Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[Cleric K]

I'm opening a new topic here to avoid clutter on the other thread.

And of course there are vital Earthly purposes served by those forces, but we are gradually trying to bridge them with the living depth thinking so as to attain more continuity of consciousness through the alternating 'light-dark' periods, which occurs not only from life to after-life, or waking to sleeping (or non-meditating to meditating), but also while we are awake between our thinking (somewhat awake), feeling (dreaming), and willing (sleeping).

This reminded me of something that coincidentally I'm investigating lately. Like it's mentioned in the movie Inception, an interesting aspect of dreams is that we don't remember how they started. This is a common aspect in every light-dark cycle. We have gradual dimming of consciousness which we can't consciously trace. Then we awaken in certain circumstances which quickly or more gradually integrate with our overall intuition. This is how we awaken in our present life, for example. We don't remember how the dream began.

What's interesting is that even our thinking trains are of the same nature. This we can notice when in meditation we investigate the nature of our distractions. Just like falling asleep, we're never clearly conscious of being distracted. We say "I used to concentrate on that thought but now I awakened to the fact that there has been an interruption and I have switched to thinking of something else". So in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts. In Imagination we can see how a thought train has a life on its own. It begins to grow and integrates until the "I" (which lives in the growth of the thought) awakens to its reflection in the image. Not all thoughts have the conditions to grow into fruits within which the intuition of the "I" is reflected. Most of our daily buzzing thoughts are like aborted growth which never reflects the activity of the "I", let alone deeper secrets of the spiritual worlds. We have these rhythms on all scales. Our incarnation is the growth of one such Cosmic Image that seeks to reflect the intuition of the Whole.

When we think ordinary thoughts we're doing the same, it's only that the thoughts are felt as fragmentary details within the Image and we easily lose the sense for the Gestalt (to borrow from Wayfarer's terminology). Nevertheless, what is in our more narrow focus of the holistic Image, only makes sense within our whole intuitive context. Our thoughts are normally pointed at the most various directions but the secret goal is always to make a more perfect image of the intuitive context.

We express images of our intuition. These images grow to fit the perfect intuition of the eternal Idea. Yet the images fail to reach that goal. It is as if they are rejected by Cosmic Intuition, like we hear our conscience say "no, this not yet it". We rise our image and try to fit it into the intuition of the Whole, yet it is like a piece of metal that enters a templating machine - shavings are shed. These are rejected, they don't fit. This turns the cycle. The shavings and the intuition connected with them become the seeds for the next attempt. The growth process begins again, where the intuitions of the previous imperfections are sought to be rectified in the new growth. These things are observed within the dynamics of our spiritual activity itself and it's no wonder why Hegel expressed them in his Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis triad. Thesis is our growing Image, our Cosmic self-reflection. We encounter the Antithesis when that reflection can't fit Cosmic Intuition. Then we have Synthesis. From the friction and shavings of this attempt, the new growth is born.

After death, our inner world grows into the Cosmic, from which it has always been a perspective. The details of our past life begin to be embedded in the holistic panorama. The panorama grows through the Cosmic spheres which are like the living concentric dials of a Cosmic clock, forming a unique temporal constellation. The Image of our whole Cosmic environment is meant to reflect the intuitive archetypal activities, as if through a center that makes perfect sense of everything. Alas, it becomes clear that our Image is imperfect. The intuition that we grasp doesn't make perfect sense of the rotations of the archetypal dials. Thus our inner Image of Cosmic existence is rejected. The 'corners' of the Image that don't fit, become apparent. Then we try to alleviate this. We understand that the Image has to be modified. We begin to work on the corners by adjusting the constellation of the dials - as far as we have conscious say on them, because their movements are the reflections of the intuitive activity of independent spiritual beings. Yet at this level we're clumsy. These corners are like communicating vessels - we adjust one but the whole Image changes. Trying to adjust the dials as to harmonize with all Cosmic spiritual intents, requires greater and greater precision and attention to details. It's like trying to fix the leak in the bathroom. We start with simple intent but as we enter the details a whole world of complexity emerges.

Think of the way our present science imagines the world expanding from the singularity of the Big Bang. If that singularity was perfectly homogenous, because of reasons of symmetry, space and energy would expand as a perfectly laminar sphere. But it is said that because of miniscule imperfections of the singularity (which today we observe in the cosmic microwave background radiation), there were tiny variations of the energy's density and this results into clumping of energy into clusters separated by great voids. Tiny variations in the singularity lead to greatly different results in the expanded state.

We can use this as a metaphor. When our Cosmic Image has expanded we don't have the 'grip' to change it in any way we like. It's like trying to change the place of two particles in a fluid. We can't reach in and take them without disturbing the whole volume in unpredictable ways. Thus we seek points of support, ways to differentiate and stabilize the Image, such that we can get a more precise grip and apply the needed corrections. In this way the whole world is re-created .

We have often spoken how even without knowing, scientists are investigating the degrees of freedom of their spiritual activity. I find it very interesting in Roger Penrose's case.



In his Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, in a completely abstract way he has noticed that the conditions in the Big Bang and the supposed heat death of the universe are practically the same. As he explains above, in a world of only photons, scale and time lose meaning. So what is unimaginably large is no different than that which in the Big Bang is supposed to have had its structure that expanded and cooled into new clusters.



Of course, I’m not including this to suggest such Cosmological models but only to show how something that can be found in Intuition secretly makes its way in the thoughts of mathematicians.

From our spatial perspective we tend to think of reincarnation as some detachment from the Earthly ball, floating around in orbit and for some reasons we decide (or we are forced) to return. Intuitive cognition reveals that there isn’t in fact such ‘turning back’. We always move forward in our evolutionary process. It’s only that as our Cosmic inner Image expands after death and gradually becomes apparent that it’s not a perfect fit to the eternal intuitive Whole, the imperfections of the Image begin to grow into a new world. Trying to get a grip on the details that should be adjusted, leads us into a very specific perspective of the Cosmic image, where we reawaken and continue the art process of shaping the Cosmic Image. Needless to say, this is not a task that we can do for ourselves only - that is, to perfect our Cosmic image as something in itself, independently of all the kingdoms, the whole humanity and our Cosmic environment. Even if we try to ignore all these things, they’ll become imperfections of our Cosmic Image, from which ultimately the new world grows again.

One thing which I am sure you have experienced in meditation is the torrent of chaotic soul-life which emerges when we are trying to deepen concentration into a unitary thought-image. Our thoughts, passions, anxieties, concerns, etc. keep swirling around and it's like playing whack-a-mole, as soon as one mole is squashed by our concentrating efforts, another pops up to take it place. We may employ some technique and have success squashing the moles and then find we are now thinking about how we attained that success, thereby sucked right back into the torrents. Our lower nature will use even our successes to distract us from the high Ideal in that way.

I would like to build upon the metaphor in order to remind how all this is to be alleviated. Meditation is really connected with the law of ‘shrinking’. If we go in the woods with a ball gown, we’ll get tangled in every branch and shrub. Similarly, while we have our inner authority spread over all phenomena, we get tangled in everything. The solution is to grow small. When we relax the moles in the periphery, they don’t tangle in our gown as much. This has nothing to do with the 'letting go' through which we become susceptible to hypnotic states. We only temporarily entrust our periphery to higher powers, while we concentrate in a tiny spot in the head that is mole free, like the eye of a hurricane.

If moles keep coming up even then, we simply need to be patient and keep going. This is a process that takes time. It’s not that easy to relax the fabric layers of our gown. Moles grow to titanic dimensions in respect to us yet we now easily pass through their 'intermolecular spaces', just like two galaxies collide, yet no stars ever hit each other. Of course all these references to scale and size shouldn't be taken in rigid spatial sense. We need to extract the living qualities from these concepts.

Then at some point we find that we grasp once again the periphery but now in a different way. It’s more like our whole environment is of thought nature. We have clothed ourselves in the thought-texture of the image of meditation. In normal cognition we need to see the mole and only then it evokes certain thought in us. Instead, now the thought-texture is more of a reflection of the ways our deeper intuitive activity weaves. We can once again sense the distractions but this time as a reflection of our intuitive life. In other words, while in normal cognition we experience in our thought-images, monolithic intuitions that feel fully ours, in the Imaginative state the thought-image expands to become our whole environment. In the thought-texture of that environment now reflect not only out atomic intuitions but our whole intuitive context is felt as highly differentiated and largely independent - our activity is only a contribution in that landscape.

Yes, I have indeed lured myself into believing that I had made progress, and that my complex was becoming more under control. I see the illusion constructed by the intellect, an additional wave of activity that only covers up the chains of the soul and sensory loops, which are still active, only doubled by one extra unit of heaviness, that our willed spiritual activity will have to disentangle. I will now try to listen to the two wavelengths, and see if they can be perceived as operating one over the other. Thank you!

Ashvin did a great job responding to this. As long as we operate in the sensory spectrum there will always be these layers of intellectual activity. They are simply part of the gradient. So we shouldn’t imagine that we’ll get away from our thinking voice. As Ashvin said, it’s rather that you become capable of expressing deeper intuition through that voice, you find the leeway. The work continues on all levels. A singer has to develop her voice gradually, such that she can gain this fine control of the will over breathing, the larynx, tongue, lips. All this makes it possible to express artistic intuition. It’s the same with our inner voice. Just as a virtuoso would be mute without a musical instrument, so the spirit can’t reach the sensory spectrum without proper instruments within that spectrum. The sixteen-petal lotus flower is where our deeper soul life becomes structured and then reflected in images in the head organ. In this sense, the suit includes also the organs of the soul body. We shouldn’t imagine that we can simply separate from it and be free in the leeway. If we would do that, we would simply succumb into the deepest unconsciousness. It is a gradual process where every opening of the leeway if followed by work on the organs. Like the virtuoso - he gains new insights about ways to perfect the violin, which then allow him to express musical ideas that previously couldn’t reach the sensory world. Of course, to get the insight we also need the concentrative activity. Fiddling only in the technical layer dissipates us. We need rhythmic alternations.

[Federica]

Federica,

Yes there is a strong connection between breathing and thinking. Our physical breathing has actually become linked tightly with our lower sensuous-intellectual nature, which is why ancient breathing techniques could serve to only reinforce that lower conditioning rather than liberating our thinking from it. You may want to experiment gently holding the breath when your concentration is deepening in meditation, just to experience some more differentiation between the bodily nature and the soul-spirit nature. But perhaps this meditation topic is better left for another thread.

We should see how the very act of becoming more self-conscious of the soul and sensory loops is indeed making progress and gaining more control over the inner depth activity. It is finding more degrees of freedom through which your inutitive activity can express itself through the 'joints and hinges' of your intellectual body suit. Your efforts here have clearly paid off, as is evident from your posts. When we find that we can employ more concepts and metaphors, etc. to express our intuitive understanding, that is a great sign of more liberated and flexible thinking. And it is that deepened inner understanding which will provide living feedback, although not necessarily evident at first (if we remember 'time' does not flow in the same linear way for the spiritual), which gradually purifies the even deeper layers of feeling and willing activity.

Thanks, Ashvin, for the comments - the suggestion to disentangle thinking but cutting the breathing link seems a tiny bit advanced, I imagine I would get instantly distracted, but I have taken note!

[AshvinP]

Federica,

Yes there is a strong connection between breathing and thinking. Our physical breathing has actually become linked tightly with our lower sensuous-intellectual nature, which is why ancient breathing techniques could serve to only reinforce that lower conditioning rather than liberating our thinking from it. You may want to experiment gently holding the breath when your concentration is deepening in meditation, just to experience some more differentiation between the bodily nature and the soul-spirit nature. But perhaps this meditation topic is better left for another thread.

We should see how the very act of becoming more self-conscious of the soul and sensory loops is indeed making progress and gaining more control over the inner depth activity. It is finding more degrees of freedom through which your inutitive activity can express itself through the 'joints and hinges' of your intellectual body suit. Your efforts here have clearly paid off, as is evident from your posts. When we find that we can employ more concepts and metaphors, etc. to express our intuitive understanding, that is a great sign of more liberated and flexible thinking. And it is that deepened inner understanding which will provide living feedback, although not necessarily evident at first (if we remember 'time' does not flow in the same linear way for the spiritual), which gradually purifies the even deeper layers of feeling and willing activity.

Thanks, Ashvin, for the comments - the suggestion to disentangle thinking but cutting the breathing link seems a tiny bit advanced, I imagine I would get instantly distracted, but I have taken note!

Federica,

Just to be clear, I only suggested that as something to experiment with as a temporary experience of differentiation of the thinking force from physical processes. It is probably so temporary as not to be very helpful, but maybe it will be. It's similar to what Cleric mentioned before about moving the force of concentration from the weightless equilibrium between the eyes, in various directions away from the center to experience the spring-like 'tension' which grows when expanded or compressed. Then we return to the equilibrium.



In reality, unlike with our physical senses, which we can start to work on 'disentagling' from thinking right away, we cannot disentangle thinking from physical breathing until much more inner work has been accomplished. Just as Cleric speaks of the gradual process of opening the leeway - first within our sensory-intellectual nature, then our soul nature (deeper passions, impulses, etc.), then finally within the bodily nature (although these can certainly overlap to some extent). I personally don't concern myself too much with the breathing aspect at this point since I am nowhere near opening that leeway.

[AshvinP]

I would like to build upon the metaphor in order to remind how all this is to be alleviated. Meditation is really connected with the law of ‘shrinking’. If we go in the woods with a ball gown, we’ll get tangled in every branch and shrub. Similarly, while we have our inner authority spread over all phenomena, we get tangled in everything. The solution is to grow small. When we relax the moles in the periphery, they don’t tangle in our gown as much. This has nothing to do with the 'letting go' through which we become susceptible to hypnotic states. We only temporarily entrust our periphery to higher powers, while we concentrate in a tiny spot in the head that is mole free, like the eye of a hurricane.

If moles keep coming up even then, we simply need to be patient and keep going. This is a process that takes time. It’s not that easy to relax the fabric layers of our gown. Moles grow to titanic dimensions in respect to us yet we now easily pass through their 'intermolecular spaces', just like two galaxies collide, yet no stars ever hit each other. Of course all these references to scale and size shouldn't be taken in rigid spatial sense. We need to extract the living qualities from these concepts.

Then at some point we find that we grasp once again the periphery but now in a different way. It’s more like our whole environment is of thought nature. We have clothed ourselves in the thought-texture of the image of meditation. In normal cognition we need to see the mole and only then it evokes certain thought in us. Instead, now the thought-texture is more of a reflection of the ways our deeper intuitive activity weaves. We can once again sense the distractions but this time as a reflection of our intuitive life. In other words, while in normal cognition we experience in our thought-images, monolithic intuitions that feel fully ours, in the Imaginative state the thought-image expands to become our whole environment. In the thought-texture of that environment now reflect not only out atomic intuitions but our whole intuitive context is felt as highly differentiated and largely independent - our activity is only a contribution in that landscape

Thank you Cleric, for this wealth of insights to explore, which is also very reassuring and inspiring!

The law of 'shrinking' is a fascinating perspective to explore. In a sense, when we get excessively frustrated with the peripheral distractions, it's because we are secretly claiming responsibility for the entire inner soul-space, and then when things defy our expectations we say, "this is terrible, I should really get my house in order!" Yet this is a responsibility we have no right to claim at our current stage of development, as it belongs to the independent spiritual activity of higher planes which weave our soul-life. We are only tenants renting a tiny room in this vast inner Mansion of soul-space, and therefore our efforts should concentrate on getting that tiny room in order through the 'eye of the hurricane', which is nevertheless a microcosmic reflection of the entire Mansion.

We express images of our intuition. These images grow to fit the perfect intuition of the eternal Idea. Yet the images fail to reach that goal. It is as if they are rejected by Cosmic Intuition, like we hear our conscience say "no, this not yet it". We rise our image and try to fit it into the intuition of the Whole, yet it is like a piece of metal that enters a templating machine - shavings are shed. These are rejected, they don't fit. This turns the cycle. The shavings and the intuition connected with them become the seeds for the next attempt. The growth process begins again, where the intuitions of the previous imperfections are sought to be rectified in the new growth. These things are observed within the dynamics of our spiritual activity itself and it's no wonder why Hegel expressed them in his Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis triad. Thesis is our growing Image, our Cosmic self-reflection. We encounter the Antithesis when that reflection can't fit Cosmic Intuition. Then we have Synthesis. From the friction and shavings of this attempt, the new growth is born.
...
From our spatial perspective we tend to think of reincarnation as some detachment from the Earthly ball, floating around in orbit and for some reasons we decide (or we are forced) to return. Intuitive cognition reveals that there isn’t in fact such ‘turning back’. We always move forward in our evolutionary process. It’s only that as our Cosmic inner Image expands after death and gradually becomes apparent that it’s not a perfect fit to the eternal intuitive Whole, the imperfections of the Image begin to grow into a new world. Trying to get a grip on the details that should be adjusted, leads us into a very specific perspective of the Cosmic image, where we reawaken and continue the art process of shaping the Cosmic Image. Needless to say, this is not a task that we can do for ourselves only - that is, to perfect our Cosmic image as something in itself, independently of all the kingdoms, the whole humanity and our Cosmic environment. Even if we try to ignore all these things, they’ll become imperfections of our Cosmic Image, from which ultimately the new world grows again.

I have only recently began to explore in dim intuitions and concepts this ongoing incarnational dynamic you illustrate, and it is of profound significance to say the least. It all reminds me of the Cain-Abel legend.

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, while Cain was a tiller of the soil. So in the course of time, Cain brought some of the fruit of the soil as an offering to the LORD, while Abel brought the best portions of the firstborn of his flock.

And the LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but He had no regard for Cain and his offering. So Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell.

That is an image of the rejection by Cosmic Intuition. Without a rejection of our 'sacrificial offerings', there could be no development towards our inner perfection through the incarnational worlds, and therefore spiritual freedom. To the extent we can become conscious that we ourselves, in connection with higher nested "I"-perspectives, when attenuated to the 'dark' cycle of consciousness which we know as "sleeping" and "death-rebirth", are seeding the new incarnational worlds through the shaved imperfections of our offered images, we can avoid the anger and fallen countenance, i.e. resentment towards the spirit worlds. We can resonate with the wise intents which allow our inner perfection and that of all Earthly beings - the Earth organism as a whole - with whom we are Karmically connected. All the sufferings of the sensory and conceptual spectrum are seen as tools for our perfection and liberation. Otherwise we murder our brother and when asked why we declare, "I don't know [and I can't know]... am I my brother's keeper?" Through this all manner of modern dualistic and nihilistic worldviews are born to justify our ignorance of and resentment against the activity of our own higher Self.

[Federica]

What I experience is that there's a particular type of circulation set in motion by your posts, Cleric. In one way the processes you describe feel remote and disconnected from my experience. But I'm nonetheless able to somehow internalize the ecosystem that emerges from the description. The sense is that these processes you are drawing must exist, not because of the coherence and inner logic of the account, but because something materializes from within the account, parallel to its description. So there is a special creativity in your words that reveals itself. The words might be reporting a perspective, but they also manifest a previously absent experience. For instance:

This is how we awaken in our present life, for example. We don't remember how the dream began.

That’s easy to realize, when pointed out. But not only does the realization create a better sense of the continuity of consciousness Ashvin was speaking of, it also creates a reality of extended continuity. I have now improved that continuity, by bringing into consciousness the experience of fog dissolving into my first memory, although only in the form of a 'mystery box'. The Idea of continuity is transferred, and its experience with it.
Similarly, when you say:

in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts

it’s not only that we are pointed to the fog blurring the exact moment the distraction occurs. It’s also that our consciousness has now eaten the fog, and it has embedded it within all its fog-multiples. I don’t know how to better say it, but there’s more than explanation here, there’s enablement. Its extent depends on the reader, but we don’t exactly have to “extract the living qualities from these concepts”. The concepts are self-extracting, we only have to synchronize or align not even our thinking, but something else that I can hardly define.

In Imagination we can see how a thought train has a life on its own. It begins to grow and integrates until the "I" (which lives in the growth of the thought) awakens to its reflection in the image.

This extracts the idea that the paradox we need to make happen is to take full ownership of our thoughts, in order to rediscover that we don’t possess them.

today we feel as if we possess our thoughts

Only by becoming fully intentional and operative with our thoughts, as if we possessed them, can we open the way to a broadening of the horizons, to that growth that has a life of its own. We are drawn to mimic our ancestors and seek liberation in natural abandon, but that needs to be inverted. Self-realization as liberation of our Self from the constrictions of the suit, into the larger spiritual medium, only can happen through ownership. We got our present thinking as salt of involution, and now that same salt needs to be given back as sacrifice, so that the contours of our individual self can start dissolving, by synchronizing, or aligning, with the larger ideal medium. Maybe the after-dearth growth of our inner world into the Cosmic can be initiated in this sacrifice.

Meditation is really connected with the law of ‘shrinking’

I understand that, even with minimal experience, by contrasting this shrinking intention with normal cognition, when we do the opposite, we expand, or disband thinking eccentrically, in an effort of self-affirmation by conquest, not of thinking itself, but of planar possessions. It’s the opposite of sacrifice. In normal thinking, instead of a concentric shrinking effort, where we own the force itself so that we can give it back, we spend it on the jagged territories of planar abundance, we buy ourselves stuff and remain in the dark as for the character and direction of the larger spiritual medium. Or, in mystical meditation, we disown our Idea-shares completely, we take a vow of poverty, we renounce the conceptual possessions, thereby also sabotaging any possibility of alignment, by dismissing the only thing of value we have/are.
Sorry I'm going on and on in re-elaborating circles. Ok I'll try to add a little pinch of new.

Ashvin did a great job responding to this

Yes! Trying to describe the different quality of what you specifically convey, Ashvin, which is consistently there, I’d say ‘precise stitches’. The stitches are highly effective but to benefit from their connecting property, one has to be ready, otherwise the connection is missed, and the stitch can hurt. Like Cleric’s self-extracting concepts, your stitches also have an active quality, they are self-dissolving, they self-integrate in the fabric they help consolidate. For instance, on the same question of differentiating thinking from the lower layers, this is a self-dissolving stitch:

the very act of becoming more self-conscious of the soul and sensory loops is indeed making progress and gaining more control over the inner depth activity. It is finding more degrees of freedom through which your intuitive activity can express itself through the 'joints and hinges' of your intellectual body suit.

And this is a self-extracting concept:

Just as a virtuoso would be mute without a musical instrument, so the spirit can’t reach the sensory spectrum without proper instruments within that spectrum. The sixteen-petal lotus flower is where our deeper soul life becomes structured and then reflected in images in the head organ. In this sense, the suit includes also the organs of the soul body (…) It is a gradual process where every opening of the leeway is followed by work on the organs. Like the virtuoso - he gains new insights about ways to perfect the violin, which then allow him to express musical ideas that previously couldn’t reach the sensory world.

…if it makes any sense
Thank you!

[Federica]

Federica,

Just to be clear, I only suggested that as something to experiment with as a temporary experience of differentiation of the thinking force from physical processes. It is probably so temporary as not to be very helpful, but maybe it will be. It's similar to what Cleric mentioned before about moving the force of concentration from the weightless equilibrium between the eyes, in various directions away from the center to experience the spring-like 'tension' which grows when expanded or compressed. Then we return to the equilibrium.



In reality, unlike with our physical senses, which we can start to work on 'disentagling' from thinking right away, we cannot disentangle thinking from physical breathing until much more inner work has been accomplished. Just as Cleric speaks of the gradual process of opening the leeway - first within our sensory-intellectual nature, then our soul nature (deeper passions, impulses, etc.), then finally within the bodily nature (although these can certainly overlap to some extent). I personally don't concern myself too much with the breathing aspect at this point since I am nowhere near opening that leeway.

Understood, though I have to admit I don't have the experience of the weightless equilibrium between the eyes, so I can see the similarity only in theory. When I imagine an object or form it is somewhere in the space in front of my eyes, maybe 40 or 50 cm from my head. I have tried to imagine a geometrical form or something else just behind the forehead but it feels too close, it's not natural (I told you you were overestimating my progress).

[AshvinP]

Federica,

Just to be clear, I only suggested that as something to experiment with as a temporary experience of differentiation of the thinking force from physical processes. It is probably so temporary as not to be very helpful, but maybe it will be. It's similar to what Cleric mentioned before about moving the force of concentration from the weightless equilibrium between the eyes, in various directions away from the center to experience the spring-like 'tension' which grows when expanded or compressed. Then we return to the equilibrium.



In reality, unlike with our physical senses, which we can start to work on 'disentagling' from thinking right away, we cannot disentangle thinking from physical breathing until much more inner work has been accomplished. Just as Cleric speaks of the gradual process of opening the leeway - first within our sensory-intellectual nature, then our soul nature (deeper passions, impulses, etc.), then finally within the bodily nature (although these can certainly overlap to some extent). I personally don't concern myself too much with the breathing aspect at this point since I am nowhere near opening that leeway.

Understood, though I have to admit I don't have the experience of the weightless equilibrium between the eyes, so I can see the similarity only in theory. When I imagine an object or form it is somewhere in the space in front of my eyes, maybe 40 or 50 cm from my head. I have tried to imagine a geometrical form or something else just behind the forehead but it feels too close, it's not natural (I told you you were overestimating my progress).

Federica,

Here we are speaking about the force of head concentration as the weightless equilibrium. You could try the exercise Cleric suggested to Lorenzo previously, without producing any images but only moving the concentration. I wonder if you sense any differences in 'tension' which comes from moving the force of concentration in various directions around that center in the brow region between the eyes slgihtly behind the forehead (often referred to as the 'third eye')?

Also, with regards to the breathing-thinking connection, instead of holding the breath, it may be better to simply experiment with the vowel exercise. I am not sure about you, but when I am thinking the vowel-sounds, the tendency is for that thinking to get automatically linked with my breath, so then I start to feel like I am running out of breath when doing the exercise. It takes a real active effort for me to keep the vowel-sounds as 'pure thought' independent of physical breathing.

I don't think I am overestimating your progress too much. Actually I am not really trying to estimate it at all, but I can tell that a clear trajectory of progress is being made from your comments, such as the last one you posted. In basketball, people speak of the 'intangibles' which don't show up on the stat sheet. These are the 'hustle' plays when a player dives to save a ball from going out of bounds, or alters the offensive player's shot, or just plays with so much enthusiasm that it is infectious for the teammates. These things don't show up in the official records but, taken together over the course of a game, they can easily decide the outcome. I think a similar principle applies here.

I really haven't made too much progress with imaginative meditation either, in terms of 'tangible' results that can be logged on the official stat sheet. But nevertheless I can sense that everything I am going through Karmically, and which I am lending my own creative 'hustle' efforts to, is working to build up the kindling in my soul which can be ignited through sparks of Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination. This first manifests in an increasing holistic understanding of my daily phenomenal experience, and certain insights into how my spiritual activity fits into the overall context. I start to place these experiences in connection with the lofty spiritual scientific ideas which detail Cosmic and Earthly evolution. I think your comments also show an increasing level of holistic understanding, and when you eventually get deeper into spritual scientific research, you will find that much of it requires less effort to place within your intuitive constellation.

For ex., in your last comment you wrote about the 'fog' and the 'fog-multiples'. Immediately this reminds me of the previous age of our Earth evolution, referred to as 'Atlantis'. At that time we were conceiving-perceiving the surrounding environment as if through a dense fog which later condensed, hence the worldwide Flood myths, after which we could clearly perceive the rainbow. But that clarity of outer perception comes at the expense of an inner fog, densely clouding our consciousness of past incarnations which link us more tightly to the spirit planes. So the very fact that you chose this fog language speaks to an intuitive connection, which we now call "symbolic", with modes of consciousness we have all lived through in our past incarnations and are embedded within our current one.

Obviously we all have very much further to go in developing our holistic consciousness. But the sad truth is that most people are at a complete standstill or moving backwards, so any little progress we make in this incarnation is really a blessing and can be compounded over time, a la the 'Matthew principle'.

[Cleric K]

Federica, thank you for your reflections! The concentration and the sacrifice are really connected with the fact that we become more and more conscious of the collective nature of the inner world. When we operate with our physical body it is relatively easy to comprehend how it is weaved out of the substances of the world and how everything we do reverberates in the same that world. Although we say ‘my body’, we are not at all capable of growing another arm by means of thought. So it is much more an environment within which our spiritual activity finds the reflections of its existence. When we investigate that environment we can see countless threads that have to be taken into account in order to have an expanded picture of the body. We have to consider everything we have eaten through our life, which connects us with substances that other human beings have worked on (grown, cooked, etc.), which in turn are part of our Cosmic environment, and so on.

Through the law of shrinking we come to feel in a similar way also about our intellectual life. Every thought is like a being for which we can write a biography. It is born in certain circumstances, it can only be what it is because of its specific context. Where did the words that we use to express the thought come from? How did we learn about the concepts? Just like the substances of our body, our intellectual life wouldn’t be what it is if all the Cosmic factors were not in this specific constellation. And here we should give credit to the materialist because in that respect he is much more realistic than most spiritually inclined people who say ‘consciousness’ and imply some top-level mystery, of which nothing more can be known.

The shrinking leads us to see our inner and outer environment as sacred space, where many beings contribute, just like our parents, all the animals, plants and minerals that we have ingested and all the people who have provided us with them, play some part in our body. Then we loosen our desire to draw a circle and say “mine” but instead we see our spiritual activity as the force that intently steers our becoming through the collective sacred space. It’s clear that we can move in that direction only when we give way to the impulse of Love.

When Ashvin pasted the weight on springs above, it occurred to me that the metaphor can be extended further.

We can take the finding of the weightless point as finding our center in space. It’s important to realize that at this spot our invisible vantage point and our point of focus merge. Because of our sensory habits, when we think spatially we feel ourselves to be at a certain point and looking at another point. A camera is the common analogy.



So we have two different cases when we seek the weightless point. In one case we feel that we look at the thought-image in the point in the head, yet our ‘camera’ is slightly behind. The other case is when we feel our vantage point to be at the point but we look at a thought-image that we feel to be at a distance in space. In time, these two points both come closer and closer together at the spot in the head. Now the thought-image is no longer something that we keep at safe distance but feels as it has become our environment, as if we’re clothed in a thought-body. This is also why we need the shrinking. Normally we like to feel larger than our thoughts, as a great container, with the camera at the periphery and only looking at the tiny thought marbles below. Naturally, those who have meditated for years by trying to push away thoughts and see them as dissolving dust particles, will feel the greatest inner opposition to such an exercise.

(I’m adding this after I saw Federica’s last post)

Understood, though I have to admit I don't have the experience of the weightless equilibrium between the eyes, so I can see the similarity only in theory. When I imagine an object or form it is somewhere in the space in front of my eyes, maybe 40 or 50 cm from my head. I have tried to imagine a geometrical form or something else just behind the forehead but it feels too close, it's not natural (I told you you were overestimating my progress).

Yes, herein lies the whole thing. Our imagining activity is still largely coupled with our physical eyes. We can actually notice this if we pay attention. When we imagine that we’re seeing the thought-image, our physical eyes indeed move as if they focus at a point in space. Put your finger at some distance in front of you and focus on its tip. Then slowly move it towards the base of the nose while trying to keep focus. As you get closer, your eyes begin to cross. At some point it becomes so uncomfortable that you simply give up – the eyes relax and look forward. Yet you still have a kind of kinesthetic awareness of where the tip of your finger is. This is pretty much what happens when we work with a thought-image (you can imagine your finger or even simply a point). We place it at some distance in front of us and slowly begin to move it closer. We’ll almost certainly feel that even though it’s only an imagined point, our physical eyes still try to follow it. Then we come to the point where our eyes strain as they cross. Then we give up and the eyes relax forward. Now we don’t see the thought-image in the traditional sense – and this is precisely the point! It’s rather that we now live in something akin to mental kinesthetic awareness of what we do with our thinking. Imagine you’re doing a yogic asana. You don’t need to stand behind yourself in order to see your body from a comfortable distance. Instead, you live in the kinesthetic sense of your body. It surrounds you and fills your consciousness. We don’t need to see our body – our inner experience of it gives a much richer awareness of its configuration. Similarly, our meditative concentration is like a spiritual asana – we assume certain shape with our thinking gesture. We don’t try to see it from the side but feel its inner form.

This is probably most easy to approach by taking a simple geometric form, like a cube or a sphere. It might be easier if we first imagine it to be larger than us, as if we’re in the center of a room. Instead of imagining it visually we can trace its edges with our imaginary fingers. In this way we get a kinesthetic feeling for the cubic shape (something like an afterglow of the kinesthetic feel of our imaginary hands). Then we can shrink that mental kinesthetic feeling towards the head region. At some point it will feel as if it becomes smaller than us. Through several iterations back and forth (growing and shrinking) we can find the sweet spot balance where we’re of identical size with the cube – that is, the cube is the form of our kinesthetic imagination! The face and eyes should be completely relaxed, we’re not ‘looking’ but experiencing the shape of our imagination. In certain sense the cube should disappear. If we feel as if we perceive it, then it means we're 'here' the cube is 'there' – there's polarization. The whole goal is to find the point where our thinking gestures are tightly clothed in the imaginative ‘substance’, similarly to the way our will is clothed in the kinesthetic sensations when doing yogic asanas. (This in another way shows how evolution proceeds. What the ancient yogi did with their will, where they sought the reflections of their dreamy "I"-activity in breathing and asanas, today is to be found in our most intimate cognitive spiritual activity)
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This shortening of the distance between the camera and the thought-image is related to the balancing of the two petal flower in the head, or the two brain hemispheres. We can say that in this way we fold the spatial intellect. In certain sense our spiritual activity finds its bearings in space. The idea that came to mind is that we can use mechanical analogy also for finding our bearings in time.

Let’s think of a clock. We have the hour, the minute and the seconds arrows. They are turning in exact ratios based on the gears. We can imagine a clock with many more arrows.



They rotate like concentric dials in certain ratios. As in the Time-Consciousness essay, we can move from this sensory picture into our inner sense of time. In regards to our sensory environment we have certain intuitive spatial orientation. We intuitively understand how we’re placed in our room, how we can employ our will to move around, how this room is placed in the whole building, which is in a certain place on Earth and so on. We can easily picture this spatial hierarchy and we feel this intuitive orientation. It is like our imagination fills the spatial world, we feel its continuity and lawfulness.

We also have temporal orientation but it is much more problematic because we have our perceptions only ‘a frame at a time’ and we understand time only as far as we intuit the continuity of the metamorphoses of the frames. So besides our momentary perceptions, we have in addition also memory images of past frames and thought-images of potential future frames. Yet there’s something more than simply the images. Otherwise we would still feel them as belonging to the momentary perceptions, they would simply seem like a kind of ‘double-vision’ – we’re perceiving more than one image at the same time. What gives these images their special character is that they are united with temporal intuition. Just like we have an intuitive understanding of distance (we have some sense of how many steps it will take to get to the bathroom) so we have this sense of duration, we feel how much conscious experiences we’ll have to endure before the frame where we’re eating our dinner becomes our present.

So the classical clock with different arrows utilizes this sense of duration. We have certain temporal intuition of how much we must endure for the seconds arrow to make a revolution. Now we can move away from the mechanical clock and realize that our inner life already presents us with such inner clock. We simply need to make an attempt to grasp the metamorphoses of our inner states in the course of a day. They are contextual, just like the arrows of the clock. Our day goes through certain phases of our daily rhythms, which are composed of more detailed tasks and so on, until we get to the point of our flow of momentary perceptions and thoughts.

Like in the TC essay, all this is not supposed to make some metaphysical model of time, where we postulate such time-dials existing in themselves. All we do is only gaining a better grasp on our temporal intuition which we use all the time anyway. When we grasp this, we find the contextual rhythms of our life as simple facts of existence, we don’t need to fantasize them as existing ‘out there in time’. The temporal intuition is present in our now, it gives us temporal orientation of the way our state metamorphoses.

We can picture these rhythms as the rotations of the clock arrows. Again – not as some abstract entities but only as symbols for our direct temporal intuition. A slower arrow may correspond to our changing moods, a faster arrow is the overall intuition of the daily tasks, an even faster arrow is the concrete thoughts and perceptions within the context of that task and so on. We simply need to get a feeling for that contextual character of our temporal intuition. Usually we do that only for the flattened sense of duration, such as when we think about days, weeks, months, years, but in our case we need to livingly picture the transformations through which our states will go along that duration. Even if we can’t see the Sun and judge the time of year by the seasons, we still can judge time by the inner seasons through which we have gone. Some parts of our life are marked with certain interests, goals, then they change and so on.

In general, our inner flow doesn’t run very smoothly. In a clock the arrows rotate in precise ratios but in our inner life it is as if these arrows constantly push in different directions. We only need to throw a glance over our hectic daily rhythms to convince ourselves how our thoughts, feelings and actions are all running quite out of sync. Our will is more or less anchored within the present frame but even here we can feel that we’re often trying to rush. Sometimes we can sense how when we walk our torso tries to move faster than our feet. In our feelings we have greater freedom but we’re still anchored in certain moods and emotions. Yet we seem to move more freely through that past sad moment or that anticipated joyful one. In our thoughts we’re most free. In one moment we can think of our birth, in the next about the moment we’ll release the bodily spectrum. But this differentiation is only one aspect. For example, we can’t literally think anything we want. Our thinking context (concepts and ideas) also develops through very long rhythms.

This rushing with our inner activity through time is what Federica spoke about when she came to the forum. Then she was trying to get a sense of the pure experience, untainted by the wild oscillations of the thinking/memory arrows. However, if we go in depth, we realize that this doesn’t eliminate the fact that we’re still going through life with certain rotations. We only learn to temporarily unite ourselves with the rhythms of the sensory spectrum and exclude all else. Yet even these perceptions are dependent on the temporal hierarchy – we’re still somewhere within the context of the arrow that turns between birth and death. So whether we like it or not, the clock rhythms keep going, even if we choose to focus on certain arrows only.

When we convince ourselves of the fact that the rhythms are there, whether we like it or not, we can appreciate how our spiritual activity tries to modify the pace of certain arrows. Yet this can only happen to an extent. If we push the seconds arrow of a clock as if to make it run faster, the gears will indeed pass some torque to the other arrows but more than anything we’ll simply bend the arrow like a spring. When I saw the image that Ashvin posted, it occurred to me that we can illustrate such rotational resistance through another mechanical analogy – namely, the clutch disc of a car.


(here’s a nice video for more detailed info about the clutch)

In order to avoid stress to the axle when the flywheel rotation is applied to the clutch disc through friction, the disc itself is made of two independent parts connected with springs. This has a dampening effect in order for changes in the rotation of the engine or the axle to synchronize more smoothly.

In the same sense, most of our spiritual activity applies torque to the concentric discs of our temporal rhythms. Most of these activities don’t have great impact on the whole system, they only wiggle the discs as far as the springs allow.

All this makes for a good metaphor through which we can find the neutral rotation of time, just like the linear springs can help us with finding the neutral center of space. This is once again connected with the law of shrinking. Normally we’re spread out and apply torque to the most varied time rhythms, even without realizing that many of these torques oppose each other when seen in the context of the whole system.

When we find our central point in space we can continue with relaxing also our torque in time. What does this mean in practical terms? For our modern state this means mainly not to rush and jump all over the place. We keep pushing the discs as if we want to make time flow more quickly in the direction we would like to. In meditation it means that we have to find that feeling of peace and patience within the time hierarchy. For example, when we look at the seconds arrow of a clock, acting nervous and imagining it going faster, doesn’t help much. Instead, we should simply fill ourselves with patience and see how the arrows lawfully rotate at their natural pace. We don’t apply torque and the springs of the discs are relaxed. In meditation this means we have to take some time, even if only five minutes and try to feel our concentrated activity softly embedded within that temporal intuition. We don’t need to spread out and try to imagine the time of the meditation as some metaphysical entity but simply feel in perfect calmness that we’re within a temporal wave that will take some duration to endure. It’s like going on a vacation and not trying to think about the time we’ll be leaving. Neither we fantasize that it will last forever. We simply move smoothly within the temporal context, fully centered in the now. In a sense, we're not moving (we're in the center of space) while time revolves 'around' us smoothly and lawfully. This also means that we have to protect ourselves from the anticipation of ‘seeing’ something any moment now. This is another kind of torque that loads the springs. Actual ‘seeing’ begins precisely when we find ourselves gently placed within temporal intuition. In this sense, seeing our torque of anticipation which loads the springs, is already a much truer seeing than anything which this anticipation expects only as a fantasy.

Here comes the important part, though. Just finding the neutral point in space and in rotation of time, would lead us into a state no different than the mystical. The critical thing to realize is that just because we have found the natural rotation, doesn’t mean that the ratios of these rhythms are optimal. So we shouldn’t one-sidedly imagine that it all boils down to letting go and allowing the Universe to take care of the rotations on her own while we simply enjoy the ride (that's polarization once again). This doesn’t make sense. It would be like eating, drinking, smoking, ruining our body then at some point deciding to concentrate and find the natural temporal rhythms by letting go of everything. This however, leaves us to flow through our diseased rhythms. So moving towards the neutral time rhythms should lead us to insights about the ways these rhythms are out of tune with the Cosmic rhythms. Thus we do need effort and torque to correct these rhythms but this is a slow and gradual process. In a way, through this metaphor we can also imagine how different levels of our spiritual activity can work into each other. When we apply torque to our thinking according to a high ideal, this has miniscule effect on the larger gears but still, that effect accumulates.

In summary, through the linear springs we can find the neutral point in space. Through the torsion springs we find the neutral rotation of time. When we shrink and no longer chaotically fight the springs, we slowly begin to expand in our spatial and temporal intuition and feel how our spiritual activity can apply gentle torque at different levels. Like said in the beginning, these rotations have to be taken as sacred space, where they result from the collective torques of many beings. This doesn’t mean that all these torques proceed from wise beings that want to help us attune our rhythms to the Cosmic. That’s another reason why by simply free flowing in space and time, we have not the faintest clue what forces shape the curvature of our free fall. Every rotation of time is connected with certain intuition of the way the momentary perceptual panorama metamorphoses. Integrating these intuitions into a musical whole is Wisdom. To apply torque to the rhythms according to the high ideal and with consideration of all beings, we need Love.

PS: Although the rotation of time is not meant in a literal spatial sense, there's still justification for that term. Obviously the planets' rotations have something to do with it, although I don't see how one can move from that perceptual image to the inner macrocosmic aspect directly. We need to find the rhythms at our level of consciousness first. Only when these images begin to make sense for the rhythms of our normal life, we can continue growing towards the macrocosmic. The ancients have called the soul organs wheels (chakras). The axis piercing our center of space and around which time revolves in our meditation, gradually proves to be the experience of the concentric configuration of the soul organs. When the organs are developed, the temporal rhythms of our life indeed begin to feel as a musical hierarchy embedded and self-similar to the rotations of the macrocosmic intuitive spirit. In one lecture cycle Steiner calls these macrocosmic levels of being Spirits of the Rotation of Time. The wheels are also present in the old Hebrew and Christian esoterism.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkabah_ ... ratovo.jpg

[Federica]

Federica,

Here we are speaking about the force of head concentration as the weightless equilibrium. You could try the exercise Cleric suggested to Lorenzo previously, without producing any images but only moving the concentration. I wonder if you sense any differences in 'tension' which comes from moving the force of concentration in various directions around that center in the brow region between the eyes slgihtly behind the forehead (often referred to as the 'third eye')?

Also, with regards to the breathing-thinking connection, instead of holding the breath, it may be better to simply experiment with the vowel exercise. I am not sure about you, but when I am thinking the vowel-sounds, the tendency is for that thinking to get automatically linked with my breath, so then I start to feel like I am running out of breath when doing the exercise. It takes a real active effort for me to keep the vowel-sounds as 'pure thought' independent of physical breathing.

I don't think I am overestimating your progress too much. Actually I am not really trying to estimate it at all, but I can tell that a clear trajectory of progress is being made from your comments, such as the last one you posted. In basketball, people speak of the 'intangibles' which don't show up on the stat sheet. These are the 'hustle' plays when a player dives to save a ball from going out of bounds, or alters the offensive player's shot, or just plays with so much enthusiasm that it is infectious for the teammates. These things don't show up in the official records but, taken together over the course of a game, they can easily decide the outcome. I think a similar principle applies here.

I really haven't made too much progress with imaginative meditation either, in terms of 'tangible' results that can be logged on the official stat sheet. But nevertheless I can sense that everything I am going through Karmically, and which I am lending my own creative 'hustle' efforts to, is working to build up the kindling in my soul which can be ignited through sparks of Intuition, Inspiration, and Imagination. This first manifests in an increasing holistic understanding of my daily phenomenal experience, and certain insights into how my spiritual activity fits into the overall context. I start to place these experiences in connection with the lofty spiritual scientific ideas which detail Cosmic and Earthly evolution. I think your comments also show an increasing level of holistic understanding, and when you eventually get deeper into spritual scientific research, you will find that much of it requires less effort to place within your intuitive constellation.

For ex., in your last comment you wrote about the 'fog' and the 'fog-multiples'. Immediately this reminds me of the previous age of our Earth evolution, referred to as 'Atlantis'. At that time we were conceiving-perceiving the surrounding environment as if through a dense fog which later condensed, hence the worldwide Flood myths, after which we could clearly perceive the rainbow. But that clarity of outer perception comes at the expense of an inner fog, densely clouding our consciousness of past incarnations which link us more tightly to the spirit planes. So the very fact that you chose this fog language speaks to an intuitive connection, which we now call "symbolic", with modes of consciousness we have all lived through in our past incarnations and are embedded within our current one.

Obviously we all have very much further to go in developing our holistic consciousness. But the sad truth is that most people are at a complete standstill or moving backwards, so any little progress we make in this incarnation is really a blessing and can be compounded over time, a la the 'Matthew principle'.

Ashvin,

I did that exercise before and I tried it again now. This exercise feels very different from creating images, because it’s about directing a ray of attention towards an object, in other words it’s a looking, no matter if with eyes open or closed. So yes, in this case the arrow of attention feels naturally starting between the eyes and flying to the object from there. Now if your question “how does it feel to move the force of concentration in various directions” means, in the context of this exercise, to move the origin of the ray, I would say it’s very difficult. It feels like there’s very little tension, very little force to be recruited elsewhere than from that point between the eyes. If I try to send a ray of attention from the heart, for example, to the corner of a piece of furniture, it is not even a ray that comes out, it’s more like soft wisps of light blue cloud that will reach destination tomorrow morning, maybe. Whilst from the third eye it works well.


Regarding the vowel exercise, I don't get breathless, but I do notice the connection with the breath. The origin of the problem is, I believe, that there’s an attempt to match the switch from inbreath to outbreath with a change of vowel (I know there’s a continuous modulation, but there’s nonetheless a moment when the thought sound becomes more similar to the next vowel). So my workaround is not to try to disconnect the exercise from breathing, but to modulate slowly enough so that in the arch of one vowel (when the character of the sound is predominantly similar to it) there are 2 or 3 switches inbreath-outbreath. So the time magnitude of the modulation is clearly bigger than the one of the breath, and clearly distinct.


Thank you for bringing in the “intangibles” of inner development, maybe that’s happening, I am letting this possibility open. I would say that even if my progress was slower than that, at this moment of my trajectory, I wouldn’t be less motivated. So I am rather relaxed in that respect. I feel very lucky, and find a world of reasons for keeping my attention, and life, oriented towards inner development, regardless of the exact record of tangible results. In a sense, every single moment, lived now from this relatively recent perspective, is experienced as a motivation and a result.

[AshvinP]

We also have temporal orientation but it is much more problematic because we have our perceptions only ‘a frame at a time’ and we understand time only as far as we intuit the continuity of the metamorphoses of the frames. So besides our momentary perceptions, we have in addition also memory images of past frames and thought-images of potential future frames. Yet there’s something more than simply the images. Otherwise we would still feel them as belonging to the momentary perceptions, they would simply seem like a kind of ‘double-vision’ – we’re perceiving more than one image at the same time. What gives these images their special character is that they are united with temporal intuition. Just like we have an intuitive understanding of distance (we have some sense of how many steps it will take to get to the bathroom) so we have this sense of duration, we feel how much conscious experiences we’ll have to endure before the frame where we’re eating our dinner becomes our present.

...

In summary, through the linear springs we can find the neutral point in space. Through the torsion springs we find the neutral rotation of time. When we shrink and no longer chaotically fight the springs, we slowly begin to expand in our spatial and temporal intuition and feel how our spiritual activity can apply gentle torque at different levels. Like said in the beginning, these rotations have to be taken as sacred space, where they result from the collective torques of many beings. This doesn’t mean that all these torques proceed from wise beings that want to help us attune our rhythms to the Cosmic. That’s another reason why by simply free flowing in space and time, we have not the faintest clue what forces shape the curvature of our free fall. Every rotation of time is connected with certain intuition of the way the momentary perceptual panorama metamorphoses. Integrating these intuitions into a musical whole is Wisdom. To apply torque to the rhythms according to the high ideal and with consideration of all beings, we need Love.

PS: Although the rotation of time is not meant in a literal spatial sense, there's still justification for that term. Obviously the planets' rotations have something to do with it, although I don't see how one can move from that perceptual image to the inner macrocosmic aspect directly. We need to find the rhythms at our level of consciousness first. Only when these images begin to make sense for the rhythms of our normal life, we can continue growing towards the macrocosmic. The ancients have called the soul organs wheels (chakras). The axis piercing our center of space and around which time revolves in our meditation, gradually proves to be the experience of the concentric configuration of the soul organs. When the organs are developed, the temporal rhythms of our life indeed begin to feel as a musical hierarchy embedded and self-similar to the rotations of the macrocosmic intuitive spirit. In one lecture cycle Steiner calls these macrocosmic levels of being Spirits of the Rotation of Time. The wheels are also present in the old Hebrew and Christian esoterism.

Man, I challenge anyone to find another forum which contains this much wealth of Cosmic-level, yet immanently practical, insight on the entire forum, as we are getting on this single thread

It's very interesting that I just read a lecture from Steiner a day or two ago which resonates very well with what Cleric is describing as the differentiated rhythms between thinking (fastest), feeling, and willing (slowest), from our Earthly perspective. In fact Cleric's post has helped me immensely in contextualizing the content of these lectures (not to mention the help with meditative practice). Incidentally, even secular science speaks of our head moving faster than our feet, as measured by an atomic clock.

To draw a parallel between head-knowledge and heart-knowledge would not lead to much. One able to understand with the heart what the head knows, would be ‘warmer’ in his knowledge than another. There would be a difference between the two men, but the difference would not be very great. If, however, facts were approached with the practical knowledge of Spiritual Science, they would appear in a very different light. We acquire knowledge, perception; it gradually comes to us. Then the following happens. Our relation to the world through our head, our perception and knowledge, takes place in a certain respect quickly; and the way in which we confront the world with the rest of our organism takes place slowly. Our head hurries on with its knowledge, the rest of the organism does not. This has a profoundly deep significance. In scholastic education we see only the training of the head; nowadays people only receive education for the head. This can be done by scholastic training, for, if the head has taken part slowly in the development of knowledge, only in exceptional cases does it close as late as the 20th year of life — in the case of most people it does not keep open so long. The head is then ready with its knowledge, its assimilation of the world. The rest of the organism needs the whole time up to death for this assimilation. We might say that in this respect the rate of the head is approximately three times as quick as that of the rest of the organism; the latter has more time and moves three times as slow; the rate is quite different. Hence one who through knowledge has the gift of clearly observing such things, is aware that having grasped something through the head it must wait until he has united it with the whole man. In order to receive something really full of life, after this absorption through the head has lasted about a day, a man must wait three or four days until he has completely absorbed it. 

The higher order rhythms appear 'slower' from the lower perspective, but actually we could say their inner ideational movements are relatively faster, like a very fast vibrating membrane would appear to us as spatially fixed and still. That is why humans have seen the Zodiac as a permanent fixture in space for many aeons, through which the Sun and its planets cyclically travel through. A relatively 'smaller' amount of ideational movement at the Macrocosmic level provides the contextual structure for a great many ideational movements down the fractal depth hierarchy. In addition to the clock image, I would remind of Cleric's TCT video of the Fourier transform arrows (first 2 min), which I find a really helpful image of the intuitive temporal depth structure.





viewtopic.php?p=15603#p15603

So we can take the tip of the cascade of arrows to represent our current state of being - all perceptions, thoughts, feelings, will. This continually metamorphoses.
...
These deeper levels of the arrows shouldn't be taken as some abstract model of reality. We should also seek the reality to which metaphors point. As said so many times, we can take the slower arrows to symbolize a sympathy, antipathy, traits of our character or temperament, traits of the nation that we're part of and so on. As long as don't have depth of consciousness, we live in the hysteresis process, where we flow in the unfoldment of states. We think, we do things but don't question them. For example, in the vowels exercise we feel completely in harmony with our random choices of sounds but in certain sense this choice is only the tip of the cascade of arrows. We call it random largely because we don't know what has led us to one choice or another. It is like identifying with the drawing tip in the video, while having no consciousness of the arrows, and imagining that what we draw is our original creation. Sam Harris is actually quite correct to point out that we're much less free than we imagine. Where he's incorrect is to dismiss that we can penetrate into the deeper processes in full consciousness. This is what freedom is in the sense of PoF. It's not about arguing endlessly if the spiritual activity on the surface is our original creation or is fully determined. It's about the possibility that we can deepen our consciousness into the arrow rhythms and from there understand the laws which govern our ordinary unfoldment of states. Of course this deepening is relative. There are always deeper arrows which we're not conscious of but even they will be revealed in the course of evolution.

And there is yet another lecture which resonates with the analogy to seconds (spirit-self thinking rhythm), minutes (life-spirit feeling rhythm), and hours (spirit-man willing rhythm) on the clock. The higher order rhythms appear 'slower' from the lower perspective, but actually we could say their inner ideational movements are relatively faster, like a very fast vibrating membrane would appear to us as spatially fixed and still. That is why humans have seen the Zodiac as a permanent fixture in space for many aeons, through which the Sun and its planets spiral through, with each pass through a sign corresponding with great evolutionary changes in consciousness. A relatively 'smaller' amount of ideational movement at the Macrocosmic level provides the contextual structure for a great many ideational movements down the fractal depth hierarchy.

The past rhythms are associated with the Father (spirit man, atma), which point back to a period before the natural world order had fully crystallized from the spirit worlds, while the future spirit rhythms associate with the Holy Spirit (spirit self, manas), pointing to a time when the natural world order is consciously transfigured back to the spirit worlds. For thousands of years now, human culture has been liberating itself gradually from the natural Earthly rhythms. We see that in the fact that people no longer necessary sleep at dusk and rise at dawn, and work from dawn to dusk, for ex., but keep their own hours to a certain extent, or they no longer give birth at certain time propitious times of the year (in alignment with Cosmic rhythms), but whenever they desire. These are prefigurements of future conditions of Earthly existence, i.e. temporal intuition in the present of the metamorphoses we will endure as new incarnational worlds evolve.

Yet they become pathological if pushed too fast, with too much torque which bend the arrows like springs. Arguably we already see that happening across many domains of human culture. On the other hand, if we simply remain chained to the cyclical natural rhythms, we fix ourselves to that which is in a descending arc of evolution, to that which is dying away. It is through the impulse of the Christ/Son (life spirit, buddhi) that we find a harmonic balance between past and future, nature (body) and spirit. That is the purifying moral force of Logos which works within to help our spiritual activity not only liberate itself from nature, but to work with the natural rhythms for the redemption of the Earthly kingdoms. Steiner points to how Christmas and various Christian festivals are celebrated by many people around the world at the same times, regardless of whether in the North or South, East or West. They are intimately connected to the Earthly rhythms which proceed from the Sun.

Of course, all of this should be found not as some intellectual model that Steiner or anyone else has postulated for others to absorb and hold in mere concepts, but that which was drawn from first-person intuitive experience of the nested temporal hierarchy. Is that which will help each individual in their own voluntary, first-person inner exploration, which, as Cleric's numerous imaginative illustrations reveal to us, can certainly be done. But I do find it very helpful and reassuring to contemplate when somewhat independent streams of inner investigation (since Cleric is relating to us, with metaphors and concepts, his completely verifiable first-person experiences and how to verify them ourselves), link up with one another in such a resonant way.