias the rich spectrum of the sound into thinking gestures that the person knows.

What I said above about cannabis is not an advocacy because there're too many other pitfalls that outweigh any of these more valuable experiences. Furthermore, everything is perfectly achievable through our own forces, even though it requires certain effort. As an example, we can try listening to music by concentrating and trying to hold perfectly centered and still. Instead of moving along the song with our limping thinking gestures, we make ourselves into a calm lake, focus all our attention in a stable point and allow the sound impress into it, without allowing it to entrain our thinking - that is, without breaking our concentration. When this is done, we begin to feel how the liminal spaces begin to open up and completely new musical gestures begin to fill our consciousness. Of course, most of the times this is so interesting and amazing that we quickly forget about our concentration and begin analyzing the new cognitive dimension, rapidly chopping them down into limping again. So as with everything, it takes many iterations. We shouldn't be discouraged but give thanks for every little opening of the cracks that we attain to. Through experiences like these we get much first-person experiential substance of which we can speak in pictorial ways, even utilizing concepts as rhythms, frequencies, liminal spaces, etc. So the real struggle shouldn't be to gain understanding in itself but seek also the living experiences to which we can unite the understanding.

Good one Cleric ... Much to digest. Briefly, rather than the term 'raising' one's frequency, it now feels more like syncing frequencies that are already innate, but rather suppressed, as if trying to play a duet in harmony with an adept musician, while one's own chords are limited to just 3 guitar strings, the rest being muted do to lack of facility, as if playing with a crippled hand. Perhaps not the best analogy, but hopefully makes the point. May have more questions in a couple of days, after some travelling.

[Cleric K]

Good one Cleric ... Much to digest. Briefly, rather than the term 'raising' one's frequency, it now feels more like syncing frequencies that are already innate, but rather suppressed, as if trying to play a duet in harmony with an adept musician, while one's own chords are limited to just 3 guitar strings, the rest being muted do to lack of facility, as if playing with a crippled hand. Perhaps not the best analogy, but hopefully makes the point. May have more questions in a couple of days, after some travelling.

Yeah, sounds good. The musician metaphor is very nice. I hope you won't mind if I extend it a little I wanted to note something about what Ashvin quoted:

We must not suppose that the formation of such a mood is able to appear on swift wings — it cannot do so. It has to be cultivated; but when it is cultivated, when we really take the trouble to be awake and, having driven out the arbitrary thoughts, wait for what can be received in the mind, this mood gradually develops. Then it becomes possible to receive thoughts from the depths of the soul, from a world wider than our ego-hood. If we really develop this, we shall soon perceive that in the world there is not only what we see, hear and perceive with our outer senses, and combine with our intellect, but there is also an objective thought-texture. Only few possess this to-day as their own innate knowledge. This experience of a universal thought-tissue, in which the soul actually exists, is not some kind of special occult experience; it is something that any man can have if he develops the aforementioned mood. From this experience he can say: In my every-day life I stand in the world which I perceive with my senses and have put together with the intellect; I now find myself in a position in which I am as though standing on the shore, I plunge into the sea and swim in the surging water; so can I, standing on the brink of sense-existence, thus plunge into the surging sea of thought. I am really as though in a surging sea. We can have the feeling of a life — or, at least, we have an inkling of a life, stronger and more intense than the mere dream-life, yet having just such a boundary between it and outer sense-reality as that between dream-life and sense-reality. We can, if we desire, speak of such experience as ‘dreams,’ but they are no dreams! For the world into which we plunge, this world of surging thoughts which are not our own, but those in which we are submerged, is the world out of which our physical sense-world arises, out of which it arises in a condensed form, as it were. Our physical world of sense is like blocks of ice floating in water: the water is there, the ice congeals and floats in it. As the ice consists of the same substance as the water, only raised to a different physical condition, so our physical world of sense arises from this surging, undulating sea of thought.

Hopefully this should be clear by now but let's emphasize it just in case. We should in no way confuse what Steiner calls 'thoughts' in the above with 'hearing voices' (Steiner has especially warned on different occasions that hearing voices is a quite pathological soul condition). Receiving thoughts is not hearing voices!

To receive a thought is only possible if we know what it is to produce a thought. That's why all the exercises here focus on developing consciousness of our invisible thinking gestures, to be able to awaken to our weaving in meaning, which impresses into the perceptual stream. To continue the musical metaphor, there's difference between hearing music and knowing the inner activity which precipitates our soul life into the willing gestures through which we play the instrument. The simplest musical instrument is our vocal tract. Singing is the most immediate kind of music. Singing captures much better the kind of life in which the soul lives. The intellect is singing that has lost its conscious contact with soul rhythm, melody, harmony. The intellect still lives in these elements but they evade clear consciousness. We call them logic. Logic is mineralized music. Puzzle of frozen tones. To evolve into the higher orders of cognition means to develop lucid consciousness of our spirit weaving in the musical dimension of our soul life. Yet this musical dimension is not simply aesthetic feeling. It's tremendously rich cognition. It is meaningful beyond what we can patch together through frozen intellectual tones. It is artful language of the Spirit through which the World Content is shaped.

We don't know what thought is unless we recognize the thinking gestures of the invisible man on the couch, producing ripples on the tablet screen. Similarly, we don't know music in its full reality if we don't know also its inner aspect - the supersensible soul life which crystalizes into tones. In that sense, we may behold the most fantastic psychedelic landscape but if we have no consciousness of the thinking gestures which weave that panorama, we're only staring at Maya.

A musical teacher is of use only if we decide to play music ourselves. If we only build intellectual picture of what playing music is, but we never try to activate our will, we're simply adding contents to our Maya tapestry. When we attempt to play we enter in contact with a world of will, musical technique. Then we meet our teacher in that realm, he lives there. If we don't know the realm of musical will within ourselves, we can't know the reality in which the teacher lives.

It is similar in the spiritual realm. To know what the higher worlds do, we need to find the realm of thinking will within ourselves. We need to become an aspirant willing to learn to use his instrument. The age of the intellect, the last few centuries, can be compared to learning the tones of the higher music. Science and philosophy have learned to produce tones but have mistaken these products for a mirror of the full reality. They try to say what the world is by building rigid arrangements of tones. What is new today is that the world is our soul. The deeper we go in our soul, the more we find it is the whole Cosmos.

The arts express what lives in the soul in perceptual forms. Today's science and philosophy still don't recognize that their own intellectual creations are the crystalized artforms of the life of the World Soul, as expressed by the Spirit. It would be foolish if an artist says "This statue, this painting, this piece of music is what my soul is". The perceptual artform is a precipitation from the soul but the living soul is something infinitely vaster. Yet, science and philosophy make exactly that mistake - not knowing that the intellect is the frozen music of the living Cosmos, they build the theory and say "This is what reality is and how it works".

The World is the artful expression of the Soul of God. For God to know the infinity of his Soul, his Spirit must give it a musical form. This form is only one of infinitely many. Evolution is the process through which the Spirit learns to know the World Soul by integrating it bit by bit. Currently the Spirit integrates the shards of the intellect into musical phrases. This can only happen if the Spirit awakens for its higher order singing activity.

To receive thoughts means to live in the realm where thoughts are willed. Everything in reality is being thought. By getting to know our clumsy thought gestures, we may be very far from fluent playing but at least we get in touch with the realm where we can find the gestures of other beings more advanced than us. We begin to resonate with the thinking gestures of the beings that think the World. We come to know the spiritual world when our thinking gestures become so sensitive that they can follow the gestures of the beings. It's like learning to play by gently placing our hands over those of our teacher and try to feel his gestures as he plays. This is what it means to receive a thought. It's becoming attuned to the thinking gestures of the living Cosmos, which thinks the spheres, the kingdoms, our bodily complex. These thoughts are not mere concepts. They are living, creative activity extending in time. We find the forces that think the liver, the heart, the opening blossom, the sunlight. Here one may say "but it sounds extremely boring to be stuck thinking the heart. I want to travel, to party, to relax." But this is only because we have very limited and anthropomorphic conception of what the higher worlds are. The heart is a whole archetypal world and what the Spirit is doing there simply doesn't fit our Earthly conceptions. What happens there is more interesting, more beautiful, more incredible than all the most fantastic sensory experiences put together. We need great humility when stepping towards the higher worlds and be ready to be taught spiritual gestures which simply cannot fit the conceptual forms we have acquired through our interaction with the senses.

All this of course still becomes impressed as sensory-like images - that's why this stage is called Imagination. Yet spiritual mastery is not about being fed psychedelic visuals without experiencing the thinking force behind them, just like musical mastery it not about hearing music without experiencing the soul life and will behind the sounds.

[AshvinP]

Space provides the arena for bottom-up maturation and ascension if navigated ethically and creatively, and Time is how forces of our 'future' - the Divinities - meet us from the top-down to lend a helping hand.

I will add a few more thoughts on this connection, to flesh it out a bit more since I hurried over it, also in relation to Cleric's last post. It's interesting how modern science came to discover the inextricable link between space and time at the dawn of the 20th century. Einstein's theory of GR developed around the same time as depth psychology and then QM, which all relate the moral (the observer, knower, inner, ideal, spirit) to the natural (the object, outer, perceptual, soul). And the process philosophies of pragmatism and phenomenology really took off at this time as well. Process philosophy is another method of coming back from isolated things in space to an understanding of all objects as momentary snapshots of processes unfolding in time. Space associates with the natural and Time with the moral. How is this so?

If we think of phenomena which flow in time, like music, we have a successive unfolding of perceptual states of being in a rhythmic and harmonious manner. Each state lawfully follows and integrates the previous, and the whole song flows along from beginning to end. Now imagine a few different people playing the same song with different instruments and at the same time, except one person is playing measures from the beginning, some from the middle, some from the end. That would be quite the disharmonious experience, and that is what we know as space. It is what normally flows along in time successively, but has now been splayed out concurrently as mostly fixed objects with and within spatial dimension. (incidentally, we can understand a lot about spatial geography by considering its temporal dimension in this way).

When things flow along perfectly in time, there is harmony but there isn't the possibility for differentiation, suffering, uncertainty, and therefore ethical virtues and freedom. For that, disharmony and uncertainty is needed. Differentiated states of being need to exist simultaneously and compete for the same goals, so that one group attaining the goal comes at the expense of the other. Without the disharmony, it would be as if the higher beings exhaled meaning into perception and then inhaled their entire essence back in, as Cleric conveyed that activity in his recent post. They would leave no remainder of perceptual essence for lower beings to take control of and evolve through in greater freedom. The lower would remain as spiritual infants.

There would be no perceptual environment whatsoever. Space is the result of this exhaling process with a remainder not fully inhaled over many iterations. How can Space then lead us back to Time? To reabsorb the perceptual environment without eliminating qualities born of the differentiation, humanity must create a symphony out of its own free desire, which is motivated by living knowledge of its own true nature, which is gained through the spatial domain. It should be a knowledge which carries stakes - it must make a huge difference in our lives whether it is known versus not known. That relates back to the fact that space allows for a perceptual world where there is immediate natural feedback for errors in judgment (at least until recently, when modern civilization became so effortlessly comfortable that we can live in abstract phantom thoughts all day without little to no health or social risks).

Different groups must freely choose to play the same song with different instruments and have their performance conducted by a shared ideal (the higher worlds), as Cleric alluded to previously. The fact that musical symphonies evolved in recent centuries reveal to us the wise guidance of evolution is giving us the tools we need to make these analogies and follow them to where they are pointing us. The same is true of the VR games and the scientific theories which were mentioned previously. These can all serve as tools in humanity's toolbox of awakening to the Spirit who lives within, if more focus is paid to what is being done to evolve the content and less on the finished content itself. The only obstacle is our own lack of interest and attention to what is happening around and through us.

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomotion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding,— its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries Matter and Mind.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

Although we can speak of this at the collective evolutionary scale, it also holds valid on the daily local scale. Invisible, durational.ideas are constantly being incarnated into outer spatial perceptions. I have the idea to light a candle, that idea meets the resistance of my physical body, my hand flicks the lighter and lights the wick, the flame ignites, and then I perceive how the fire, as a symbol of ideation and knowledge (think Prometheus), consumes the air and meets the resistance of the candle wax, as a symbol of spatial matter, to maintain its life while longing to return to its supersensible home and working tirelessly towards that goal. What I perceive spatially points me back to what I just did ideationally through time, but now with much greater clarity of consciousness of the holistic process, if I am awake enough to consider it this way.

[Cleric K]

This is more uncharted terrain for me for the time being. Why has the mirror of perceptual reality been broken into pieces? Why can't the world of perceptions be a specular reflection of the spiritual? And the 'how' of this inverted correspondence between meaning/intuition/spirit and the holes remains obscure. (Not asking these questions, only saying that's where my inquiry will try to move to as I become more familiar with this process.)

To address the 'how' we must enter the details of spiritual science. The 'why' is interesting because usually when we ask, we imagine that we have the appropriate conceptual 'slots' to receive the answer. But is it so? The medieval villager can grasp only answers in the form "You exist in this condition in order to experience chopping wood and taking the sheep out." So as our understanding evolves, so do the kinds of answers that we're capable of receiving.

Yet if we have to answer in a general way, we can say: "In order to know what Love is." It will be very assuming on our part if we believe we know what Love is. There's nothing that we can put our finger on and say "That's what Love is." Love contains within itself all possibilities. Everything is born out of Love then seeks understanding and inner experience of what Love is. To find that understanding and experience one must follow Love to its Source, one must approach the perspective of the Source. The mother does the same, doesn't she? When she herself is born as a baby she is surrounded by Love, it is her external reality. When she grows up she seeks to experience the inner dimension of Love, so she herself begins to love and new life is born. This is a tiny fractal image of the greater Love that births and sustains the Cosmos.

Love in inexhaustible, there are infinite ways of knowing it. In all cases the Spirit awakens to Love as environment and goes on to know its inner essence in ever expanding dimensions of its Unity. Our current evolutionary journey is knowing Love by going through the greatest contrasts. Today there's a lot of talk about dissociation, alters, whirlpools, bubbles, veils and so on. There's a search for the mechanism of separation. It's all very simple - it's lovelessness. This is not to be judgmental. It's a simple fact of our evolutionary scenario. We're learning what Love is by having so much outside us that we no longer recognize it. The tiny particle of Love that has remained in us has become self-love. Even human love between partners in our age is primarily self-love. We primarily seek to receive the joys of love and not so much that we become a spring of Love.

When a stranger eats with our spoon, most people will feel disgust if they have to use it afterwards. Deep within ourselves, in our epoch and culture, we feel similar disgust about the spiritual essence of others. Not everyone will admit this but it is so if we observe without prejudice. That's why there's a lot of speculation about what dissociation is but very little about how to overcome it. To overcome it one must realize that we're breathing the same spiritual air, that our thoughts and feelings pass as waves through the one inner space. Not everyone is willing to approach such knowledge. There are two directions which support the resistance. One is the fear of the spiritual world. This fear is usually masked as pride, which conceals the antipathy we feel if we were to find the inner being of all humans on the same side as ours. The other is shame. Believing that our inner world is a completely private sphere, a blackhole from which no light comes out, has led modern humanity to be completely indiscriminatory about the quality of thoughts and feelings that go through our soul. We simply believe that they have no significance except as our own fully private phenomena. This hasn't be so in the past when people still had fear of God and they knew that their soul is an open book for him. Today this negligence has built up as a secret feeling of shame for the forms we have bred in our souls.

We can't change the past and no one will condemn us for what we've done in our ignorance but we must set to work so that things change for the future. Purity is what allows the "I" to safely step out of its dissociative womb. And Love is what allows us to find our bearings in the new world.

Now all this doesn't mean that we should dissolve and diffuse in the Cosmos. We should use the method of the Sun. Love is fire. First it melts and evaporates our own impurities, then it doesn't allow anything impure to enter us from the outside, without melting it first. That's what the Alchemists sought. Turning lead into gold through the Philosopher's Stone is an image for the transmutation of the soul. So it is all a process and a process that requires a lot of Wisdom.

In any case, finding these higher levels of Love, also give us new forms of consciousness. The moment we taste even a drop of the Elixir of Everlasting Life, which is Love, we immediately say "Now I see why!" And even this 'why' is only a stage.

So when we ask 'why' we shouldn't expect something which can simply fit our intellectual slots. The real 'why' must be lived through, it must be known from its inner side. Then we understand how ingenious, how incredible all this is. Then we also understand why higher beings seed the worlds and beings that can go through similar process, and we understand why we'll find the greatest creative joy in doing the same in the future.

[AshvinP]

It's a simple fact of our evolutionary scenario. We're learning what Love is by having so much outside us that we no longer recognize it. The tiny particle of Love that has remained in us has become self-love. Even human love between partners in our age is primarily self-love. We primarily seek to receive the joys of love and not so much that we become a spring of Love.

Great! I want to add a note to this for anyone else following.

Our own thinking can be understood as an expression of Love, but 'stepped down' over many iterations of involution from Spirit (Pure Love) to Matter. Feelings by themselves never reach beyond the personal to the transpersonal. That is reflected in language. When an object makes me happy, like a tree, I say "this tree makes me happy" or "I am happy about this tree." When I discern the meaning of its form, I say, "this tree is growing" or "this tree is dying". The "I think" is there but almost always remains implicit, silent in the background. The more I contemplate the meaning of the tree, the less likely the thought-statement will simply be a means of expressing my own desires and feelings rather than expressing something meaningful about the tree itself. Mystical types are quite incorrect, then, to say certain materialist scientists are not engaging their soul when they devote so much thinking energy to the phenomena of nature - the only problem is they are not conscious of what they are doing.

Our own thinking is the hardest for us to take notice of because it is always active and focusing its energy on the object of its activity. It runs quietly in the background, submerging itself into whatever it is contemplating. And because of that sacrifice, we become self-aware in the world, yet we also forget that we are thinking. We start to feel we have immediately discerned meaning from simply being aware, simply willing, simply feeling, simply looking at outer perceptions, simply absorbing revelation from scripture, etc. Thinking forgets what it is doing while focusing only on what it is thinking about. Perhaps we are even annoyed with this long post because it is forcing us to think carefully about our own thinking. That is simply the evolutionary stage we are in, as Cleric remarked. 

Our thinking is now lost in perceptions, dragged around by them passively, and we cannot locate our own soul in any of these perceptions. We devote all energy to these fragmented perceptions and none to Thinking itself. What is the way out? When we contemplate the spiritual, we are necessarily contemplating our own thinking - the Spirit is none other than Thinking. This can't be done in any materialized way - devout religious people contemplate the "spiritual", but really it's the spiritual recast into sensory phenomena through rigid literal-mindedness. So they are mostly contemplating sense perceptions again, being dragged around by them. Instead, we can begin to study spiritual science - a field of inquiry rooted in heartfelt investigation of supersensible domains of soul and spirit. We call follow the logic carefully with our thinking - which is then thinking contemplating its own supersensible nature. This is what Steiner does in PoSA continuing into spiritual scientific writings and lectures.

We can also do focused thinking meditations where we actively will our thinking of certain images not found in the sense-world. This allows for our Willing activity (what we are doing) and our Thinking activity (what we are thinking about or perceiving) to spiral together, and the images can also get Feeling involved if they are of a devotional spiritual nature and we join them with prayer. These things don't require money, great IQ, or even much time at first. But they do require a sacrifice of purely abstract speculating and opinionating, which we mostly do for our own curiosity and pleasure, without any higher ideal - such as Divine Love - to motivate and orient the intellect. They require us to stop forming absolute conclusions about the "essence" of the Cosmos, and rather look inwards at our own impure soul qualities and discern how they obstruct the flow of the fiery Spirit through us and into our thoughts, so as to obscure that essence from us. We can then embark on a limitless quest to discover this essence from within in the most living way imaginable.

[Federica]

To address the 'how' we must enter the details of spiritual science. The 'why' is interesting because usually when we ask, we imagine that we have the appropriate conceptual 'slots' to receive the answer. But is it so? The medieval villager can grasp only answers in the form "You exist in this condition in order to experience chopping wood and taking the sheep out." So as our understanding evolves, so do the kinds of answers that we're capable of receiving.

Yet if we have to answer in a general way, we can say: "In order to know what Love is." It will be very assuming on our part if we believe we know what Love is. There's nothing that we can put our finger on and say "That's what Love is." Love contains within itself all possibilities.

Yes. What I have tried to realize is what love is not. In this way I think I have got closer to what (human) love is…

Our current evolutionary journey is knowing Love by going through the greatest contrasts. Today there's a lot of talk about dissociation, alters, whirlpools, bubbles, veils and so on. There's a search for the mechanism of separation. It's all very simple - it's lovelessness. This is not to be judgmental. It's a simple fact of our evolutionary scenario. We're learning what Love is by having so much outside us that we no longer recognize it. The tiny particle of Love that has remained in us has become self-love. Even human love between partners in our age is primarily self-love. We primarily seek to receive the joys of love and not so much that we become a spring of Love.

It sounds absolutely spot-on - our self-inflicted and self-maintained epochal condition of lovelessness. But I can’t see any overlap between human love and self-love. Vocabulary is unfair here, the two words shouldn’t share so much estate. What tiny particle of Love (not even of love) has remained in self-love? I can't see any. Self-love is at worst narcissism and egoism, and at best, it’s fear. As you say, it is also what human love between partners in our age primarily is: the sterile workings of the expectation-projection loop; the fear that our requests could remain unfulfilled, and our pride and self-image unmatched; it's the rule of do ut des. There is not the least bit of love in these habits. It’s not even that we seek to receive the joys of love, because we ignore what they are, let alone to become a spring of love. Not being judgmental either. I am not there, but I have been there.
I see human love as something we can receive and reflect back, or give and receive back. We can let it flow through well maintained plumbing, but it’s nothing that we can redirect on ourselves and find in that gesture a small particle of Love… This doesn’t make any sense to me. A movement of a very different nature is self-respect, and maybe it’s just vocabulary. There's a growing narrative around self-care and self-love today and maybe what you refer to as self-love here I simply call self-respect.

Deep within ourselves, in our epoch and culture, we feel similar disgust about the spiritual essence of others. Not everyone will admit this but it is so if we observe without prejudice. That's why there's a lot of speculation about what dissociation is but very little about how to overcome it. To overcome it one must realize that we're breathing the same spiritual air, that our thoughts and feelings pass as waves through the one inner space. Not everyone is willing to approach such knowledge. There are two directions which support the resistance. One is the fear of the spiritual world. This fear is usually masked as pride, which conceals the antipathy we feel if we were to find the inner being of all humans on the same side as ours. The other is shame. Believing that our inner world is a completely private sphere, a blackhole from which no light comes out, has led modern humanity to be completely indiscriminatory about the quality of thoughts and feelings that go through our soul. We simply believe that they have no significance except as our own fully private phenomena. This hasn't be so in the past when people still had fear of God and they knew that their soul is an open book for him. Today this negligence has built up as a secret feeling of shame for the forms we have bred in our souls.

I clearly recognize the truth of what you expose here… it’s eye-opening to see it that way. Yes, we wouldn’t want to glimpse into someone else’s inner life and thoughts if we could, because we know it’s their dirty laundry and we know too well how our own laundry is also dirty - who knows how much dirtier. Therefore we prefer to be shamefully thankful that the “thoughts pay no-toll” regime applies.
Speaking for myself, I think I have been somehow preserved from this fear of the spiritual from a very young age, simply because at that age I used to wish just the complete opposite to the privacy of thoughts. ‘If only my thoughts could be visible, and recognizable, and recognized’ was my wish. Growing up I then became somewhat utilitarian, taking advantage of the “thoughts pay no-toll” regime like everyone else, but I never really immersed myself deeply in this disgust or fear of the underlying web of thoughts…

We can't change the past and no one will condemn us for what we've done in our ignorance but we must set to work so that things change for the future. Purity is what allows the "I" to safely step out of its dissociative womb. And Love is what allows us to find our bearings in the new world.

Now all this doesn't mean that we should dissolve and diffuse in the Cosmos. We should use the method of the Sun. Love is fire. First it melts and evaporates our own impurities, then it doesn't allow anything impure to enter us from the outside, without melting it first. That's what the Alchemists sought. Turning lead into gold through the Philosopher's Stone is an image for the transmutation of the soul. So it is all a process and a process that requires a lot of Wisdom.

In any case, finding these higher levels of Love, also give us new forms of consciousness. The moment we taste even a drop of the Elixir of Everlasting Life, which is Love, we immediately say "Now I see why!" And even this 'why' is only a stage.

So when we ask 'why' we shouldn't expect something which can simply fit our intellectual slots. The real 'why' must be lived through, it must be known from its inner side. Then we understand how ingenious, how incredible all this is. Then we also understand why higher beings seed the worlds and beings that can go through similar process, and we understand why we'll find the greatest creative joy in doing the same in the future.

To the extent that it can be, it’s clear. Thank you!