It’s a very simple fractal produced by taking a line segment (the top one) and removing the middle third. Then we recursively do the same with all resulting segments.
In our metaphor let’s imagine that the top line corresponds to the Absolute – the holistic and unattainable first-person intuition of all that can ever be. Filtering the bright light of universal intuition is symbolized by the removal of parts of the lines. And now here’s the first important moment – the stripped lines are not separate copies of the upper lines – they are the same top line but diminished, something has been taken away from it. We draw them separately only because otherwise it will be very difficult to represent everything stacked over a single line. So the fractal represents a specific diminished state of the Absolute. What has been removed from the line can be imagined to belong to another perspective diminished in a different way. These all exist simultaneously, they belong to different times, spaces or universes. All those perspectives that are in close ‘phase relationships’ with ours, seem to belong to a common world.
Let’s now look at this:
I have shadowed the upper and lower part of the spectrum since we really live in the middle, at our human scale, where we operate at the level of thoughts and perceptions. Even though with the telescope and microscope we look in the small and the great, all this is still experienced at our human scale, in our thoughts – in our ordinary consciousness we don’t have direct spiritual experience of the inner reality of particles or the planets. At our scale we know balls. Then we simply imagine in the intellect these balls getting smaller and picture this as the world of the small, we imagine them getting bigger and we imagine that as the world of the big. But in reality we keep both the small and the big in the size of balls that fit our human-scale mind.
Another important moment is not to imagine that the smaller fractals (where we imagine that the particles of our bodies belong) are contained in our consciousness, as chopped up thoughts for example. Our bodies don’t belong to us in the true sense. Other beings think them (from their perspective they truly are fractals of their inner states) while for us they are the shadowed environment that we interact with and shape. The only thing that currently belongs to us is our “I” experience and the thoughts that we think in freedom (out of Nothing in the context of the previous posts).
For this reason our consciousness grows from the middle outwards. I have drawn the lines slightly misplaced because this is what makes it possible to have individuated experience. If everything was perfectly harmonious we would feel in a Divine state along the full spectrum. But as the line is chopped it also becomes slightly misaligned. Not long ago I mentioned the coffee house analogy, where we can make sense only of the conversation on our table, while everything else sounds like noise. If the whole coffee house sings together, we grasp it holistically. In this sense our awakening to self-consciousness begins in a small ‘coffee table’ in the middle where we make intuitive sense of our perceptions (the happenings on our table).
When we make sense of our memories, our perceptions, our goals, hopes and fears, we live in an overarching intuition of our self, which unites them in a holistic complex. This is illustrated with the purple dashed line. We can be conscious of phenomena only insofar the corresponding intuitions fit our holistic complex. For example, in split personalities, we have two different complexes of integration which haven’t yet found common overarching intuition.
We spoke about this previously. The dashed line intuition holds the keys to the whole evolutionary process. Even though all partial intuitions can be seen as fitting in the Absolute whole, it is still true that the experience of these intuitions on a local coffee table which doesn’t yet integrate with the others, is in itself a true and unique intuitive experience.
Now we come to the question of oneness. With spiritual insight we can realize that our essential being is the same as the Being of the Cosmos (remember, the fractal is drawn as delaminated only for clarity). But at the same time the intuition of the dashed line, which unites the fragments is something unique which is not equivalent to the full line at the top. Even in deep mystical experiences where we feel the boundaries of our being dissolve and we are One with the Cosmos, we’re still at a coffee table, even though on a different scale. If we truly were the top line, we would report experiencing perspectives of the all infinite multiverse. And we can indeed feel the crystal clear intuition that this is the true nature of the Divine – this is how we are at all capable of speaking of it – but we should also be clear that this intuition is ‘scaled down’ to our level.
Now we come to the apparent conflict – working with thinking seems to continually threaten the holistic intuitive context. And this is true, we can see it perfectly well in our contemporary abstract sciences and philosophies. But as we have talked so many times, we focus on thinking for completely different reasons.
We should be crystal clear that at our stage of evolution, thinking is the mirror of the self (the holistic intuition). The “I” awakens in thinking. We wouldn’t even know about the background of intuition if there was no thinking. If we grasp this fact properly we’ll already know that intuition of self can only expand through the growth of our thinking organism. This thinking later transforms and reaches higher orders of intuition in Imagination and so on.
Ever since we’re leading these conversations, we always have been revolving around this one and the same issue. When the “I” focuses on the general intuitive context (the feeling for unbounded self, the field of experiencing), it is prone to say about thoughts: “Yeah, thoughts are useful, they help me operate but I must not be drawn too much by them or I’ll lose my holistic feeling.” And this is fine if we’re speaking of the abstract intellect. But when we take thinking as the surface manifestation of even deeper spiritual activity, then in meditation our attitude towards thinking should transform.
Let’s return to the coffee house. We can imagine the different tables as partitions of our spiritual being. We move from table to table in time but our ordinary life doesn’t lead to a point where we can grasp them as a whole. So Eastern meditation employed in our contemporary context is like saying: “The conversations on my table are interesting and useful but I must not forget the holistic intuitive context.” So we go on and expand our consciousness and try to be all-inclusive. But what do we hear? The noise of the coffee house. It doesn’t make any sense to us. Yet driven by deep intuition we say “Within this noise I’m one with everything. I am the same as the top line of the fractal.” And it is true that our essential being is present in every point of the noise but it is not true that we are now equivalent to the solid top line. We are an aliased line which nevertheless is felt as a holistically integrated intuition of self (the dashed purple line).
Contemporary meditation realizes this: “By just trying to expand and encompass everything, I experience only an expanding intuition of noise. There’s no way in sight that this noisy intuition will somehow transform into the top solid line. Instead, I humbly acknowledge my middle position in the gradient. This I do not in order to feel remote from the Divine but quite the opposite – to find the one place where I’m truly one with it. This place is the focal point of my spiritual activity where the Divine becomes self-conscious of itself, even though in a very aliased condition. My intuitive background will forever remain as noise if I simply focus on it. Instead, if I focus my spiritual activity on a meaningful thought-image (the line circled in yellow) I grasp a very small, but true point of self-consciousness. This point is to become for me a seed point around which my thought-organism begins to grow. It spins its threads below and above and reveals ever greater imaginative volume which reflects spiritual activity in ever more holistic intuition. Soon this organism grows and unites the different partitions of my being, the coffee tables, and now they sing in harmony, they are no longer noise but clear cognitive music. From this vantage point I see that I have surpassed my previous state, where I was sitting at one of the tables, listening to the noise of the room and imagining that I’m one with everything.”
So this is the basic idea. Trying to keep the intuition of the forest, truly expands us in the noise of the uncountable leaves, we can feel blissful in that holistic panorama, and in fact we must turn attention to that intuitive background. But we must also be clear that just pushing into the ever expanding noise will never lead us into the perspective of the top line. Instead, our dashed line intuition inflates and tries to fit within itself ever greater amounts of noise. Then the person says “I understand your desire to investigate the trees but you shouldn’t forget the sweet noise of the whole forest. Your tree-thinking path is one way and it is interesting and practical but there are also other ways, which expand into the noise directly.” And herein lies the difference – that the evolving human being needs to transfigure itself such that when it expands, the noise should be grasped as clear speech. This is the great difference. And this only becomes possible in the following way: “I feel you, great Intuitive background, I hear your rustling leaves but I don’t understand your Word. No matter how much I expand and yearn to be One with you, great Cosmic Intuitive Being, I hear only mysterious whisper, which remains incomprehensible to me. But I know that the Self-consciousness that You have, is the same one that also lives in me. I find it in the reflection of the humble thought. In these tiny shards of a Cosmic mirror broken in infinite pieces, I find the tiniest reflection of the Self, in which we are truly One. I humbly rest myself in your Cosmic embrace, in your Intuitive Being. I can only open myself in prayer to you. But your Spirit I’ll only see reflected in the growing organism of my thinking being. Only in this way your Intuitive Being inflows in me like clear speech, just as I understand my own thoughts as clear speech.”
What does this mean in practical terms for our meditation? In the popular Eastern techniques we try to let go of all phenomena. We gently let thoughts flow without trying to force anything. At some point, if we have overcome certain cognitive and emotional tendencies, our thinking self gently drifts to sleep. Then we’re left within the vast intuitive background of our being, which is always with us but we constantly chop it into intuitive fragments in our daily beta brainwave states. As explained though, this only expands to the intuitive panorama of the magnificently beautiful but incomprehensible Cosmic rustling. As we descend back in our thinking self, we feel how insignificant our thoughts are which suck within their forms only the tiniest droplets of the intuitive panorama. This only reinforces our conviction, we nod our head and say “Thoughts can never capture this. They may be practical in Earthly life but have no chance to capture this wordless intuitive world.” And this is true – thoughts can never capture this intuitive background, we can never intellectually arrange thoughts as a mosaic that captures the intuitive background. But that background will also never sound as anything other than noise if we keep putting the thinking self to sleep in order to bask in the inexplicable intuitive aura.
Modern meditation demands as a precondition, clear understanding of all this. Then we know that we’re in the middle. Meditation should always begin with prayer – even if wordless. We turn with all our soul towards the infinite intuitive background and humbly desire to be one with it, just like the mystic does. Then we leave our periphery in complete trust to the Cosmic forces. Now we live in an aura of loving surrender to powers that can’t fit our ‘cabin’. At the same time we direct towards that which is up to us, and which no one else can do for us. We focus all our spiritual energy in the thought-seed around which our cognitive organism grows with much patience. The Divine forces work from the periphery, from all sides, from behind our back, while we humbly support the growing organ in which these forces begin to reflect. These reflections are not like visions that we must then interpret with our intellect but are flashes of integrating intuition. More and more of Divine thinking becomes also our own thinking. This is the reason why integrating intuition in this way leads to clear cognition, to Cosmic speech. In the mystical meditation we forsake the only point where we can find cognition, in favor of the bliss of Cosmic noise, where we find no cognition at all, only nebulous intuition of Cosmic be-ing. In meditation as appropriate for the evolving man of today, we unite with the general intuition in prayer and leave it as our back, while our thinking self begins to prepare the organism in which the Higher Self incarnates and his intuitions become also our intuitions. Just as our disorganized brain organ can reflect in thoughts our fragmentary intellectual intuitions, which nevertheless are integrated in the holistic intuition of an ego-self, so our or organized structure becomes capable of reflecting higher order intuitions and thus a higher Self can recognize its existence within our reflective sheaths, in clear cognition.
To be even more specific, with prayer we expand our being in complete surrender to the peripheral Cosmic being (the top line), while the point of concentration naturally feels in the head, between the eyes, slightly behind the forehead. We don’t have to search for it through geometric means. Once I described this spot in the following way. Imagine a weight between springs and ignore gravity.
There’s a perfectly neutral place in the head where our concentrated thought-image feels weightless. We can experiment by moving it front, back, left, right, top, down. Any position different than the neutral feels like a spring is pushing/pulling and we need extra force to keep our concentration in that point. Gradually we can spiral our imagination in the perfect spot where we feel weightless and supporting the image there is almost effortless. From that spot our thinking organism begins to grow and reflect our intuitions in images. There are so many more fascinating things to speak of from this point onwards, but that’s enough for now.
So, Eugene, you didn’t comment on my previous post about aliasing, so I don’t know what you think of these things. Here I present the same things but as explicitly as my current skills allow me to. I believe that this is really at the core of your struggle. You feel that in the head (thinking) you’re losing the intuitive background that you so dearly cherish. And I understand that perfectly well from my own journey. It really feels as if we have gone so far, expanded so much that our head feels as mere detail in a Cosmic sea, as a floating image, just another of the countless illusions. We feel more secure in this expanded state where we feel as if we contain the illusions. But just give it a thought. Do you see any conceivable way in which this Cosmic microwave background intuition can be transformed in clear Cosmic speech? Do you see any other way except waiting for a miracle? Does this even make any sense? What child has learned language by listening to noise and then in an act of enlightenment acquired the full vocabulary with grammatical and cognitive skills? What if we have to take the hard road after all and start from the point where we know as a fact that the Self finds the intuition of its own existence – in the humble thinking organ in the head? Doesn’t it make sense that if the Self is to gain true intuition of its reality (the higher lines), and not only the intuition of Cosmic noise, we should find ways to integrate the organism that can reflect these intuitions?
