Whirlpool's core/first motion

[Federica]

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.

Helpful guidance to reconnecting the discourse on feelings back to thinking. Then in the details of your reasoning I get stuck…

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.

You seem to make a neat separation between being happy about the tree and getting to the meaning of the tree. If I am happy about it, it’s for my personal desires and feelings, while if I look at the meaning of the tree, it's a higher level spiritual activity. But couldn’t it be that looking at the meaning of the tree is the (only) means by which I can be happy about the tree? By the way, being ‘happy about the tree’ or ‘the tree makes me happy’ sound as concessions to language (yes, we say these things) that doesn’t really reflect the reality of the feeling…
We have to be happy first, open to happiness first, and in that state we can then look at the tree and let it be the catalizer, the litmus paper, the burning attractor of our feeling of happiness and joy. I would say that at that moment we have to integrate and balance a piercing, thoughtful look at the tree and its ramifications in the substratum of meaning (wise choice to take a tree as an example) in other words, we have to integrate a strongly intentional thought that wants to grasp what the seal is doing, with a flat, unfocused, encompassing ‘thinking mood’ that tries to stay open to connections, to new entries or intuitions in the thought sphere, open to the bigger picture that could emerge in slightly clearer terms. That would be, referring back to my ‘phenomenology of thinking’ from the other thread, a thought process that is both very intentional and unfocused. When we do that integration, we are opening the floodgates for a feeling of joy and happiness to pervade the experience. Do you see any way to reconcile this with your take? Is it another case where we are saying similar things?

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.

Why would they be incorrect? That scientist would be occupied with a laser-focused thought process, that aims at extracting from the object how it behaves in connection to what it is made of by zooming in, both literally and abstractly on that ‘external object’ that would engulf thinking. But the intentionality in it (the awareness of thinking itself in that process) would be low. So it would be a hyper-focused thought process with low intention (by intention, I mean the willing attempt to stay conscious of the weaving in meaning/ of the seal). How would that type of thinking by itself engage the scientist's soul?

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.

Again, I see a gradient here, where intentionality has a spectrum, and the level of thought submersion into whatever the thought is contemplating is almost completely free to vary at any given point on that spectrum. (I am trying to guard myself from making this into a theory and from trying to confirm it as such before I check it in experience, I hope I did so, I cannot be fully sure, maybe I did it fragmentarily, can you please help me here?)

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. 

Sure I have to humbly and seriously work on my ‘thinking fitness’ but I am glad I don’t feel ‘annoyed with this long post because it is forcing us to think carefully about our own thinking’. That would equal total paralysis…

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.

I have a trade-off between on one hand catching up here, reading and re-reading the threads and the essays, responding to posts and probing thinking in this active way, and on the other hand stepping back, taking time to try exercises and try meditate. I am clearly drawn to the first for now, but do you think it's an indulgence?

[Cleric K]

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.

Let's see if we can make this clearer. As said, we need to evolve our conceptions of what Love is. If, for example, we seek Love as a specific feeling, we're looking through an aperture too narrow.

If we put aside our physical understanding of external space and bodies in it, we're left with space of inner spiritual phenomena going through continual metamorphosis. On one hand we can imagine the chaos of phenomena coming and going, much like entropic soup. As a counterweight we have negative entropy, something akin to gravity which unites the various perceptions in meaningful whole. Now this is not the usual way we think about Love but let's follow the line.

When I say 'self-love' I mean this well of negative entropy which gives us wholeness in the midst of the entropic soup of spiritual phenomena (Note that this soup seems chaotic from our perspective, just like anthill may look chaotic on first glance. This doesn't mean that from the proper vantage point the meaningful flow can't be discovered). We find order within the World Content because we have found a center around which we integrate phenomena into wholeness. Normally we call that unseen center of gravity, the "I". So from our perspective we behold sensory perceptions, feelings, desires, ideas and all of this forms a more or less coherent picture amidst the chaos. Whether we realize it or not, our activity aims, if not to expands, then at least to preserve this well of coherency. An animal doesn't have thinking understanding of space and other beings. In the animal perspective, inner space assumes different pictorial configurations which are felt to be sympathetic or antipathetic. Some pictures are felt to be
fearful and painful and threaten to dissolve the coherency of inner space, others are felt pleasurable and maintain the coherency.

So 'self-love' is the manifestation of activity which coheres the World Content around a personal story. In the course of development we begin to recognize that this coherency can go far beyond the domain of sensory perceptions and the associated feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Maternal love is an example where, still in instinctive way, the sphere of coherency expands and our goals include the coherency also of other beings. It's similar with love between human beings in general. Our consciousness expands when we include the stories of other beings. There's still a lot of egoistic element in this. For example, today parents may love their child because they secretly assume there'll be someone to take care of them at old age. It is even easier to see how egoism creeps into other kinds of love. But yet, even if imperfect, it's still preferable for one to love rather than remain at the limits of their strictly personal sphere of coherency.

We live in a very exciting stage of evolution because we're already in position to recognize this deep principal place of inner coherency and begin to consciously purify it from the egoistic element and expand it beyond the merely personal. This means that consciousness expands to grasp the World flow with the same intimacy with which we grasp our personal biographical flow. Ultimately we approach the living experience that our destiny is not separate from that of the World and Love is the the force (if we may call it so) which coheres the inner Cosmos such that we see the inner flow of our personal biography as embedded within inner perspective of the World flow. Self-love becomes World-love because our little self is seen as aspect of the World-Self.

Now we have to be careful about something. We shouldn't imagine that this integrating coherency happens in the mind. We shouldn't fantasize that the World flow will become similar to our intellectual thoughts, that is, we shouldn't try to fit the World in our head. We're not speaking of solipsism here. We can fit concepts of the World in our mind but not the real inner World flow, within which these concepts stream. This can also be used as hint about how the build up of coherency takes egoistic turn. It is when we try to integrate our own picture of the world, instead of realizing that it is our picture that must adapt to the real macrocosmic perspective. This is always connected with sacrifice. Love is inseparable from sacrifice. This is also why we can't expand our Love without understanding of the Divine Being from whose perspective there's unity in the inner Cosmos.

All the above shouldn't be taken as exhaustive exposition. It's only a point for departure. The key here is not to look at Love as attractive relations between atomic beings existing in spiritual vacuum but as the force that leads our inner perspective towards the concentric perspective of the World-Being. We can't approach that perspective unless we purify the egoistic element and look upon the World flow as our true inner being. From our perspective we need to Love the World if it is to become our inner World and we need to sacrifice the egoistic elements that seek their personal story that feeds on the World but doesn't want to share its destiny. This development is not a one-time achievement, so we need to always have the ideal for Divine Being greater than us, that is all Love, and of whose perspective we experience only an aliased shadow.

[AshvinP]

You seem to make a neat separation between being happy about the tree and getting to the meaning of the tree. If I am happy about it, it’s for my personal desires and feelings, while if I look at the meaning of the tree, it's a higher level spiritual activity. But couldn’t it be that looking at the meaning of the tree is the (only) means by which I can be happy about the tree? By the way, being ‘happy about the tree’ or ‘the tree makes me happy’ sound as concessions to language (yes, we say these things) that doesn’t really reflect the reality of the feeling…
We have to be happy first, open to happiness first, and in that state we can then look at the tree and let it be the catalizer, the litmus paper, the burning attractor of our feeling of happiness and joy. I would say that at that moment we have to integrate and balance a piercing, thoughtful look at the tree and its ramifications in the substratum of meaning (wise choice to take a tree as an example) in other words, we have to integrate a strongly intentional thought that wants to grasp what the seal is doing, with a flat, unfocused, encompassing ‘thinking mood’ that tries to stay open to connections, to new entries or intuitions in the thought sphere, open to the bigger picture that could emerge in slightly clearer terms. That would be, referring back to my ‘phenomenology of thinking’ from the other thread, a thought process that is both very intentional and unfocused. When we do that integration, we are opening the floodgates for a feeling of joy and happiness to pervade the experience. Do you see any way to reconcile this with your take? Is it another case where we are saying similar things?

None of these things should be taken too rigidly. With the phenomenological approach, we should get comfortable that all activity and experience is interwoven. Although we speak of Willing, Feeling, Thinking as distinct activities, they never exist in isolation. We make the distinctions for purposes of greater understanding of their holistic relations - to come back to their Unity in a living way. So you are correct in that sense - we are never contemplating the meaning of the tree without any feeling involved, and vice versa. In fact, our sense of spatial dimensions is an intuition (meaning) which comes immediately with the percept of objects in space. So we can't speak of perceiving, feeling, or thinking any spatial objects in actual isolation from each other.

So, yes, it is a case where we are saying similar things from the phenomenological perspective. Mostly I was sticking with my theme of reuniting the natural with the moral, through thinking empowered by devotional feeling. If we can discern the moral dimension directly in our inner activity which mediates all experience, then we have made a huge step in spiraling these polar aspects back together. We will become open to discerning the moral dimension in all aspects of Nature as well. The main distinction to be made is between personally concerned spiritual activity and other-concerned activity. But we actually get the other-concerned activity by directing our feeling 'outwards' and our thinking inwards towards the 'well of negative entropy' Cleric mentioned. This is an inversion of the standard M.O. in the modern age. 

In past times, thinking was experienced as a gift from the higher worlds which flows through the soul and towards natural phenomena. Therefore it was simply natural for us to accept this grace with a sense of great responsibility, to pay that grace forward to the appearances of Nature including other human souls. More recently, due to abstraction of the higher worlds practically out of existence, we feel that we originate our own thoughts and they belong to us. There is nothing to be open to or grateful for in the Cosmos, because the inner thought-activity all seems to begin and end with us (and equating our localized self as 'Consciousness' as such doesn't change this dynamic). We then engage feeling and thinking as a means to accumulate more personal pleasurable experience, and to encapsulate the World Content in our conceptual thought-marbles, and that's about it. This is why I mentioned the materialist scientists.

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.

Why would they be incorrect? That scientist would be occupied with a laser-focused thought process, that aims at extracting from the object how it behaves in connection to what it is made of by zooming in, both literally and abstractly on that ‘external object’ that would engulf thinking. But the intentionality in it (the awareness of thinking itself in that process) would be low. So it would be a hyper-focused thought process with low intention (by intention, I mean the willing attempt to stay conscious of the weaving in meaning/ of the seal). How would that type of thinking by itself engage the scientist's soul?

We have forgotten how to appreciate the devotion it takes to engage in such a rigorous scientific approach. Of course, most materialists have also forgotten that and what they do can hardly be called science anymore, but there are still some around, and in any case more than there are hardcore mystical types who say all appearances, sometimes including other spheres of coherency, are illusions with little of value to offer the soul. It is similar to the religious evangelical - this person is also engaging the soul in his contemplation of the Divine, but has simply lost the connection between the Divine and his own soul and spirit activity. All they have to do is become more conscious of this inner activity to put that devotional mood to great use. But if the other-centered feeling and thinking is missing to begin with, becoming more conscious of our activity could just as easily lead to dark arts than to a quest for collective understanding and universal brotherhood. Above all, we should see that these dynamics can be precisely understood. The moral is a continuation of the natural on a higher plane, which can only occur through our spiritual activity. That's why Cleric can draw all of these analogies to the spiritual path from the natural domain, for ex.

I completely agree there is a gradient to these things. It's never all or nothing. In fact, we practically cannot ever become fully conscious of our present thinking, only seek a more perfect union of that thinking with our feelings and perception than we had the day before. And I am also glad you don't find these 'thinking about thinking' posts annoying! What you are doing is not at all an indulgence. It's very hard to go wrong with active thinking in our age. We are so polarized to passive consumption of abstract concepts and perceptions that any active engagement with our living activity within should be nourished as much and as often as possible. It actually doesn't matter so much if you understand the specific concepts in these posts, but rather you understand their purpose and the general direction they are pointing. There will be plenty of time to revisit the posts and essays later, and it will be much easier to digest in a holistic way the more one's thinking has been purified and renewed by the living waters and fire of the Soul and Spirit.

[Federica]

Let's see if we can make this clearer. As said, we need to evolve our conceptions of what Love is. If, for example, we seek Love as a specific feeling, we're looking through an aperture too narrow.

If we put aside our physical understanding of external space and bodies in it, we're left with space of inner spiritual phenomena going through continual metamorphosis. On one hand we can imagine the chaos of phenomena coming and going, much like entropic soup. As a counterweight we have negative entropy, something akin to gravity which unites the various perceptions in meaningful whole. Now this is not the usual way we think about Love but let's follow the line.

When I say 'self-love' I mean this well of negative entropy which gives us wholeness in the midst of the entropic soup of spiritual phenomena (Note that this soup seems chaotic from our perspective, just like anthill may look chaotic on first glance. This doesn't mean that from the proper vantage point the meaningful flow can't be discovered). We find order within the World Content because we have found a center around which we integrate phenomena into wholeness. Normally we call that unseen center of gravity, the "I". So from our perspective we behold sensory perceptions, feelings, desires, ideas and all of this forms a more or less coherent picture amidst the chaos. Whether we realize it or not, our activity aims, if not to expands, then at least to preserve this well of coherency. An animal doesn't have thinking understanding of space and other beings. In the animal perspective, inner space assumes different pictorial configurations which are felt to be sympathetic or antipathetic. Some pictures are felt to be
fearful and painful and threaten to dissolve the coherency of inner space, others are felt pleasurable and maintain the coherency.

So 'self-love' is the manifestation of activity which coheres the World Content around a personal story. In the course of development we begin to recognize that this coherency can go far beyond the domain of sensory perceptions and the associated feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Maternal love is an example where, still in instinctive way, the sphere of coherency expands and our goals include the coherency also of other beings. It's similar with love between human beings in general. Our consciousness expands when we include the stories of other beings. There's still a lot of egoistic element in this. For example, today parents may love their child because they secretly assume there'll be someone to take care of them at old age. It is even easier to see how egoism creeps into other kinds of love. But yet, even if imperfect, it's still preferable for one to love rather than remain at the limits of their strictly personal sphere of coherency.

We live in a very exciting stage of evolution because we're already in position to recognize this deep principal place of inner coherency and begin to consciously purify it from the egoistic element and expand it beyond the merely personal. This means that consciousness expands to grasp the World flow with the same intimacy with which we grasp our personal biographical flow. Ultimately we approach the living experience that our destiny is not separate from that of the World and Love is the the force (if we may call it so) which coheres the inner Cosmos such that we see the inner flow of our personal biography as embedded within inner perspective of the World flow. Self-love becomes World-love because our little self is seen as aspect of the World-Self.

Now we have to be careful about something. We shouldn't imagine that this integrating coherency happens in the mind. We shouldn't fantasize that the World flow will become similar to our intellectual thoughts, that is, we shouldn't try to fit the World in our head. We're not speaking of solipsism here. We can fit concepts of the World in our mind but not the real inner World flow, within which these concepts stream. This can also be used as hint about how the build up of coherency takes egoistic turn. It is when we try to integrate our own picture of the world, instead of realizing that it is our picture that must adapt to the real macrocosmic perspective. This is always connected with sacrifice. Love is inseparable from sacrifice. This is also why we can't expand our Love without understanding of the Divine Being from whose perspective there's unity in the inner Cosmos.

All the above shouldn't be taken as exhaustive exposition. It's only a point for departure. The key here is not to look at Love as attractive relations between atomic beings existing in spiritual vacuum but as the force that leads our inner perspective towards the concentric perspective of the World-Being. We can't approach that perspective unless we purify the egoistic element and look upon the World flow as our true inner being. From our perspective we need to Love the World if it is to become our inner World and we need to sacrifice the egoistic elements that seek their personal story that feeds on the World but doesn't want to share its destiny. This development is not a one-time achievement, so we need to always have the ideal for Divine Being greater than us, that is all Love, and of whose perspective we experience only an aliased shadow.

I was on the wrong plane. Ok, so self-love is a nucleus of Love that at first expresses itself and arises in us as a survival principle that keeps the ‘I’ together. Then it expands to include other beings, and later, at the current stage of evolution, it becomes ready to purify itself from egoism/survival through sacrifice, hence it starts expanding to the whole of experience.


Would love expansion, just as well as the deepening of thinking faculties, liberate us from the thought-pay-no-toll habit? In other words is the ‘world flow’ that can be grasped through love expansion the same as the thought-texture that pervades the world?


And would love expansion be one of three drivers of evolution, one of three paths to realize and integrate the continuity/unity of existence, where the other two are sharpening thinking agility until the subsoil of thoughts is touched and filling back the perceptual holes with meaning?
Are these three paths in reality the same path...


.

[Federica]

Mostly I was sticking with my theme of reuniting the natural with the moral, through thinking empowered by devotional feeling. If we can discern the moral dimension directly in our inner activity which mediates all experience, then we have made a huge step in spiraling these polar aspects back together.

I had in mind as your last theme here space as intellectualized time (that I'm still trying to do something with). Would you please refer me to the theme of the natural and the moral at its beginning?

We have forgotten how to appreciate the devotion it takes to engage in such a rigorous scientific approach (..) This person is also engaging the soul in his contemplation of the Divine

Ok, but could we not say that of any other occupation, as they all engage with world content?


.

[AshvinP]

Mostly I was sticking with my theme of reuniting the natural with the moral, through thinking empowered by devotional feeling. If we can discern the moral dimension directly in our inner activity which mediates all experience, then we have made a huge step in spiraling these polar aspects back together.

I had in mind as your last theme here space as intellectualized time (that I'm still trying to do something with). Would you please refer me to the theme of the natural and the moral at its beginning?

We have forgotten how to appreciate the devotion it takes to engage in such a rigorous scientific approach (..) This person is also engaging the soul in his contemplation of the Divine

Ok, but could we not say that of any other occupation, as they all engage with world content?


.

It's all interrelated. Space-Time associates with the Natural-Cultural, the union giving birth to the Moral. Space is the arena where moral qualities can develop and purify thinking, feeling, and willing. Let's see if this can also be related to the Love discussion with Cleric. I think you have a pretty solid grasp on that dynamic. 

It's very useful to understand all phenomena as manifestations of the Spirit, which we could associate with Divine Love, as it freely descends into Matter and ascends back to Spirit. It's important to remember that it isn't the Spirit becoming something else in each phase of the involution-evolution (descent-ascent), but metamorphosing itself. Every new phase embeds the earlier ones, yet during the involution the Memory of the Spirit's essential being and participation in the Divine realms is sacrificed so that new beings can develop self-awareness, individuality, and freedom. Clarity of certain senses like spatial vision come at the expense of other ones which are more subtle and relate us back to the higher temporal worlds. The free individual must then win back knowledge of its essential Self, oriented towards the Cosmic organism, to return to its expression of Divine Love.

Now it gets really tricky to understand the temporal dynamics. Cleric has explored this metaphorically in a few posts, and his understanding is much better than mine, so I'll keep this brief. Linear time experience is only a phenomenal manifestation of cognition at its low point in the evolutionary progression, i.e. where we are now. As it continues, the 'now' expands more and more to remember the 'past' in full consciousness. This remembering of past states in consciousness is what we call the 'future'. The future is the past remembered in full consciousness. In a real sense, the more integrated 'centers of gravity' who work into our present are us - we are always interacting with our future states of Be-ing in order to evolve. We see this depicted in movies often as future humans, aliens, angels and demons, robots, or something or the other visiting or communicating with present humans (if you have seen the movie Arrival by Villenueve, that was a really great depiction, which is not to say he was conscious of what we are speaking about here).

So these 'future beings' as a whole form what we can refer to as our "higher Self". This should provide a theoretical basis for how self-love in its current form, when oriented properly, is also an expression of Love directed towards the Godhead, as you seem to grasp above. Ultimately the phenomenal inquiries into these things will be the most useful, not the theoretical metaphysics, but I am simply using it to tie back into what we were discussing. Since all is essentially a manifestation of Love (which embeds other virtues), every lower instinct, impulse, passion, feeling, thought, etc. can be transmuted into a corresponding virtue on the higher spiritual plane. This is related to the spiritual alchemy of turning 'lead into gold' that Cleric referenced elsewhere. We could say Divine Love is the transmuted instinct of physical sex in the natural domain, and maternal love in the cultural domain. Now if we get in the habit of being faithful to the first-person phenomenal perspective, it's easier to see why the metaphysical positions we call "wrong" are much more useful than we tend to give them credit for.

In fact, no metaphysical theory is wrong, only incomplete. What we now call "matter", i.e. physical forces and mineral substances, is nothing other than the Spirit in a very low metamorphic phase of its involution. It has involved itself into material nature and is only recently beginning to evolve back by awakening itself through human culture. Philosophy, science and aesthetics are major channels of awakening. In that sense, the materialist is correct - spiritual forces are nowhere to be found in outer nature right now. Everything we perceive around us are past deeds of beings which are in the process of decaying and dying out. Just as we shed and replace our physical substance every 7 years, the Earth as a whole is shedding her physical (perceptual) substance. The future truly resides within us. Where the materialists go wrong is exactly where the analytic idealist goes wrong as well - idolizing a momentary snapshot of ceaseless spiritual evolution into a fixed ontology, making it a universal truth which holds good for everyone and for all time.

As Schelling put it, "Nature is visible Spirit and Spirit is invisible Nature." These are all metamorphoses of the primal Spirit. So the materialists are certainly expressing a dim love towards higher worlds when they devote so much attention to Nature's appearances and attempt to derive laws,  principles, and archetypes underlying them. These are nothing other than Spirit! Only the qualitative significance is stripped out and they aren't conscious of what they're doing yet (but easily can be). The same can't really be said for the analytic idealist. He has placed the Spirit in a black box 'behind' the appearances and decided it can't be opened in this lifetime (I realize this doesn't hold for every person, but I am speaking of the philosophy more generally). They have both forgotten that their truth is only a temporal truth based on our current evolutionary stage. They have confused an incomplete truth for a complete truth. What is really needed is for these two and other world conceptions to be synthesized with living knowledge. That is essentially what spiritual science is.

The worldviews, and actually all cultural phenomena, are broken mirror pieces reflecting a partial and foggy image back to us, just like the physical appearances of Nature. If we truly hold the high ideal of brotherly and sisterly Love, we can start by expressing love with our thinking towards those who seemingly hold contrary positions to our own. This would be a concrete example of sacrificing our atomized ego and loving our enemies. We start with purifying thinking with more active and creative thoughts, since it's most readily accessible, and then broaden out to feeling and willing (but we should certainly try to work on all three to the extent we can). These thinking sacrifices will also really make a difference in our own inner soul development. They will provide endless fuel for our inner flames to burn brighter. We then enter into a positive feedback of growing in knowledge and wisdom as we also grow in sacrificial love. (sorry if I already posted this quote, but it's worth hanging onto!)

This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea.

[Cleric K]

I was on the wrong plane. Ok, so self-love is a nucleus of Love that at first expresses itself and arises in us as a survival principle that keeps the ‘I’ together. Then it expands to include other beings, and later, at the current stage of evolution, it becomes ready to purify itself from egoism/survival through sacrifice, hence it starts expanding to the whole of experience.

I must confess once again that it feels quite surreal to me to read a response like this And I'm not saying this to balm anyone's heart. I don't say you agree with it, that it feels reasonable, that it makes any difference to you. It's only the simple fact that your response shows you have read and understood what the other side is saying. As you can probably see for yourself, in most cases one either doesn't get a response at all or it's in the form of "It's all goggeldygook" or "It's a sect!" and so on.

Would love expansion, just as well as the deepening of thinking faculties, liberate us from the thought-pay-no-toll habit? In other words is the ‘world flow’ that can be grasped through love expansion the same as the thought-texture that pervades the world?

Yes, ultimately they are not different and irreconcilable categories of spiritual life. It would be more appropriate to think of them as different states of aggregation of the flow. It's like our intellectual thoughts are ice block but still flowing along the streamlines of the flow. This gives a completely different idea of what knowledge is. Traditionally for the intellectual age, there's a hard divide. We create arrangements of ice blocks which are supposed to mirror the dynamics of the appearances. This is what is conventionally understood as knowledge today - to have a private mental representation of reality. The more correlated it is with the appearances, the more true it is consider to be. But today we're in position to see thoughts as part of the flow. Then knowledge becomes something living. It is precisely as you wrote to Lorenzo in the other thread. Initially it's a tedious process but it leads very far and it's so worth it. There you have touched upon something fundamental. It's not so much about seeing the thoughts as finished pieces of knowledge, rather than feeling how the way we move our thoughts is resisted or reinforced by the streamlines of the invisible flow. That's how we begin to grasp its dynamics, not by simply having intellectual picture of it but by finding how we can swim with our spirit through it. This doesn't come easily because if leads to consciousness of what our ordinary self is 'made of' - the streamlines of the flow, which are not abstract concepts but the very reality of our temperament, character, preferences, beliefs, passions, likes and dislikes, our relations with others, our love or hate. And even superficial observation shows that our daily thinking flows within all these streamlines. Today we still place all these streamlines on the 'other side' of cognition. Freudian psychoanalysis conceptualizes the subconscious, theorizes about how it works but it still remains only an intellectual picture within waking consciousness. Today the challenge is to step into the reality of the subconscious and find out that it is a living world knowable in higher orders of consciousness. Ordinary human consciousness is only a crystalline aperture of this world. And this comes only slowly, pretty much in the way you use in your fitness classes.

I have often given this example: we don't know what gravity is when we're in a free fall. Then we're weightless. If there are no points of reference around us we can't know if we're accelerating or we're floating in free space, far from any gravity source. Only if we find a point of support (like the surface of the Earth) we then feel how gravity drags us down. It's quite the same in our spiritual being. As long as we simply free fall in our temperament, character, likes and dislikes, all this feels as the unquestionable structure of reality. It is only when we find different points of support that we can feel how up until a moment ago we have been unknowingly dragged along a stream that we only now become conscious of because we have resisted it. It's similar in your practice. We need to step out of our well trodden motor habits in order to become conscious of them and in this way learn about new ways of willing. This is always connected with effort and sacrifice and that's why it is generally avoided and the carefree freefall is preferred. The fact that freefalling feels nice is not a guarantee for anything. All crashes into the ground are preceded by a freefall. We need to become more and more conscious of the streamlines within which are falling. Thinking provides the anchor points through which we can reorient our inner being and in the process feel how different streamlines are dragging through us. Through persistence, a magnificent landscape begins to be intuited, where we find the flow of our own life embedded into that of the world.

The difficulty is that because of the habits of the intellectual age, we expect this flow to be seen as something in front of us, that we reason about with our thinking hidden in the blind spot. But it is not so. The flow is a higher order of cognition, out of which our intellectual being precipitates. In this sense, the flow is of thought nature. The thought-texture is not something secondary on top of the world, it is the flowing idea reflected in the perceptions of the world, just like on the ice block level, our ideas are reflected in words. So the flow is one and it is being thought, yet it is experienced at different states of aggregation so to speak, forming a musical hierarchy.

And would love expansion be one of three drivers of evolution, one of three paths to realize and integrate the continuity/unity of existence, where the other two are sharpening thinking agility until the subsoil of thoughts is touched and filling back the perceptual holes with meaning?
Are these three paths in reality the same path...

Yes, indeed. What you have intuited is really connected with what have been known in Western esoterism as three archetypal pillars - Love, Wisdom, Truth.

These are not something that we can simply grasp in our intellect and say "I got it". Those are archetypal forces. As with all things, they can only be approached by looking at them from many sides. For example, Love prepares the soil, it expands consciousness to include more and more of the world flow. But this in itself is not enough. We spoke about how Love doesn't mean that one simply opens up and swallows everything indiscriminately. Here's where Wisdom comes in. One shouldn't simply dissolve in the flow but understand that it must be intelligently cultivated. There are streamlines that are to be consciously flown with and others that should be resisted. We can't do that without understanding about what leads to what results. Thus we need also knowledge - Wisdom. When Love and Wisdom work together we attain to Truth. Truth is the is-ness that you seek. But as it has been hopefully shown, this is-ness is not something finished that we can simply behold. The expansion of Love and the organization of Wisdom lead to the ever growing perspective of Truth.

As you guessed, these three pillars can't be taken in isolation. They are found in rhythmic relations but they should always work towards a single goal. For example, some souls are more predisposed to start working with Love. They have the innate Love for God, this deep sacred feeling that everything is ordered, everything is wise and we need to align with that flow. Of course the time of the simple pious souls is already passing away and this Love should lead us to the Wisdom of God flowing in us, such that we can also understand. Only in this way we come to Truth which sets us free.

On the other hand, there are souls which live in reason, they seek the music of logic in everything. These souls can never simply open up for Love without first understanding. This is the path that begins with knowledge, such as PoF, which leads to Wisdom. If everything goes properly, this leads to Love, where Wisdom is utilized. Once again, both lead to Truth - we understand what existence is, what the human being is, where it comes from and where it is going. This makes us free.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

I am reading your words again, and it’s like there’s new activity emerging from them. Words are out there, in a clear sense they’re unchangeable impressed wax, and at the same time they are not. Everything is becoming so akin to moving platforms in a moving sea in a moving multiverse… It reminds me of the teacups carousel in the amusement park. Every cup turns on itself clockwise, while the round tray the cup is put on spins anti-clockwise, while the whole carousel wheel also turns, clockwise. Maybe that’s one of the meanings of recentering on the first-person experience of the ‘I’ as the only temporary aperture that can lead us further ahead, or down or up, when one is trying to get a sense of the direction of the Flow but hasn’t found it consistently. So I am now reading again of this inversion:

If we can discern the moral dimension directly in our inner activity which mediates all experience, then we have made a huge step in spiraling these polar aspects back together. We will become open to discerning the moral dimension in all aspects of Nature as well. The main distinction to be made is between personally concerned spiritual activity and other-concerned activity. But we actually get the other-concerned activity by directing our feeling 'outwards' and our thinking inwards towards the 'well of negative entropy' Cleric mentioned. This is an inversion of the standard M.O. in the modern age. 

…gaining a slightly better sense of what it means, and wishing it could help GrantHenderson on the other thread, maybe as a middle step towards the further helping step you’ve offered him there:

By making our thinking consciously creative, we begin to pay these debts off by giving spiritual content back to Nature's appearances. We begin to satisfy our own longings, including the love we are always seeking from others, by the strength of active and heartfelt thinking towards the higher worlds who actually have the capacity to provide us the eternal Love we need. Far from being the overwhelming responsibility most people fear from approaching the Divine in living thinking, it is a redemption, a jubilee, from the oppressive spiritual debts which weigh us down.

I doubt I am able to formulate it and wrap it up in a presentable way, but I know it’s impossible to fall out of love first by focusing on self-love, and only then pull thinking up above cloud level. Falling out of love does not go ‘entirely against our thinking/perceiving nature’, as Grant feels, and above all, this cannot be ‘accomplished by directing our love inwardly’... It’s the other way round, the more we expand in and with love, the more we find an independence that allows us to lack less and to give more, until there’s nothing to fall out of. So I am concerned. I guess an inversion is needed here. I will think further about this question…


Back to your theme of reuniting the natural with the moral, I would like to explore this idea of the moral as a ‘continuation of the natural on a higher plane, which can only occur through our spiritual activity’. This connection between nature and morality is completely obscure to me and I wish I could gain a beginner's sense of what it means. I‘m seeing that you have written a number of essays and I can imagine you have tackled this theme before. Now if the reason why you are not referring me to these is that you don’t think it’s appropriate to quote your own writings, please consider making an exception to your reference policy : )


Lastly, about this:

Now it gets really tricky to understand the temporal dynamics. Cleric has explored this metaphorically in a few posts, and his understanding is much better than mine, so I'll keep this brief. Linear time experience is only a phenomenal manifestation of cognition at its low point in the evolutionary progression, i.e. where we are now. As it continues, the 'now' expands more and more to remember the 'past' in full consciousness. This remembering of past states in consciousness is what we call the 'future'. The future is the past remembered in full consciousness. In a real sense, the more integrated 'centers of gravity' who work into our present are us - we are always interacting with our future states of Be-ing in order to evolve. We see this depicted in movies often as future humans, aliens, angels and demons, robots, or something or the other visiting or communicating with present humans (if you have seen the movie Arrival by Villenueve, that was a really great depiction, which is not to say he was conscious of what we are speaking about here).

Yes, this past integration into the future is tricky enough to remain quite elusive to me for the moment. My hurdle is the benefits I gained (or at least so it felt) by focusing on the present, hence getting a sense of time being thought-created, of time being enclosed in thinking, instead of it being woven into the world dynamics themselves. I guess this still holds true in a sense - the 'equation' of time with thinking - just because higher Thinking encompasses Everything. Still, when I moved towards this understanding of time as relative, a couple of years ago, I was regarding thinking as mind, as a quality of the egoic self, as the self-love that holds together the ‘I’ in a sense. I now clearly realize the higher nature of thinking, so I have moved away from that viewpoint. But it still does not come easy to clearly grasp time dynamics. I haven’t seen Arrival. Since a while ago I have more or less lost the curiosity and patience to stay focused for two hours on Hollywood fiction, but maybe I will watch it now.


Another connected issue I'm experiencing is a fluctuation in understanding. Just because at one point I might have intuited some bits of reality, it doesn’t mean that they are acquired forever. Tomorrow I could lose sight of them, regress to a lower point, and come up with some less than intelligent questions or notes. Ok. I will stop rambling now. As you said, every day is a new adventure. And within every adventure awaits the bright, light-blue lagoon of gratitude and the gift of dipping our steps and soaking our soul in it.


.

[Federica]

I was on the wrong plane. Ok, so self-love is a nucleus of Love that at first expresses itself and arises in us as a survival principle that keeps the ‘I’ together. Then it expands to include other beings, and later, at the current stage of evolution, it becomes ready to purify itself from egoism/survival through sacrifice, hence it starts expanding to the whole of experience.

I must confess once again that it feels quite surreal to me to read a response like this And I'm not saying this to balm anyone's heart. I don't say you agree with it, that it feels reasonable, that it makes any difference to you. It's only the simple fact that your response shows you have read and understood what the other side is saying. As you can probably see for yourself, in most cases one either doesn't get a response at all or it's in the form of "It's all goggeldygook" or "It's a sect!" and so on.

Would love expansion, just as well as the deepening of thinking faculties, liberate us from the thought-pay-no-toll habit? In other words is the ‘world flow’ that can be grasped through love expansion the same as the thought-texture that pervades the world?

Yes, ultimately they are not different and irreconcilable categories of spiritual life. It would be more appropriate to think of them as different states of aggregation of the flow. It's like our intellectual thoughts are ice block but still flowing along the streamlines of the flow. This gives a completely different idea of what knowledge is. Traditionally for the intellectual age, there's a hard divide. We create arrangements of ice blocks which are supposed to mirror the dynamics of the appearances. This is what is conventionally understood as knowledge today - to have a private mental representation of reality. The more correlated it is with the appearances, the more true it is consider to be. But today we're in position to see thoughts as part of the flow. Then knowledge becomes something living. It is precisely as you wrote to Lorenzo in the other thread. Initially it's a tedious process but it leads very far and it's so worth it. There you have touched upon something fundamental. It's not so much about seeing the thoughts as finished pieces of knowledge, rather than feeling how the way we move our thoughts is resisted or reinforced by the streamlines of the invisible flow. That's how we begin to grasp its dynamics, not by simply having intellectual picture of it but by finding how we can swim with our spirit through it. This doesn't come easily because if leads to consciousness of what our ordinary self is 'made of' - the streamlines of the flow, which are not abstract concepts but the very reality of our temperament, character, preferences, beliefs, passions, likes and dislikes, our relations with others, our love or hate. And even superficial observation shows that our daily thinking flows within all these streamlines. Today we still place all these streamlines on the 'other side' of cognition. Freudian psychoanalysis conceptualizes the subconscious, theorizes about how it works but it still remains only an intellectual picture within waking consciousness. Today the challenge is to step into the reality of the subconscious and find out that it is a living world knowable in higher orders of consciousness. Ordinary human consciousness is only a crystalline aperture of this world. And this comes only slowly, pretty much in the way you use in your fitness classes.

I have often given this example: we don't know what gravity is when we're in a free fall. Then we're weightless. If there are no points of reference around us we can't know if we're accelerating or we're floating in free space, far from any gravity source. Only if we find a point of support (like the surface of the Earth) we then feel how gravity drags us down. It's quite the same in our spiritual being. As long as we simply free fall in our temperament, character, likes and dislikes, all this feels as the unquestionable structure of reality. It is only when we find different points of support that we can feel how up until a moment ago we have been unknowingly dragged along a stream that we only now become conscious of because we have resisted it. It's similar in your practice. We need to step out of our well trodden motor habits in order to become conscious of them and in this way learn about new ways of willing. This is always connected with effort and sacrifice and that's why it is generally avoided and the carefree freefall is preferred. The fact that freefalling feels nice is not a guarantee for anything. All crashes into the ground are preceded by a freefall. We need to become more and more conscious of the streamlines within which are falling. Thinking provides the anchor points through which we can reorient our inner being and in the process feel how different streamlines are dragging through us. Through persistence, a magnificent landscape begins to be intuited, where we find the flow of our own life embedded into that of the world.

The difficulty is that because of the habits of the intellectual age, we expect this flow to be seen as something in front of us, that we reason about with our thinking hidden in the blind spot. But it is not so. The flow is a higher order of cognition, out of which our intellectual being precipitates. In this sense, the flow is of thought nature. The thought-texture is not something secondary on top of the world, it is the flowing idea reflected in the perceptions of the world, just like on the ice block level, our ideas are reflected in words. So the flow is one and it is being thought, yet it is experienced at different states of aggregation so to speak, forming a musical hierarchy.

And would love expansion be one of three drivers of evolution, one of three paths to realize and integrate the continuity/unity of existence, where the other two are sharpening thinking agility until the subsoil of thoughts is touched and filling back the perceptual holes with meaning?
Are these three paths in reality the same path...

Yes, indeed. What you have intuited is really connected with what have been known in Western esoterism as three archetypal pillars - Love, Wisdom, Truth.

These are not something that we can simply grasp in our intellect and say "I got it". Those are archetypal forces. As with all things, they can only be approached by looking at them from many sides. For example, Love prepares the soil, it expands consciousness to include more and more of the world flow. But this in itself is not enough. We spoke about how Love doesn't mean that one simply opens up and swallows everything indiscriminately. Here's where Wisdom comes in. One shouldn't simply dissolve in the flow but understand that it must be intelligently cultivated. There are streamlines that are to be consciously flown with and others that should be resisted. We can't do that without understanding about what leads to what results. Thus we need also knowledge - Wisdom. When Love and Wisdom work together we attain to Truth. Truth is the is-ness that you seek. But as it has been hopefully shown, this is-ness is not something finished that we can simply behold. The expansion of Love and the organization of Wisdom lead to the ever growing perspective of Truth.

As you guessed, these three pillars can't be taken in isolation. They are found in rhythmic relations but they should always work towards a single goal. For example, some souls are more predisposed to start working with Love. They have the innate Love for God, this deep sacred feeling that everything is ordered, everything is wise and we need to align with that flow. Of course the time of the simple pious souls is already passing away and this Love should lead us to the Wisdom of God flowing in us, such that we can also understand. Only in this way we come to Truth which sets us free.

On the other hand, there are souls which live in reason, they seek the music of logic in everything. These souls can never simply open up for Love without first understanding. This is the path that begins with knowledge, such as PoF, which leads to Wisdom. If everything goes properly, this leads to Love, where Wisdom is utilized. Once again, both lead to Truth - we understand what existence is, what the human being is, where it comes from and where it is going. This makes us free.

Cleric... to be honest, what I was thinking, as I was writing this, is to pin down a short recap, a confirmation post to make sure I had read and well understood your self-love-to-Love explanation correctly. Anyhow I did write it, I remember doing it, although I was quite tired, no supersensitive phenomena involved here : )
And your accrued illustrations deeply add to the understanding. They open up new fractal perspectives of realization. It’s as if one post takes me to a fairly all-round sense of what is conveyed that makes me say ‘ok, I’m following, what’s next?’ but then you take us on a second round through the same landscape, and by brushing the same, seemingly well-explored points, the contour map breaks open under our feet and the path is cleared to an undreamed-of new level of appreciation that encompasses and accrues on the previous one. Which fuels a longing for further exploration and for bringing it all back to my last status maps of understanding, but... maybe not just yet. I guess I’ll leave it at this level of surreal a little longer yeah? : ) I feel no need to come up with another of my this-doesnt-make-any-sense type of posts just yet. No no, I’m staying for this round : )


.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I am reading your words again, and it’s like there’s new activity emerging from them. Words are out there, in a clear sense they’re unchangeable impressed wax, and at the same time they are not. Everything is becoming so akin to moving platforms in a moving sea in a moving multiverse… It reminds me of the teacups carousel in the amusement park. Every cup turns on itself clockwise, while the round tray the cup is put on spins anti-clockwise, while the whole carousel wheel also turns, clockwise. Maybe that’s one of the meanings of recentering on the first-person experience of the ‘I’ as the only temporary aperture that can lead us further ahead, or down or up, when one is trying to get a sense of the direction of the Flow but hasn’t found it consistently.

I know I have said it before, but I'll say it again - I have felt the same thing many times in the recent past and your intuition is again on point and expressed very well. This is why we always remind people to take the 'naive realism' critique very seriously, because the depth of meaning is never evident at first glance (or second or third etc.).

On the discord server, I was told "naive realism" can only be a critique of materialists who take physical appearances as things-themselves, and it can't be used to critique an idealist view. That's simply "not what the term means", they say. So, ironically, it's their naive realism of philosophical terms, this outer form obsession of the modern era, which acts as an obstacle to them penetrating to the inner meaning and a shared understanding. It's like there is zero interest in the latter, because they have found their worldview of choice and are comfortable in this superior position over the less 'enlightened'. And it seems no amount of pointing out what's happening can disarm the defense mechanism.

So again it is refreshing that you are taking the time to not only try and understand the inner meaning, but re-reading old posts to mine that deeper meaning once your own thinking perspective has deepened. Not only refreshing, but what seems like a miracle! I have done the same with most of Cleric's posts here, Steiner's writings, and scripture, and I never fail to uncover new insights which I had simply been blind to before. It goes to show how much we subconsciously project our own limitations onto what we are contemplating. That is, until we become conscious of this projective tendency in a living way, from our own inner perspective and experience.

Which comes back to the natural-moral relation you ask about. I will address it further below. But consider, if we go around attributing our lack of understanding others on the person communicating, on the Ideas being communicated, or on Reality itself, instead of locating it in our own incomplete development and superficial reasoning, then are we not sowing the seeds for irreconcilable differences amongst ourselves which must inevitably result in war? So the natural psychological projective tendency is very much bound up with the domain of ethical thought and action. We will always find a moral dimension to natural processes if we ask enough questions and seek the inner meaning conveyed by them in their relation to our own soul. Granted, this particular connection is easy to make and others require more effort - effort that we are much more motivated to give to the phenomena in consideration once we become conscious of this tendency![/quote]

So I am now reading again of this inversion:

If we can discern the moral dimension directly in our inner activity which mediates all experience, then we have made a huge step in spiraling these polar aspects back together. We will become open to discerning the moral dimension in all aspects of Nature as well. The main distinction to be made is between personally concerned spiritual activity and other-concerned activity. But we actually get the other-concerned activity by directing our feeling 'outwards' and our thinking inwards towards the 'well of negative entropy' Cleric mentioned. This is an inversion of the standard M.O. in the modern age. 

…gaining a slightly better sense of what it means, and wishing it could help GrantHenderson on the other thread, maybe as a middle step towards the further helping step you’ve offered him there:

By making our thinking consciously creative, we begin to pay these debts off by giving spiritual content back to Nature's appearances. We begin to satisfy our own longings, including the love we are always seeking from others, by the strength of active and heartfelt thinking towards the higher worlds who actually have the capacity to provide us the eternal Love we need. Far from being the overwhelming responsibility most people fear from approaching the Divine in living thinking, it is a redemption, a jubilee, from the oppressive spiritual debts which weigh us down.

I doubt I am able to formulate it and wrap it up in a presentable way, but I know it’s impossible to fall out of love first by focusing on self-love, and only then pull thinking up above cloud level. Falling out of love does not go ‘entirely against our thinking/perceiving nature’, as Grant feels, and above all, this cannot be ‘accomplished by directing our love inwardly’... It’s the other way round, the more we expand in and with love, the more we find an independence that allows us to lack less and to give more, until there’s nothing to fall out of. So I am concerned. I guess an inversion is needed here. I will think further about this question…

We need to get accustomed to the fact that the entire ideal Cosmos resides within us. Consider what modern science says - when we perceive the color red on an object, it's because all the other colors of the spectrum have been absorbed by the object. So really our perception of red is an absence of all the other colors. It is the same thing we spoke about with the negative images and holes, except we must understand our own involvement in this process. What we perceive outwardly is the reflection of all the ideal activity we have blocked out from consciousness inwardly. It is only outer surfaces of this ideal depth structure of archetypal activity within us. That structure embeds all our past and present associations with collectives, such as nation, race, family, gender, species.

So maybe we are saying a similar thing here. I don't think it's possible to consciously love others without growing into their inner perspective, which is synonymous with growing into the higher worlds within us. There is an inner perspective which corresponds with all of these collectives mentioned above. Our current individual perspective is embedded within these higher archetypal perspectives, as cells are embedded within tissues, organs, and systems of a living organism. We all belong to the same Cosmic organism with many other beings at lower and higher levels of cognitive metamorphosis. And the first layer of  this higher Self we meet will always be our current self inverted, the glove turned inside out.


“You know that it is said about sacrifice in this Work that, as we are, we have nothing to sacrifice, nothing worth sacrificing, save one thing —namely, our negative states, our negative suffering, our depressions and songs of misery. We can only sacrifice what we love.”
—Maurice Nicoll

This also reminds me of a quote from Jung. I will address the natural-moral more in a separate comment.

The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.