Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[Federica]

I also want to point that out what you wrote above about transhumanism could be used as a pretty tight-fitting description of healthy spiritual evolution, such as we are trying to manifest through Anthroposophy and similar communities. Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness which unites the seemingly 'parallel' worlds of spirit-soul-body, and eventually expands out into the spiritual Cosmos to 'colonize' (integrate) the evolutionary streams of different planets. We aim to become planetary spirits in that sense, and to shape the physical world through our ideation. We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life world in the even shorter term, to harmonize the ego-astral and physical-etheric complexes through their sleeping-waking rhythms. But what flips the aims completely on their head, from consciously allowing the physical to be made more spiritual to instinctively forcing the spiritual to be made more physical, is the lack of living consciousness of the underlying spiritual evolutionary impulses which 'incept' these desires, feelings, and thoughts within our soul-life.

I will start with this shorter one first. For the moment, I am overwhelmed at the idea of tackling the other post with the drone analogy, and the thousand things that would require to be pointed out. I realize nothing I could say would have any chance to have any effect. No matter how much on-point I would respond, you would probably ignore again 95% of it, and throw in whatever you have decided to communicate, as you say, without much edit, including a technical review of a drone - unbelievable, but it's there to watch - and using language like "higher tech". I feel you are not there, Ashvin.


Anyway, to your statement above, I would say this.
Is it a joke? How can you reasonably say that healthy spiritual evolution and mastering Ego-consciousness the way Steiner envisions it for humanity in a far away epoch in the future fits pretty tightly present-day transhumanist pursuit of self-seclusive/self-reductive mastery over the physical body?!

"Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness"
You call it a change of "language"? ...to be "more in terms of"??

"We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life"
These worlds do coincide, as they are ideated by higher intelligences, and what we most definitely aim to is to realize that, and our interactive part in that integration.
This has ZERO in common with the transhumanist ambition of making up a parallel physical-sensory-world, hoping to make it coincide by grafting it into our physical bodies - but really just looking away from all the disturbing, unresolved natural world - with the belief that the named two things, sensory world and physical body, are all reality and life are made of.

Maybe if you read it from Steiner instead of me, you will see it's not at all a joke, so I will look for a relevant passage which hopefully doesn't require too much background study (as you probably know, most of his lectures require that). The one thing I would point out is that the higher intelligences ideating our spiritual evolution do not only work on the Anthroposphists or those pursuing the high ideals. The 'spirits of darkness' are also higher intelligences in which our human consciousness is nested and we can't understand current developments in human culture apart from their intentions. They are seeking the path of least resistance to their own spiritual evolution and the interference of these paths with progressive spiritual paths is what manifests as the pathological cultural forms of our evolution.

Just consider what Cleric wrote with regards to Levin, which you just highlighted - "The previous actually provides a perfect transition to the topic of transhumanism, insofar as Levin’s model can be seen as a precursor of an upcoming new sort of vertically integrating scientific bio-models that will open the way to advanced body modifications, biohacking, and other transhumanist pursuits."

So what makes the difference between Levin's models as, in the words of Cleric, "nothing but reaching the idea of the formative forces of the Cosmos yet entirely through intellectual reasoning about sensory facts", and the models as the precursor to more extreme transhumanist pursuits? It is a very strait gate and narrow way which makes the difference. Or I should say, it's deviating from that narrow way which leads the evolved spiritual knowledge of the Cosmic formative forces from genuine progressive insight into egoistic material pursuits.

"Maybe if you read it from Steiner instead of me"

Ashvin, if there is something I don't have, and I don't want to have, is an authority-based, or belief-based, approach to knowledge where I would accept the same exact idea if it comes from one source, and not if it comes from another.
I am unable to just dismiss my own current level of understanding, no matter how inadequate and incomplete it might be, and append it to someone else's at a different point of the landscape, no matter how much authority might be gathered at that point. I can only try to make my own understanding evolve, preferably without supplements

So I prefer to follow your today's suggestion to be patient and see how it is possible to understand these spirits of darkness, why they should move along least resistance paths (surely not because on top of being dark, they are also lazy) and why they nevertheless don't create dead ends in evolution. But for now, I am not there yet.

[Federica]

Federica,

My response will be lengthy as well and I tried to hit on most of the points you made.

Ashvin, I don’t feel immune to any lapsing. I know intuitions don’t grant anything, and I constantly have the painful experience of losing the awareness of ideas, and oftentimes even their memory. I can say this is my number one preoccupation and struggle, and whether or not I will be able to improve this status. It’s true that I am far from neutral, feelingwise, but that part is clearly improving and is not as big of a concern as the lapsing.

I do realize this and it makes me confident that our disagreements here won't really stray you from the most important work on the path. If anything, it makes me comfortable to be more direct and blunt with you on the points in contention. That said, I feel the lapsing (or whatever we want to call it) is still very much an issue.

I first want to point you towards my comment to Anthony on the other thread, which maybe you already read, especially the part about foundational principles. These are most important for us to grasp first, and then to evaluate any particular phenomenal manifestation within their context. Steiner's quote on the Lucifer, Human/Christ, Ahriman triad is especially important for us. With material technology like VR, we are mostly dealing with an Ahrimanic phenomena. If we declare it universally incapable of pedagogical value, irredeemable, or anything similar, we are essentially creating a duality excluding the Christ impulse which works through the extremes to balance them within the human soul.

Now you may well imagine that it is entirely in the interest of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers to conceal this secret of the triad. For the proper comprehension of this secret enables mankind to bring about the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers; that means, on the one hand, to use the Luciferic tendency toward freedom for the achievement of a wholesome cosmic aim, and on the other hand, to strive to achieve the same with the Ahrimanic element. The human being's normal spiritual condition consists in relating himself in the proper way to this trinity, this triune structure of the world.

Let's be clear - this doesn't mean every single person needs to delve into VR territory as part of their spiritual mission, or that some people should incorporate it as a daily practice. No one is making that argument. The argument is whether we can declare it or any other cultural phenomena universally beyond redemptive uses, which is effectively the position you have been arguing for. 

I certainly don’t feel tech phenomena are beyond the purview of spiritual processes, and I have said multiple times that I recognize there are insights to glean, and meaning to grasp in VR as a cultural phenomenon. I don’t know why you are forgetting that now, but I want to add what I consider a key question: how do you fit the idea of dead ends of evolution in these collective developments and the ideational activity that shapes them?

My mention of the elemental beings was intended to briefly address the question of the 'dead ends of evolution'. Basically, no such thing exists for a spiritual evolutionary understanding. All the forces which have ever been developed through the spiritual evolutionary process still exist and are embedded in our now-perspective, serving critical purposes, mostly below the threshold of waking consciousness. As a crude comparison, the 'elemental beings' were like the materialists of their time who, remained so adamantly opposed to the spiritual Cosmos for many ages, that they lagged too far behind the healthy spiritual evolution to seize the opportunity to incorporate the Spirit, to become fully human and eventually Gods, and became beings of Nature instead, serving as the sub-sensory support for higher life waves of minerals, plants, animals, humans. Maybe in your view, these are the humans who get so addicted to VR they end up living their whole lives (and even subsequent incarnations) in a virtual kingdom with no knowledge of the Spirit. Nevertheless, even this tragic outcome would serve a critical purpose for future life waves who need to carry out their 'work against nature' for spiritual growth. And eventually those life waves would be tasked with redeeming the VR rejects, like we are now tasked with redeeming the elemental beings. 

Ok - Observing that already at the time of language impression on stones, man was impressing language on airwaves too (through speech) I tentatively interpret your idea of growing spiritualized activity as more conscious activity? Is this correct? Though maybe it’s not, because what’s the substantial difference between mastering stone sculpting and mastering airwaves? They present us with different constraints, but they’re all laws of nature, so why should the latter be more spiritualized/conscious? Certainly not because air feels more lofty than stone? All sensorial spectrum is mineral, there’s a slice of mineral in every kingdom, therefore digital signals, as a materialist technology, constitute a wider but equally mineral mastery of the laws of nature, compared to stone, and not necessarily more conscious. If so, I still don’t get in which sense you describe them as more spiritualized. I see them as equally spiritualized, because that is, and always has been, the nature of our activity, while the evolving element in evolution is the expansion of human thinking with respect to itself. Only thinking can manipulate itself and make or break human evolution. The feeling and willing spheres, as expressions of that activity, are more anecdotal. Or not anecdotal, but more free to happen or not happen in specific configurations, especially the sensory spectrum. So in which sense do you speak of such a linear spiritual crescendo, and growing of degrees of freedom linearly reflected in the sensory instruments?

I am realizing that, in order to adequately address some of these questions, I would need to delve even further into spiritual scientific details. I don't quite have the skills to express the principles involved with technical metaphors and such. I'm not sure how fruitful it would be to just list out the relevant details, since it requires a lot of background study. Right now I am interested in hammering down the core principles of spiritual evolution. Yes, the transforming mediums of expression reflect the thinking activity becoming more and more conscious and, therefore, more and more capable of harmonizing understanding between various families, tribes, clans, communities, etc. so that there exists the potential for a truly human family, where individuals understand and love one another on a purely soul-to-soul level, independent of blood ties, national ties, and so forth. As we know from the PoF reasoning, in so far as we merely perceive, desire, or feel, we are personal beings, but when those activities are permeated by thinking, we transcend the personal. All cultural developments can really be seen as the evolution from the sentient soul to the intellectual and spiritual soul, as thinking increasingly awakens to its own reality. While these developments are most noticeable at the cultural and individual soul levels, they also penetrate down into the natural level.

In connection with the elements, I will also share the following diagram. It will no doubt seem very complex at first, but we are only using it to highlight a few principles. We can associate the planes between the 'arupa mental' plane and the physical plane with the sevenfold configuration spaces in Cleric's post on Levin. 





The basic principle is that everything we know as 'physical' now, i.e. the earth (solid), water (liquid), air (gas), was once more spiritual and has descended with our mode of consciousness into the physical as we know it. That was our spiritual involutionary phase at the scale of planetary incarnations, Earth rounds and globes. We have much more recently entered our evolutionary phase and, through human thinking renewed by the warmth-fire element of Cosmic Will, the physical elements can be again spiritualized. In that sense, everything we perceive physically is the outer manifestation of the spiritual. The physical, left to itself, is in process of decaying and dying. That is what made our self-consciousness possible - the destructive forces of our intellectual organism - and therefore we are also responsible for resurrecting the physical we have killed through our deeper spiritual activity. It is true that the current elements we experience with normal waking consciousness are all physical, yet they are also analogs for the higher spiritual (etheric) conditions. Earlier in the thread I made the following metaphor:

As our consciousness delaminates and becomes mired in the convolutions, the 'bureaucracy' of intuitive ideal relations becomes more densified from Fire to Earth. We meet more resistance tunneling through the Earth, or swimming through the water, then we do soaring through the air or expanding into the fire-warmth like a phoenix. It takes more effort to create accurate mirror reflections of our intuitive intents within the more densified stratum. All of that inner resistance manifests as our normally sluggish experience of space-time flow, and fixed objects, which constrain the degrees of freedom through which our intuitive intents can manifest themselves as percepts, concepts, images, etc. which accurately reflect those intents back to our "I"-center of consciousness.  We should understand all these nested layers of convolution as overlapping and interpenetrating, just as there is always Fire-warmth interpentrating the elements of Earth, Water, Air.

At each stage of delamination, intuitive intents (archetypal moral Ideas) create spheres of ideal space in which their fulfillment must unfold. We could say the Idea is arrested, so to speak, until its original intent can be redeemed, i.e. it can be made fit for integration into our pure intuitive becoming, through the expanding of degrees of freedom within a lower convolution, allowing for continuity of consciousness. Until then, a portion of our conscious experience is devoted to a more indirect transformation of the space-like mirrored images of our intuitive intents, until they once again resonate with the latter (like the circle smoothed out to resonate with the triangle). That creates a discontinuity of consciousness, demarcated by periods of 'darkness' without accessible memory (integrated intuition).  Those ideas/intents which set their ideal aim towards personal desires, passions, preferences, interests, etc. naturally create 'larger' spheres of ideal space, more complex bureaucracies, due to the intended atomization of ideal relations. Instead of creating a circle around the triangle, we create squares, pentagons, hexagons, etc. The very process of working through this indirect transformation with our actively willed thinking, which develops various virtues, also purifies and prepares the arrested Idea for its reintegration at higher (more conscious) stages of completion.

Within the fourth Earth convolution, we perceive-conceive fragmented stones, rocks, etc. and mineral bodies of plants, animals, and humans. As we move back with our consciousness into water (imagination) and air (inspiration) and warmth (intuition), in contrast, the ideal relations are more fluid, interconnected, formless. 

So these are analogies but, just like all analogies, they also point to real conditions which existed before in the manifest world and will exist again in the future. Humanity is now tasked with raising the physical condition of the Earth into a more etheric condition through higher consciousness, and we can see the very dim firstfruits of in recent technological developments, such as those mentioned before. Eventually it will return to a more astral condition, etc. 

The CEO doesn’t depend on the middle management to be the CEO, but has to take into account the constraints coming from the management’s activity. The transformation of imagery does not depend less on legs in VR, or more on them in the natural world, it happens as fully spiritualized activity regardless, although when we make it express through legs, yes - it will make do with leg constraints.
Luckily (again!) I expressed the idea that our activity is equally spiritualized all the time,  in 3 or 4 more alternative phrasings, the incriminated one being only one of them, so I still have hope that you will change your mind on this point, and grant me that basic level of living understanding.

I can't grant you that. This expression alone in bold gives us a clear signal that we have veered into a 3rd person perspective.

How can this be so? When the average person is in deep dreamless sleep, is his thinking activity equally spiritualized with when he is in full waking consciousness? What is the meaning of "spiritual evolution" if our activity is always equally spiritualized? Perhaps you mean something entirely different by "fully spiritualized" and "equally spiritualized" than what the words suggest, but I can't currently guess what that meaning might be. And the CEO does depend on the middle management, if we are using that as an analogy for the configuration space of human-scale thinking in relation to the soul, life, and physical spaces. 

Imagine this as clearly as possible. As a thinking being we’re steering in thinking intuitive space. When we think about matter and biology we project our thinking in that direction. Please note – in our intellectual life we don’t experience the full nature of the lower and higher spaces. They only act as constraints to our human-scale flow. Our consciousness spans through all spaces but we are clearly self-conscious only in the steering of thinking space. Other spaces mysteriously impress into our thinking space as various conscious phenomena.

Even though for clarity the spaces are depicted as something separate, we should imagine that they are all one within the others – every space is being bent by all others and it bends all others. So when we say that we’re self-conscious in thinking space this doesn’t mean that other spaces are separated from our consciousness through some membranes. It’s only that our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics.

To be clear, lapsing into this abstracted or dualistic thinking perspective, whether that's what has happened or not, doesn't mean we will completely forget how to live and survive in the world. Our will and our feeling and our subconscious thinking still remain much wiser and more integrated than our surface-level intellect which floats around in abstracted concepts. It simply means that, when confronting certain thinking inquiries, we will forget the foundational principles rooted in the first-person relational perspective for purposes of making our preferred arguments and reaching our preferred conclusions. 

As we can observe, the more we move on, the more technology is created to add constraints, rather than to remove them. The more we dwell in the current evolutionary loop, the more the technology birthed in this space is one that supplements, not our understanding, but our sensory spectrum. The energy that should go to improving thinking mastery, goes to improving mastery of senses, and technology is increasingly bent to serve this purpose. In the past, it was used to clear the constraints of the physical plane, so as to enhance the possibilities to deepen religious, mystical, philosophical, and artistic endeavors. But now we are witnessing a reversal, where new technology is less and less focused on eliminating sensory constraints, and more focused on creating new ones.

So it’s a gradient. I don't set VR apart from anything. I don’t have an extreme position just for VR. To get back to the initial question, I think the internet, and the interface constituted by this computer, both eliminate and add conspicuous (and probably comparable) amounts of constraints, so they definitely change the sensory landscape and the way it feeds back into our activity, but do they “supplement my understanding?” What does that even mean… Again, if all activity is equally spiritualized, as it is, holistic understanding increases in the form of expansion of Thinking, independent (and I don’t mean there are no constraints!) of the specific sensory landscape our will and circumstances put under our nose. Thinking has to expand its conscious grip on whatever sensory landscape is experienced, and beyond. It’s a self-generated impulse, not one ignited by the senses. When such impulse is nourished from within, we develop our knowledge/understanding, so that whatever space of constraints can be integrated. When we have that impulse, we also press on the space of constraints with causal agency, to make it as conducive as possible to that same thinking expansion. Does the change to my space of constraints, as produced by my computer, supplement this process? Who knows how alternative configurations would have interacted and integrated? I don’t think it’s an important question, or even an inquirable one.

The first paragraph sounds very much like you are forgetting that our thinking activity, with its increasing DoF, developed the technologies in question. You are treating the technology like something which came into existence entirely independent of that spiritual evolutionary process and then serves to dampen it for everyone, regardless of whether or how they use it as an instrument of living thinking. Or, alternatively, you are suggesting that the materialist age made our thinking lose DoF and we are now stuck in a descending loop. But this isn't accurate - the fact that most people are unaware of the increasing DoF when absorbed into sensory technology doesn't mean they aren't still amassing those DoF as a whole, and are not a few inner realizations away from releasing its potential energy. What we are able to do here on this forum, which would be unavailable without the computer technology, should be sufficient to put this issue to rest. But I will also quote a comment from Cleric as a reminder:


viewtopic.php?p=18034#p18034

Let's look at this in the context of the speech/writing split. Seen phenomenologically, in our stream of becoming we're continuously impressing our spiritual activity in the perceptual stream. With our spiritual activity we weave in intuitively grasped meaning. When we think, we express in perceptual verbal artforms the invisible meaning that we live in.

These two poles are not independent. Many times the metaphor of the riverbed has been given. Through our intuitively willed spiritual activity we impress the forms of the riverbed but at the same time this activity is being shaped by the riverbed. So we have a classical example of an unitary system which is only seen from two different angles. The best example is probably General Relativity where "Matter tells space how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move". In our case we can say something like "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve (how to fit the perceptions), and intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move." Of course this by no means should remain simply as an abstract conundrum for the intellect (basically perpetuating the bi-stable mode). Instead, it is perfectly possible for modern man to enter livingly into this flow of reality.

In ordinary consciousness we're tempted to anchor ourselves within something apparently stable. We can anchor ourselves either in the perceptual stream and see only the "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve" part (basically materialism or contemplative mysticism) or we anchor ourselves in the 'mind-stuff' and see only how the "intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move" (idealism which however fails to understand why this activity is constrained).
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When we learn some form of art we develop our motor skills and make them fit to express artistic intuition. So it's the same basic principle at all levels. The perceptual world - the stone, clay, canvas, paints, keys, strings, our body and senses - curve and restrict our intuition. At the same time our intuition tells the art materials how to move and arrange. When we come to our soul life we have the same process. Through our activity we're shaping our character which in turns acts as the riverbed for future activity. So much like with Hegel, we have this dialectic evolution, through which the spirit impresses itself in the resisting perceptual spectrum and transforms it such that in turn it can express even greater degrees of freedom.

Your second paragraph, I will admit, sounds like it somewhat reintegrates the role of our thinking agency in the use of technology, in great tension with the first paragraph. How the phenomenal products of our thinking activity can work to supplement the perfection of that activity is certainly an important and inquirable question, if not THE most important question. What we are speaking of here is nothing other than the polar relationship of Idea to Perception, spiritual activity to riverbed forms. So your tendency to dismiss the critical role of the perception pole as unimportant again reminds me of the speech vs. writing discussion. You may say it is important, but the "equally spiritualized" comments, and all of your subsequent reasoning, practically dismisses it as irrelevant. I really hope you can see this occurring now. 

I like this question! First, why do you see a principal problem in there being nothing to descend into for people with living thinking? Could they not, in principle, put their whole energy into ascension, for example in the detailed ways illustrated earlier in this thread?

That is exactly the question - we can't understand spiritual evolution as a holistic process unless we discern the endless of string of sacrifices (descents) required at every stage, which make the ascents possible. It is again a polar relationship, perhaps we could say the polar relationship of Cosmic evolution, since it reflects the moral dimension. I hope it is clear from the above why the lapsing, i.e. the severing of the polarity into duality, is the thread running throughout all of your reasoning on this particular topic. Perhaps because you began with a great antipathy for materialistic thinking and technology. But it's critical to make every effort to keep the polar principle of descent-ascent incarnational rhythms in the background of our living thinking through all these topics.

Ashvin,

Again, thank you for your reply. Yes please, I appreciate as direct a communication as possible. I’m notoriously not good at reading between the lines. I've tried to select the most burning among the thoughts and questions prompted by your reply. It is this: Regarding your statement about the dead ends of evolution, that “no such thing exists” - I feel resistance to this idea. If everything is nice and square, or will end up nice and square, or round, if everything serves or will end up serving a purpose in the grand scheme of evolution, why do we rack our heads as we do? Why worry about free falling? Why did Cleric tell Shu that it’s not guaranteed that souls will pursue their spiritual development no matter what, but they could get extinguished? Isn't extinction a dead end? And what about reductionisms being dead ends of evolution in Cleric’s Levin post? How should that be interpreted? I was putting VR in the deadend, so if there are no dead ends, sure, my position can’t hold.

Also, regarding the credit that you can’t grant me, and what I mean by equally spiritualized “different than what the words suggest” - Intending spiritual activity as synonym of thinking activity, as I understand it’s commonly done here, when I read “spiritualized” with reference to human activity, I understand “operated by thinking”. So when I say “equally spiritualized” I mean that the transformation of imagery frame to frame is equally and fully operated by thinking (which doesn't mean consciously) whatever the particular constraints, and not more operated by thinking in a given setup with certain constraints, and less in others with other constraints.

[AshvinP]

I like this question! First, why do you see a principal problem in there being nothing to descend into for people with living thinking? Could they not, in principle, put their whole energy into ascension, for example in the detailed ways illustrated earlier in this thread?

What makes the difference whether the model becomes a blessing for us or a precurse to infernal goals - I would say: it’s not an either/or. Now that it’s become a blessing for us, it can still transform into infernal goals. Also, while Cleric was doing this, he was not doing something else, say, meditations that could have both elevated the collective evolution and become a blessing for us if verbalized on the forum. It’s impossible to know, and even a very strange question to ask/speculation to make.

What seems important to me, though, is that Cleric descended in Levin’s model in cohered manner. It's an exploration in thinking of an intellectual scaffolding. Ok, he watched the videos, and read the papers, which are sensory experiences, but that’s ancillary to what you call descending, I guess. The descent is, he thought in the model, he thought about it, verbalized it. So why call it a descent, after all? I would imagine that a descent should involve feeling, and above all, will/decohesion. Descent means ‘in the sensory spectrum’ doesn't it?
In a similar way, we can (try to) encompass VR as a cultural phenomenon (it’s not a descent) and understand its meaning in the grand ideational scheme - be it a dead-end meaning, or smoothed-in meaning, both... - but descending into its practice with feeling and will fits differently in the spiritual activity, compared to exploring an intellectual scaffolding. Not qualitatively different, because it’s all equally spiritualized activity all the time (please comment here if you mean that there is a crescendo of “spiritualization”, as I understand you do) but the degree of interactivity with the environmental levels, or the causal fabric of the activity, are different. This difference is not about being more or less conscious of reality/being (which I am unsure if it's the junction you would take at this point, but I may be wrong?) It’s not about how advanced thinking expansion is. This difference is something else. It’s about how much it overlaps across levels of causality. And I feel it has big significance, at least while we have an alive physical body, that we make our thinking expansion proceed or not in such a way that it will overlap and press across levels of causality, down to the sensory, and make us descend or not descend in those experiences.
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Ashvin,

Again, thank you for your reply. Yes please, I appreciate as direct a communication as possible. I’m notoriously not good at reading between the lines. I've tried to select the most burning among the thoughts and questions prompted by your reply. It is this: Regarding your statement about the dead ends of evolution, that “no such thing exists” - I feel resistance to this idea. If everything is nice and square, or will end up nice and square, or round, if everything serves or will end up serving a purpose in the grand scheme of evolution, why do we rack our heads as we do? Why worry about free falling? Why did Cleric tell Shu that it’s not guaranteed that souls will pursue their spiritual development no matter what, but they could get extinguished? Isn't extinction a dead end? And what about reductionisms being dead ends of evolution in Cleric’s Levin post? How should that be interpreted? I was putting VR in the deadend, so if there are no dead ends, sure, my position can’t hold.

Also, regarding the credit that you can’t grant me, and what I mean by equally spiritualized “different than what the words suggest” - Intending spiritual activity as synonym of thinking activity, as I understand it’s commonly done here, when I read “spiritualized” with reference to human activity, I understand “operated by thinking”. So when I say “equally spiritualized” I mean that the transformation of imagery frame to frame is equally and fully operated by thinking (which doesn't mean consciously) whatever the particular constraints, and not more operated by thinking in a given setup with certain constraints, and less in others with other constraints.

Federica,

I wanted to add a few more thoughts as response to the above. First, in response to your last post, I think we should differentiate between what the potential negative outcomes of spiritual evolution may be and what is the reason for these outcomes. To be sure, most likely we have quite gruesome developments coming down the pike. The way modern materialistic thinking culture is looking now, not enough living thinking will develop to make things better before they get a lot worse. In fact the effect of VR tech, on the whole, will probably be similar to what you have been saying here. We could call these 'dead ends' in a colloquial sense, because they will be rife with unnecessary pain and suffering, which makes what happened in the last century look like a walk in the park. But these are just speculations that we can go on making endlessly across all domains of modern culture, across all modern technologies. My interest is in the question, what principle understanding of these phenomena can be helpful for us on the forum right now? What inner disposition is fruitful for us to take for our own spiritual evolution, here and now? So with that said, I will continue with the additional thoughts.

We don't need to get too rigid or literal-minded with the terminology. By 'descent', let's just say we mean a sacrificial effort to mine the sensory-intellectual spectrum for spiritual value, for our long-term benefits and that of our Cosmic organism. It's an incarnation of intuitive spiritual activity into images and verbalizations and forms. The difference I have always been pointing to is the redemptive Christ impulse of self-consciousness. Are we incarnating our spiritual activity consciously for the perfection of that activity and its contribution towards the high ideals? Or are we incarnating it to puff up the intellect and seek worldly egoistic goals? If our activity remains in the blind spot, then we are by default failing to incarnate that activity for its perfection within the Cosmic organism. This principle can be applied to even our daily intellectual pursuits - although we need to make a certain level of income, we can also use those pursuits as opportunities for spiritual growth, perfection, and high ideals. We shouldn't feel our blindspot with respect to these things are any less troublesome just because we are on this forum while others are pursuing 'transhumanist' technological aims. 

Certain quotes, outside the scriptures themselves, have always seemed to capture the orientation engendered by the Christ impulse very well for me. Especially when it comes from someone who has confronted great evil deeds first-hand. For instance,

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Now let's assume for sake of argument that this Christ impulse is the bedrock principle. Obviously it should not be held as dogma, but we should discern its centrality in the whole course of Cosmic evolution with increasing intuitive clarity, which I would argue is exactly what spiritual science, as a lived experience, reveals within us. But assuming it is a valid bedrock principle of all spiritual evolution, do you agree it really makes sense of why all natural and cultural phenomena are not either/or, as you say, but can lead to evolutionary advances or regressions depending on the heart-intentions of the person approaching and employing them? We can know immediately why the abstract intellectual scaffolding penetrated by Cleric for purposes of this forum can elevate the Spirit within us while the same scaffolding used by the transhumanists for their infernal aims repels that Spirit. We don't locate the source of evil within the scaffolding itself, or even within the individual people involved in the infernal aims, but in the transpersonal ideas-intents living within our heart which steer our lower nature towards those aims. None of us are immune.

As mentioned, a living experience of spiritual science should make this principle and its core necessity within spiritual evolution increasingly clear to us. We should start to feel like we can't engage a single act of thinking-perception without this principle manifesting when we actually pay close attention to what we're doing (which will be rare outside of dedicated time for spiritual practice). Then it will become intuitively more clear to us, for ex., why every sense-impression with our ordinary cognition incurs a Karmic debt. We are always killing the living impulses in the world to attain our normal self-consciousness, just as we are always breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. And therefore we see why the quote above is more intimately true than most people can imagine. We can sense why the forgiving and redemptive inner disposition is the only way spiritual evolution can progress in a healthy way for us as individuals and for humanity as a whole.

Actually, even apart from a study of spiritual science as we find in Steiner, most of the core principles are already embedded within Cleric's various posts on this forum. For ex, with regards to materialistic technologies and 'dead ends of evolution', we could look at the following:

Let's see if we can find an alternative way of thinking about these things. In our conscious life we continuously do things. When we work with the device that we're now using to write/read these words, we're doing certain things - pointing, clicking, tapping, scrolling, dragging, etc. In other words, we know that if we want to open the forum and check for new posts we need to perform certain gestures with our hands. But let's back up a little more and try to investigate what we're doing in order to do the gestures themselves? Look at your hand, focus on a finger and will its movement. Do that for different fingers one at a time. Try to feel how intricate these movements can be, how finely they can be controlled. It's not like we have single button for each finger which either clenches or extends it. We have quite continuous control over its motion. Now really try to pay attention to what exactly you're doing in order to move the fingers? It's not very easy, is it? It's almost like magic. There're no buttons that we can point at and say "When I want to move my finger I press this button". Furthermore, even this was possible it would only regress the problem because we're left with the exact same question about pressing the button that controls the finger.

Nevertheless, we can state generally that we have certain degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity. We don't know the exact details but somehow it is possible to thoughtfully will the movements of our fingers. There are many questions. For example, we can't tell exactly how we chose the order in which we moved our fingers. The important thing is that somehow we know what inner spiritual gesture we should perform in order to accomplish the most varied movements. Try to appreciate for a moment how astonishingly complicated that 'keyboard' would be if we had to objectify every little thing that we can will in relation to our body. All the time we do with ease things that are marvelously complicated. Yet we have no problem to immediately know what we need to do in order to move our toe instead of our thumb.

Things become exponentially more complicated when we consider how our spiritual activity expresses in feeling and most importantly - in thinking. Somehow we know what to do if we want to put words in logical sequence in our mind.

Now things become interesting when we realize that we also perform certain thinking gestures when we remember things. This allows us to look on memory in a very interesting way. Imagine how everything we learn increases the degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity. When we learn to ride a bicycle, when we learn something on the news, when we learn certain mathematical skills, all of this leads to increase of spiritual degrees of freedom, it is as if new buttons are added to our spiritual keyboard. Well, when we see things in this way, we realize that the flow of Time is practically continuous increase of these degrees of freedom. Even if we don't learn anything significant, from moment to moment, our inner palette nevertheless grows. For example, at the moment you clicked on the link that led you to this post, you've attained new degrees of freedom. It's like new 'fingers' have been discovered which can be activated with their unique inner spiritual gestures. To remember the moment when you began reading this post, something must be done. It is a different inner gesture compared to if you want to remember what you had for breakfast. Or what you had for breakfast yesterday.

This is quite an unusual way to look at things. But please take note that we're entirely within the given. Everything that we have said is purely phenomenological investigation. We don't postulate world structure, we don't postulate what time is, we don't postulate what consciousness is. We simply observe the kinds of activity we do in order to will bodily movement, to feel, to think and to remember things. Then, when we avoid to postulate time as abstract concept but instead try to read it out of the given, we can understand it as constant increase in our degrees of freedom. We continually gain new skills to remember new moments. We're staying within concrete knowledge. We don't speak about abstract memory which we must explain, instead we simply speak of the concrete inner activities which we perform in order to remember.

Here I would like to point out that 'remembering' doesn't postulate some return in time to a previous state. It is simply the utilization of a degree of freedom that we have acquired. When we learn a skill with our hand, when we perform that skill we don't return in time but experience new states which utilize that skill. Similarly, when we remember something, we don't simply return in time but we experience new state where we utilize the remembering degree of freedom. This act in itself becomes a new degree of freedom which allows us to think/remember that we remembered the past event.

Another important observation, which I have pointed out many times, is that we can experience time flow in a direction in which the degrees of freedom continuously increase. If every next state of being doesn't contain the previous as a degree of freedom through which we can remember it, then it wouldn't be possible to have the experience of time flow. We arrive to an explanation for the arrow of time purely from inner observation.

So, in a certain sense, individuals and humanity at large has been increasing its DoF by simply existing and following instinctive impulses in nature and culture. Just as Klockek writes in TSH, the infant, young child, adolescent, and young adult develop their willing, feeling, thinking DoF as a matter of course, through biology and socialization. Yet then they reach the stage when something active must be done by them for continued development of thinking DoF. What must be done? Nothing other than making the DoF process that has already occurred, and which Cleric describes above, more conscious. It's really that simple, although how we can make the process more conscious is obviously not easy to explain for abstract habits of thinking, nor is it easy to accomplish inwardly over a sustained period. All of Cleric's posts here go towards making the 'how' more clear to us, building the gradient between modern habitual thinking and introspective spiritual thinking.  

Once that gradient is established for us, however - once we orient within the Heliocentric perspective out of second nature - is there any phenomena, any technology which should be immune to our conscious efforts, to the Christ impulse itself? Should any such phenomena cause us to lose DoF while we penetrate it with our living knowledge, relating every new button on our 'spiritual keyboard' to our intuitive temporal becoming? Like Steiner says, "For the proper comprehension of this secret enables mankind to bring about the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers." The comprehension itself is the key which unlocks all doors to spiritual evolution. As is probably clear by now, this is hardly about VR technology as some isolated experience. In so far as we are only discussing such an isolated experience, I could care less about 'defending it' against critiques. I have no problem saying VR is going to be largely unhelpful as a spiritual practice for most people, as far as I can tell, and I doubt it will be very helpful for me either. Maybe Cleric or myself will manage to find a few more nuggets of value from the VR experience here and there, maybe not. But once our critiques find justification in certain lines of reasoning, we are dealing with a more principled issue manifesting within us for which the VR tech only serves as the opportunity for its expression. That is the only reason I was interested in exploring this topic much further.

Also, regarding the credit that you can’t grant me, and what I mean by equally spiritualized “different than what the words suggest” - Intending spiritual activity as synonym of thinking activity, as I understand it’s commonly done here, when I read “spiritualized” with reference to human activity, I understand “operated by thinking”. So when I say “equally spiritualized” I mean that the transformation of imagery frame to frame is equally and fully operated by thinking (which doesn't mean consciously) whatever the particular constraints, and not more operated by thinking in a given setup with certain constraints, and less in others with other constraints.

But reality is only our conscious spiritual activity in relation to our subconscious spiritual activity. Do you see why it becomes meaningless to say it is equally spiritualized at all times and include our subconscious activity which extends to the Godhead? We can't evaluate the spiritual evolutionary value of any phenomena whatsoever if we take that approach.  Again, we need to inhabit the first-person perspective for these things. It simply has no meaning to say our activity is always equally spiritualized in relation to the transformation of imagery from the first-person perspective.

Also, did you re-read Cleric's post that I shared from the writing vs. speech discussion? That shows exactly why the transformation of imagery in response to our conscious spiritual activity is more constrained by certain riverbed forms than others, and how more spiritualized riverbed forms (made conscious and therefore pliable by our activity) can positively feed back into the DoF of our spiritual activity. It probably helps to remember there is no principle difference between physical forms such as stone, clay, paper, etc. and soul-forms like our character, traits, habits, etc. and thought-forms like our abstract opinions and theories.

[Federica]

(...)

There’s much to consider in the first part of your post above, Ashvin. Thanks for all the insights! I’m not yet ready to comment. Here I only have a few thoughts on the second part.

Also, regarding the credit that you can’t grant me, and what I mean by equally spiritualized “different than what the words suggest” - Intending spiritual activity as synonym of thinking activity, as I understand it’s commonly done here, when I read “spiritualized” with reference to human activity, I understand “operated by thinking”. So when I say “equally spiritualized” I mean that the transformation of imagery frame to frame is equally and fully operated by thinking (which doesn't mean consciously) whatever the particular constraints, and not more operated by thinking in a given setup with certain constraints, and less in others with other constraints.

But reality is only our conscious spiritual activity in relation to our subconscious spiritual activity. Do you see why it becomes meaningless to say it is equally spiritualized at all times and include our subconscious activity which extends to the Godhead? We can't evaluate the spiritual evolutionary value of any phenomena whatsoever if we take that approach. Again, we need to inhabit the first-person perspective for these things. It simply has no meaning to say our activity is always equally spiritualized in relation to the transformation of imagery from the first-person perspective.

I do. But that was not an approach, it was a reaction to your statement that, in VR, activity is ‘more spiritualized’ because the body parts-instruments are different.

The third person reminder is useful anyway. As I said, I do often lapse into it, in ways that might not emerge publicly, but that I suddenly realize upon reading again a post, or a passage from Steiner.

Also, did you re-read Cleric's post that I shared from the writing vs. speech discussion? That shows exactly why the transformation of imagery in response to our conscious spiritual activity is more constrained by certain riverbed forms than others, and how more spiritualized riverbed forms (made conscious and therefore pliable by our activity) can positively feed back into the DoF of our spiritual activity. It probably helps to remember there is no principle difference between physical forms such as stone, clay, paper, etc. and soul-forms like our character, traits, habits, etc. and thought-forms like our abstract opinions and theories.

How comes that one of the very few times I don’t open and read every single link in a post, I happen to get flushed out
I’ve carefully read it now, and I’m happy you recommended it. It's yet another way to describe the same process as in the post about Levin's model, yet I surely needed to read it again since last August. Since then I feel I got better at bringing it all together, the riverbed, the tree, the membrane, the percept and concept, the concentration, and my experience of that. Reflecting on my efforts to be diligent and discard the third person perspective, I identify two hinders (or at least, for me they have been/still are).


The first is that, as I make an effort to quit the statement-about-reality mode, the 'I' who receives that invitation is still the conventional self, centered around my physical-intellectual identity. The 'me' I'm inviting to enter the living flow of reality is still this body-mind, sitting in this room. I can wish "Don't dissect the ‘about’ so abstractly, don't ponder it as a judge, just live the meaning, experiment in it". But what can my physical-mental self make with that, stuck as it is under the spell of the sensory spectrum? It's like trying to teach someone how to swim while they're drowning in deep waters. There seems to be no leverage to extricate oneself from the situation. Like Archimedes wondering how to lift the Cosmos with a lever, we lack a point of support to extract ourselves from the flow:

The mind tries to extricate itself from the flow of reality and make a bystander-statement about what reality is. It is clear that we need different cognitive skills if we're to overcome this mode. We need to find a new anchor point which is neither within some particular perception nor within some particular concept.

The new anchor is found in concentrated thinking, but beyond concentration, I'm finding it useful to imaginemy being somehow separate from the habitual, physical self. Not as a 'ghost' floating in the room like in NDEs, but as a very real, ego-like 'me', much like the 'me' we are familiar with, only completely immaterial, freed from space-time. So I try to 'scan the landscape', hoping to get a sense of that I/me who is free from the forceful suggestiveness of the perceptual sphere. And I imagine that, from that less constrained center, the I/me enlivens and operates this body as one available, very constrained mode of existence, in accord with the sensory operating system the body belongs to. Maybe it's a vain effort, but I like the 'exercise'.


The second hinder I noticed is that, when I used to go back to PoF for guidance, I was clearly doing it in a very philosophical-intellectual mode, really trying to follow the reasoning, paying attention to its mechanics, pretty much in the same modeling mode that is required in standard, step-by-step approach to knowledge. The way PoF's first part is written clearly allows for that, which is great, because the thirst for intellectual inquiry usually is our only language when we approach SS, so it has to be addressed, and can hardly be quenched otherwise. Still, getting closer to the ideas, one comes to realize that the stage of philosophical understanding is necessary, but only preliminary, and needs to be transcended. That's not easy. The risk is to keep the dissecting mode on, trying to get more agile in that same mode. PoF is layered meaning, not in the usual way many books are, that we grasp better at second read, but in an intentional, sort of engineered way. One needs to learn how to read the same pages multiple times but with changing soul-modes, and that involves for me a good amount of fumbling.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

Thanks for sharing these interesting thoughts.

(...)

There’s much to consider in the first part of your post above, Ashvin. Thanks for all the insights! I’m not yet ready to comment. Here I only have a few thoughts on the second part.

Also, regarding the credit that you can’t grant me, and what I mean by equally spiritualized “different than what the words suggest” - Intending spiritual activity as synonym of thinking activity, as I understand it’s commonly done here, when I read “spiritualized” with reference to human activity, I understand “operated by thinking”. So when I say “equally spiritualized” I mean that the transformation of imagery frame to frame is equally and fully operated by thinking (which doesn't mean consciously) whatever the particular constraints, and not more operated by thinking in a given setup with certain constraints, and less in others with other constraints.

But reality is only our conscious spiritual activity in relation to our subconscious spiritual activity. Do you see why it becomes meaningless to say it is equally spiritualized at all times and include our subconscious activity which extends to the Godhead? We can't evaluate the spiritual evolutionary value of any phenomena whatsoever if we take that approach. Again, we need to inhabit the first-person perspective for these things. It simply has no meaning to say our activity is always equally spiritualized in relation to the transformation of imagery from the first-person perspective.

I do. But that was not an approach, it was a reaction to your statement that, in VR, activity is ‘more spiritualized’ because the body parts-instruments are different.

The third person reminder is useful anyway. As I said, I do often lapse into it, in ways that might not emerge publicly, but that I suddenly realize upon reading again a post, or a passage from Steiner.

To be clear, in VR the activity is not more 'spiritualized' because the body parts or instruments are different, but the instruments are (slightly) different and differently utilized because the activity is more spiritualized, through the natural spiritual evolutionary progression. It is the same reason why our fingers typing on a computer keyboard can give us access to reams of data in websites, videos, etc., which a person with only physical libraries would have to travel across the world for, and still then would only find a small portion of what's now available. The evolution of our spiritual activity has allowed for computer technology which unites the collective human intelligence in more spiritualized form, allowing for this more spiritualized expression of that activity, which can also feed back into further evolution of our activity IF approached with the deepened and purified intents. For ex., without the computer tech, none of the scaffolding Levin and his team developed would have been possible. If his intellect were to be 'tricked' into confronting its own living reality, and seeking out the high ideals, then all of that scaffolding would serve to greatly advance his spiritual evolution. Otherwise it will likely become more and more oppressive as a millstone around the neck, taking him only in the direction of more abstraction from living impulses and towards the infernal goals.

Also, did you re-read Cleric's post that I shared from the writing vs. speech discussion? That shows exactly why the transformation of imagery in response to our conscious spiritual activity is more constrained by certain riverbed forms than others, and how more spiritualized riverbed forms (made conscious and therefore pliable by our activity) can positively feed back into the DoF of our spiritual activity. It probably helps to remember there is no principle difference between physical forms such as stone, clay, paper, etc. and soul-forms like our character, traits, habits, etc. and thought-forms like our abstract opinions and theories.

How comes that one of the very few times I don’t open and read every single link in a post, I happen to get flushed out
I’ve carefully read it now, and I’m happy you recommended it. It's yet another way to describe the same process as in the post about Levin's model, yet I surely needed to read it again since last August. Since then I feel I got better at bringing it all together, the riverbed, the tree, the membrane, the percept and concept, the concentration, and my experience of that. Reflecting on my efforts to be diligent and discard the third person perspective, I identify two hinders (or at least, for me they have been/still are).


The first is that, as I make an effort to quit the statement-about-reality mode, the 'I' who receives that invitation is still the conventional self, centered around my physical-intellectual identity. The 'me' I'm inviting to enter the living flow of reality is still this body-mind, sitting in this room. I can wish "Don't dissect the ‘about’ so abstractly, don't ponder it as a judge, just live the meaning, experiment in it". But what can my physical-mental self make with that, stuck as it is under the spell of the sensory spectrum? It's like trying to teach someone how to swim while they're drowning in deep waters. There seems to be no leverage to extricate oneself from the situation. Like Archimedes wondering how to lift the Cosmos with a lever, we lack a point of support to extract ourselves from the flow:

The mind tries to extricate itself from the flow of reality and make a bystander-statement about what reality is. It is clear that we need different cognitive skills if we're to overcome this mode. We need to find a new anchor point which is neither within some particular perception nor within some particular concept.

Yes this is completely natural. It is very helpful that you clearly recognize this threshold your ordinary cognitive state keeps bumping up against. Now it is a matter of making the act of recognition more conscious. Because the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self, centered around the physical-intellectual identity. 

I came across a cinematic story the other day which was pretty powerful for me. The most powerful part was experiencing, as concrete intuition, how the same self-destructive soul tendencies which lived in the main character also live in me, even as I am on this self-conscious spiritual path. The outer forms of their expression are quite different (although overeating has been an ongoing issue for me, but certainly not to the same extent), but nevertheless the inner landscape is quite familiar. 





So recognizing that shared soul-landscape has a deepening effect, which is more centered around the life of feeling. Archetypal stories often resonate with us for this reason. But we can try to go even a level deeper by concretely sensing what we are doing in the act of cognitively relating the archetypal story with our own soul-life, the thinking-gestures we are making to find ourselves within the story. We can make mini-exercises out of these things and try to sense how our spiritual activity is bridging the two seemingly disparate worlds of personal and personal, from all outward appearances, through archetypal soul-resonance. I know this is very vague and unstructured example and therefore not too helpful, so a better one is probably what Cleric wrote recently on the other thread:

Imagine that we take symbolic snapshots of our states of be-ing:

[image]

Each state symbolizes the full spectrum of inner experience (not only sensory perceptions but also feelings, thoughts, will). When we think, our state transforms. The states are drawn along a dimension but from our perspective we’re always at the center – the state transforms around us, so to speak.

If we think verbally, as the states metamorphose, at any point in time we hear a different verbal word. When we think “I need to take the garbage out”, we’re clearly experiencing sequences of words through time. Yet these words would be just a sequence of random noise if there wasn’t the overarching intuition that is actually being linearized in language. Very little attention is paid to these things today. Even worse than this is that the thoughts themselves usually stream in quite uncontrollable torrents. We jump from thought to thought quite erratically.

It’s important to realize that when we think about the above image this doesn’t yet equate with a real experience of the ‘thickness’ of time. In fact, current scientific views will outright say that such an experience is impossible. Our brain simply feeds our conscious frames one by one. In that sense, the whole image above is only an abstraction. We should take the whole image and imagine that it is experienced as one of the blue circles. That is, the whole image is just a thought in our current state of being.

In other words, we are following along the post, using the image to conceptualize how our states metamorphose when we think verbally, and our thoughts jump from the one blue dot to the next which are expressed in the verbal sequences. You probably find this a very helpful image as I do, really orienting our thoughts about the issue. When you get to the underlined, do you feel a sort of 'plunge' or 'deepening' in your thought-life? Do you sense the concrete intuition that it is now flowing within an even layer deeper, even if only for a few moments? We now differentiate from the image-oriented thinking to the layer which realizes that thinking is still on the horizontal plane - which realizes those horizontal thoughts were still within the context of our metamorphosing states. It is a similar feeling for me when I read the following in PoF, which we are all familiar with at this point, and really try to inhabit the first-person perspective of what is being written about.

While I am reflecting upon the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is focussed upon it. To be thus occupied is precisely to contemplate by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to the object of this activity. In other words, while I am thinking I pay no heed to my thinking, which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking, which is not of my making.

I am, moreover, in the same position when I enter into the exceptional state and reflect on my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking; I can only subsequently take my experiences of my thinking process as the object of fresh thinking. If I wanted to watch my present thinking, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this I cannot do. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts.

 

So these can be powerful experiences of how we are already flowing in the deeper strata of our 'I'-being as we intellectually contemplate the sensory-conceptual content, and we only need a certain spark of intuition from that content, when approached with good and active will, to reveal that strata to our 'I'-consciousness. As we know, Steiner carefully structured the content to help produce such results, and I am sure Cleric does as well. 

The new anchor is found in concentrated thinking, but beyond concentration, I'm finding it useful to imaginemy being somehow separate from the habitual, physical self. Not as a 'ghost' floating in the room like in NDEs, but as a very real, ego-like 'me', much like the 'me' we are familiar with, only completely immaterial, freed from space-time. So I try to 'scan the landscape', hoping to get a sense of that I/me who is free from the forceful suggestiveness of the perceptual sphere. And I imagine that, from that less constrained center, the I/me enlivens and operates this body as one available, very constrained mode of existence, in accord with the sensory operating system the body belongs to. Maybe it's a vain effort, but I like the 'exercise'.

The second hinder I noticed is that, when I used to go back to PoF for guidance, I was clearly doing it in a very philosophical-intellectual mode, really trying to follow the reasoning, paying attention to its mechanics, pretty much in the same modeling mode that is required in standard, step-by-step approach to knowledge. The way PoF's first part is written clearly allows for that, which is great, because the thirst for intellectual inquiry usually is our only language when we approach SS, so it has to be addressed, and can hardly be quenched otherwise. Still, getting closer to the ideas, one comes to realize that the stage of philosophical understanding is necessary, but only preliminary, and needs to be transcended. That's not easy. The risk is to keep the dissecting mode on, trying to get more agile in that same mode. PoF is layered meaning, not in the usual way many books are, that we grasp better at second read, but in an intentional, sort of engineered way. One needs to learn how to read the same pages multiple times but with changing soul-modes, and that involves for me a good amount of fumbling.

Exactly! One simply can't go wrong revisiting PoF and using it as an exercise to deepen our spiritual activity, at least to reach the proper foundation from which we can further deepen through concentration/meditative exercises.

I do something very similar to what you write in the 1st paragraph, so I agree it is a very helpful exercise. I think this will really help when you approach more detailed spiritual science of the human physical-etheric-astral organism and how the Ego works through it. Then you may sense how the true 'I' is an interference of these layered modes of existence, through which it acts against varied lawful constraints in its temporal becoming. What we know as the 'physical body', which is like a concentrated image of the entire sensory world, can only be properly understood in its functions as the outer expression of this inner depth structure, through which the 'I' is always rhythmically incarnating, ascending, and reincarnating.

The physical body, in its inner nature, is actually the oldest and therefore most perfected member of our organism. Through it we can have a seamless integration of our willing-feeling-thinking which allows us to traverse the sensory landscape in an intuitively meaningful way. Yet it has progressively sacrificed itself to accommodate our younger, 'higher' members in their much less mature existence, so that we may also become creative agents in the transformation of the meaningful landscape through more conscious spiritual activity. In the astral-desire body, for ex., our spiritual activity has much more free reign, yet this is also at the root of our erratic soul-life and thought-life, as well as even deeper psycho-physical illnesses and decohered perceptual states, in so far as our desires, feelings, interests, thoughts remain entangled with the merely personal nature. So we also owe a debt to the physical body, and the physical world as such, which can be redeemed through our purified spiritual activity, which freely seeks out the high ideals.

[Federica]

To be clear, in VR the activity is not more 'spiritualized' because the body parts or instruments are different, but the instruments are (slightly) different and differently utilized because the activity is more spiritualized, through the natural spiritual evolutionary progression. It is the same reason why our fingers typing on a computer keyboard can give us access to reams of data in websites, videos, etc., which a person with only physical libraries would have to travel across the world for, and still then would only find a small portion of what's now available. The evolution of our spiritual activity has allowed for computer technology which unites the collective human intelligence in more spiritualized form, allowing for this more spiritualized expression of that activity, which can also feed back into further evolution of our activity IF approached with the deepened and purified intents. For ex., without the computer tech, none of the scaffolding Levin and his team developed would have been possible. If his intellect were to be 'tricked' into confronting its own living reality, and seeking out the high ideals, then all of that scaffolding would serve to greatly advance his spiritual evolution. Otherwise it will likely become more and more oppressive as a millstone around the neck, taking him only in the direction of more abstraction from living impulses and towards the infernal goals.

Ashvin, maybe this example is now worn out to the point where it won't find its right-sounding linguistic form for a little while. I am the one to blame, I've been too much focused on language. Beyond vocabulary, the parallel with the fingers typing on a computer makes me wonder about one thing. Fingers are not necessary, but only practical for using the computer interface. I could give the machine inputs in various alternative ways. On the contrary, in VR it’s intentional and crucial that there’s no alternative. The fingers are instrumental to the experience as such, not as the interchangeable tools they are for our computers, that live in relative harmony with the surrounding spectrum. Our computers fairly negotiate their place within the perceptual spectrum. VR doesn’t negotiate anything, it seeks to exterminate its surroundings. It’s the seclusion I referred to before, in which a schizophrenic threshold is passed (pathological as you called it), beyond which we become both abducted and the abductor. This inevitably sends me back to the idea of hunching on oneself, implosion, and dead end. Maybe I would spare this question for the dead end post: are these differences irrelevant in all respects?

In any case, even amidst these questions, the exchange is helping me look for continuity more than for differentiation, in the same line as Cleric's post on Levin. Thanks for the wealth of new supporting illustrations in this post. And I'm impressed by the sacrifice you're making and the composure it demonstrates. I can only hope I will attain some similar capability someday.

It is very helpful that you clearly recognize this threshold your ordinary cognitive state keeps bumping up against. Now it is a matter of making the act of recognition more conscious. Because the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self, centered around the physical-intellectual identity. 

I came across a cinematic story the other day which was pretty powerful for me. The most powerful part was experiencing, as concrete intuition, how the same self-destructive soul tendencies which lived in the main character also live in me, even as I am on this self-conscious spiritual path. The outer forms of their expression are quite different (although overeating has been an ongoing issue for me, but certainly not to the same extent), but nevertheless the inner landscape is quite familiar. 







So recognizing that shared soul-landscape has a deepening effect, which is more centered around the life of feeling. Archetypal stories often resonate with us for this reason. But we can try to go even a level deeper by concretely sensing what we are doing in the act of cognitively relating the archetypal story with our own soul-life, the thinking-gestures we are making to find ourselves within the story. We can make mini-exercises out of these things and try to sense how our spiritual activity is bridging the two seemingly disparate worlds of personal and personal, from all outward appearances, through archetypal soul-resonance. I know this is very vague and unstructured example and therefore not too helpful, so a better one is probably what Cleric wrote recently on the other thread:

Imagine that we take symbolic snapshots of our states of be-ing:

[image]

Each state symbolizes the full spectrum of inner experience (not only sensory perceptions but also feelings, thoughts, will). When we think, our state transforms. The states are drawn along a dimension but from our perspective we’re always at the center – the state transforms around us, so to speak.

If we think verbally, as the states metamorphose, at any point in time we hear a different verbal word. When we think “I need to take the garbage out”, we’re clearly experiencing sequences of words through time. Yet these words would be just a sequence of random noise if there wasn’t the overarching intuition that is actually being linearized in language. Very little attention is paid to these things today. Even worse than this is that the thoughts themselves usually stream in quite uncontrollable torrents. We jump from thought to thought quite erratically.

It’s important to realize that when we think about the above image this doesn’t yet equate with a real experience of the ‘thickness’ of time. In fact, current scientific views will outright say that such an experience is impossible. Our brain simply feeds our conscious frames one by one. In that sense, the whole image above is only an abstraction. We should take the whole image and imagine that it is experienced as one of the blue circles. That is, the whole image is just a thought in our current state of being.

In other words, we are following along the post, using the image to conceptualize how our states metamorphose when we think verbally, and our thoughts jump from the one blue dot to the next which are expressed in the verbal sequences. You probably find this a very helpful image as I do, really orienting our thoughts about the issue. When you get to the underlined, do you feel a sort of 'plunge' or 'deepening' in your thought-life? Do you sense the concrete intuition that it is now flowing within an even layer deeper, even if only for a few moments? We now differentiate from the image-oriented thinking to the layer which realizes that thinking is still on the horizontal plane - which realizes those horizontal thoughts were still within the context of our metamorphosing states. It is a similar feeling for me when I read the following in PoF, which we are all familiar with at this point, and really try to inhabit the first-person perspective of what is being written about.

While I am reflecting upon the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is focussed upon it. To be thus occupied is precisely to contemplate by thinking. I attend, not to my activity, but to the object of this activity. In other words, while I am thinking I pay no heed to my thinking, which is of my own making, but only to the object of my thinking, which is not of my making.

I am, moreover, in the same position when I enter into the exceptional state and reflect on my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking; I can only subsequently take my experiences of my thinking process as the object of fresh thinking. If I wanted to watch my present thinking, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this I cannot do. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts.

 

So these can be powerful experiences of how we are already flowing in the deeper strata of our 'I'-being as we intellectually contemplate the sensory-conceptual content, and we only need a certain spark of intuition from that content, when approached with good and active will, to reveal that strata to our 'I'-consciousness. As we know, Steiner carefully structured the content to help produce such results, and I am sure Cleric does as well. 

That “the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self” is a completely unexpected statement, for me I am at the stage of searching for a sense of it and hoping to find some idea of distinction in that sense. Certainly not that I had found anything! Also, I don’t clearly recognize any thresholds. I only have a desire to extricate myself. And from there, I fumble. Maybe I would try to visualize my body as vividly as possible from an external viewpoint, following what it was doing earlier in the day. Crossing the street, it was raining, it looked sideways to check for coming bikes. Some thoughts were hovering over these frames - the ‘film’ gets captions.
This looking back is not the usual one of recalling a memory, which we form, bring to us, and attach to ourselves, as an increment to complement the unity of our identity. Here it’s about forming a clear enough visualization to detach from, and look at as part of a flow. It could be incorporated in the series of snapshots in Cleric’s quoted post, and could weld with the other constraints. But for me all this is only at the wish-stage. I guess I am demonstrating the lack of consciousness of the act you speak of.


Coming to the film trailer, I paused reading immediately, and watched first. I couldn’t guess the intuition you gathered, much less the purpose of the example. But I understand. Wishing to separate from the physical body means searching for a shared spiritual landscape, and feelings can also be traced back to their original common source. Paying attention to the gestures that operate that deepening is what you did with those feelings, and what I haven’t done with my exercise.


The description of deepening in Cleric’s post is very helpful! I understand everything you say. I don’t feel the plunge, because I don’t have enough momentum. It has happened with other posts, rarely, but never at first or second reading. More on returning after a while, after having lost the detailed memory of previous reading. When rediscovering the idea at that point, with only a general understanding of the direction but no details, the conscious attention can feel new and light, and roll on the landscape, until it plunges. In fact, this only happens because of the invisible support of the preparation work.

I do something very similar to what you write in the 1st paragraph, so I agree it is a very helpful exercise. I think this will really help when you approach more detailed spiritual science of the human physical-etheric-astral organism and how the Ego works through it. Then you may sense how the true 'I' is an interference of these layered modes of existence, through which it acts against varied lawful constraints in its temporal becoming. What we know as the 'physical body', which is like a concentrated image of the entire sensory world, can only be properly understood in its functions as the outer expression of this inner depth structure, through which the 'I' is always rhythmically incarnating, ascending, and reincarnating.

The physical body, in its inner nature, is actually the oldest and therefore most perfected member of our organism. Through it we can have a seamless integration of our willing-feeling-thinking which allows us to traverse the sensory landscape in an intuitively meaningful way. Yet it has progressively sacrificed itself to accommodate our younger, 'higher' members in their much less mature existence, so that we may also become creative agents in the transformation of the meaningful landscape through more conscious spiritual activity. In the astral-desire body, for ex., our spiritual activity has much more free reign, yet this is also at the root of our erratic soul-life and thought-life, as well as even deeper psycho-physical illnesses and decohered perceptual states, in so far as our desires, feelings, interests, thoughts remain entangled with the merely personal nature. So we also owe a debt to the physical body, and the physical world as such, which can be redeemed through our purified spiritual activity, which freely seeks out the high ideals.

For now this is vague to my understanding. I will be reading this post again going forward, and hopefully the degrees of freedom will have evolved by then.

[AshvinP]

To be clear, in VR the activity is not more 'spiritualized' because the body parts or instruments are different, but the instruments are (slightly) different and differently utilized because the activity is more spiritualized, through the natural spiritual evolutionary progression. It is the same reason why our fingers typing on a computer keyboard can give us access to reams of data in websites, videos, etc., which a person with only physical libraries would have to travel across the world for, and still then would only find a small portion of what's now available. The evolution of our spiritual activity has allowed for computer technology which unites the collective human intelligence in more spiritualized form, allowing for this more spiritualized expression of that activity, which can also feed back into further evolution of our activity IF approached with the deepened and purified intents. For ex., without the computer tech, none of the scaffolding Levin and his team developed would have been possible. If his intellect were to be 'tricked' into confronting its own living reality, and seeking out the high ideals, then all of that scaffolding would serve to greatly advance his spiritual evolution. Otherwise it will likely become more and more oppressive as a millstone around the neck, taking him only in the direction of more abstraction from living impulses and towards the infernal goals.

Ashvin, maybe this example is now worn out to the point where it won't find its right-sounding linguistic form for a little while. I am the one to blame, I've been too much focused on language. Beyond vocabulary, the parallel with the fingers typing on a computer makes me wonder about one thing. Fingers are not necessary, but only practical for using the computer interface. I could give the machine inputs in various alternative ways. On the contrary, in VR it’s intentional and crucial that there’s no alternative. The fingers are instrumental to the experience as such, not as the interchangeable tools they are for our computers, that live in relative harmony with the surrounding spectrum. Our computers fairly negotiate their place within the perceptual spectrum. VR doesn’t negotiate anything, it seeks to exterminate its surroundings. It’s the seclusion I referred to before, in which a schizophrenic threshold is passed (pathological as you called it), beyond which we become both abducted and the abductor. This inevitably sends me back to the idea of hunching on oneself, implosion, and dead end. Maybe I would spare this question for the dead end post: are these differences irrelevant in all respects?

In any case, even amidst these questions, the exchange is helping me look for continuity more than for differentiation, in the same line as Cleric's post on Levin. Thanks for the wealth of new supporting illustrations in this post. And I'm impressed by the sacrifice you're making and the composure it demonstrates. I can only hope I will attain some similar capability someday.

Federica,

Allow me to ask a few brief questions on this, and I understand if you would rather not continue much further on this topic. I sort of like it because VR is a new phenomena and therefore it forces us to test our principled understanding of spiritual evolution against a relatively unfamiliar manifestation of that evolution. Anyone can hold on to a bunch of principles, and many people do, but they only develop strength within us when they are tested.

1) Can you imagine a scenario in which VR technology develops further so that we can also feed it all necessary inputs in many different ways, perhaps by voice, without any hand controllers? Just as the computer started as some humongous set of clunky servers which took up an entire room and now nearly every person has one in their pocket or on their wrist, could a similar progression happen for VR?
(also, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have not yet tried VR?)

2) What is your feeling on the inner disposition argument I made previously, in relation to the mindset we must adopt to feel/think that there are some phenomena which, of themselves, pass a 'schizophrenic threshold'? What is the principle reason we could not adopt this same line of reasoning to say other phenomena have passed such thresholds, including other souls, who we feel/think are no longer 'negotiating their place within the perceptual spectrum'?

I will respond to the other part of the post separately.

[Cleric K]

That “the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self” is a completely unexpected statement, for me I am at the stage of searching for a sense of it and hoping to find some idea of distinction in that sense. Certainly not that I had found anything! Also, I don’t clearly recognize any thresholds. I only have a desire to extricate myself. And from there, I fumble. Maybe I would try to visualize my body as vividly as possible from an external viewpoint, following what it was doing earlier in the day. Crossing the street, it was raining, it looked sideways to check for coming bikes. Some thoughts were hovering over these frames - the ‘film’ gets captions.
This looking back is not the usual one of recalling a memory, which we form, bring to us, and attach to ourselves, as an increment to complement the unity of our identity. Here it’s about forming a clear enough visualization to detach from, and look at as part of a flow. It could be incorporated in the series of snapshots in Cleric’s quoted post, and could weld with the other constraints. But for me all this is only at the wish-stage. I guess I am demonstrating the lack of consciousness of the act you speak of.

Federica, I’ll offer you another analogy here. Attempts to detach from ourselves could be misleading.

The child of friends of mine, aged about three, like many children of our modern civilization, shows episodes of hyperactivity. It can hardly stay in one place. When they give it a pencil to sit down and draw something, it takes the pencil in a fist and begins hammering the sheet of paper on the table.

So there’s a child of will which is like a pressure cooker, barely capable of containing itself. If the child manages to sit still, the child of will becomes the foundation for another child – the child of imagination, which is capable of expressing something more spiritual through finer movements of the hands.

Here’s a key question. Where’s the hyperactive child of will while the child of imagination is quietly drawing? It’s still there! In a sense it continually sacrifices itself such that it can support the substrate through which the child of imagination can express. Yet even though we speak of two children, they are tightly connected. The child of will doesn’t try to detach from itself in order to find the other child. In a certain sense it has to go through itself even to a much greater degree than it is the case while it acts erratically.

It will be misleading if the child of will says “Now I have to make the effort to hold still for a while. This is very boring yet I must endure it until something begins to change. Then I’ll be back to my hammering, yet in a modified environment.” But as the child of imagination awakens, the child of will never returns back to hammering. Its standing still is not a temporary activity that has to be endured but goes ever deeper and deeper. Of course, the child eventually returns back to its will life but as a kind of rhythmic descent.

Today we’re in a similar situation in regards to the intellect. Our intellectual life is that hyperactive child that keeps hammering thought-images. When we engage in meditative concentration we try to sit still for a while. There’s another child of higher Imagination that can’t draw into the soul substance because of our constant hammering.

Now we have the same key question. Where’s the intellectual child when we’re in the Imaginative state? It is still there! Just as our will-being is still there and we keep it still, so we’re continually supporting the concentrated state of the intellectual child.

For how long should we support that concentration before the higher child begins to come to consciousness? This is a wrong way of posing the question. It secretly implies that we’re willing to endure a period of boredom, an act of concentration that we don’t really like but accept to suffer through, in exchange for something else that we expect. This attitude however, is not fruitful. It implies that we expect to resume our hammering on a different level and we see the concentration only as temporary means. In reality, the concentration never ends. It grows deeper and deeper, and deeper. The deeper it grows, the more conductive our state becomes to finer spiritual currents which are like the higher resolution texture of our spiritual being (the intellectual hammerings are only like crude Moiré patterns of that intuitive texture).

So this is the thing. When we start the meditation we don’t try to detach from ourselves but quite the opposite – we take hold of our intellectual force to an even greater degree than it is the case in everyday life. This poses an interesting question: “But if I flow myself even more in the intellectual force, how can I expect that at some point I’ll rise above it? Shouldn't I do this only up until a point and then say ‘OK, that’s enough, now it’s time to detach’”?

It indeed looks paradoxical. But we can gain relative insight by our analogy. It would be like the child of will saying “OK, I’ll stand still for a while but I can’t expect that I’ll rise above myself in that way. At some point I have to say ‘OK, that’s enough, it’s time to detach’”. Yet such detachment only splits us within ourselves. In actuality, the sitting still of the child goes further and further. The more the child of will sacrifices its erratic habits in the sitting still, the more the child of imagination awakens and utilizes the stillness. That latter child says “I’m still standing still. I never stopped doing that. In fact, I’m going through the standing still and going even further and further.”

It’s similar in meditation. There’s no point at which our intellect says “OK, enough boring concentration, time to detach from my regular self and picture myself becoming something else.” This however, we can never do. We can never produce the higher being in that way. We need to only continue supporting the concentration. If we find ourselves thinking “OK, I’m quite concentrated now, it’s time to look around” it should only remind us that we have to get back to concentrating. I remind of this toy metaphor. When we concentrate we gain altitude. We shouldn’t see this as some tool through which our “I” tries to achieve some personal goal. We should concentrate as if we’re done philosophizing. The ground school is over. Now we take all our intellectual hammering and focus it in a singularity. This singularity is not a temporary goal while on the back of our mind we expect something else to happen. The focusing in itself is the path towards the future state that we expect.

When we try to that our intellectual voice will quickly begin to dissuade us. It says “Wait, wait, wait… have you thought this through? Look at all those other things that have to be considered? Don’t you feel a little vulnerable by letting go of all this and investing yourself in a single thought?” These are the kind of solicitous hammerings that our intellect provides as if saying “It’s not the time, you’re missing something, you have to keep hammering.” In the act of focusing we try to act as a centrifuge that peels away such dissuading thoughts, while seeking the radiant center (even though the center is not something that we can point our finger at – it is that which is being obscured by the layers of hammering activity).

There’s a recurring archetype in mythology and fairytales, where one has to move in a certain direction but resist looking back. We have that also in the OT, for example with the story of Lot’s wife. So in that sense, we have to continue through our concentration going further and further, without turning back. When we do that, concentration is no longer boring. In fact people will find a million other reasons to stop the concentration but boredom won’t be one of them. Actually, one would break the concentration mainly because things become way too real, scarily real. Then one feels the need to look back and feel the firm support of intellectual hammering, saying “Oh, thank God, I’m still here”.

This doesn’t mean that we have to force ourselves. This is a gradual process. But at least we have to be clear before ourselves about the process. Through tiny experiences we gain courage and every time we go a little further. At some point we’ll realize we’re swimming without stepping on the seafloor. And our intellectual activity is still there, it’s still concentrating and supporting the stillness of the soul substance, in which finer currents are intuited.

[Federica]

To be clear, in VR the activity is not more 'spiritualized' because the body parts or instruments are different, but the instruments are (slightly) different and differently utilized because the activity is more spiritualized, through the natural spiritual evolutionary progression. It is the same reason why our fingers typing on a computer keyboard can give us access to reams of data in websites, videos, etc., which a person with only physical libraries would have to travel across the world for, and still then would only find a small portion of what's now available. The evolution of our spiritual activity has allowed for computer technology which unites the collective human intelligence in more spiritualized form, allowing for this more spiritualized expression of that activity, which can also feed back into further evolution of our activity IF approached with the deepened and purified intents. For ex., without the computer tech, none of the scaffolding Levin and his team developed would have been possible. If his intellect were to be 'tricked' into confronting its own living reality, and seeking out the high ideals, then all of that scaffolding would serve to greatly advance his spiritual evolution. Otherwise it will likely become more and more oppressive as a millstone around the neck, taking him only in the direction of more abstraction from living impulses and towards the infernal goals.

Ashvin, maybe this example is now worn out to the point where it won't find its right-sounding linguistic form for a little while. I am the one to blame, I've been too much focused on language. Beyond vocabulary, the parallel with the fingers typing on a computer makes me wonder about one thing. Fingers are not necessary, but only practical for using the computer interface. I could give the machine inputs in various alternative ways. On the contrary, in VR it’s intentional and crucial that there’s no alternative. The fingers are instrumental to the experience as such, not as the interchangeable tools they are for our computers, that live in relative harmony with the surrounding spectrum. Our computers fairly negotiate their place within the perceptual spectrum. VR doesn’t negotiate anything, it seeks to exterminate its surroundings. It’s the seclusion I referred to before, in which a schizophrenic threshold is passed (pathological as you called it), beyond which we become both abducted and the abductor. This inevitably sends me back to the idea of hunching on oneself, implosion, and dead end. Maybe I would spare this question for the dead end post: are these differences irrelevant in all respects?

In any case, even amidst these questions, the exchange is helping me look for continuity more than for differentiation, in the same line as Cleric's post on Levin. Thanks for the wealth of new supporting illustrations in this post. And I'm impressed by the sacrifice you're making and the composure it demonstrates. I can only hope I will attain some similar capability someday.

Federica,

Allow me to ask a few brief questions on this, and I understand if you would rather not continue much further on this topic. I sort of like it because VR is a new phenomena and therefore it forces us to test our principled understanding of spiritual evolution against a relatively unfamiliar manifestation of that evolution. Anyone can hold on to a bunch of principles, and many people do, but they only develop strength within us when they are tested.

1) Can you imagine a scenario in which VR technology develops further so that we can also feed it all necessary inputs in many different ways, perhaps by voice, without any hand controllers? Just as the computer started as some humongous set of clunky servers which took up an entire room and now nearly every person has one in their pocket or on their wrist, could a similar progression happen for VR?
(also, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have not yet tried VR?)

2) What is your feeling on the inner disposition argument I made previously, in relation to the mindset we must adopt to feel/think that there are some phenomena which, of themselves, pass a 'schizophrenic threshold'? What is the principle reason we could not adopt this same line of reasoning to say other phenomena have passed such thresholds, including other souls, who we feel/think are no longer 'negotiating their place within the perceptual spectrum'?

I will respond to the other part of the post separately.

Ashvin,

Sure, it's mainly that I'm wary of becoming tedious. Otherwise I would have no issue going on. My answers:

1) Absolutely, and that’s an example (steering the flow through voice rather than hand control) of how the technology will probably result in, and merge with, transhumanism. I never thought it was static. But what’s noticeable is, the experience it constitutes at this moment in time is constrained in the particular way I described - no alternatives. By contrast, at this same particular moment in time, I can continually choose how I interact with my computer. I have alternative constraints that mix in the sensorial spectrum in various ways. In VR, it’s crucial that there’s no such choice. It’s reductive, exclusive, seclusive.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have not yet tried VR?" It’s correct. I haven’t tried VR yet, but not because I’m strenuously resisting it. Last year it was even a question of possibly having it incorporated in my training/coaching work. A startup proposed that to me. In the end, for other reasons, it hasn’t happened, but I was open to exploring the possibility, because, even with my antipathy, I appreciate innovative pursuits and, also, I know that sooner or later it will happen in the industry. It is happening.

2) Are we back to splitting vocabulary then? It’s fine for me, especially if we can make a bonfire with all the splits Not sure what could be burned in it, but I got from your latest graph that fire is the most spiritualized element of the physical-mineral spectrum, whatever that might foreshadow that air cannot, in terms of scary upcoming technological evolutions.
So, to answer your question, by no means am I adopting a mindset in which phenomena do things by themselves! Which should be clear when I say that in VR we become both abducted, and the abductor. Previously I have worded that in various ways, for example by saying that - levels of spiritualization being supposed equal - what makes a difference is how and

how much [our spiritual activity] overlaps across levels of causality. And I feel it has big significance, at least while we have an alive physical body, that we make our thinking expansion proceed or not in such a way that it will overlap and press across levels of causality, down to the sensory, and make us descend or not descend in those experiences.

Also, if we are to play this game, your vocabulary seems to suggest that, in the unitary system that holds the causal levels together, you are writing off one direction in the two-way causal flow, when you state:

in VR the activity is not more 'spiritualized' because the body parts or instruments are different, but the instruments are (slightly) different and differently utilized because the activity is more spiritualized

This being said, I feel positively about the inner disposition of keeping in mind the usefulness of this exchange for our personal spiritual development. But how is this different from getting to grips with the phenomenon, provided that one strives for first person understanding? What am I missing in the inner disposition you suggest?

[Federica]

That “the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self” is a completely unexpected statement, for me I am at the stage of searching for a sense of it and hoping to find some idea of distinction in that sense. Certainly not that I had found anything! Also, I don’t clearly recognize any thresholds. I only have a desire to extricate myself. And from there, I fumble. Maybe I would try to visualize my body as vividly as possible from an external viewpoint, following what it was doing earlier in the day. Crossing the street, it was raining, it looked sideways to check for coming bikes. Some thoughts were hovering over these frames - the ‘film’ gets captions.
This looking back is not the usual one of recalling a memory, which we form, bring to us, and attach to ourselves, as an increment to complement the unity of our identity. Here it’s about forming a clear enough visualization to detach from, and look at as part of a flow. It could be incorporated in the series of snapshots in Cleric’s quoted post, and could weld with the other constraints. But for me all this is only at the wish-stage. I guess I am demonstrating the lack of consciousness of the act you speak of.

Federica, I’ll offer you another analogy here. Attempts to detach from ourselves could be misleading.

The child of friends of mine, aged about three, like many children of our modern civilization, shows episodes of hyperactivity. It can hardly stay in one place. When they give it a pencil to sit down and draw something, it takes the pencil in a fist and begins hammering the sheet of paper on the table.

So there’s a child of will which is like a pressure cooker, barely capable of containing itself. If the child manages to sit still, the child of will becomes the foundation for another child – the child of imagination, which is capable of expressing something more spiritual through finer movements of the hands.

Here’s a key question. Where’s the hyperactive child of will while the child of imagination is quietly drawing? It’s still there! In a sense it continually sacrifices itself such that it can support the substrate through which the child of imagination can express. Yet even though we speak of two children, they are tightly connected. The child of will doesn’t try to detach from itself in order to find the other child. In a certain sense it has to go through itself even to a much greater degree than it is the case while it acts erratically.

It will be misleading if the child of will says “Now I have to make the effort to hold still for a while. This is very boring yet I must endure it until something begins to change. Then I’ll be back to my hammering, yet in a modified environment.” But as the child of imagination awakens, the child of will never returns back to hammering. Its standing still is not a temporary activity that has to be endured but goes ever deeper and deeper. Of course, the child eventually returns back to its will life but as a kind of rhythmic descent.

Today we’re in a similar situation in regards to the intellect. Our intellectual life is that hyperactive child that keeps hammering thought-images. When we engage in meditative concentration we try to sit still for a while. There’s another child of higher Imagination that can’t draw into the soul substance because of our constant hammering.

Now we have the same key question. Where’s the intellectual child when we’re in the Imaginative state? It is still there! Just as our will-being is still there and we keep it still, so we’re continually supporting the concentrated state of the intellectual child.

For how long should we support that concentration before the higher child begins to come to consciousness? This is a wrong way of posing the question. It secretly implies that we’re willing to endure a period of boredom, an act of concentration that we don’t really like but accept to suffer through, in exchange for something else that we expect. This attitude however, is not fruitful. It implies that we expect to resume our hammering on a different level and we see the concentration only as temporary means. In reality, the concentration never ends. It grows deeper and deeper, and deeper. The deeper it grows, the more conductive our state becomes to finer spiritual currents which are like the higher resolution texture of our spiritual being (the intellectual hammerings are only like crude Moiré patterns of that intuitive texture).

So this is the thing. When we start the meditation we don’t try to detach from ourselves but quite the opposite – we take hold of our intellectual force to an even greater degree than it is the case in everyday life. This poses an interesting question: “But if I flow myself even more in the intellectual force, how can I expect that at some point I’ll rise above it? Shouldn't I do this only up until a point and then say ‘OK, that’s enough, now it’s time to detach’”?

It indeed looks paradoxical. But we can gain relative insight by our analogy. It would be like the child of will saying “OK, I’ll stand still for a while but I can’t expect that I’ll rise above myself in that way. At some point I have to say ‘OK, that’s enough, it’s time to detach’”. Yet such detachment only splits us within ourselves. In actuality, the sitting still of the child goes further and further. The more the child of will sacrifices its erratic habits in the sitting still, the more the child of imagination awakens and utilizes the stillness. That latter child says “I’m still standing still. I never stopped doing that. In fact, I’m going through the standing still and going even further and further.”

It’s similar in meditation. There’s no point at which our intellect says “OK, enough boring concentration, time to detach from my regular self and picture myself becoming something else.” This however, we can never do. We can never produce the higher being in that way. We need to only continue supporting the concentration. If we find ourselves thinking “OK, I’m quite concentrated now, it’s time to look around” it should only remind us that we have to get back to concentrating. I remind of this toy metaphor. When we concentrate we gain altitude. We shouldn’t see this as some tool through which our “I” tries to achieve some personal goal. We should concentrate as if we’re done philosophizing. The ground school is over. Now we take all our intellectual hammering and focus it in a singularity. This singularity is not a temporary goal while on the back of our mind we expect something else to happen. The focusing in itself is the path towards the future state that we expect.

When we try to that our intellectual voice will quickly begin to dissuade us. It says “Wait, wait, wait… have you thought this through? Look at all those other things that have to be considered? Don’t you feel a little vulnerable by letting go of all this and investing yourself in a single thought?” These are the kind of solicitous hammerings that our intellect provides as if saying “It’s not the time, you’re missing something, you have to keep hammering.” In the act of focusing we try to act as a centrifuge that peels away such dissuading thoughts, while seeking the radiant center (even though the center is not something that we can point our finger at – it is that which is being obscured by the layers of hammering activity).

There’s a recurring archetype in mythology and fairytales, where one has to move in a certain direction but resist looking back. We have that also in the OT, for example with the story of Lot’s wife. So in that sense, we have to continue through our concentration going further and further, without turning back. When we do that, concentration is no longer boring. In fact people will find a million other reasons to stop the concentration but boredom won’t be one of them. Actually, one would break the concentration mainly because things become way too real, scarily real. Then one feels the need to look back and feel the firm support of intellectual hammering, saying “Oh, thank God, I’m still here”.

This doesn’t mean that we have to force ourselves. This is a gradual process. But at least we have to be clear before ourselves about the process. Through tiny experiences we gain courage and every time we go a little further. At some point we’ll realize we’re swimming without stepping on the seafloor. And our intellectual activity is still there, it’s still concentrating and supporting the stillness of the soul substance, in which finer currents are intuited.

Thank you, Cleric, for this orientation! I admit I am tempted to make it a matter of language and say "Hey, I don't mean that anything is boring, I don't mean detaching from myself. I only mean gaining perspective from the heaviness of the conventional self." But I remember you gave me this same warning before:

As long as we see our concentration as an indirect activity which is supposed to lead us to some expected state, the meditation is not yet as it should be. At some point we have to approach the matters directly. It's like saying "I like to have things, to travel here and there and thus I need to get a job in which I'm otherwise not particularly interested". We're still divided as long as we see concentration as something boring which we need to get through in order to arrive at something more interesting.

and I remember your explanations on grounding, so I realize this must apply, even if I don't like that, months later, I am still stumbling on this same obstacle. I’ll try to make the most out of this chance. I only want to add:

Actually, one would break the concentration mainly because things become way too real, scarily real. Then one feels the need to look back and feel the firm support of intellectual hammering, saying “Oh, thank God, I’m still here”.

Yes! I definitely felt that fear. A fear of maybe not being able to come back. And I immediately looked back… (I don't rememeber at which occasion. I remember the fear, I don't remember the exact occasion).