Whirlpool's core/first motion

[AshvinP]

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 : )

I appreciate that you are interested in my essays, but honestly I feel that they are not too helpful at this point, especially for anyone pretty new to these issues. I have gained a greater appreciation of how abstract and complex these things can sound when someone is not familiar with the holistic spiritual evolutionary context. Perhaps I will start quoting a few excerpts here and there as needed.

I can't say the natural- moral connection is super clear for me either. It's clear enough that I know it exists and is increasingly permeating my own experience on the path to higher consciousness. As Cleric mentioned before, when dealing with moral ideals - the 'why' of various actions undertaken in Cosmic evolution - we are in a domain that the intellect simply cannot grasp yet. There is a strong tendency for it to anthropomorphize the higher worlds with our concepts of what it means to be ethical and moral in our thoughts and actions. So we need to always look out for that and be satisfied with our fuzzy moral intuitions for a while, although we make the broad outlines more clear with sound reasoning.

That being said, from a purely theoretical perspective, we can consider how the perceptual world, i.e. the natural world, came into existence. Why did the primordial Spirit (Idea) polarize itself and differentiate from perfectly unified meaning? We all have experience of this polarization within us as well - it is the hysteresis process that Cleric wrote about. When our spirit submerges itself into the world, we are polarized on the x-axis of flowing along in outer perceptions. When it withdraws back into itself, we polarize on the y-axis of contemplating meaning. You seem to have already grasped this dynamic from within your own spiritual activity. So this is a dim reflection within us of the Cosmic breathing out and breathing in. When we breathe in meaning, we breathe out perceptions and vice versa. This is quite literal in the case of speech and singing.

In all cases, modern humans do this voluntarily, or at least in principle we can. No one says, "you must submerge your spirit into surroundings to flow with perception and then withdraw back into meaning". Even Nature's relation to humans makes this activity less and less conditioned over time, more and more a matter of choice. (clearly many have chosen to flow along with perceptions with little rhythmic contemplation of their meaning). The polar relation will always be there, but how closely the poles are united is up to us now. Here we also see the danger in MAL as an instinctive animal, which implies it is somehow less evolved (more polarized) than we are. Then all is flipped on its head - we feel to be at the very apex of cognitive evolution and MAL can be encapsulated within our concepts. This is the basis of all modern dualism and reductionism. And if MAL is an instinctive animal consciousness, then we ourselves are essentially only that. Instead of evolving to higher levels of consciousness, the goal is to devolve back to lower modes. And clearly this can be accomplished if we make it our goal - we already see it happening around us and, if we are brave enough to look inwards, within us.

I hope it's evident the moral implications of such an orientation. But, returning to the Cosmic hysteresis, it is only reasonable to conclude it was a free sacrificial act, which is dimly reflected in our own spiritual activity. And this free sacrifice propagates through the entire Cosmic architecture. At every level, we see ideational beings freely sacrificing so that others may evolve through the natural environment created by those sacrifices. What is inner spiritual activity always becomes the outer environment during the course of evolutionary progression. We will run into issues with this if we try to conceptualize it with linear time assumption, so we just need to remember that linear time is our own cognitive limitation, not a property of reality itself. Nature also requires death to prepare the soil for new life on the individual and species level. As Goethe said, "Nature has invented death so that she might have abundant life." More immanently to our own experience, our cognitive adaptation and evolution at this stage requires free sacrifices of the intellectual ego. This is an example of natural sacrifice of living organisms expressed on a higher cultural and individual plane.

We can only make room for new ideas, passions, habits, feelings, etc. if we are willing to sacrifice old ones. We can't put 'new wine into old wineskins or else both will be ruined'. We should make no mistake, this is resisted from within just as much as physical death. Ideologies across the board from materialism to theistic fundamentalism are clinged to by those in their possession beyond any reason. The suicide bomber will sacrifice his own life for his ideology. Is this logical? Not at all. One cannot truly sacrifice by killing other people on the promise of a reward in heaven. It's the cessation of logical reasoning when reaching a subconsciously desired conclusion which leads to dangerous idolatry in this manner. The only way to transmute this natural inclination towards radical idolatry is through living knowledge of the spiritual born through a higher Logic within, the Logos or Divine Word. The path to higher consciousness mentioned above, if pursued, will make very clear to us what sort of sacrifices are needed at every stage along the way to sow the seeds for further growth, and will also add to us the courage to confront those sacrifices if we pursue it in righteousness.


"No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles."
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

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.

Yes this will continue. I definitely have experienced and continue to experience that on this intuitive thinking path, although it becomes less and less of an issue over time. The best I can tell so far, the knowledge only remains firmly in place once the holistic context is firmly rooted within us, and that requires a certain amount of imaginative thinking development through meditation and other exercises for soul work. As Steiner says, "the visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve." That's why I keep stressing the individual concepts don't matter so much as the thinking skills which you are developing simply by approaching your inner world of experience in humility and good faith. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't attempt to understand and remember the concepts expressed, but we don't need to become too pedantic about it. Things will be forgotten and mistakes will be made repeatedly, but the new thinking skills will also provide a means to balance that out. These skills will prove invaluable for you later down the road.

[Federica]

...

Thank you for taking the time! I will wait a little while and see to what extent the questions that arise clear up by themselves.

[AshvinP]

...

Thank you for taking the time! I will wait a little while and see to what extent the questions that arise clear up by themselves.

It also occurred to me that, if you haven't seen this essay from Cleric yet, you should definitely check it out - Time-Consciousness Spectrum

It was enormously helpful for me to get in the habit of contemplating all of my experience, as well as my conceptual understanding of the higher worlds, from our daily rhythms to those of Cosmic evolution, as nested durational Ideas within the TC spectrum. When we get a feel for this ideational depth structure, we can also make the natural-moral connection more clear. If the day-night cycle is seen as a fully lucid Idea within a higher sphere of consciousness, for ex., it is hard to deny there is a moral valence to it just as their is for all of the ideas/intentions within our own sphere of consciousness, nested within those higher spheres. This also helps give us a sense for why all natural images, like day, night, light, warmth, darkness, deep sea, desert, sky, water, fire, north, south, etc. are so universally adaptable since the dawn of human culture as symbols for moral realities of soul and spirit.

[Federica]

It also occurred to me that, if you haven't seen this essay from Cleric yet, you should definitely check it out - Time-Consciousness Spectrum

It was enormously helpful for me to get in the habit of contemplating all of my experience, as well as my conceptual understanding of the higher worlds, from our daily rhythms to those of Cosmic evolution, as nested durational Ideas within the TC spectrum. When we get a feel for this ideational depth structure, we can also make the natural-moral connection more clear. If the day-night cycle is seen as a fully lucid Idea within a higher sphere of consciousness, for ex., it is hard to deny there is a moral valence to it just as their is for all of the ideas/intentions within our own sphere of consciousness, nested within those higher spheres. This also helps give us a sense for why all natural images, like day, night, light, warmth, darkness, deep sea, desert, sky, water, fire, north, south, etc. are so universally adaptable since the dawn of human culture as symbols for moral realities of soul and spirit.

Thank you so much! I have read it, but only once. It was far from enough.

[Federica]

It also occurred to me that, if you haven't seen this essay from Cleric yet, you should definitely check it out - Time-Consciousness Spectrum

It was enormously helpful for me to get in the habit of contemplating all of my experience, as well as my conceptual understanding of the higher worlds, from our daily rhythms to those of Cosmic evolution, as nested durational Ideas within the TC spectrum. When we get a feel for this ideational depth structure, we can also make the natural-moral connection more clear. If the day-night cycle is seen as a fully lucid Idea within a higher sphere of consciousness, for ex., it is hard to deny there is a moral valence to it just as their is for all of the ideas/intentions within our own sphere of consciousness, nested within those higher spheres. This also helps give us a sense for why all natural images, like day, night, light, warmth, darkness, deep sea, desert, sky, water, fire, north, south, etc. are so universally adaptable since the dawn of human culture as symbols for moral realities of soul and spirit.

Now I’ve read it various times, so as to make sure I extract from it all that can be extracted, at this point of my understanding. I see that there is a wealth of insights in it to uncover, if only I had the right tools to gather all of them. But for now, part of it remains elusive. Here below are some of the questions that are still open.


In the part that spectrum-analyzes the various time consciousness spans of various overarching ideas, I understand the text explanation well. However, looking at the picture I don’t get what is represented on the vertical axis as ‘holistic integration’. If we for instance take the overarching ‘going to the store’ idea, what is it that is higher in the middle of the time arch covered by that idea? What creates the ondulation? I read: ‘These waves we draw simply symbolize our ability to encompass the unity of states of being that are spread in time.’ To represent this, maybe horizontal segments would be enough? And the vertical dimension could then visualize various degrees of ‘consciousness/unconsciousness’ of phenomena?
The way I understand it, such a representation would be enough to picture the ‘recognition that through our thinking activity we can relate the states of our metamorphic process as being related by superimposed layers of ideas, both passively reflective and actively motivating the will’. But because it is pictured with waves, it must mean I am missing some dimension of the spectrum? Also, I don’t get that the higher up the wave, the longer the time span (as the picture seems to suggest). For example, the overarching idea of the various phases of my life, it’s not a higher-order type of idea, although it has a very extended time span? And finally, the lower level elementary subconscious rhythms being pictured in very short waves, should they not be immediately encompassed in the now-perception, as their wavelengths are shorter than the ones the now is already capable of grasping?
And maybe all this is easily solved by following the exhortation to not take the picture too strictly, but I'm asking just to be sure. (Anyway, I do understand well that we are speaking concretely of inner experiences. Abstraction is not the reason for my questions).


The inversion limit. Here I understand that the perception of our ‘now state’ is subjective, and also playable, and that it can be willingly extended to encompass in it broader and broader overarching ideas, so that we no longer feel we are traversing them. Instead we are flipping them in full, we are making them fall entirely within the scope of our now-perception. In so doing we bring them in the sphere of what we can encompass in one go, and so we realize our creative potential to willingly interfere with them.
Here the suggestion seems to be that time is a perception entirely enclosed in thinking. Not in the way I used to think about it (time is bad, etc. etc) but more matter-of-factly in the simple sense that the quality of the time flow, quick or slow, is entirely determined by the individual ability to grasp simultaneously within one creative, conscious, overarching idea, a sequence of frames. This set of frames can be more or less conspicuous and it is our ability to wrap our thinking around them in one turn that creates our subjective experience of time. That’s what I understand in the now seen as a ‘slice of states of being that we encompass simultaneously’


All this being said, I don’t understand the word 'inversion'. What is it that is inverted? It’s an extension… that makes a cycle fall within the expanding scope of the now. When we hold a whole cycle within the now we get its inner logic, we are not observing one frame here, wondering what it means, forgetting about it, and later observing another frame, wondering again, and in the end failing to connect the dots. I understand that we hold it with one hand in front of us, thus we can squeeze it, shape it, or put it on the side, we can make a creative decision about it in full awareness, and not just take mental notes of isolated observations that fly beyond our sphere of control and just painfully observe how they crash into our world content. Ok, but I don’t get the reason to use this word ‘inversion’?


Going deep into the spectrum. So we can work at bringing within our creative consciousness more and more overarching ideas. The little bit that is missing for me, the arrival point that I can’t grasp is why the way out of the unconscious ‘being carried’ by phenomena or rhythms, goes through squeezing them in the now (or enlarging our now until it eats them). What makes subjective time perception so decisive…? Is time a veil then? Is it the one constantly inbuilt element of our experience that keeps us unconscious? That would suggest that - there being no limit to how much can be encompassed in the now - the higher beings do not exist in time? Because it is said that there is no limit, what happens when the now is expanded indefinitely? Is this not falling back into the mystical idea that time is the one element of perception that is to be transcended? Here this is done through hard work on making thinking more and more robust, while the mystical approach seeks a magical shortcut out of time by just stopping all efforts? Is there an end point to the journey that can be pictured, if not reached? I read that ther are always higher level ideas to look up to, but for us as humans is there a destination to be aimed to or is it only an endless progression in itself?


What comes to mind is the Steiner analogy (I hope I remember correctly) of thoughts as islands of ice flowing within the underlying streams in the sea of unconscious rhythms/phenomena/ideas. So if this work on thinking robustness is like going from drifting away to sailing, by making the icy islands into high performance sailing boats, where are they sailing towards… Or is it simply the ‘anchoring of spiritual activity within itself’ the arrival point, so that the sea, the icy plates, and the whole journey along and against the various streams remains a level of reality below, while the spirit can extract itself from that quest completely?


‘There are reasons for every sympathy and antipathy that we experience and these are found when the higher order time-consciousness waves are brought to lucid awareness’. So our personal unconscious gets elucidated as we become able to encompass larger wavelengths. But then again, what are those mini waves in the lower part of the picture? I would have put the rose circle of the now tangent to the horizontal axis and only open to expand upwards and wider.. In this sense, I understand much better the second, concentric picture (although I still don't get the word ‘inversion’).


‘the inconvenience that we must first pass through the murky layers of our own personality and karma, and this is rarely a pleasant experience. Yet we must 'shew ourselves men' and have the courage to endure the pulling out of the thorn from the flesh because what follows afterwards compensates for all hardships.’ I personally feel that I am extremely curious to uncover all that. Why would that be an unpleasant inconvenience? Regarding the character of nations, for example, which is mentioned as one aspect that can be brought into consciousness, I am ready to work very hard to understand for example why I have been going from nation to nation, and why they, after a while, start feeling like not as satisfactory as they seemed in the beginning. What would be the inconvenience of uncovering the why of our sympathies and antipathies? Is it possible to be more curious about a thing than about uncovering our inner reality...

.

[AshvinP]

It also occurred to me that, if you haven't seen this essay from Cleric yet, you should definitely check it out - Time-Consciousness Spectrum

It was enormously helpful for me to get in the habit of contemplating all of my experience, as well as my conceptual understanding of the higher worlds, from our daily rhythms to those of Cosmic evolution, as nested durational Ideas within the TC spectrum. When we get a feel for this ideational depth structure, we can also make the natural-moral connection more clear. If the day-night cycle is seen as a fully lucid Idea within a higher sphere of consciousness, for ex., it is hard to deny there is a moral valence to it just as their is for all of the ideas/intentions within our own sphere of consciousness, nested within those higher spheres. This also helps give us a sense for why all natural images, like day, night, light, warmth, darkness, deep sea, desert, sky, water, fire, north, south, etc. are so universally adaptable since the dawn of human culture as symbols for moral realities of soul and spirit.

Now I’ve read it various times, so as to make sure I extract from it all that can be extracted, at this point of my understanding. I see that there is a wealth of insights in it to uncover, if only I had the right tools to gather all of them. But for now, part of it remains elusive. Here below are some of the questions that are still open.


In the part that spectrum-analyzes the various time consciousness spans of various overarching ideas, I understand the text explanation well. However, looking at the picture I don’t get what is represented on the vertical axis as ‘holistic integration’. If we for instance take the overarching ‘going to the store’ idea, what is it that is higher in the middle of the time arch covered by that idea? What creates the ondulation? I read: ‘These waves we draw simply symbolize our ability to encompass the unity of states of being that are spread in time.’ To represent this, maybe horizontal segments would be enough? And the vertical dimension could then visualize various degrees of ‘consciousness/unconsciousness’ of phenomena?
The way I understand it, such a representation would be enough to picture the ‘recognition that through our thinking activity we can relate the states of our metamorphic process as being related by superimposed layers of ideas, both passively reflective and actively motivating the will’. But because it is pictured with waves, it must mean I am missing some dimension of the spectrum? Also, I don’t get that the higher up the wave, the longer the time span (as the picture seems to suggest). For example, the overarching idea of the various phases of my life, it’s not a higher-order type of idea, although it has a very extended time span? And finally, the lower level elementary subconscious rhythms being pictured in very short waves, should they not be immediately encompassed in the now-perception, as their wavelengths are shorter than the ones the now is already capable of grasping?
And maybe all this is easily solved by following the exhortation to not take the picture too strictly, but I'm asking just to be sure. (Anyway, I do understand well that we are speaking concretely of inner experiences. Abstraction is not the reason for my questions).


The inversion limit. Here I understand that the perception of our ‘now state’ is subjective, and also playable, and that it can be willingly extended to encompass in it broader and broader overarching ideas, so that we no longer feel we are traversing them. Instead we are flipping them in full, we are making them fall entirely within the scope of our now-perception. In so doing we bring them in the sphere of what we can encompass in one go, and so we realize our creative potential to willingly interfere with them.
Here the suggestion seems to be that time is a perception entirely enclosed in thinking. Not in the way I used to think about it (time is bad, etc. etc) but more matter-of-factly in the simple sense that the quality of the time flow, quick or slow, is entirely determined by the individual ability to grasp simultaneously within one creative, conscious, overarching idea, a sequence of frames. This set of frames can be more or less conspicuous and it is our ability to wrap our thinking around them in one turn that creates our subjective experience of time. That’s what I understand in the now seen as a ‘slice of states of being that we encompass simultaneously’


All this being said, I don’t understand the word 'inversion'. What is it that is inverted? It’s an extension… that makes a cycle fall within the expanding scope of the now. When we hold a whole cycle within the now we get its inner logic, we are not observing one frame here, wondering what it means, forgetting about it, and later observing another frame, wondering again, and in the end failing to connect the dots. I understand that we hold it with one hand in front of us, thus we can squeeze it, shape it, or put it on the side, we can make a creative decision about it in full awareness, and not just take mental notes of isolated observations that fly beyond our sphere of control and just painfully observe how they crash into our world content. Ok, but I don’t get the reason to use this word ‘inversion’?


Going deep into the spectrum. So we can work at bringing within our creative consciousness more and more overarching ideas. The little bit that is missing for me, the arrival point that I can’t grasp is why the way out of the unconscious ‘being carried’ by phenomena or rhythms, goes through squeezing them in the now (or enlarging our now until it eats them). What makes subjective time perception so decisive…? Is time a veil then? Is it the one constantly inbuilt element of our experience that keeps us unconscious? That would suggest that - there being no limit to how much can be encompassed in the now - the higher beings do not exist in time? Because it is said that there is no limit, what happens when the now is expanded indefinitely? Is this not falling back into the mystical idea that time is the one element of perception that is to be transcended? Here this is done through hard work on making thinking more and more robust, while the mystical approach seeks a magical shortcut out of time by just stopping all efforts? Is there an end point to the journey that can be pictured, if not reached? I read that ther are always higher level ideas to look up to, but for us as humans is there a destination to be aimed to or is it only an endless progression in itself?


What comes to mind is the Steiner analogy (I hope I remember correctly) of thoughts as islands of ice flowing within the underlying streams in the sea of unconscious rhythms/phenomena/ideas. So if this work on thinking robustness is like going from drifting away to sailing, by making the icy islands into high performance sailing boats, where are they sailing towards… Or is it simply the ‘anchoring of spiritual activity within itself’ the arrival point, so that the sea, the icy plates, and the whole journey along and against the various streams remains a level of reality below, while the spirit can extract itself from that quest completely?


‘There are reasons for every sympathy and antipathy that we experience and these are found when the higher order time-consciousness waves are brought to lucid awareness’. So our personal unconscious gets elucidated as we become able to encompass larger wavelengths. But then again, what are those mini waves in the lower part of the picture? I would have put the rose circle of the now tangent to the horizontal axis and only open to expand upwards and wider.. In this sense, I understand much better the second, concentric picture (although I still don't get the word ‘inversion’).


‘the inconvenience that we must first pass through the murky layers of our own personality and karma, and this is rarely a pleasant experience. Yet we must 'shew ourselves men' and have the courage to endure the pulling out of the thorn from the flesh because what follows afterwards compensates for all hardships.’ I personally feel that I am extremely curious to uncover all that. Why would that be an unpleasant inconvenience? Regarding the character of nations, for example, which is mentioned as one aspect that can be brought into consciousness, I am ready to work very hard to understand for example why I have been going from nation to nation, and why they, after a while, start feeling like not as satisfactory as they seemed in the beginning. What would be the inconvenience of uncovering the why of our sympathies and antipathies? Is it possible to be more curious about a thing than about uncovering our inner reality...

.

Federica,

I'm not sure if Cleric is already in process of writing a response here, so I will just make a brief note about the vertical axis for now.

As we move up, we go from Ideas which encompass less states of being to those encompassing more states of being. So your idea of 'going to the store' would be below your idea of 'plan for the day'. The former idea and its encompassed states of being are dependent on the latter, but not vice versa (although what happens during the 'going to the store' idea could certainly feedback and modify the 'plan for the day' idea, and most likely will in some way). These are both your active ideas, i.e. ones you feel creatively responsible for. For the person who never plans their day, what for you is the active 'plan for the day' idea will be, for them, passive/reflective 'what the day had planned for me' perceptions (not ideas). So that lack of active, creative thinking makes what is otherwise experienced as outer 'destiny' or 'fate' be experienced as one's own inner creation to some greater or lesser extent.

At a certain point along each individual's spectrum, we pass from active/creative to passive/reflective. Practically the 'day-night cycle' idea is passive/reflective for most people (yet this is certainly not an absolute property for all people, as Cleric illustrated with 'laws of nature' which can pass into our creative domain, like our breathing activity, temperament, habits, etc.). For most, it is simply a given and all lower nested ideas we are active with are contingent on its rhythmic unfoldment. The same would obviously apply for 'monthly cycle', 'season cycle', etc. We can notice how the 'slower' rhtyhms above structure the 'faster' rhythms below - a single season will structure a great number of first-person states of being within the ideas below which are nested within its domain. From the perspective creatively responsible for the 'season' idea, one movement of the rhythm structures many rhythmic movements of lower ideas, like our daily plans. We could say that higher perspective experiences what feels like several months of movements for the lower perspective, according to our measuring of time, in what feels like a single hour (this is not precise correspondence, of course).

So, actually, the higher ideational perspectives are moving faster through their states of being while the lower ones are moving slower through theirs. This gives a coherent and logical explanation for why lower perspectives experience time-flow as they do within the ideational consciousness of higher perspectives they are nested within, which experience time-flow differently, how the 'future' (higher integrated rhythm) is always influencing the 'past' and present states of being as they unfold, and how, from the highest integrated ideational perspective of All-Being, all possible states of being occur within the ever-present 'now'. It really opens up the possibility for us to take much more creative responsibility for our unfolding states of being than we imagine possible, simply through the development of active and creative thinking faculties which can grow into the higher integrated perspectives (simple, but not necessarily easy). All that we perceive, feel, think, and do can ultimately be traced back to nested ideational beings and their inner activity which is concentric with our own.

Here is also another angle to view it from in terms of Earthly evolution (which maybe we can discuss more later). Remembering there is actually no 'side' perspective on the evolutionary progression, but this is the only way it can be represented.

https://anthroposophy.eu/Spiritual_hier ... genperiods

Schema FMC00.169 illustrates the principle of Overlapping evolutionary periods. While an earlier (red) is morphing into the current (green), the future is already developing (blue). This is also related to the symbol of the spiral: evolution does not proceed in linear fashion but takes evolutionary 'jumps'.

[AshvinP]

The inversion limit. Here I understand that the perception of our ‘now state’ is subjective, and also playable, and that it can be willingly extended to encompass in it broader and broader overarching ideas, so that we no longer feel we are traversing them. Instead we are flipping them in full, we are making them fall entirely within the scope of our now-perception. In so doing we bring them in the sphere of what we can encompass in one go, and so we realize our creative potential to willingly interfere with them.
Here the suggestion seems to be that time is a perception entirely enclosed in thinking. Not in the way I used to think about it (time is bad, etc. etc) but more matter-of-factly in the simple sense that the quality of the time flow, quick or slow, is entirely determined by the individual ability to grasp simultaneously within one creative, conscious, overarching idea, a sequence of frames. This set of frames can be more or less conspicuous and it is our ability to wrap our thinking around them in one turn that creates our subjective experience of time. That’s what I understand in the now seen as a ‘slice of states of being that we encompass simultaneously’


All this being said, I don’t understand the word 'inversion'. What is it that is inverted? It’s an extension… that makes a cycle fall within the expanding scope of the now. When we hold a whole cycle within the now we get its inner logic, we are not observing one frame here, wondering what it means, forgetting about it, and later observing another frame, wondering again, and in the end failing to connect the dots. I understand that we hold it with one hand in front of us, thus we can squeeze it, shape it, or put it on the side, we can make a creative decision about it in full awareness, and not just take mental notes of isolated observations that fly beyond our sphere of control and just painfully observe how they crash into our world content. Ok, but I don’t get the reason to use this word ‘inversion’?

Federica,

I wanted to add a couple more thoughts here. Firstly, that your intuitive penetration of these ideas is so deep that I can barely follow what the objection is - in some ways, you have understood what Cleric wrote in ways that I simply haven't, or in ways not very evident to me. I don't think this reflects your failure to understand, but actually a very keen ability to follow the first-person contours of the TC phenomenology. So, in that sense, I'm not sure how much benefit you would get from me trying to explain what is meant by "inversion" versus you simply experiencing it, because I can't imagine you would be too far off from the latter after some meditative work. On the other hand, Cleric illustrating it further for you would be of great benefit, I'm sure. I'm just not well-versed enough to come up with useful metaphors on this topic yet.

That being said, perhaps this will be relevant for you - the only reason we perceive any outer world is because there are higher Ideal rhythms which we don't feel creatively responsible for. All that we feel creatively responsible for is what we now call "inner world", which is imperceptible to normal waking cognition, and the rest we call the "outer" world. This is the basis for modern dualism - so much became subconscious due to natural cognitive evolution, and therefore became outer perception, and then the outer forms became so attenuated in their meaningful valence, that people forgot there were living beings and their activity 'behind' their appearances; activity which exists in relationship to our own inner activity. It's no coincidence that modern science of outer nature became so precise during this time yet also so devoid of soul and spirit - outer peception became much more clear due to the natural evolutionary progression, unlike the more dreamy consciousness of ancient Indians for ex., but also entirely disconnected from the depth structure of spiritual activity which lives within the rhythmic processes of the human organism. This is equally true regardless of any ontological label that is adorned today.

So if your outer perception of the world content really began to change - to become more flowing, more consolidated, more vibrant in some ways, the interrelations of processes were more easily discernable, the objects were viewed more as the meeting places of various supersensible forces, etc. (it's really difficult to describe the changes with concepts, which is why metaphors are more useful) - in relation to your own inner ideal activity and its development, then this would be an 'inversion' of the relationship that is normally experienced. Normally, you can think with concepts all day long, feel or desire whatever you want, and it won't have any discernable effect on perception whatsoever. It actually does, obviously, as suggested by modern science across the board, but our own resonating mind-forks have not been sufficiently attuned, at the normal waking stage, to the supersensible domains where these changes are being effected from. So we go about our days none the wiser and get in the habit of thinking our inner activity has almost no role to play in the creative unfoldment of the perceptual world. Then we perceive, feel, think, and act with great abandon.

There are other related 'inversions' which accompany this inner-outer, meaning-perception, creative-passive inversion. Really all the polar relations start to invert - Space is viewed more in terms of Time, for ex., hence the TC spectrum. In general, it is slowly understood how all that occurs within daily experience relates back to ideal activity, both our own and those higher temporal rhythms we are not yet conscious of but whose existence we can intuit in a very meaningful and immanent way. The ideal rhythms responsible for our color experience, for ex., can gradually be approached in this way. What is written below can become more than simply another abstract spiritual theory, but a living reality that begins to become almost obvious, like, "oh yeah, of course that's what my color experience is and has always been!" (which is certainly not to suggest what is below exhausts the significance of colors, or they can be interpreted in compelete isolation). Again, it's very hard to relate with just concepts, yet it's an unmistakeable pattern of experience which begins to take shape on this spiritual path.

Colours can teach us how to get into touch with the higher worlds... Red is the colour with the lowest frequency of vibrations; it is related to man’s vital functions. In the triangle of heart, mind and will, that we talked about last time, red represents the will. Yellow represents intelligence, wisdom, the faculty of thought, and blue represents religious sentiments, gentleness, music, the heart.

All colours relate to specific areas of the brain which has centres that act as antennae, each one of which picks up a particular range of waves. If you have a series of tuning forks, each one of which is tuned to a different pitch, when you cause one of them to vibrate, the others remain silent. But if, among your tuning forks, there are two which are tuned to the same frequency, when you make one of them vibrate, the other will begin to resonate in harmony with it. Our brain is constructed according to the laws of nature. Each of its centres is like a tuning fork tuned to resonate in response to certain waves. When the vibrations of red, for instance, reach the brain, only the centres at the back of the skull resonate. Red excites sexual love (centre situated at the back of the head) and the centres above and behind the ears, which correspond to destruction and cruelty...

The vibrations of yellow reach and penetrate all our organs, but the only tuning forks that respond to them are the centres situated in the middle and upper part of the forehead. If we immerse ourselves in yellow, it helps to develop our scientific and philosophical faculties. If we immerse ourselves in the vibrations of blue, on the other hand, they excite the centres of spirituality situated on the top of the head. All kinds of currents flow through nature; some of them have the effect of vivifying us while others, on the contrary, tend to have a disintegrating effect... of these currents to descend to hell or to raise ourselves to the highest summits. If we want to be in harmony with the beneficial currents in the universe, we must entertain only elevated thoughts and pure, spiritual feelings.

Aïvanhov, Omraam Mikhaël. The Second Birth

Also, I'm not sure if this directly addresses what you were wondering about, but it's helpful to understand that our outer world is the inner world of the angelic beings, and their 'outer world' is the inner world of archangels, and so on. We can also go the other direction and say our inner world is the outer world of certain less evolved beings. All activity takes place within the relational domains of these 'vertically' nested inner-outer enviroments. We can't simply project our experience of an 'outer world', in terms of quantities and spatial dimension, onto other beings, though - there is a great asymmetry at play which can only be resolved by growing into the higher ideal rhythms. Also this isn't an absolute property of reality (there are only relational, evolving perspectives) - any given individual can regain more creative thinking responsibillity for outer processes at any given time, and many such individuals have. They are known as Masters of Wisdom, Initiates, and various pupils of esoteric schools. As you know, these people do not simply make conceptual models of these things, which are bound to be at least half-right (all percepts and concepts are holographic tokens of Reality as a Whole, self-similar across all nested temporal scales). A key question to ask is always whether they are pointing to us towards a path we can take to discover these realities for ourselves, or whether they are asking us to accept their teachings on the spiritual worlds so they can sell more books and lectures. True Masters and Initiates only do the former, never the latter.

[Cleric K]

...

Hi Federica, I would like to add things to the discussion but I'm little short on time these days.

In my opinion you're approaching a stage where it becomes increasingly important to find the right inner stance which will begin to make sense of everything. I very often use this as a metaphor:



In the geocentric model everything seems to move in complicated trajectories. Our mind has to jump around, grasp a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but the whole is complicated. It is a matter of shift in perspective to move to the heliocentric mode where everything becomes much more clear.

It is somewhat similar in our inner life. We can surely build ever more complex understanding of our inner flow, through identifying the most varied epicycles, but at some point it becomes a weight too much to bear. On the other hand, when we find the proper inner perspective, all the streamlines begin to make sense in a different way. Of course, this is not a one time event - it's a gradient.

The point here is that through the intellect we probe the ideal landscape but we need also other inner gestures through which we can transform the inner perspective. In the 'person on the couch' metaphor, no amount of tapping on the tablet screen and beholding the ripples, can give first-person experience of the geometry of the unseen arm and body.

Consider this drawing by Escher:

The mystical and materialistic philosophy see only the right half of the picture. The world is the great dark mysteriousness and the white birds are thought phenomena - packets of meaning - that spark around and add interpretative layer to the otherwise inexplicable. Paradoxically, in this view the white birds of meaning are to be conceived as coagulation of darkness.

The white pole is what the stream of German idealism was striving for - to see everything as first-person manifestation of the Divine Idea (in Goethean sense).

If we conceive of the meaning within thinking only as a second order coagulation of primordial inexplicability (only the right half), it's natural that the higher we build the tower of Babel (thoughts upon thoughts), the more it seems we're moving away from the true ground of reality and into the clouds. And this is really the case with all the abstract science and philosophy of today. Strings, MAL, alters - all of this builds the tower. This is not to say that everything is completely useless, as in the Sisyphus myth. It's still exploration of degrees of freedom but it will never be anything more than abstract tower of thoughts unless we understand how the other pole of the Cosmic Polarity plays out.

The pole of meaning is just as real as the pole of the ground raw phenomena. When we turn the picture of Escher around, then we can see all phenomena not as coagulation of inexplicability but as diminished meaning, as aliased meaning, primordial perfect meaning out of which holes have been cut out. When the holes are small it feels as if we're living in a completely meaningful Cosmos, where the holes move along the curvature of living ideas (invisible meaning). But when the holes become much greater than the light, it feels as if the Cosmos is mainly a mystery, a conscious phenomenon and only here and there we have sparks of meaning that give the intellect some sense of what's going on.

So we have two Cosmic Poles - one is the Pole of Mystery, the Cosmic raw phenomena which in itself is inexplicable. The other is the Pole of Meaning, the grand Idea (in Goethe's sense) which is the perfect meaning of all and we have mystery phenomena only where the Idea has been hollowed out. In the GR metaphor the Pole of Mystery is the perceptual phenomena of mass/energy, the Pole of Meaning is the Cosmic curvature of meaning which makes sense of the phenomena's movement.

I believe most readers will understand this on the abstract level. The question is how to approach it as something real and not simply as floating sparks of intellectual thoughts. The only place we can start the process is thinking itself because this is the only place where we find real interplay of the two poles. It is the only place where we find curvature of meaning in conjunction with raw phenomena flowing along its geodesics. So it is from the point of concentrated thought that the holes of Mystery can begin to be filled with the Light of meaning.

This process is asymmetric. Just as Time. In fact, they are secretly related. The equations of physics look like Escher's painting. Scientists look at them, scratch their heads and ask "Why time flows along with the one flock of birds and not the other?" Then begin to spin wild theories about entropy and the likes. When we understand the picture through the Great Poles, the answer comes by itself. Time can flow only in the direction of increasing meaning, which on our everyday level is most readily grasped as increase of memory (every moment of life adds some meaning/knowledge, even if it is simply the awareness that we have moved forward in time and now we encompass more of our life). The whole problem comes because of the Kantian divide through which we keep insisting that the world (and thus time) exists in itself and as such time and its direction are attributes of that world. Our consciousness is simply dragged along and we try to understand why the world-in-itself drags in this direction and not the other. When we understand reality from the first person perspective, the answer is self-evident. Time can be experienced only as buildup of meaning. In the intellect we conceive of this as living and aging in a physical Cosmos with no clue why, in the spirit it is the continual filling of the holes of mystery with meaning. This filling is not monotonic but in rhythmic iterations. Sleep is the clearest example. We can never experience how we fall to sleep precisely because it's not possible to experience stream of consciousness where every next state is less conscious than the previous. But the rhythmic integration continues in the morning (or to some extent while dreaming).

So the key to PoF is to understand that even though the meaning of the intellect looks only like tiny sparks, it is of the same essence as the Absolute Meaning. One difficulty with this is that the modern mind is so addicted to reductionism that it simply can't conceive of meaning as the holistic essence of reality. It can see meaning only as accumulation of atoms into a mechanical complex. For this reason people see God as some kind of super intellect, as inconceivably complex computer. But the Absolute Idea is actually the simplest thing. It is the perfect sense, perfect unity, perfect wholeness, perfect clarity, perfect completeness. All existence flows in Time as integration of meaning between the two poles. At the poles at infinity themselves there's no existence in Time. The light of perfect meaning is the same as the darkness of complete mystery. Outside of Time they are one and the same. Yet between the two, consciousness can be experienced as a stream in Time only in the direction of the Light of meaning.

The challenge here is to become concentric to the Divine. Sooner or later this leads us to the question of the Christ. This has nothing to do with worshiping one god over countless others. It is really about finding the perspective of the human "I" concentric with the pole of meaning.

It is relatively easy to conceive how shifting our perspective within soul space can bring clarity. Our soul life resembles bouncing around on inner pendulums that throw us around. Everything is very complicated from such a perspective. When we find our central point of stability then we begin to make sense of the soul planets revolving around the inner Sun of the "I".

This is more or less palpable. The difficulty is to conceive that the Earthly state of consciousness is embedded within a higher perspective, in a way similar to how our dream self is embedded within our waking self. While we dream we feel to be an "I" but when we become lucid we say "I've been my waking self all along, but I was asleep for this fact and I was bouncing along the streams of imagery."

This is the inversion horizon. Think about how our dreams often are inspired by things that have happened in our waking life. In the dream we have no idea about this but as soon as we become lucid, we're clearly aware that our desires, ideas, fears, etc. have formed the general curvature of the dreamscape and our dream self has simply become entrenched in it. Please note that from the perspective of the dream self what happens in the dream seems like laws of nature or destiny - depending on how we are predisposed to see it. We don't conceive that the causes for the dream flow can be found within a perspective concentric to our dream one.

In a similar way, our Earthly life's destiny can be seen from a more lucid first-person perspective. This is not to say that that perspective is fully responsible for our life flow. At that level our higher self still interferes with soul environment and within this interference the curvature of the dreamscape takes shape. At an even higher level of lucidity the dreamscape is seen as rhythmic structured potential for the most varied inner states. These rhythms give rise to the eons and the epochs of planetary development (as Ashvin quoted above).

That's why I used the term 'inversion' because the higher perspective which lives in the causes of the flow is 'inverted' from our current perspective and the causes seem as the laws of reality within which we flow. Building intellectual models of these laws doesn't in the least lead us closer to their inner causal perspective. That's why we need the inversion, which gives us a glimpse of the outer laws from the perspective from which these laws are seen as spiritual activity.

So basically we can imagine the white pole as the potential for any possible state of existence. This potential is filtered through interference with the other great pole (once again the image with the fractal border) and the rhythmic patterns are like the archetypal dream waves (eons, epochs) which can be sub-structured further. We can approach this only through analogies and metaphors but at that level it is like the rhythmic dreamscape is grasped as, for example, we can grasp the general idea for a book or a movie. We have the general picture of the stages of potential, the introduction, the twist, the resolution, but there are still infinitely many ways in which this potential can be fleshed out (filtered). I'm giving this only as an analogy, it would be misleading to imagine that the world is created in exactly this way. Such an idea still falls unconsciously under the spell of linear time standing outside everything. It will take too long to elaborate on this now.

The main point is that we should be open for these higher levels of lucidity which live in the temporal structure of the dreamscape. The key is that these more lucid levels of being, are really the Divine in us, the Christ principle. We need to identify an inner conflict within ourselves - the desire to understand reality entirely within the bounds of our personality (which is really accumulation of mental epicycles) or find the concentric relations of our "I" with the Divine Being in us. The second case leads to in-spired knowledge which alone can transform our ideal constellation and give us proper heliocentric grasp on reality.

The key here is that this deeper transformation can only enter in us through inspiration from our true self. In a similar sense, no amount of speculation of our dream self can lead to lucidity. Building intellectual theory within the dream, about our supposed Earthly self which dreams our current dream self, still leaves it as something external. We need a different kind of dream gesture. We need to sacrifice our dream self and in-spire something of our waking self. Only this adds something of the inversion and we now know a level of reality in a completely different way, which is simply non-existent for the speculating dream self.

It is similar in our waking life. It's not only about finding the right configuration of intellectual epicycles. We need inner sacrifice, to realize that there's something missing in our inner being which can only be found if we seek to be in-spired by the Divine. To awaken to a higher level of self we have no other option than be ready something of this self to flow into us.

[Federica]

The inversion limit. Here I understand that the perception of our ‘now state’ is subjective, and also playable, and that it can be willingly extended to encompass in it broader and broader overarching ideas, so that we no longer feel we are traversing them. Instead we are flipping them in full, we are making them fall entirely within the scope of our now-perception. In so doing we bring them in the sphere of what we can encompass in one go, and so we realize our creative potential to willingly interfere with them.
Here the suggestion seems to be that time is a perception entirely enclosed in thinking. Not in the way I used to think about it (time is bad, etc. etc) but more matter-of-factly in the simple sense that the quality of the time flow, quick or slow, is entirely determined by the individual ability to grasp simultaneously within one creative, conscious, overarching idea, a sequence of frames. This set of frames can be more or less conspicuous and it is our ability to wrap our thinking around them in one turn that creates our subjective experience of time. That’s what I understand in the now seen as a ‘slice of states of being that we encompass simultaneously’


All this being said, I don’t understand the word 'inversion'. What is it that is inverted? It’s an extension… that makes a cycle fall within the expanding scope of the now. When we hold a whole cycle within the now we get its inner logic, we are not observing one frame here, wondering what it means, forgetting about it, and later observing another frame, wondering again, and in the end failing to connect the dots. I understand that we hold it with one hand in front of us, thus we can squeeze it, shape it, or put it on the side, we can make a creative decision about it in full awareness, and not just take mental notes of isolated observations that fly beyond our sphere of control and just painfully observe how they crash into our world content. Ok, but I don’t get the reason to use this word ‘inversion’?

Federica,

I wanted to add a couple more thoughts here. Firstly, that your intuitive penetration of these ideas is so deep that I can barely follow what the objection is - in some ways, you have understood what Cleric wrote in ways that I simply haven't, or in ways not very evident to me. I don't think this reflects your failure to understand, but actually a very keen ability to follow the first-person contours of the TC phenomenology. So, in that sense, I'm not sure how much benefit you would get from me trying to explain what is meant by "inversion" versus you simply experiencing it, because I can't imagine you would be too far off from the latter after some meditative work. On the other hand, Cleric illustrating it further for you would be of great benefit, I'm sure. I'm just not well-versed enough to come up with useful metaphors on this topic yet.

That being said, perhaps this will be relevant for you - the only reason we perceive any outer world is because there are higher Ideal rhythms which we don't feel creatively responsible for. All that we feel creatively responsible for is what we now call "inner world", which is imperceptible to normal waking cognition, and the rest we call the "outer" world. This is the basis for modern dualism - so much became subconscious due to natural cognitive evolution, and therefore became outer perception, and then the outer forms became so attenuated in their meaningful valence, that people forgot there were living beings and their activity 'behind' their appearances; activity which exists in relationship to our own inner activity. It's no coincidence that modern science of outer nature became so precise during this time yet also so devoid of soul and spirit - outer peception became much more clear due to the natural evolutionary progression, unlike the more dreamy consciousness of ancient Indians for ex., but also entirely disconnected from the depth structure of spiritual activity which lives within the rhythmic processes of the human organism. This is equally true regardless of any ontological label that is adorned today.

So if your outer perception of the world content really began to change - to become more flowing, more consolidated, more vibrant in some ways, the interrelations of processes were more easily discernable, the objects were viewed more as the meeting places of various supersensible forces, etc. (it's really difficult to describe the changes with concepts, which is why metaphors are more useful) - in relation to your own inner ideal activity and its development, then this would be an 'inversion' of the relationship that is normally experienced. Normally, you can think with concepts all day long, feel or desire whatever you want, and it won't have any discernable effect on perception whatsoever. It actually does, obviously, as suggested by modern science across the board, but our own resonating mind-forks have not been sufficiently attuned, at the normal waking stage, to the supersensible domains where these changes are being effected from. So we go about our days none the wiser and get in the habit of thinking our inner activity has almost no role to play in the creative unfoldment of the perceptual world. Then we perceive, feel, think, and act with great abandon.

There are other related 'inversions' which accompany this inner-outer, meaning-perception, creative-passive inversion. Really all the polar relations start to invert - Space is viewed more in terms of Time, for ex., hence the TC spectrum. In general, it is slowly understood how all that occurs within daily experience relates back to ideal activity, both our own and those higher temporal rhythms we are not yet conscious of but whose existence we can intuit in a very meaningful and immanent way. The ideal rhythms responsible for our color experience, for ex., can gradually be approached in this way. What is written below can become more than simply another abstract spiritual theory, but a living reality that begins to become almost obvious, like, "oh yeah, of course that's what my color experience is and has always been!" (which is certainly not to suggest what is below exhausts the significance of colors, or they can be interpreted in compelete isolation). Again, it's very hard to relate with just concepts, yet it's an unmistakeable pattern of experience which begins to take shape on this spiritual path.

Colours can teach us how to get into touch with the higher worlds... Red is the colour with the lowest frequency of vibrations; it is related to man’s vital functions. In the triangle of heart, mind and will, that we talked about last time, red represents the will. Yellow represents intelligence, wisdom, the faculty of thought, and blue represents religious sentiments, gentleness, music, the heart.

All colours relate to specific areas of the brain which has centres that act as antennae, each one of which picks up a particular range of waves. If you have a series of tuning forks, each one of which is tuned to a different pitch, when you cause one of them to vibrate, the others remain silent. But if, among your tuning forks, there are two which are tuned to the same frequency, when you make one of them vibrate, the other will begin to resonate in harmony with it. Our brain is constructed according to the laws of nature. Each of its centres is like a tuning fork tuned to resonate in response to certain waves. When the vibrations of red, for instance, reach the brain, only the centres at the back of the skull resonate. Red excites sexual love (centre situated at the back of the head) and the centres above and behind the ears, which correspond to destruction and cruelty...

The vibrations of yellow reach and penetrate all our organs, but the only tuning forks that respond to them are the centres situated in the middle and upper part of the forehead. If we immerse ourselves in yellow, it helps to develop our scientific and philosophical faculties. If we immerse ourselves in the vibrations of blue, on the other hand, they excite the centres of spirituality situated on the top of the head. All kinds of currents flow through nature; some of them have the effect of vivifying us while others, on the contrary, tend to have a disintegrating effect... of these currents to descend to hell or to raise ourselves to the highest summits. If we want to be in harmony with the beneficial currents in the universe, we must entertain only elevated thoughts and pure, spiritual feelings.

Aïvanhov, Omraam Mikhaël. The Second Birth

Also, I'm not sure if this directly addresses what you were wondering about, but it's helpful to understand that our outer world is the inner world of the angelic beings, and their 'outer world' is the inner world of archangels, and so on. We can also go the other direction and say our inner world is the outer world of certain less evolved beings. All activity takes place within the relational domains of these 'vertically' nested inner-outer enviroments. We can't simply project our experience of an 'outer world', in terms of quantities and spatial dimension, onto other beings, though - there is a great asymmetry at play which can only be resolved by growing into the higher ideal rhythms. Also this isn't an absolute property of reality (there are only relational, evolving perspectives) - any given individual can regain more creative thinking responsibillity for outer processes at any given time, and many such individuals have. They are known as Masters of Wisdom, Initiates, and various pupils of esoteric schools. As you know, these people do not simply make conceptual models of these things, which are bound to be at least half-right (all percepts and concepts are holographic tokens of Reality as a Whole, self-similar across all nested temporal scales). A key question to ask is always whether they are pointing to us towards a path we can take to discover these realities for ourselves, or whether they are asking us to accept their teachings on the spiritual worlds so they can sell more books and lectures. True Masters and Initiates only do the former, never the latter.

Ashvin,

I feel that simply saying thank you does not do justice to the value you are constantly bringing with your extensive comments. There is so much in your replies that I could reflect on and use as a starting point for further inquiry, and it cannot be good practice for me to go on asking new random questions, and leave behind so much unprocessed material. Endlessly skiing and skiing downhill, enjoying the beautiful scenes one after the other is pleasant, but the reason to allow myself to be that spoiled is not there. Plus it can be tricky, I know from experience. So I will try to glide less and consider every new opening perspective a little more thoroughly. Reading more and writing less seems a more appropriate way to go. Thank you for every piece of the edifice you are pointing to!

.

[Federica]

...

Hi Federica, I would like to add things to the discussion but I'm little short on time these days.

In my opinion you're approaching a stage where it becomes increasingly important to find the right inner stance which will begin to make sense of everything. I very often use this as a metaphor:



In the geocentric model everything seems to move in complicated trajectories. Our mind has to jump around, grasp a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but the whole is complicated. It is a matter of shift in perspective to move to the heliocentric mode where everything becomes much more clear.

It is somewhat similar in our inner life. We can surely build ever more complex understanding of our inner flow, through identifying the most varied epicycles, but at some point it becomes a weight too much to bear. On the other hand, when we find the proper inner perspective, all the streamlines begin to make sense in a different way. Of course, this is not a one time event - it's a gradient.

The point here is that through the intellect we probe the ideal landscape but we need also other inner gestures through which we can transform the inner perspective. In the 'person on the couch' metaphor, no amount of tapping on the tablet screen and beholding the ripples, can give first-person experience of the geometry of the unseen arm and body.

Consider this drawing by Escher:

The mystical and materialistic philosophy see only the right half of the picture. The world is the great dark mysteriousness and the white birds are thought phenomena - packets of meaning - that spark around and add interpretative layer to the otherwise inexplicable. Paradoxically, in this view the white birds of meaning are to be conceived as coagulation of darkness.

The white pole is what the stream of German idealism was striving for - to see everything as first-person manifestation of the Divine Idea (in Goethean sense).

If we conceive of the meaning within thinking only as a second order coagulation of primordial inexplicability (only the right half), it's natural that the higher we build the tower of Babel (thoughts upon thoughts), the more it seems we're moving away from the true ground of reality and into the clouds. And this is really the case with all the abstract science and philosophy of today. Strings, MAL, alters - all of this builds the tower. This is not to say that everything is completely useless, as in the Sisyphus myth. It's still exploration of degrees of freedom but it will never be anything more than abstract tower of thoughts unless we understand how the other pole of the Cosmic Polarity plays out.

The pole of meaning is just as real as the pole of the ground raw phenomena. When we turn the picture of Escher around, then we can see all phenomena not as coagulation of inexplicability but as diminished meaning, as aliased meaning, primordial perfect meaning out of which holes have been cut out. When the holes are small it feels as if we're living in a completely meaningful Cosmos, where the holes move along the curvature of living ideas (invisible meaning). But when the holes become much greater than the light, it feels as if the Cosmos is mainly a mystery, a conscious phenomenon and only here and there we have sparks of meaning that give the intellect some sense of what's going on.

So we have two Cosmic Poles - one is the Pole of Mystery, the Cosmic raw phenomena which in itself is inexplicable. The other is the Pole of Meaning, the grand Idea (in Goethe's sense) which is the perfect meaning of all and we have mystery phenomena only where the Idea has been hollowed out. In the GR metaphor the Pole of Mystery is the perceptual phenomena of mass/energy, the Pole of Meaning is the Cosmic curvature of meaning which makes sense of the phenomena's movement.

I believe most readers will understand this on the abstract level. The question is how to approach it as something real and not simply as floating sparks of intellectual thoughts. The only place we can start the process is thinking itself because this is the only place where we find real interplay of the two poles. It is the only place where we find curvature of meaning in conjunction with raw phenomena flowing along its geodesics. So it is from the point of concentrated thought that the holes of Mystery can begin to be filled with the Light of meaning.

This process is asymmetric. Just as Time. In fact, they are secretly related. The equations of physics look like Escher's painting. Scientists look at them, scratch their heads and ask "Why time flows along with the one flock of birds and not the other?" Then begin to spin wild theories about entropy and the likes. When we understand the picture through the Great Poles, the answer comes by itself. Time can flow only in the direction of increasing meaning, which on our everyday level is most readily grasped as increase of memory (every moment of life adds some meaning/knowledge, even if it is simply the awareness that we have moved forward in time and now we encompass more of our life). The whole problem comes because of the Kantian divide through which we keep insisting that the world (and thus time) exists in itself and as such time and its direction are attributes of that world. Our consciousness is simply dragged along and we try to understand why the world-in-itself drags in this direction and not the other. When we understand reality from the first person perspective, the answer is self-evident. Time can be experienced only as buildup of meaning. In the intellect we conceive of this as living and aging in a physical Cosmos with no clue why, in the spirit it is the continual filling of the holes of mystery with meaning. This filling is not monotonic but in rhythmic iterations. Sleep is the clearest example. We can never experience how we fall to sleep precisely because it's not possible to experience stream of consciousness where every next state is less conscious than the previous. But the rhythmic integration continues in the morning (or to some extent while dreaming).

So the key to PoF is to understand that even though the meaning of the intellect looks only like tiny sparks, it is of the same essence as the Absolute Meaning. One difficulty with this is that the modern mind is so addicted to reductionism that it simply can't conceive of meaning as the holistic essence of reality. It can see meaning only as accumulation of atoms into a mechanical complex. For this reason people see God as some kind of super intellect, as inconceivably complex computer. But the Absolute Idea is actually the simplest thing. It is the perfect sense, perfect unity, perfect wholeness, perfect clarity, perfect completeness. All existence flows in Time as integration of meaning between the two poles. At the poles at infinity themselves there's no existence in Time. The light of perfect meaning is the same as the darkness of complete mystery. Outside of Time they are one and the same. Yet between the two, consciousness can be experienced as a stream in Time only in the direction of the Light of meaning.

The challenge here is to become concentric to the Divine. Sooner or later this leads us to the question of the Christ. This has nothing to do with worshiping one god over countless others. It is really about finding the perspective of the human "I" concentric with the pole of meaning.

It is relatively easy to conceive how shifting our perspective within soul space can bring clarity. Our soul life resembles bouncing around on inner pendulums that throw us around. Everything is very complicated from such a perspective. When we find our central point of stability then we begin to make sense of the soul planets revolving around the inner Sun of the "I".

This is more or less palpable. The difficulty is to conceive that the Earthly state of consciousness is embedded within a higher perspective, in a way similar to how our dream self is embedded within our waking self. While we dream we feel to be an "I" but when we become lucid we say "I've been my waking self all along, but I was asleep for this fact and I was bouncing along the streams of imagery."

This is the inversion horizon. Think about how our dreams often are inspired by things that have happened in our waking life. In the dream we have no idea about this but as soon as we become lucid, we're clearly aware that our desires, ideas, fears, etc. have formed the general curvature of the dreamscape and our dream self has simply become entrenched in it. Please note that from the perspective of the dream self what happens in the dream seems like laws of nature or destiny - depending on how we are predisposed to see it. We don't conceive that the causes for the dream flow can be found within a perspective concentric to our dream one.

In a similar way, our Earthly life's destiny can be seen from a more lucid first-person perspective. This is not to say that that perspective is fully responsible for our life flow. At that level our higher self still interferes with soul environment and within this interference the curvature of the dreamscape takes shape. At an even higher level of lucidity the dreamscape is seen as rhythmic structured potential for the most varied inner states. These rhythms give rise to the eons and the epochs of planetary development (as Ashvin quoted above).

That's why I used the term 'inversion' because the higher perspective which lives in the causes of the flow is 'inverted' from our current perspective and the causes seem as the laws of reality within which we flow. Building intellectual models of these laws doesn't in the least lead us closer to their inner causal perspective. That's why we need the inversion, which gives us a glimpse of the outer laws from the perspective from which these laws are seen as spiritual activity.

So basically we can imagine the white pole as the potential for any possible state of existence. This potential is filtered through interference with the other great pole (once again the image with the fractal border) and the rhythmic patterns are like the archetypal dream waves (eons, epochs) which can be sub-structured further. We can approach this only through analogies and metaphors but at that level it is like the rhythmic dreamscape is grasped as, for example, we can grasp the general idea for a book or a movie. We have the general picture of the stages of potential, the introduction, the twist, the resolution, but there are still infinitely many ways in which this potential can be fleshed out (filtered). I'm giving this only as an analogy, it would be misleading to imagine that the world is created in exactly this way. Such an idea still falls unconsciously under the spell of linear time standing outside everything. It will take too long to elaborate on this now.

The main point is that we should be open for these higher levels of lucidity which live in the temporal structure of the dreamscape. The key is that these more lucid levels of being, are really the Divine in us, the Christ principle. We need to identify an inner conflict within ourselves - the desire to understand reality entirely within the bounds of our personality (which is really accumulation of mental epicycles) or find the concentric relations of our "I" with the Divine Being in us. The second case leads to in-spired knowledge which alone can transform our ideal constellation and give us proper heliocentric grasp on reality.

The key here is that this deeper transformation can only enter in us through inspiration from our true self. In a similar sense, no amount of speculation of our dream self can lead to lucidity. Building intellectual theory within the dream, about our supposed Earthly self which dreams our current dream self, still leaves it as something external. We need a different kind of dream gesture. We need to sacrifice our dream self and in-spire something of our waking self. Only this adds something of the inversion and we now know a level of reality in a completely different way, which is simply non-existent for the speculating dream self.

It is similar in our waking life. It's not only about finding the right configuration of intellectual epicycles. We need inner sacrifice, to realize that there's something missing in our inner being which can only be found if we seek to be in-spired by the Divine. To awaken to a higher level of self we have no other option than be ready something of this self to flow into us.

Hi Cleric,
Thank you for this last addition. I think the best I can do for now is to refrain from replying and stop aggravating the time balance. That will also gain me some room to try to make sense of your message here, which I have to admit at this moment sounds somewhat chaotic. I have no doubt this depends on my geocentric, intellectual approach (no irony here). If anything, this is the one thing that’s been repeated enough to make it all the way through quite clearly. I realize there is so much I should read and read again in the old posts and beyond, before being able to move along the discussion with some ease and find the red thread, or maybe the yellow and blue thread, in what’s being said.

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