Whirlpool's core/first motion

[Soul_of_Shu]

And the Steiner quote is revelatory! It speaks precisely to what Cleric is coming to in the other thread...

Steiner strikes a resonant chord here too ... And this musing is about the 'man of today' a century ago. Wonder what would be made of the 'man of today' a century later, let's say at a party, whose intense focus is lost in the thrall of some smartphone VR entertainment, with thoughts unspoken. What Thinking is this? What depths of the soul are mined? What does it bespeak? What insightful poetry might flow from it? Then again, maybe they're on twitter, doing just what the man of a century ago was doing, only now in the global 'www' village, thumbs furiously tapping away on the electron screen, with likes and followers galore, the would-be man of tomorrow seeming as rare as ever. Still seems it's going to take some messianic intervention, to better effect than the last one.

Cleric ... Can you walk on water?

[Federica]

Steiner strikes a resonant chord here too ... And this musing is about the 'man of today' a century ago. Wonder what would be made of the 'man of today' a century later, let's say at a party, whose intense focus is lost in the thrall of some smartphone VR entertainment, with thoughts unspoken. What Thinking is this? What depths of the soul are mined? What does it bespeak? What insightful poetry might flow from it? Then again, maybe they're on twitter, doing just what the man of a century ago was doing, only now in the global 'www' village, thumbs furiously tapping away on the electron screen, with likes and followers galore, the would-be man of tomorrow seeming as rare as ever. Still seems it's going to take some messianic intervention, to better effect than the last one.

Cleric ... Can you walk on water?

I read around that quote. What he seems to say is that, along the lines of evolution, mankind goes towards less clairvoyance in the spiritual and - because of a thickening body substance - lower ability to think, feel and perceive certain perceptions that yet must be perceived. On the other hand mankind also goes towards more freewill and more opportunities to gather from the dead those necessary thoughts that only can be thought by the dead, and access and integrate them through spiritual work and through refraining from thought dissipation. So... compounded effect on the man of today uncertain.

From various facts presented to our souls by Spiritual Science, we know that in course of the earth's evolution, the spirit of man passes through an evolution of its own. We know that man can only understand himself by a fruitful consideration of the question: What is man's attitude in any one incarnation, in his present incarnation, to the spiritual world, to the spiritual realms? To what stage of evolution has mankind in general attained in the time when we ourselves live in a definite incarnation.

We know that outer observation of this general evolution of mankind allows of the opinion that in earlier times, earlier epochs, a certain ‘atavistic clairvoyance’ was poured over mankind, the human soul was then, as it were, nearer to the spiritual worlds. But it was also further from its own freedom, its own freewill, to which in our age we are nearer while more shut off from the spiritual world. Anyone who knows the real nature of man at the present time must say: in the unconscious self, in the really spiritual part of man, there is, of course, the same relation to the whole spiritual world; but in his knowledge, in his consciousness, man in general cannot realise it in the same way as was possible to him in earlier epochs, though there are exceptions. If we enquire into the reason why man cannot bring to consciousness the relation of his soul to the spiritual world, — which is, of course, as strong as ever though of a different kind — we find that it is due to the fact that we have passed the middle of the earth's evolution and are now in the ascending stream of its existence, and our physical organisation (although, of course, this is not perceptible to external anatomy and physiology) has become more ‘physical’ than it was, so that in the time we spend between birth or conception and death, we are no longer organised to bring fully to consciousness our connection with the spiritual world. We must clearly understand that no matter how materialistic we are we actually experience in the subconscious region of the soul much more than the sum of our general conscious knowledge.

This goes even further, and here we come to a very important point in the evolution of present humanity. In general, man is not able to think, perceive and feel all that could really be thought, perceived and felt within him. At the present time he is gifted for far more intensive thoughts and perceptions than are possible through the coarse material components of his organism. This has a certain consequence, namely, that at the present epoch of human evolution we are not in a position to bring our capacities to complete development in our earthly life. Whether we die young or old has very little influence upon that. For both young and old it is the rule that, on account of the coarse substance of his organism, man cannot fully attain to what would be possible were his body more finely organised. Thus, whether we pass through the gate of death old or young, there is a residue of unexercised thoughts, perceptions and feelings which, for the above reason, we could not elaborate. We all die leaving certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions unexercised. These are there, and when we pass through the gate of death, whether young or old, these occasion an intense desire to return to earthly life for further thinking, feeling and perceiving.

Let us reflect upon the bearing of this. We only become free after death to form certain thoughts, feelings and perceptions. We could do much more for the earth if we had been able to bring them to fruition during our physical life, but we cannot do this. It is actually true that every man to-day could do much more for the earth with the capacities within him than he actually does. In earlier epochs of evolution this was not so, for when the organism was finer there was a certain conscious looking into the spiritual world, and man could work from the spirit. Then he could, as a rule, accomplish all for which his gifts fitted him. Although man is now so proud of his talents, the above is true.

Because of this, we can recognise how necessary it is that what is carried through the gate of death unused should not be lost to earth-life. That can only be brought about by cultivating the union with the dead under the guidance of Spiritual Science, in the sense often described, by rightly maintaining the connection with the dead with whom we are united by karmic ties, and endeavouring to make the union a conscious, a fully conscious one. Then these unfulfilled thoughts of the dead pass through our souls into the world, and, through this transmission, we can allow these stronger thoughts — which are possible to the dead because they are free from the body — to work in our souls. Our own thoughts we cannot bring to full development, but these thoughts could work within us.

We see from this that what has brought us materialism should also show us how absolutely necessary at the present time and for the near future is the quest of a true relation to the spirits of the dead. The only question is: How can we draw these thoughts, perceptions and feelings from the realm of the dead into our own souls?

I have already given certain hints as to this, and in the last lecture spoken of the important moments which should be well observed: the moment of falling asleep and that of waking. I shall now describe with more detail a few things connected with this.

The dead cannot directly enter this world of ordinary waking life, which we outwardly perceive, in which we act through our will and which rests upon our desires. It is out of their reach, when they have passed through the gate of death; yet we can have a world in common with them if, spurred on by Spiritual Science, we make the effort — which is difficult in our present materialistic age — to discipline the world of our thinking as well as our outer life, and not to allow our thoughts the customary free course. We can develop certain faculties which introduce us to a ground in common with the spirits who have passed through the gate of death. There are, of course, at the present time a great many hindrances to finding this common ground. The first hindrance is one to which I have but little referred, but what is to be said thereon follows from other considerations already discussed here. The first hindrance is that we are, as a rule, too prodigal with our thoughts, we might even say we are dissipated in our thought-life. What, exactly, is meant by this?

and you already read the segue.

[AshvinP]

What you were concerned for has happened...

I am not confident such things can be understood without the proper experiential (including conceptual) foundation. But I will try this once, anyway. 

I take with me your comment on the vowel exercise, thank you, and spare the one on the candle exercise for a later time, let's not add anymore foolishness to it for the moment : )

And the Steiner quote is revelatory! It speaks precisely to what Cleric is coming to in the other thread... I doubt I have the level of discipline and thickness of focus that must be required to endeavoring to this exploration... Anyway, with this, my draft comment about thinking feeling perceiving has to be turned around, again. I will go back to that as soon as I am done with normal work...

Federica,

You shouldn't expect to follow and fully understand every concept we write. From my own experience, it simply won't happen that way. What we are speaking of is approached very differently than the philosophies and religions we are used to. Orienting to a new habit of thinking (which is a sort of inversion, as mentioned before), is much more important at this stage than the fitting together the particular concepts involved. All too often people feel it is important to match up what is written with what they have already heard elsewhere in some conceptual form. For ex., I may say, "we are seeking new states of being which resonate with the frequencies of higher worlds and their activity". Someone reading may then think, "oh that sounds a lot like Rupert Sheldrake's theory of 'morphic resonance', I get it!" (I'm not sure that is an apt comparison, but you get the point). This approach actually leads to less understanding with our modern abstract habits of thinking. It's only safe to make these comparisons after we have attained a higher vantage on our normal intellectual experience and understand how the latter functions.

This is what makes it quite difficult to convey what we intend to convey here - one, most people don't like it when we say, "you won't get any deeper understanding by comparing with or adding on to other conceptual systems you already know, but rather you must focus all your efforts on awakening to your own spiritual activity before those conceptual systems will harmonize". And two, that it must be grasped quite separately from all that you are already familiar with in the sensory world and conceptual thinking. That's why Cleric uses so many metaphors - in fact, the physical plane exists so that our spirit can penetrate its images to the living meaning within the 'holes' between perceptions. Concepts such as particles, waves, frequencies, resonance, forces, etc. all of these and many more exist by virtue of the higher worlds which precipitate them through our intellectual consciousness as conceptual shadows - "as above, so below". Consider a really crude example of what we mean by these 'holes' in perceptions:


 1) "hereliesthewhitemousewhowaseatenbythebrowncat".



(2) "hereli esthewhitemo usewhowaseate nbytheb rowncat".



(3) "herelies thewhitemouse, whowas eatenbythe browncat".



In formulations #2 and #3, I have simply created or enlarged empty spaces within the syntax of the letters and words, so that your conceptual activity can fill them with meaning more easily. Note how the empty spaces do not automatically bring meaning to the structure, but only reveal it after our cognitive activity has been invited in to assume its 'shape' and we accept the invitation with meaningful engagement. The same logic used above will apply to all other perceptual phenomena in our experience, including the activity of thinking itself. Instead of seeking to penetrate the spaces between letters and words, we are seeking to penetrate those between outer and inner perceptions. 

It could also help here to try a simple exercise. Walk a few steps forward reaching your arms out as you do and think, "I am grasping the world of senses, with all its luminous and beautiful forms". Then take a few steps backwards while trying to see behind you, moving your arms back into a 'W' shape and thinking, "I venture into the unknown future". Maybe add the thought, "the invisible meaning which lives behind me gives birth to all that meaning I perceive in front of me." In this exercise, what is behind symbolizes the spiritual we seek inwardly. It is that dark, mysterious realm of forces which are integral to our conscious experience, but we are normally unsure of why or how. What we are pointing to here is a path where we begin turning around to face those normally invisible worlds (future) which give rise to all that is visible/perceptual (past), as Cleric mentioned. We should sense how impossible it is to take what perceptions are normally in front of us and configure them in a way to give us knowledge of what is behind us. The inner spiritual forces live in what we call the future, i.e. the more integrated, holistic Time-rhythms, and the perceptual past is simply like broken glass shards of a mirror which once reflected an image of that future.

We can explore these differentiated Time-rhythms in our experience of waking and sleeping. When we dream, it feels like much more meaningful content is packed into shorter amounts of normal time. Or when we are engaged in deeply meaningful thinking during the day, time seems to fly by - before we know it, a few hours have passed. Conversely, if we are thinking mechanically and tediously about some outer perceptions, we keep checking the clock because time isn't moving fast enough. We call this the tempo or rhythm of successive notes in music, for ex, which can be analogized to our successive states of being in these various modes. In dreaming or meaningful cognitive engagement during the day, we are literally living with our spirit in higher worlds which flow according to a more integrated Time-rhythm. So these dynamics are immanent and verifiable for us, we only need to pay more attention and actively seek them out, and that seeking out itself puts us in a more Time-integrated state of Being. Here are some of the core points which should be grasped from my posts to you (Cleric has made several other, but related, ones), while much of the details of what I wrote can be left aside for now.

- How our thinking permeates all experience - it participates in the co-creation of that experience at all levels, including the extreme of the mystical state.

Interesting attempts have been made to arrive at the relation between thinking and perceiving by imagining them actually divided from each other. You may remember Williams James's supposition of a confrontation between, on the one hand, the environment... and, on the other, a man who possessed all the organs of perception, but who had never done any thinking. He demonstrated that such a man would perceive nothing, or nothing but what James called "a blooming buzzing confusion". Well, he was only expressing in his own blunt way the conclusion which always is arrived at by all who make the same attempt, whether philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, or physicists. Unfortunately it is also a conclusion which is commonly forgotten by those same [people] almost as soon it has been arrived at; or certainly as soon as they turn their minds to other matters - such as history or evolution - but which I personally decline to forget. I mean the conclusion, the irrefragable consensus, that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.
...
The distinction between [perceiving and thinking] is... rather easy to lose sight of, once we begin to reflect or philosophize, for this reason: that the single experience we call "consciousness" - our inwardness at any given moment - is not composed either of perceiving alone or of thinking alone, but of an immemorial and inextricable combination of the two. Indeed it is better to call it an interpenetration rather than a combination. We soon learn, once we begin to reflect, that what we have been accustomed to refer to in everyday speech as "perceiving" - as for instance when we speak of perceiving a chair... or for that matter a neuron or chromosome - is in fact perception heavily laced with thinking, with habitual thought, with mental habit.

- The asymmetry of knowledge - lesser evolved forms (intellectual cognition) cannot understand the inner perspective of higher evolved forms (imaginative thinking) while higher forms can understand the lower, i.e. our current conceptual systems cannot substitute for understanding the imaginal realm from its own higher perspective, only the other way around. 

- The evolution (or metamorphosis) of perception-cognition over many epochs of human history. What we are speaking of here as Imaginative cognition is a recovery of an ancient clairvoyance around the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, except, while the latter was mostly instinctive and perceived outwardly, we are recovering it from within and in full clarity of consciousness. These evolutionary dynamics can be known quite precisely, even with only sound intellectual reasoning. Generally, through this metamorphic progression, what was first revealed outwardly to our ancestors as 'Divine revelation' or 'nature spirits' is now revealed inwardly through us as 'thoughts' and 'ideas', which then lead to 'laws of nature' derived by science. The latter have been stripped of all their qualitative significance in this process, so we should endeavor to reunite the evolving natural laws with the meaningful dimension we find within ourselves, with our faces forward to the future, through more living thinking.

[Cleric K]

2. When I tried the vowel exercise out loud first, I realized that the subsequent silent version completely relied on the fresh memory of the sound, which was a disturbance. So I never tried the vocal version again, but only the silent version directly. It makes me wonder whether you tried to visualize the candle from scratch. I imagine it’s way more difficult than the vowel sound gesture, which I find in itself difficult enough, but just asking.

Then of course at some point I would want to open this Pandora box of the etheric body, how you know about it, and how it’s a complete repository of all memories of sensory perceptions...

I would like to add further resolution to what Ashvin already said. This connects with what I said in the other thread - that we don't really create the sound or color 'substance' of our thoughts but it is much more that we perceive the mysterious effects of our thinking gestures, within mysterious fabric of perceptions. It takes the highest forms of cognition to reach understanding of what exactly this fabric is - that is, to reach the true essence of what we call color, sound, taste, smell, feeling, etc. And once again this connects with the post that you said you had trouble understanding.

Think of the following. We take a sheet of paper and cut out a circle from it. Then we look at the cut out paper and say "This is a circle." But we can do also the following: we take the sheet of paper and say "A circle is that which is not paper i.e. a circle is where the paper is missing." This is highly simplified analogy but hints at a very deep mystery. What we call perceptions can be thought of as hollowed out spirit (or hollowed out intuition).

We can easily see that our science and philosophy are preoccupied with speculating about what reality is. We try to say what everything is made of - energy, fields, consciousness, etc. A great revolution in cognition awaits everyone who finds also the reverse way of looking at things - that what we try to find as substantial is actually hollowed out, just like the missing paper from the sheet. Actually the substantial thing is our spirit, the ideal, the meaning. This is the sheet of paper. We look at the 'things' (perceptions) and seek their is-ness. Yet we're looking at holes. We understand the sensory world neither by chopping perceptions into smaller and smaller pieces, nor by simply staring at them. We do that only when our spirit finds its being in the wider spiritual world - the sheet. Then we understand also how perceptions arise by the world of Intuition being hollowed out. Evolution is the process of filling the holes back with the ideal.

For the reasons above, the voice that we hear in our mind is something complicated. It is not some pure creation of our free spirit. We can easily see that there are many factors at play. For example, our physical voice depends on our physical organism, which produces the unique timbre. On first thought, our inner voice is not dependent of the vocal tract so it shouldn't be constrained to one timbre only - we should be able to do the voice of Robert De Niro, Beyoncé. And it is really so, although not achievable as easily as one might imagine at first. So that's a question - what constraints me that I have to think with my own voice?

Personally, I can't do vibrato. As Hedge would say, it's like I can't move my earlobe. I haven't developed the degrees of freedom through which I can do that. At this point I can not imagine what should I do in order to produce that effect. Of course, I can 'manually' pitch my voice up and down but this is way too sluggish and imprecise in comparison to the real effect. I don't think that the real effect is achieved by simply doing these manual pitch variations faster. For this reason I can't produce that effect even with my inner voice. To some extent I can imagine someone else doing it, like when trying to remember the voice of a song, but if I am to become the first-person producer of that sound - I can't do it.

With all this I aim to show that our inner activity is not principally different from that rendered through the bodily nature. Our inner nature still consists of various degrees of freedom that we can utilize, even though of much more pliable nature. For this reason it is natural that we feel somewhat out of control of the actual texture of the sound.

The vowel exercise is not supposed to focus on that texture. We should accept with certain acquiescence that at this time we're not in complete control of the timbre and texture of the vowels. These are still highly dependent on our inner organization. The goal of the exercise is to focus on the fact that nevertheless, it is our intents that get reflected in the sound. This is most easily discerned when we morph the sound between vowels. It's not so much how it sounds but the fact that the morphing of the sounds mirrors our intents. It is similar with when we move the light dot. Actually very few people have vivid colorful imagination. I don't have it either. But that doesn't matter in the least because it is not at all the goal to experience vivid visual impression but to become conscious of the way we steer that impression, no matter how dim and colorless it is. It might not be there at all. Actually, it could be even easier if instead of trying to imagine a dot, we focus our attention in a dot. We can certainly do that
in our visual field - we can pick any fine detail and focus our sight on it. Instead of that, we can imagine we're focusing our thought in a point of inner space. We don't care if there's something at that point, its the steering of focused attention that we want to experience. Now as I think, this is a less confusing way to present this exercise because it doesn't distract us with production of visual phenomena. Instead we're completely within thought and we simply steer our attention as a focused laser beam, with no concern whether there's something at the point of focus. The simple goal is to experience how we steer the focused beam of attention.

The goal of such exercises are to awaken for a kind of activity that is normally completely unconscious. The goal is to get a feeling for our activity within the etheric body, if we need to get technical about it. This is how we attain to clairvoyance for the etheric body. It's not that we simply begin to see some additional exotic colors overlaid on our ordinary perceptions. To see the etheric is to experience our degrees of freedom within it. As an analogy, a blind man 'sees' his unsuspected arm by finding the degrees of freedom through which he moves it (assuming he can't touch it with other parts of the body and get an external sensation for the arm). Through much experimentation he gains intuition of the volume of perceptions that he can probe with his will. That's how he becomes clairvoyant for his arm. It is analogous with our spiritual activity. Most of the life of modern man proceeds as a movie, uncontrollable stream of phenomena. The exercises help us discover deeper strata of our being which can steer the thought perceptions. By probing this activity for a long time, from different directions, we begin to gain intuition of the volume of these degrees of freedom. This is what we call etheric body from the perspective of cognitive seeing. It is cognitive seeing because it is our thought force which is liberated and begins to probe its constraints, which normally format it into completely templated stream.

This also hints at your other question. To know our arm in depth is to have a feeling for the innerly experienced volume that we can sweep with it - the degrees of freedom. When we explore the degrees of freedom of our thinking life, we discover also the volume of all the things that we can potentially remember. That's why you have the intuition that remembering is a form of thinking activity and why I say that every memory is a degree of freedom of our thinking organism. In the course of spiritual development, as our spiritual activity probes more and more of this volume of degrees of freedom, we begin to gain holistic intuition of all those degrees of freedom that we can use for remembering. In this way we reach an experience which otherwise can be glimpsed at only in abnormal circumstances - namely, the so called flashing of one's life before their eyes. What in near death experiences happens in abnormal way (loosening of the etheric body through trauma) is achieved gradually and in a completely safe way in the course of spiritual development.

As one more analogy, which hopefully will get that more into focus, let's remember the 'man on the couch' metaphor. Our spiritual activity is like drowsy man on the couch, in a pitch-black room, whose finger half-consciously slides along a tablet screen - representing the world of perceptions.

It is interesting to note how modern user interface on phones and tablets uses certain feedback visualizations for tapping. For example, ripple effects like this:



Tapping is the thinking gesture, the ripple on the screen is the thought perception. Note that our gesture is not completely responsible for the actual ripple - it's shape, color, etc. Analogously our spiritual activity usually doesn't have perfect control over the texture of the sound or the intensity and vividness of the light dot. Yet we do feel that our thinking gestures trigger the ripples.

The initial goal of modern meditation is to gain consciousness precisely of these, otherwise unconscious, spiritual gestures. The more we come to know the degrees of freedom of this spiritual being, the more we begin to intuit the structured volume which we probe. Within this volume we begin to experience more and more of the forces which shape and constrain the actual texture of our timbre, habits, inclinations, preferences, likes, dislikes and so on. In other words, we come to know more of the sheet of paper of which our ordinary perceptions are hollowed out. Just like our physical voice is shaped by the vocal tract, so the expressions of our thinking, feeling and willing character are funneled by our subtle organization.

As one last remark, it's worth noting that being able to think in more than one language is already a very good way to loosen the etheric body, if we turn it into a conscious exercise. If we meditate on producing the same meaning in different languages, we'll quickly see that our spiritual being lives in the meaning itself. The languages are only symbolic gestures expressing that meaning. When we advance on the path of spiritual development, we attain to the possibility to think directly within this layer of meaning in pictorial form, without having to precipitate words. Thinking pictorially about the sensory world is a good preparation. Most people in the morning may think verbally something like "I need to make a breakfast". Instead, we can exercise to think that pictorially. We can imagine ourselves preparing the breakfast. It's the same meaning except that we think it in much more immediate and living forms.

Things become more challenging when we have to think about supersensible things. For example, the circle and the dot that Ashvin wrote about above is one such example. To understand that symbol doesn't mean to have some abstract theory. This symbol becomes alive when we live through the spiritual gestures of the most varied polar activities - expansion of attention - focusing of attention, sympathy - antipathy and so on. It's not about the dry concepts that we extract in this way - it is the living experience of our spiritual movements as we morph our being through these polarities. Then gradually the sum total of these movements begin to take holistic shape and we come to feel certain supersensible axis of reality (axis not to be taken in purely spatial sense). We begin to sense the fundamental polarity of existence, which similar to the two areas of the Mandelbrot set contain within themselves the infinite Time fractal of states of being.

[AshvinP]

Consider a really crude example of what we mean by these 'holes' in perceptions:

Another clarification - we can speak of ideas living in the 'holes' between perceptions or, inversely, perceptions as being 'holes' (or negative images) in the ideas.

[Federica]

Federica,

You shouldn't expect to follow and fully understand every concept we write.

I don't, but I do expect to understand every concept you write to me.

From my own experience, it simply won't happen that way. What we are speaking of is approached very differently than the philosophies and religions we are used to. Orienting to a new habit of thinking (which is a sort of inversion, as mentioned before), is much more important at this stage than the fitting together the particular concepts involved. All too often people feel it is important to match up what is written with what they have already heard elsewhere in some conceptual form. For ex., I may say, "we are seeking new states of being which resonate with the frequencies of higher worlds and their activity". Someone reading may then think, "oh that sounds a lot like Rupert Sheldrake's theory of 'morphic resonance', I get it!" (I'm not sure that is an apt comparison, but you get the point). This approach actually leads to less understanding with our modern abstract habits of thinking. It's only safe to make these comparisons after we have attained a higher vantage on our normal intellectual experience and understand how the latter functions.

This is what makes it quite difficult to convey what we intend to convey here - one, most people don't like it when we say, "you won't get any deeper understanding by comparing with or adding on to other conceptual systems you already know, but rather you must focus all your efforts on awakening to your own spiritual activity before those conceptual systems will harmonize". And two, that it must be grasped quite separately from all that you are already familiar with in the sensory world and conceptual thinking.

I know that. To what do I owe the reminder?

That's why Cleric uses so many metaphors - in fact, the physical plane exists so that our spirit can penetrate its images to the living meaning within the 'holes' between perceptions. Concepts such as particles, waves, frequencies, resonance, forces, etc. all of these and many more exist by virtue of the higher worlds which precipitate them through our intellectual consciousness as conceptual shadows - "as above, so below". Consider a really crude example of what we mean by these 'holes' in perceptions:


 1) "hereliesthewhitemousewhowaseatenbythebrowncat".



(2) "hereli esthewhitemo usewhowaseate nbytheb rowncat".



(3) "herelies thewhitemouse, whowas eatenbythe browncat".



In formulations #2 and #3, I have simply created or enlarged empty spaces within the syntax of the letters and words, so that your conceptual activity can fill them with meaning more easily. Note how the empty spaces do not automatically bring meaning to the structure, but only reveal it after our cognitive activity has been invited in to assume its 'shape' and we accept the invitation with meaningful engagement. The same logic used above will apply to all other perceptual phenomena in our experience, including the activity of thinking itself. Instead of seeking to penetrate the spaces between letters and words, we are seeking to penetrate those between outer and inner perceptions. 

It could also help here to try a simple exercise. Walk a few steps forward reaching your arms out as you do and think, "I am grasping the world of senses, with all its luminous and beautiful forms". Then take a few steps backwards while trying to see behind you, moving your arms back into a 'W' shape and thinking, "I venture into the unknown future". Maybe add the thought, "the invisible meaning which lives behind me gives birth to all that meaning I perceive in front of me." In this exercise, what is behind symbolizes the spiritual we seek inwardly. It is that dark, mysterious realm of forces which are integral to our conscious experience, but we are normally unsure of why or how. What we are pointing to here is a path where we begin turning around to face those normally invisible worlds (future) which give rise to all that is visible/perceptual (past), as Cleric mentioned. We should sense how impossible it is to take what perceptions are normally in front of us and configure them in a way to give us knowledge of what is behind us. The inner spiritual forces live in what we call the future, i.e. the more integrated, holistic Time-rhythms, and the perceptual past is simply like broken glass shards of a mirror which once reflected an image of that future.

Thanks, this is helpful.

Here are some of the core points which should be grasped from my posts to you (Cleric has made several other, but related, ones), while much of the details of what I wrote can be left aside for now.

What is this... Are you giving me the user manual for the user manual?

- How our thinking permeates all experience - it participates in the co-creation of that experience at all levels, including the extreme of the mystical state.

Interesting attempts have been made to arrive at the relation between thinking and perceiving by imagining them actually divided from each other. You may remember Williams James's supposition of a confrontation between, on the one hand, the environment... and, on the other, a man who possessed all the organs of perception, but who had never done any thinking. He demonstrated that such a man would perceive nothing, or nothing but what James called "a blooming buzzing confusion". Well, he was only expressing in his own blunt way the conclusion which always is arrived at by all who make the same attempt, whether philosophers, psychologists, neurologists, or physicists. Unfortunately it is also a conclusion which is commonly forgotten by those same [people] almost as soon it has been arrived at; or certainly as soon as they turn their minds to other matters - such as history or evolution - but which I personally decline to forget. I mean the conclusion, the irrefragable consensus, that what we perceive is structurally inseparable from what we think.
...
The distinction between [perceiving and thinking] is... rather easy to lose sight of, once we begin to reflect or philosophize, for this reason: that the single experience we call "consciousness" - our inwardness at any given moment - is not composed either of perceiving alone or of thinking alone, but of an immemorial and inextricable combination of the two. Indeed it is better to call it an interpenetration rather than a combination. We soon learn, once we begin to reflect, that what we have been accustomed to refer to in everyday speech as "perceiving" - as for instance when we speak of perceiving a chair... or for that matter a neuron or chromosome - is in fact perception heavily laced with thinking, with habitual thought, with mental habit.

I know this by now, including the quote.

- The asymmetry of knowledge - lesser evolved forms (intellectual cognition) cannot understand the inner perspective of higher evolved forms (imaginative thinking) while higher forms can understand the lower, i.e. our current conceptual systems cannot substitute for understanding the imaginal realm from its own higher perspective, only the other way around. 

This too, I have read many times by now.

- The evolution (or metamorphosis) of perception-cognition over many epochs of human history. What we are speaking of here as Imaginative cognition is a recovery of an ancient clairvoyance around the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, except, while the latter was mostly instinctive and perceived outwardly, we are recovering it from within and in full clarity of consciousness. These evolutionary dynamics can be known quite precisely, even with only sound intellectual reasoning. Generally, through this metamorphic progression, what was first revealed outwardly to our ancestors as 'Divine revelation' or 'nature spirits' is now revealed inwardly through us as 'thoughts' and 'ideas', which then lead to 'laws of nature' derived by science. The latter have been stripped of all their qualitative significance in this process, so we should endeavor to reunite the evolving natural laws with the meaningful dimension we find within ourselves, with our faces forward to the future, through more living thinking.

I didn't know about this foundation of Imaginative cognition. I imagined that the foundation of what you and Cleric are speaking about were Steiner, other thinkers in the idealist / phenomenology western tradition, and personal developments of the former. I would like to know more about how you came to this Egyptian clairvoyance, why this choice.

[Federica]

Consider a really crude example of what we mean by these 'holes' in perceptions:

Another clarification - we can speak of ideas living in the 'holes' between perceptions or, inversely, perceptions as being 'holes' (or negative images) in the ideas.

Yes, thank you, I see. I am reading an example of this in the last of Cleric's posts: the cut-out circle in the sheet of paper is the circle versus the cut-out space in the sheet is the circle.

[AshvinP]

I know this by now, including the quote.

- The asymmetry of knowledge - lesser evolved forms (intellectual cognition) cannot understand the inner perspective of higher evolved forms (imaginative thinking) while higher forms can understand the lower, i.e. our current conceptual systems cannot substitute for understanding the imaginal realm from its own higher perspective, only the other way around. 

This too, I have read many times by now.

Sorry, I expressed myself pretty poorly in the last post. 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.

I didn't know about this foundation of Imaginative cognition. I imagined that the foundation of what you and Cleric are speaking about were Steiner, other thinkers in the idealist / phenomenology western tradition, and personal developments of the former. I would like to know more about how you came to this Egyptian clairvoyance, why this choice.

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.

[Federica]

I would like to add further resolution to what Ashvin already said. This connects with what I said in the other thread - that we don't really create the sound or color 'substance' of our thoughts but it is much more that we perceive the mysterious effects of our thinking gestures, within mysterious fabric of perceptions. It takes the highest forms of cognition to reach understanding of what exactly this fabric is - that is, to reach the true essence of what we call color, sound, taste, smell, feeling, etc. And once again this connects with the post that you said you had trouble understanding.

After many examples the thinking gesture seems to have taken a reasonably stable form for me.

Think of the following. We take a sheet of paper and cut out a circle from it. Then we look at the cut out paper and say "This is a circle." But we can do also the following: we take the sheet of paper and say "A circle is that which is not paper i.e. a circle is where the paper is missing." This is highly simplified analogy but hints at a very deep mystery. What we call perceptions can be thought of as hollowed out spirit (or hollowed out intuition).

We can easily see that our science and philosophy are preoccupied with speculating about what reality is. We try to say what everything is made of - energy, fields, consciousness, etc. A great revolution in cognition awaits everyone who finds also the reverse way of looking at things - that what we try to find as substantial is actually hollowed out, just like the missing paper from the sheet. Actually the substantial thing is our spirit, the ideal, the meaning. This is the sheet of paper. We look at the 'things' (perceptions) and seek their is-ness. Yet we're looking at holes. We understand the sensory world neither by chopping perceptions into smaller and smaller pieces, nor by simply staring at them. We do that only when our spirit finds its being in the wider spiritual world - the sheet. Then we understand also how perceptions arise by the world of Intuition being hollowed out. Evolution is the process of filling the holes back with the ideal.

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.)

For the reasons above, the voice that we hear in our mind is something complicated. It is not some pure creation of our free spirit. We can easily see that there are many factors at play. For example, our physical voice depends on our physical organism, which produces the unique timbre. On first thought, our inner voice is not dependent of the vocal tract so it shouldn't be constrained to one timbre only - we should be able to do the voice of Robert De Niro, Beyoncé. And it is really so, although not achievable as easily as one might imagine at first. So that's a question - what constraints me that I have to think with my own voice?

With all this I aim to show that our inner activity is not principally different from that rendered through the bodily nature. Our inner nature still consists of various degrees of freedom that we can utilize, even though of much more pliable nature. For this reason it is natural that we feel somewhat out of control of the actual texture of the sound.

The vowel exercise is not supposed to focus on that texture. We should accept with certain acquiescence that at this time we're not in complete control of the timbre and texture of the vowels. These are still highly dependent on our inner organization. The goal of the exercise is to focus on the fact that nevertheless, it is our intents that get reflected in the sound. This is most easily discerned when we morph the sound between vowels. It's not so much how it sounds but the fact that the morphing of the sounds mirrors our intents.

The reason why I moved on to the silent version of the exercise is not that I was irritated by not being able to control the texture of my thought voice. Texture variation never occurred to me during the exercise. The reason is that doing the silent exercise immediately after the vocal was not very effortful. It was enough to just go back in thought to my own voice a minute before, rest on the tail of that thought and let it do all the work, undulating on the vowel's spectrum. It's like sitting on a bike that someone else is riding, It's not nearly as effortful as riding it yourself. Moving the voice without access to a memory feels much more creative and apt to develop sense-free thinking, or at least so I imagined.

It is similar with when we move the light dot. Actually very few people have vivid colorful imagination. I don't have it either. But that doesn't matter in the least because it is not at all the goal to experience vivid visual impression but to become conscious of the way we steer that impression, no matter how dim and colorless it is. It might not be there at all. Actually, it could be even easier if instead of trying to imagine a dot, we focus our attention in a dot. We can certainly do that in our visual field - we can pick any fine detail and focus our sight on it. Instead of that, we can imagine we're focusing our thought in a point of inner space. We don't care if there's something at that point, its the steering of focused attention that we want to experience. Now as I think, this is a less confusing way to present this exercise because it doesn't distract us with production of visual phenomena. Instead we're completely within thought and we simply steer our attention as a focused laser beam, with no concern whether there's something at the point of focus. The simple goal is to experience how we steer the focused beam of attention.

I will try this too.

The goal of such exercises are to awaken for a kind of activity that is normally completely unconscious. The goal is to get a feeling for our activity within the etheric body, if we need to get technical about it. This is how we attain to clairvoyance for the etheric body. It's not that we simply begin to see some additional exotic colors overlaid on our ordinary perceptions. To see the etheric is to experience our degrees of freedom within it. As an analogy, a blind man 'sees' his unsuspected arm by finding the degrees of freedom through which he moves it (assuming he can't touch it with other parts of the body and get an external sensation for the arm). Through much experimentation he gains intuition of the volume of perceptions that he can probe with his will. That's how he becomes clairvoyant for his arm. It is analogous with our spiritual activity. Most of the life of modern man proceeds as a movie, uncontrollable stream of phenomena. The exercises help us discover deeper strata of our being which can steer the thought perceptions. By probing this activity for a long time, from different directions, we begin to gain intuition of the volume of these degrees of freedom. This is what we call etheric body from the perspective of cognitive seeing. It is cognitive seeing because it is our thought force which is liberated and begins to probe its constraints, which normally format it into completely templated stream.

So the etheric body, the true body, locus of perceptions of the spirit, should be able to expand indefinitely? And would the physical body we normally refer to be the inverted hole, or a dead precipitation of our spirit in the world content?

It is interesting to note how modern user interface on phones and tablets uses certain feedback visualizations for tapping. For example, ripple effects like this:



Tapping is the thinking gesture, the ripple on the screen is the thought perception. Note that our gesture is not completely responsible for the actual ripple - it's shape, color, etc. Analogously our spiritual activity usually doesn't have perfect control over the texture of the sound or the intensity and vividness of the light dot. Yet we do feel that our thinking gestures trigger the ripples.

Useful analogy...

The initial goal of modern meditation is to gain consciousness precisely of these, otherwise unconscious, spiritual gestures. The more we come to know the degrees of freedom of this spiritual being, the more we begin to intuit the structured volume which we probe. Within this volume we begin to experience more and more of the forces which shape and constrain the actual texture of our timbre, habits, inclinations, preferences, likes, dislikes and so on. In other words, we come to know more of the sheet of paper of which our ordinary perceptions are hollowed out. Just like our physical voice is shaped by the vocal tract, so the expressions of our thinking, feeling and willing character are funneled by our subtle organization.

As one last remark, it's worth noting that being able to think in more than one language is already a very good way to loosen the etheric body, if we turn it into a conscious exercise. If we meditate on producing the same meaning in different languages, we'll quickly see that our spiritual being lives in the meaning itself. The languages are only symbolic gestures expressing that meaning. When we advance on the path of spiritual development, we attain to the possibility to think directly within this layer of meaning in pictorial form, without having to precipitate words. Thinking pictorially about the sensory world is a good preparation. Most people in the morning may think verbally something like "I need to make a breakfast". Instead, we can exercise to think that pictorially. We can imagine ourselves preparing the breakfast. It's the same meaning except that we think it in much more immediate and living forms.

I can see this working for concrete objects but do you mean it should be possible to express any meaning in pictorial forms? For example the meaning you are expessing here in language?

Things become more challenging when we have to think about supersensible things. For example, the circle and the dot that Ashvin wrote about above is one such example. To understand that symbol doesn't mean to have some abstract theory. This symbol becomes alive when we live through the spiritual gestures of the most varied polar activities - expansion of attention - focusing of attention, sympathy - antipathy and so on. It's not about the dry concepts that we extract in this way - it is the living experience of our spiritual movements as we morph our being through these polarities. Then gradually the sum total of these movements begin to take holistic shape and we come to feel certain supersensible axis of reality (axis not to be taken in purely spatial sense). We begin to sense the fundamental polarity of existence, which similar to the two areas of the Mandelbrot set contain within themselves the infinite Time fractal of states of being.

Thank you, this consolidates and clairify various things!

[Federica]

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.


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 : )

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... : )