Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[AshvinP]

Federica,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashvin,

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


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


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

Thanks, Federica, I think you are right about the breathing connection with the change of vowel-sounds. I wonder if this can be extracted to a more general principle. Generally, we speak of Logic as that force which weaves between our thought-forms and connects them into coherent constellations of meaning. So the vowel-sounds are thought-images and when we transition from one to another, it is that Logos force which gives it implicit meaning, i.e. continuity of consciousness. When this force is tied to our lower bodily nature, though, it's as if the sphere of connective capacity is limited within a personalized range of passions, emotions, preferences, interests, and thoughts. Our physical breathing is normally an expression of our lower astral (desire) nature. That connection served a critical purpose in ancient times, when a stronger impulse towards the Earthly sphere was needed to develop inner life and eventually the impulse towards thought-out freedom - "Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being."

But now this 'breath of life', which was the spiritual germ of what we now know as breathing, needs to also be redeemed through the purifying Ego-consciousness. The only other option is that we retrogress, gradually or quickly, to a spiritual condition before the inner thought-life could mature, and therefore more deeply into our animal nature. I think that aligns with your strategy of not trying to disconnect from breathing but to modulate it slowly. In Cleric's metaphor, you are gradually applying torque to this natural rhythm through your spiritual activity. 

In response to this demand there’s a strenuous, if not rash and petulant effort to pull men up out of their immersion in the sensuous, the commonplace, and the personal and to direct their gaze to the stars—as though they’d forgotten all about the divine and had reached the point of contenting themselves, like worms, with dirt and water. In times past they had a heaven provisioned with vast stores of ideas and imagery. The meaning of everything hung by the thread of light that linked it to that heaven. Their vision, rather than keeping within the present, went further, following this luminous thread up to the divine being—to, as one might say, a present that lies “beyond.” The eye of spirit had to be turned and held to the mundane forcibly; and it has taken a long time for the clarity once afforded only by the celestial to penetrate the tangled and turbid intricacies in which one’s sense of the here-and-now had become mired, and to make attentiveness to the present as such, that is, what was called “experience,” interesting and worthwhile. Nowadays there seems to be need of just the opposite: one’s sensibility is so rooted in the mundane that an equivalent force is needed to extricate it. Spirit appears so destitute that, like a wanderer in the desert thirsting for a simple drink of water, it seems to be yearning after the barest feeling of something divine to revitalize it. By what thus satisfies it we can gauge the magnitude of its loss.

So the lower astral nature, through the breathing process, grabs hold of our imaginative stream and keeps it circling about infernal loops of familiar meaning, perhaps unbeknownst to us. Of course the materialist would scorn at such a connection made between bodily processes and soul-forces, but it only stands to reason, from the spiritual-idealist perspective, that inner subconscious soul-forces are expressed through inner subconscious bodily processes (for the average person's consciousness).





As a really simple analogy, we could compare that process to a city underground metro.  We take a ride on our passions, our sympathies and preferences, our conditioned habits of thinking, our rigid concepts, moving from one preordained stop to the next. We could have the illusion that we are making great strides into the depths of Cosmic meaning, but really we are moving to the end of the line and then back again, all within our personalized horizontal plane of meaning with many cross-conflicting impulses beneath the surface of our consciousness. The modern mystic who seeks a complete synchronization of spiritual activity with natural rhythms such as the breathing process, which are now 'diseased' rhythms as Cleric pointed out, does not realize his imaginative activity is thereby still entrained by the lower astral nature. What he experiences as imaginations are mostly emanating from personal processes within the depths of his own bodily organism rather than the Cosmic spheres.

Still less can this so easily satisfied mentality, dispensing as it does with science, make any claim that such murk and ferment is somehow superior to science. This manner of prophetic utterance, intent upon dwelling right at the core and in the deep, views definiteness (the horos) with contempt, and deliberately avoids conception and the workings of necessity as being concerned with reflection rooted merely in finitude. But just as there’s an airy breadth, so too is there a vacant depth; just as there’s an attenuatedness in which substance gushes forth into endless multiplicity without having the power to hold it all together, so is there a contentless intensity which, sustaining itself as sheer force without scope, is nothing but superficiality. The power of spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to extend and expend itself in disclosing what it is. And so, when a noncohesive, substance-bound mode of knowledge like the above claims to have submerged in the divine being what’s idiosyncratic to the self and imagines that in so doing it is philosophizing in a true and holy manner, it keeps from itself the fact that, by thus scorning measure and specificity, it doesn’t devote itself to God, but only betrays the arbitrariness of its content even as it ascribes to God what’s merely its own caprice. When its advocates abandon themselves thus to the teeming ferment of substance, they imagine that by engulfing their self-consciousness and forsaking their understanding they become God’s very own, to whom he gives wisdom in sleep, which is why what they in fact conceive and bring forth in their slumber are indeed dreams.

It's interesting how that inner disposition also projects into the outward mystical approach to philosophy-spirituality. "But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first." The further one ascends with spiritual activity before resting comfortably due to idolatry, i.e. mistaking their current state of being and world-conception as an end-in-itself (until death), the steeper there is to fall. The materialist intellectual who starts his idolatry right out the gate, in the realm of sense-perceptions, gets stuck for the time being, but continues to amass outer knowledge which can be made inner knowledge with an inspired effort. Whereas the mystical or fundamentalist intellectual has forsaken all forms of scientific knowledge and thereby prevents himself from even the ancillary benefits of his ongoing spiritual activity.

With regard to the description and comprehension of Nature, those older times were permeated with what comes from the whole man. To-day it is head-knowledge. Therefore on the one side it is abstract, dry, and does not fill a man's whole life to the end, yet on the other side it is very spiritual. This dual nature is really present, so that we actually do engender what is most spiritual; for these abstract ideas are the most spiritual that can be, yet they are incapable of grasping the Spirit. It is astonishingly easy to perceive the cleavage in which man is involved through the spiritual ideas he has developed. It is precisely in them that he has become so remarkably materialistic. When these ideas come in the right way, however, materialism never arises from them. The simple existence of abstract ideas is the first refutation of materialism. In this duality we live. We have been tremendously intellectualised for four centuries, and in this spiritual, which we only possess in the abstract, we must find again the living spiritual. We have risen to objective concepts; we must get back to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We have cast aside what has been handed down to us of old primeval wisdom in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We must now recover it, after having so wholly discarded the richness of the knowledge of man's whole being. This is a truth which will fill us with a sense of the seriousness of Spiritual Science.

[Cleric K]

I would like to add few words about the slower and faster rhythms. Slower and faster are relative qualities and thus we always need to be aware from what position we’re forming our thoughts. Otherwise we may easily imagine that the more we encompass the higher order Cosmic rhythms, which from our human perspective seem excruciatingly slow, the more our existence becomes boringly sluggish. This of course, is not the case but at the same time it’s not that easy to show what the case is. To grasp this we need to make our way all the way to Intuitive cognition. Here’s one attempt.

To get into a position where we can address this topic we need to undress the layers of our soul life – our sensory perceptions, intellectual thinking, attraction and repulsion of feelings. If modern man is to do this in meditation, there’ll be practically nothing left from our familiar conscious life. This is a state similar to the deepest dreamless sleep. Yet if we have worked to unite with the “I am” impulse, something remains in that state – the consciousness of willful becoming through time. Without uniting with this will, we can only remember that some duration of time has been experienced but with no continuity of our self-consciousness.

Let’s try to approach this through a mathematical example. We see a triangular form. It impresses as perception and evokes certain intuition – that of ‘triangle’. Then we can turn away from the perceptions and summon a memory image of the triangle. Now we’re doing elementary geometry, our geometric intuition is being expressed into a thought-image of our own making. Here we already have something analogous to Imaginative cognition. The difference is that we’re expressing intuition that is frozen. It is as a fixed standing wave in an ideal world. Mathematical intuition is timeless. It consists of timeless relations. They have temporal character only insofar as we need to serialize these relations in thoughts. For example, when we think of the natural numbers, they are not subject to time. We need time to count through them but their relations are something timeless. Two is always between one and three – this is an eternal relation. This has nothing to do with Platonism. There’s no need to fantasize mathematical intuition as some exotic metaphysical realm. It is a simple fact of experience – when we move through mathematical ideas we simply experience their timeless relations in the meaning of our thoughts. Because of this frozen nature of mathematical intuition, when we’re thinking math we’re always alone. It is as if we walk through a frosty kingdom and any movement that we sense can only be our own, reflected in the ice crystals. The difference with Imagination in the wider sense is that in the latter we no longer feel alone. The reflections in our imaginative pictures are not only of our own movement but also of a kingdom teeming with life. It is as if we’re expressing in images intuitive life that continually changes underneath us on its own accord.

The next step is to turn attention to what we’re doing when we think the mathematical thought-images. For example, if we take the triangle, we can try to visualize it as if we trace its edges with our ray of imagination, as if it is the tip of a pencil. When we become familiar with this activity we can try to disregard the imaginative element and focus entirely on the experience of how we will our thinking gestures. It’s no longer about how our thinking gestures are perceived in imagination but how it feels to be the active force that propels them. This gives us a hint about Inspirative cognition, where we live not in images of the living kingdom but in the interference of thinking gestures that impresses in the images.

Finally, we need to relinquish even our thinking gesticulation and remain in the pure intuitive meaning of the triangle. This is exceedingly difficult to do without practice but in the end, the idea of triangle becomes the intuitive form of our “I”. We always live in such intuitions. They are present all the time as our intuitive background, as the meaningful context which gives us the feeling that our reality ‘makes sense’ and that we have a certain sense of orientation within it. To reach Intuitive cognition is to live entirely within this intuitive context, which is identical to our sense of what we are as a spiritual being. So when we think ‘triangle’, this is normally convoluted in several layers of inner life – the perception, the image, the thinking gesture – yet our sense of being is actually identical with the intuition of a triangle that we currently think.

When we live in Intuitive cognition, we are not focused on images, there’s no movement of thoughts, no pushes and pulls of sympathies and antipathies, but only the intuitive awareness of our being’s becoming. Someone may imagine that what is thus described is identical to the mystic’s pure awareness but there’s one great difference – the latter lacks the awareness of being one with the intuitive intent that metamorphoses the state. Without this, such a state is felt to border on the absolute nothingness, where all existence sinks into oblivion. Only through the union with the “I am” force, we can exist in that nothingness because through that force the intuition of our existence is being continually recreated as a fiery phoenix.

This continual becoming not only metamorphoses our intuitive sense of being but it does so in a way that feels as a process in time. As it has been spoken many times, this is connected with the mystery of memory. Memory not as some data storage mechanism but as growing intuition (Gestalt) which integrates within itself the intuitions of the previous states.

In this state of Intuitive cognition we live in a purely spiritual state. Remember: perceptions, thought gestures, sympathies and antipathies have all been relinquished. We find ourselves in a realm of pure intuitive existence, as if we live in a mathematical realm metamorphosing through the lawful relations of different states of intuition, where these intuitions are identical with our sense of being. In our ordinary life our intuitive context holds the implicit meaning of “I’m a person living on Earth, doing this, going there, having such and such interests” and so on. This is what gives us our sense of being. In Intuitive cognition all the layers of our soul life are stripped and we feel as pure being identical with the intuitive content of its awareness, metamorphosing through different states of being. Yet these metamorphoses are lawful. Allegorically speaking, if our sense of being within this mathematical intuitive realm is “1” it can transform into “2” and only then to “3”. Of course, this sounds impossibly abstract – how can a number be felt as a sense of being? With our abstract thinking habits it is indeed impossible so let’s try to approach this more gradually.

Let’s ignore for a while what the exact intuitive content of a given state of being is. The general situation is that we can think of our being as existing in pure time. The metamorphoses of our intuitive states in a purely mathematical (spiritual) existence, is really all there is. We can look upon these states as moments of existence. Here we come to a fundamental secret. As said, we not only metamorphose through these intuitive states but they also integrate the previous. Otherwise we would simply go through eternal momentary change without any intuition of existing through time. So if we move through states “1”, “2”, “3” and so on, we would never feel as a being having continuity through time. But if we go through something like “1”, “1+2”, “1+2+3” then every state contains the intuition of the previous and we feel as we have gone through them, they are now embedded in our present intuition as memory. These moments of existence (not necessarily only past) that we feel to have integrated within our present, are what archetypally corresponds to space. There’s no space in the traditional sense in the mathematical world. Space-like is our intuition of the moments of existence that we can grasp simultaneously. This is true even for our ordinary life. We can grasp time as simultaneous space-like images – photos from our life, the time axis of a graph, a calendar on the wall and so on. Yet we’re also continually metamorphosing, we feel there are moments of existence that haven’t yet integrated as space. We can present this in the following way:



In the above image, the moments of existence that are yet to come are spread out in large future arcs, while these already experienced contract and become more and more space-like points. A succession of few notes of a song, even though experienced as several moments of existence, can be grasped in hindsight as a simultaneous whole. Similarly, a word is something experienced as a sequence of moments of sound, yet in our intuition we grasp it as something whole, as a point-like concept. On the other hand, we feel the notes to be somewhere along the composition of the whole song or the word to be somewhere along the story. These spread out moments of existence we don’t yet grasp as something that can be encompassed as space.

Now we come to something very peculiar. Look again at the above animation. The states that we go through there are fully self-similar. For any given state above, we’re experiencing certain intuition encompassing infinite past moments coiled as space. If we then transition to any other state along the spiral, we end up in a state with an intuitive sense of being completely indistinguishable from the previous. We’re always midway between two infinities. So not only the past states are identical to the present but also the present is identical to any future. There’s absolute symmetry. There’s no left, right, up, down, slower, faster. Like in the symmetries in physics, so here, translation, rotation, zooming, leaves us in indistinguishable state.

Here we should be very careful because practice on the forum shows that people don’t try to grasp this with the needed depth. One habitually says “What a boring existence, metamorphosing through identical states endlessly.” But such an objection secretly reserves for itself a completely separate flow of being for which the transitions between the self-similar states are seen only as changes in perceptual contents. It is completely taken for granted that this separate flow has its own independent integration of intuition (memory) which allows it to know that it spends more and more time moving through self-similar phenomenological states and gets more and more bored. This separate intuitive flow lies entirely in the blind spot. To understand what we’re here describing we should conceive that the states above symbolize the full intuitive experience.

Obviously, such a perfectly self-similar state can be conceived only asymptotically. It is clear that it’s impossible to have consciousness of flow of being in this way. So we take that image above only as a symbol for the eternal. Yet even though abstractly conceived, the ‘gravity’ of this state can be felt in Intuitive cognition. The more we approach it, the more we intuit reality as an infinite spectrum of moments of existence. This intuition is beautifully preserved in the Indra's net image. Of course, in our age this intuition is enriched with the “I am” impulse. Now the net is not only a crystal lattice of frozen states of being but the beings continually will their becoming and thus go through evolutionary integration.

Time begins for a being when it awakens within a state where intuition integrates as memory. The details of the evolutionary process would require a whole book on spiritual science to be reproduced here so let’s only look at a few characteristic moments.

Temporal existence can be pictured as broken symmetry of the eternal state.



It is as if moments of existence are delaminated from eternity (represented by the background fractal) and form new kinds of unities that can be experienced as temporal integration of intuition. They may start as some distinct unity but gradually and rhythmically evolve towards states where they integrate more and more moments of existence, thus they evolve towards the eternal. Now these evolving states are like relative perspectives within eternity, different worldlines that all converge at infinity. Even though we speak of these states abstractly, they can’t be observed from some third-person vantage point but only through that of a first-person intuitive perspective.

Here we don’t have any space in our Earthly sense. It’s all a purely spiritual existence, a world of mathematical intuition. Time cannot be measured by anything perceptual either. Of all the forms of cognition, only the Intuitive is possible. All that is known is the integrative intuition of being within complicated ideal relations. These relations are not external but entirely within the intuitive lawfulness of the metamorphoses. For example, if we metamorphose from intuitive sense of being “1” towards “2”, an activity of another being is not something that presses from the outside but something that is found to be active in the intuitive topology, for example, an intermediate state “1.5” interjects on our way to “2”, as if suggested by another spiritual being. It is difficult for our ordinary conscious habits but we should try to conceive that we don’t look at that environment, we don’t have hands to touch it, we don’t think about it, we don’t have desires for it. All we have is our intuitive sense of being, which transforms, in the same way our ordinary intuitive state transforms as we count from “1” to “2”. Our intuition of a spiritual (mathematical) environment is present only as far as we have intuitive orientation within the states possible in that environment and how other willed intents modulate it. Time is not some external force that drags us along but the collectively shaped ideal landscape through which our state of being integrates.

Our integrating intuition of moments of existence (not only past but also potential future), begins to form the mentioned archetypal sense of space. Just like the moments of the clock above exist at different scales, so here these moments are grasped at different temporal scales, we might say – different ‘frequencies’. This makes our archetypal sense of space to feel as a kind of spectrum. Different ‘bands’ of this spectrum encompass different kinds of relations between moments of existence (that can belong to other beings). Even at this stage we can already distinguish that these form the archetypal beginnings of what we call on a quite different level, color, sound, smell, taste and so on. Of course, at that stage there’s nothing to be seen, nothing to be touched or smelled. These qualities are only the archetypal space-like reflections of purely ideal relations of beings. It is as if in our evolving state, a space-like image of time is being integrated.

Another eon of existence commences with another act of delamination. The previous eon is one of purely ideal existence. There’s no life, no nutrition, no personal life of desires. It’s a mirror of  intuitive ideal existence. Now this new delamination further differentiates our intuitive life. In certain sense, everything that has been going on before, continues also now but through this differentiation a kind of indirection is introduced. Previously, our space-like aspect was a perfect mirror of time, while now our metamorphoses through time are one degree removed from that mirror, so to speak. It is almost as if there’s a certain leeway between our space-like mirror and our present intuitive activity, much like a double pendulum becomes more difficult to control.



Now it is as if we have to more indirectly transform the space-like aspect of our state. As a simple example, if previously we had to morph between a state of a circle and a triangle, we could simply will that transformation. Now however, we have to will that in more roundabout ways. Our intuition of a circle has a more independent existence, we have to lead it in contact with other forces that can interact with it and straighten the arcs into triangle edges, so to speak.



What we really have to intuitively grasp here is that in the previous eon the space-like spectrum simply reflects ideal relations of moments of existence. Now these reflections become more opaque, so to speak, more inert. In a very simplified analogy, imagine how we can jump in our mathematical thinking from one number to any other, for example, we can go from “2” to “7”. Now imagine that for whatever reason our thinking becomes constrained and we’re now capable of changing our number state only by moving forward by three of moving backward by two. Then to get to “7” we can go forward in threes: 2 -> 5 -> 8 -> 11 and then backward in twos: 11 -> 9 -> 7. This is a very elementary analogy but it can help us gain some intuition of the way the perceptual spectrum becomes more elusive and we can work upon it only in more constrained ways.

What was thus described can be understood as the beginning of archetypal life. This is the archetypal nature of growth and reproduction. We should feel how this more convoluted form of existence provides us with the possibility to experience new intuitive configurations, even though at the expense of greater constraints of our spiritual activity. If we grasp this polar relation, we’ll have intuition of the most important key for understanding the nature of our present human stage. The whole secret lies in the way spiritual activity is differentiated from its environment and enters more convoluted relations with it. It can no longer morph the images as immediate reflections of ideal becoming but the images rigidify, they are now reflections of the activity of certain spiritual beings. If we want to partake in the transformations of these images, it can only be done in harmony with the beings that reflect in them, thus there is a certain lawfulness that we need to abide by.

Why would the intuitive spirit constrain itself in such a way? Why renounce the possibility to exist in a purely spiritual existence, as if in a mathematical realm where we metamorphose through ideal states? Because these more limited states allow the spiritual world to be objectified. The spirit can explore an infinite variety of worlds that can be experienced from within their constraints. Each such delamination results into a more convoluted form of existence and corresponding new forms of consciousness. From our present perspective, the form of consciousness which allows us to experience the spirit weaving in the life forces, is known as Inspirative cognition.

A third eon consists in yet another delamination where spiritual activity becomes further differentiated from both the space-like spectrum and the life forces. This leads to even more convoluted relations between the layers (think of a triple pendulum). Now a kind of inner soul life begins to form within these layers. The whole spiritual environment impresses itself as images in these layers and our intuitive activity lives in them as within inner representations of the spiritual world. The space-like world of color, sound and so on, is to a much lesser degree seen as the intuition of integrated moments of existence but become more like the inner soul dashboard within which indirectly the ideal processes are represented. In the previous two eons existence is still spread out in the environment, the intuitive state doesn’t feel as an enclosed being. Now this inner vision leads to ensouled existence. At this point the idea of physical world is not yet possible. A being at that level of consciousness is intuitively aware that it exists as a spiritual being, yet cognizes its environment as far as it forms intuitions about the images impressed in the soul substance. The being doesn’t mistake these impressions for realities in themselves but uses them to indirectly form intuition of its ideal environment. From our human perspective this stage can be investigated through Imaginative consciousness.

Finally we arrive at a fourth eon, where through another delamination, thought-images are lifted from the soul substance and intuitive activity recognizes itself in their movements. As we can see, every delamination leads to growing complexity (as if we add more segments to the pendulum). The original space-like spectrum becomes more and more complicated and as a result it cannot be transformed that easily. If we picture the time hierarchy of moments in the highly spiritual states as a cascade of cogwheels, then in the more convoluted states these moments become more and more difficult to harmonize. It is as if spiritual ‘bureaucracy’ emerges where every transformation of the state has to pass through tedious adjustments on all levels that aim to support the overall holism of the spectrum. All in all, this decoheres the more fluidic ways in which intuitive activity can reflect itself in the environment and instead, all activity has to painstakingly go through the complicated constraints that have rigidified at all levels.



If we grasp this, then we’ll have a true understanding of the nature of the physical world and why the ancients called it Maya. Our state is and has always been one of spiritual existence. It is only that through the increased convolutions of spiritual activity, a highly complex ‘bureaucracy’ decoheres. If there is to be continuity of consciousness, the progression of states can only go in a certain way. This doesn’t mean that the rigid ‘bureaucracy’ revealed in the sensory spectrum is an illusion. All sensory phenomena reflect the real convoluted relations of ideal beings, that increasingly constrain one another. Biological life manifests as the ‘mechanization’ of more spiritual states begin as they decohere in the increasing complexity. It is a means to preserve the hierarchical gradient of being within these complicated relations that constantly threaten to dissolve into chaos.

The reason we had to go through all this, is in order to understand that simply bigger, smaller, faster, slower, in respect to space and time as we intuit them in our human consciousness, is really a several times convoluted image of purely ideal existence, where all there is, is metamorphosis of intuitive moments of existence through time and their space-like integration.

[Federica]

Thank you Cleric, the advice you offer is not only logically, intuitively, and practically helpful but also, as Ashvin said, inspiring and reassuring. The illustration of the time rhythms has taken some effort to integrate, hence this delayed comment.
(Note: I see now a related post just above this one. I have not yet read it)

So [the body] is much more an environment within which our spiritual activity finds the reflections of its existence.

Yes, this has evolved for me. I don’t feel 100% scratched in the body anymore, I realize the meaning of “body as an environment”. I had this realization before, however, reading this now makes it more clear. I believe an accessible opportunity to ponder this slightly loosened perspective on the physical body is at the occasion of travel, when the means of transport puts us beyond the limit of our abilities to make sense, in continuous way, of what the travel means for the physical body. Air travel is the obvious example, as it’s impossible to follow the unfolding of the journey in continuous way, from a merely physical perspective.
Of course we can make sense of our flight symbolically, by imagining ourselves at the end destination (as we would do in a fictitious travel). Consciousness can grasp “the continuity and lawfulness of the spatial world” but that would not be a continuous experience from the perspective of our barely physical bodily environment. What I mean is this: when traveling by car, or even train, we are usually still able to follow up our journey as if our body was doing it. We could translate the ride into its implications at the scale of the body, if we had to walk, or jog the distance, for example. The distance remains commensurable with what our body could theoretically perform within its space-time bound degrees of freedom, and we get a tangible and reliable sense of how much distance we have covered, using the reference of our unit of measure for sensory experience, our body. So we fill our spatio-temporal account with these values. On the contrary, traveling by plane, and even if I can look continuously through the window, this is not possible anymore. The speed of the aircraft, and the separation from the Earth, make for an unbridgeable discontinuity in the sense of physical existence in space-time. The body has been taken beyond the limits of its physically apprehendable context and is unable to fully make sense of what’s going on for it experientially, instinctually. Only thinking can bridge that gap. In this sense it seems to me, that’s a particularly favorable moment to realize our body as environment for our thinking activities, rather than “who we are”. In a way, from the viewpoint of consciousness, the place where the body happens to move or find itself is an epiphenomenon, while it’s the I-complex that keeps the whole experience cohesive and unitary.

We can take the finding of the weightless point as finding our center in space. It’s important to realize that at this spot our invisible vantage point and our point of focus merge. Because of our sensory habits, when we think spatially we feel ourselves to be at a certain point and looking at another point. A camera is the common analogy. So we have two different cases when we seek the weightless point. In one case we feel that we look at the thought-image in the point in the head, yet our ‘camera’ is slightly behind. The other case is when we feel our vantage point to be at the point but we look at a thought-image that we feel to be at a distance in space.

That’s helpful! My case is the second one, and I know now how I have to work, to bring the point of focus progressively closer to the “camera”. Another analogy that comes to mind for kinesthetic awareness is the gesture of serving, for instance in volleyball or tennis: in the exact moment the player hits the ball to initiate the game, there is no looking at it. The eyes need to look ahead. The ball is looked at just before, in a sort of concentration effort, to ‘infuse’ it with the projected trajectory, but the moment the energy is imparted happens in kinesthetic awareness. It makes me think that, in that gesture, the player executes a small but real loosening of the space-time constraint. The whole gesture is like becoming more comfortable, more active in the direct experience of space-time, because the spatial constraint is reduced (I don’t give in to the spatial imperative, I loosen it with kinesthetic awareness) and that small degree of freedom is used to peek into the future and press the desired, visualized outcome in the future, se that it gets expressed as reality. Maybe that’s simply a definition of an act of will, as an untying of the space-time flow.

Now the thought-image is no longer something that we keep at safe distance but feels as it has become our environment, as if we’re clothed in a thought-body.

So when thought-image and camera merge, the eyes disengage but also the quality of seeing changes, from one that is bound to mental space, to a spaceless one, where the thought-image is not our personal production anymore, that lives within the context of our drawing rules and actions. Instead it’s recognized as an environment. This fully answers a question that I have been struggling with for a while: “What is the exact nature of the visualization of the thought-image? How to exactly recognize that it is it? Could it be that I am just wishing I am seeing it, but it’s not granular enough? Could it be that I’m only thinking about seeing rather than really seeing?” Now I feel I have the answer. That was really precise guidance… (and I had actually not fully understood the law of shrinking before). Thank you!!

This is probably most easy to approach by taking a simple geometric form, like a cube or a sphere. It might be easier if we first imagine it to be larger than us, as if we’re in the center of a room. Instead of imagining it visually we can trace its edges with our imaginary fingers. In this way we get a kinesthetic feeling for the cubic shape (something like an afterglow of the kinesthetic feel of our imaginary hands). Then we can shrink that mental kinesthetic feeling towards the head region. At some point it will feel as if it becomes smaller than us.

I see this as a smart way to teach our intentions how to tame the space velleity. We will not tame it until objectification is maintained, because that’s exactly the problem that keeps the spatial principle in charge. By surrendering to our own ‘creation’ first (the cube is bigger than us, it is our spatial environment) we give ourselves some more leverage to come to realize it as our spiritual environment.

The face and eyes should be completely relaxed, we’re not ‘looking’ but experiencing the shape of our imagination. In certain sense the cube should disappear. If we feel as if we perceive it, then it means we're 'here' the cube is 'there' – there's polarization. The whole goal is to find the point where our thinking gestures are tightly clothed in the imaginative ‘substance’

I realize the cube has to work as a placeholder or symbol for our ‘environmental’ intentions, until it dissolves into an ideal canvas. I am not there

This rushing with our inner activity through time is what Federica spoke about when she came to the forum. Then she was trying to get a sense of the pure experience, untainted by the wild oscillations of the thinking/memory arrows. However, if we go in depth, we realize that this doesn’t eliminate the fact that we’re still going through life with certain rotations.

Yes, I had heard “Past and future only exist in our thoughts, not as a reality” and I was intrigued, I couldn’t articulate any good objection to such flattened understanding. So I was searching for reality in experience, as opposed to in thoughts about past or future, which inevitably meant searching for reality in space and multiplicity. When the attempt to grasp our place in the context of reality is tackled from the wrong edge, a chain of mental pitfalls is inevitably triggered. True, the impossibility to subtract ourselves from the supposedly illusory rotations that give our life indispensable orientation should have set off the alarm bells, but I was inclined to label those rhythms as illusions. One reason to keep them up and running was the noticeable improvement I experienced in terms of developing a sense of peaceful acceptance and gratitude for life.
I could see that focusing on the rhythms of the sensory spectrum meant an exclusion of all other inevitable rhythms, but I was hoping that this focus would eventually work as a gate to come to experience some further level of understanding. I lacked much context and orientation to be able to recognize there was no gate, or breakthrough to expect, but only a narrowing of perspective, and eventually a standstill.

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

Here I gather that rotational tension arises when we try to rush, or slow down, the time rhythms as if they rotated in isolation from each other. When we don’t have an eye for the nested quality of time, we try to extricate ourselves one rotation at a time, but in fact we are disbanding our experience of the clock, putting it even more out of sync. Deconstructed acts of will won't add degrees of freedom.

we have to protect ourselves from the anticipation of ‘seeing’ something any moment now. This is another kind of torque that loads the springs. Actual ‘seeing’ begins precisely when we find ourselves gently placed within temporal intuition.

I would have thought that such anticipation, like a visualization in space, is a way to will the act of seeing, just like when our torso wants to rush ahead, I would have seen it as the way our willed intention tells the whole body it has to come up to speed. As I understand it now, our will should focus on relaxing the torque first, in order to let our embedded place in the TC-spectrum emerge as it naturally is first, in all its interconnectedness. We need to fill the abstract durational time units with the experiential content of our life-rhythms, and let these rhythms become the new units of measure of our sense of time. This process is also a shrinking, to the extent that we accept the collective influences, good and bad, that might lie behind the twists and turns of our natural clock. Once we have made this first person time context of our existence - no matter how disharmonious - the conscious framework of reference of our life, we can start using our willed spiritual activity to try to change gears, and make room within the time flow for our new moral intuitions, attuned to the Cosmic rotations. That would require using the clutch, and maybe seeing the springs like a help to smooth out the torque and to refine the angles of our small contributions (as per the first post in this thread) rather than like a constraint.

[Federica]

Thanks, Federica, I think you are right about the breathing connection with the change of vowel-sounds. I wonder if this can be extracted to a more general principle. Generally, we speak of Logic as that force which weaves between our thought-forms and connects them into coherent constellations of meaning. So the vowel-sounds are thought-images and when we transition from one to another, it is that Logos force which gives it implicit meaning, i.e. continuity of consciousness. When this force is tied to our lower bodily nature, though, it's as if the sphere of connective capacity is limited within a personalized range of passions, emotions, preferences, interests, and thoughts. Our physical breathing is normally an expression of our lower astral (desire) nature. That connection served a critical purpose in ancient times, when a stronger impulse towards the Earthly sphere was needed to develop inner life and eventually the impulse towards thought-out freedom - "Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being."

But now this 'breath of life', which was the spiritual germ of what we now know as breathing, needs to also be redeemed through the purifying Ego-consciousness. The only other option is that we retrogress, gradually or quickly, to a spiritual condition before the inner thought-life could mature, and therefore more deeply into our animal nature. I think that aligns with your strategy of not trying to disconnect from breathing but to modulate it slowly. In Cleric's metaphor, you are gradually applying torque to this natural rhythm through your spiritual activity. 

In response to this demand there’s a strenuous, if not rash and petulant effort to pull men up out of their immersion in the sensuous, the commonplace, and the personal and to direct their gaze to the stars—as though they’d forgotten all about the divine and had reached the point of contenting themselves, like worms, with dirt and water. In times past they had a heaven provisioned with vast stores of ideas and imagery. The meaning of everything hung by the thread of light that linked it to that heaven. Their vision, rather than keeping within the present, went further, following this luminous thread up to the divine being—to, as one might say, a present that lies “beyond.” The eye of spirit had to be turned and held to the mundane forcibly; and it has taken a long time for the clarity once afforded only by the celestial to penetrate the tangled and turbid intricacies in which one’s sense of the here-and-now had become mired, and to make attentiveness to the present as such, that is, what was called “experience,” interesting and worthwhile. Nowadays there seems to be need of just the opposite: one’s sensibility is so rooted in the mundane that an equivalent force is needed to extricate it. Spirit appears so destitute that, like a wanderer in the desert thirsting for a simple drink of water, it seems to be yearning after the barest feeling of something divine to revitalize it. By what thus satisfies it we can gauge the magnitude of its loss.

So the lower astral nature, through the breathing process, grabs hold of our imaginative stream and keeps it circling about infernal loops of familiar meaning, perhaps unbeknownst to us. Of course the materialist would scorn at such a connection made between bodily processes and soul-forces, but it only stands to reason, from the spiritual-idealist perspective, that inner subconscious soul-forces are expressed through inner subconscious bodily processes (for the average person's consciousness).

Very clear explanation of the issue with breathing, Ashvin, thank you, including the perfect quotes!
Regarding the torque applied through clearly separating the vowel rotations from the breaths’: in Cleric’s metaphor, that type of torque should be intentional, coming after one’s natural clock setup has been made conscious, but in my case I’m not there, so I got lucky one more time
The reason why I do the exercise that way is not that I try to apply torque, but basically it's my… antipathy (yes) for the out-loud version of the exercise, where breath is the dominant rotation and the vowels have no choice but to fit in. I never do that one, and I dislike it, so in the mute version I wanted to clearly go the opposite direction, reversing the 'power relation' and neutralizing the breath by design, by forcing it to fit in.

As a really simple analogy, we could compare that process to a city underground metro.  We take a ride on our passions, our sympathies and preferences, our conditioned habits of thinking, our rigid concepts, moving from one preordained stop to the next. We could have the illusion that we are making great strides into the depths of Cosmic meaning, but really we are moving to the end of the line and then back again, all within our personalized horizontal plane of meaning with many cross-conflicting impulses beneath the surface of our consciousness. The modern mystic who seeks a complete synchronization of spiritual activity with natural rhythms such as the breathing process, which are now 'diseased' rhythms as Cleric pointed out, does not realize his imaginative activity is thereby still entrained by the lower astral nature. What he experiences as imaginations are mostly emanating from personal processes within the depths of his own bodily organism rather than the Cosmic spheres.

That’s intriguing - in one of my draft posts to Wayfarer, I used pretty much this same metaphor you are using here, to comment on his “explanatory frameworks” (you were reasoning within an “esoteric” framework, and Cleric within a “depth meditation” framework). I wanted to illustrate the rigid grids of intellectual, categorizing thinking. In my metaphor, rather than the underground metro, I had various networks of roads on a territory and various GPS options, as opposed to free roaming on the same landscape. Then I limited my reply to only one point, so the illustration didn’t make it to the thread, but it was basically the same!

Still less can this so easily satisfied mentality, dispensing as it does with science, make any claim that such murk and ferment is somehow superior to science. This manner of prophetic utterance, intent upon dwelling right at the core and in the deep, views definiteness (the horos) with contempt, and deliberately avoids conception and the workings of necessity as being concerned with reflection rooted merely in finitude. But just as there’s an airy breadth, so too is there a vacant depth; just as there’s an attenuatedness in which substance gushes forth into endless multiplicity without having the power to hold it all together, so is there a contentless intensity which, sustaining itself as sheer force without scope, is nothing but superficiality. The power of spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to extend and expend itself in disclosing what it is. And so, when a noncohesive, substance-bound mode of knowledge like the above claims to have submerged in the divine being what’s idiosyncratic to the self and imagines that in so doing it is philosophizing in a true and holy manner, it keeps from itself the fact that, by thus scorning measure and specificity, it doesn’t devote itself to God, but only betrays the arbitrariness of its content even as it ascribes to God what’s merely its own caprice. When its advocates abandon themselves thus to the teeming ferment of substance, they imagine that by engulfing their self-consciousness and forsaking their understanding they become God’s very own, to whom he gives wisdom in sleep, which is why what they in fact conceive and bring forth in their slumber are indeed dreams.

It's interesting how that inner disposition also projects into the outward mystical approach to philosophy-spirituality. "But many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first." The further one ascends with spiritual activity before resting comfortably due to idolatry, i.e. mistaking their current state of being and world-conception as an end-in-itself (until death), the steeper there is to fall. The materialist intellectual who starts his idolatry right out the gate, in the realm of sense-perceptions, gets stuck for the time being, but continues to amass outer knowledge which can be made inner knowledge with an inspired effort. Whereas the mystical or fundamentalist intellectual has forsaken all forms of scientific knowledge and thereby prevents himself from even the ancillary benefits of his ongoing spiritual activity.

With regard to the description and comprehension of Nature, those older times were permeated with what comes from the whole man. To-day it is head-knowledge. Therefore on the one side it is abstract, dry, and does not fill a man's whole life to the end, yet on the other side it is very spiritual. This dual nature is really present, so that we actually do engender what is most spiritual; for these abstract ideas are the most spiritual that can be, yet they are incapable of grasping the Spirit. It is astonishingly easy to perceive the cleavage in which man is involved through the spiritual ideas he has developed. It is precisely in them that he has become so remarkably materialistic. When these ideas come in the right way, however, materialism never arises from them. The simple existence of abstract ideas is the first refutation of materialism. In this duality we live. We have been tremendously intellectualised for four centuries, and in this spiritual, which we only possess in the abstract, we must find again the living spiritual. We have risen to objective concepts; we must get back to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We have cast aside what has been handed down to us of old primeval wisdom in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. We must now recover it, after having so wholly discarded the richness of the knowledge of man's whole being. This is a truth which will fill us with a sense of the seriousness of Spiritual Science.

It's thought-provoking that materialism of ideas is actually a more polarized approach to reality than materialism of perceptions, and, as you say, that certain inner dispositions predispose to particular worldviews. In the spirit of one of your recent posts about these various worldviews and moods, and their potential for spiraling, it would be interesting to inquire if there are lines or reasoning or, more generally, approaches that are more likely to address the specific needs lying behind any specific worldview. What exactly are the soul preferences that induce a mystical view, a physicalist one, etc., and what are their weak points? Not metaphysical or logical weak points, but their overall quests and needs? This is a question I cannot even start to tackle - I would have to first become aware of the panorama of my own ‘soul situation’. I am only saying it would be a captivating and also useful exploration to pursue.

[AshvinP]

I would like to add few words about the slower and faster rhythms. Slower and faster are relative qualities and thus we always need to be aware from what position we’re forming our thoughts. Otherwise we may easily imagine that the more we encompass the higher order Cosmic rhythms, which from our human perspective seem excruciatingly slow, the more our existence becomes boringly sluggish. This of course, is not the case but at the same time it’s not that easy to show what the case is. To grasp this we need to make our way all the way to Intuitive cognition. Here’s one attempt.

Thank you, Cleric, this elaboration was immensely helpful, yet again! I'm sure it will take some time for most to digest its intricacies, as I am still digesting them as well. But I would characterize my process of reading through it as one in which the content of the post became increasingly united with what I was doing to comprehend it. 

Another eon of existence commences with another act of delamination. The previous eon is one of purely ideal existence. There’s no life, no nutrition, no personal life of desires. It’s a mirror of  intuitive ideal existence. Now this new delamination further differentiates our intuitive life. In certain sense, everything that has been going on before, continues also now but through this differentiation a kind of indirection is introduced. Previously, our space-like aspect was a perfect mirror of time, while now our metamorphoses through time are one degree removed from that mirror, so to speak. It is almost as if there’s a certain leeway between our space-like mirror and our present intuitive activity, much like a double pendulum becomes more difficult to control.

Right around here, my perceptual-conceptual process within the fourth eon of delamination/convolution was able to meet its own descent from pure ideal relations of intuitive intents and grasp what had been thus far illustrated more holistically, as something more immanent to my first-person cognitive experience, as well as humanity's evolution at large. 

It is only that through the increased convolutions of spiritual activity, a highly complex ‘bureaucracy’ decoheres. If there is to be continuity of consciousness, the progression of states can only go in a certain way. This doesn’t mean that the rigid ‘bureaucracy’ revealed in the sensory spectrum is an illusion. All sensory phenomena reflect the real convoluted relations of ideal beings, that increasingly constrain one another.

So I think it would be fair to say, as a crude summary, that within the fourth convolution in which a spiritual being awakens to itself in the movement of thought-forms, it then has the entire depth structure of nested rhythms through which it has delaminated, represented in its outer perceptual environment. We can associate this perceptual structure with the 4 elements of Fire, Air, Water, Earth. These are not really the physical elements we are familiar with, but we can use those familiar elements as symbols for their higher spiritual counter-poles (sometimes known as warmth-ether, light-ether, chemical-ether, life-ether). The Fire element is what connects the Earth's upper atmosphere to the Cosmic depths of outer space. It also works the other way around, going down from the Earth's crust to the fiery inner core. These are all symbols for inner realities.

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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. Although we perceive the entire depth structure outwardly, we only see flattened pictures which cannot be connected with our inner intuitive activity (or even our imaginative activity for most people). For ex., there is the archetypal idea-intent of the Fall into physical sense existence (allowing for inner freedom), which was arrested in primordial times and must now unfold through the convolutions of the birth-death, waking-sleeping, cycles until it is purified, redeemed, and therefore fulfilled at a higher (more conscious) metamorphic stage. How do we purify this ideal intent from within its own convolution? By inverting our spiritual activity towards the high Ideals of Love, Wisdom, Harmony, Truth, etc., thereby resonating with the intuitive intents which have already 'made good' the original intents. That is another way of saying, becoming more conscious of what is already taking place subconsciously within the whole spectrum of simultaneous intuitive moments of existence. Thereby we fully realize the spiritual freedom we only anticipated with the original intent. The uniqueness of the fourth convultion really comes from the fact that its intent can only be redeemed from within, i.e. through our own efforts in complete freedom.

That doesn't mean we are all alone, however. As a brief aside, we can also notice how there is only one event we can point to where the intuitive intent is mirrored exactly in a relatively narrow spectrum of perceptual manifestations within the fourth eon of delamination, which is the Mystery of Golgotha. It is like a few imaginative notes were played then which can allow us to holistically grasp the entire intuitive symphony of our Cosmic and individual evolution.

Of course, this is all a very broad conceptual outline - as Cleric mentioned, the living details of this delamination process have been greatly fleshed out through spiritual scientific investigation, which is still ongoing. And most important is the inner work which allows us to orient our own first-person spiritual activity within the nested rhythms of descending-ascending convolution, which is ever-present in all acts of cognition. 
 

[Federica]

I would like to add few words about the slower and faster rhythms.
(...)

I am prompted to this early word by Ashvin's comment that it will take some time for most to digest the intricacies of this elaboration. Yesterday night I started reading. Well, my initial reflection has been "Ok, this is not for me". The context of this thought is deep gratitude and also the positive realization that the gap between now and the possibility of concretely relating to these ideas has to be worked out with more intensity. And I am stunned that the exact same language and format can be used to express universe-apart ideas in terms of altitude and what meaning can be, or could be, unpacked from their trail. So far this is helpful for me to put things in perspective, but I don't despair that I could eventually grasp more of the meaning too. Thank you!

[AshvinP]

Regarding the torque applied through clearly separating the vowel rotations from the breaths’: in Cleric’s metaphor, that type of torque should be intentional, coming after one’s natural clock setup has been made conscious, but in my case I’m not there, so I got lucky one more time
The reason why I do the exercise that way is not that I try to apply torque, but basically it's my… antipathy (yes) for the out-loud version of the exercise, where breath is the dominant rotation and the vowels have no choice but to fit in. I never do that one, and I dislike it, so in the mute version I wanted to clearly go the opposite direction, reversing the 'power relation' and neutralizing the breath by design, by forcing it to fit in.

Federica,

Since you say that it is not a very conscious decision, I won't argue with that!

It is interesting to note that, when we get into imaginative exercises of concentration and meditation, Steiner speaks of developing a certain antipathy and sympathy for illogical and logical thinking, respectively.

Anyone who has acquired a certain clairvoyance does not simply feel that one thing is correct and another incorrect, but he suffers actual pain when confronted by illogical thinking, and a sense of well-being in connection with clear, transparent thinking. This signifies that he has acquired a feeling for such things, and this enables him to make decisions. And this brings far truer differentiations when one has actually reached this stage. It gives a far truer discrimination between truth and untruth. This seems incredible, but it is true. When something erroneous is said in the presence of a clairvoyant person, the pain which rises in him shows him that this is illogical, erroneous.

I am certainly not clairvoyant, but nevertheless I have noticed a certain amount of 'pain' associated with illogical thinking, more than I remember experiencing before, which could be the seeds of the more concrete pain he is speaking of. I wonder if a similar principle could apply to decisions such as the one you describe? I don't know, but it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. After all, allowing our breathing rotation to dominate our thought-images is quite illogical from the standpoint of development towards spiritual freedom.

That’s intriguing - in one of my draft posts to Wayfarer, I used pretty much this same metaphor you are using here, to comment on his “explanatory frameworks” (you were reasoning within an “esoteric” framework, and Cleric within a “depth meditation” framework). I wanted to illustrate the rigid grids of intellectual, categorizing thinking. In my metaphor, rather than the underground metro, I had various networks of roads on a territory and various GPS options, as opposed to free roaming on the same landscape. Then I limited my reply to only one point, so the illustration didn’t make it to the thread, but it was basically the same!

That is intriguing! Probably it means we are both just reaching for the low-hanging metaphors right now

It's thought-provoking that materialism of ideas is actually a more polarized approach to reality than materialism of perceptions, and, as you say, that certain inner dispositions predispose to particular worldviews. In the spirit of one of your recent posts about these various worldviews and moods, and their potential for spiraling, it would be interesting to inquire if there are lines or reasoning or, more generally, approaches that are more likely to address the specific needs lying behind any specific worldview. What exactly are the soul preferences that induce a mystical view, a physicalist one, etc., and what are their weak points? Not metaphysical or logical weak points, but their overall quests and needs? This is a question I cannot even start to tackle - I would have to first become aware of the panorama of my own ‘soul situation’. I am only saying it would be a captivating and also useful exploration to pursue.

Well I think that's a core question we, and especially Cleric, have been trying to answer here. What are the best tailored approaches for pointing to the thinking inversion horizon for certain soul-constellations? Imaginative thinking certainly helps with answering this question. I think Steiner gives a pretty comprehensive treatment of what soul moods give rise to the worldviews in that lecture series ('Human and Cosmic Thought'), but not necessarily what sort of approaches would be best when confronted by them, especially in this online forum format. Generally, I think it's important that we show that the underlying perspective and concerns with alternative perspectives are understood before being addressed. But, as we saw with Wayfarer recently, that still may not make a difference.

[Cleric K]

Federica, Ashvin, thank you for your feedback. I'm really probing the ground. I'm still working on the series of essays and I was thinking about a chapter that goes more deeply in the four-fold convolution but it seems that it is very difficult to make this sound reasonable in few paragraphs. There are so many things that have to be taken into account if we're to triangulate the right cognitive perspective from which it all makes sense. I was going to write some more things but I'll save it for now. Maybe just one:

When Federica gave the example with transformation in space and the airplane, I thought about what I wrote: that what is space-like is really intuitively encompassed time. I guess this sounds utterly abstract. After all, our understanding of space couldn't be more orthogonal to that of time. Yet it is possible to bring them closer together.

Federica, it might to of interest to you to check out also this older post: viewtopic.php?t=795 which is similar to what I'll write here.

We need a more living experience for what space is - not as some abstract idea in itself but for what it is to our spiritual activity. We don't pay much attention to such things but space is meaningful to us because we have the intuition about the ways we can employ our will against perceptions. For example, as we sit now, we can try to touch everything with our imaginary hands. All the objects on the table, the furniture, the walls and so on. We can also imagine that we move to any point in the room and look in some other direction. We have intuition for the way our perceptions will transform. The more we do such experiments, the more we feel as if we superimpose all these imagined gestures and we get a kind of intuitive totality of the possible degrees of freedom. Every imagined touch, every imagined vantage point, are potential moments of existence that normally have to be experienced sequentially through time. When we see things in this way, it becomes more comprehensible that our understanding of space is really the holistic intuition of the degrees of freedom of our will-imagination. Without such intuition our changing perceptions would be like what destiny is for man of today: perceptions of places, people, objects, events, with all the associated concepts and feelings, metamorphose in our soul life but we have quite limited intuition about these transformations, except for the more elementary things like day and night, seasons and so on.

So the key is to avoid thinking about space as an abstract framework within which our existence is placed but to take all perceptions as the mysterious constraints against which we feel the palette of potential moments of existence. This is the important thing: the sense of space doesn't come from the perceptions themselves but as the growing holistic intuition of how our spiritual activity can utilize its degrees of freedom, such that the changes in perceptions make sense.

The same holds true also when we grow into Imaginative cognition. Instead of living in a semi-random flow of thoughts, we begin to sense the possible moments of existence that extend the intuition of space in new ways. For example, we know that when we see someone walking with their gaze down in the ground, they are most probably burdened by something. They are moving through sticky regions of their thoughts and feelings - the rent, the job, the inflation and so on. The spirit looks down on its Earthly existence, it sees through its bodily suit and its complicated relations with the environment. When we begin to gain intuition of the extended space, we begin to sense these domains of spiritual activity within ourselves. It might not be strictly correlated with our head position (although in many cases it is) but we begin to distinguish the different qualities of our soul life in one case and another. Then we begin to feel how these different qualities are like domains of our soul life. In time we begin to feel intuitive orientation within these domains, just like we feel orientation in our room. Then changing our mood or the area of thought, becomes similar to employing higher degrees of freedom to modulate the constellation of our soul organs. We don't have total control over these constellations because they are indeed connected with macrocosmic rotations of time, yet it is always possible to utilize them in a better way.

Here I remind that prayer is the universal tool through which we can seek these harmonious configurations. Even if we have grasped the intuition of this inner space in meditation, it will still be the case that in our daily life we're much dissipated in the slots of our suit. But we can always hold an ideal in our heart and mind. Even few simple thoughts like "Lord, be with me in every step. Inspire my thoughts with the luminous ideas that can lead me to the green pastures and still waters. Fill my heart with the warmth of your Love. Empower my will with your strength." can be tremendously effective. In time our faith is strengthened that there's always a potential way to employ our spiritual activity in the most beneficial way for all, even if we don't immediately see that way as part of our familiar palette. It's all a matter of rising our ideal and always seeking that potential, to breathe it in and manifest it.

[AshvinP]

When Federica gave the example with transformation in space and the airplane, I thought about what I wrote: that what is space-like is really intuitively encompassed time. I guess this sounds utterly abstract. After all, our understanding of space couldn't be more orthogonal to that of time. Yet it is possible to bring them closer together.

This passage from Scaligero may also help our intuitive orientation, as multiple conceptual angles on the same topic generally do. Such passages as the below are only helpful, though, once we first try to find what the experience of space-time means to our own spiritual activity, as Cleric described, and then discern its meaning in that context.

We must witness the various transformations of a tree's life—from a cast seed to its initial bursting forth out of the earth, to its process of growth, flowering, and bearing of fruit. We must reunite various moments or spatial-temporal images, namely, the various successive aspects of the spatial-temporal specter, or the various sections of the same entity, in order to arrive at the image-synthesis of what already exists entirely within the seed and in each moment of its development.

The secret of each worldly entity is that it appears as a veil by concealing its entire past as well as its entire future—both present and interwoven—which can rise from the veil only by means of imagining-thinking. Each entity can be intuited as a timeless density of time, as a spatial form of time, in which its own being is already truly complete.

Only an entity's earthly appearance must be divided into points and into moments for human perception. The importance of such points and moments lies in their correlation: the resolution of the succession.

Pain within the human soul corresponds of necessity to this illusory relation from point to point, from moment to moment. Such is the pain of the soul, confined to the death of its own space, to the anticipation of its revivification in time—the pain of having to experience itself reflected by corporeal being. By reflecting the soul, our corporeal being sections off its timeless life into a succession of time. As a result, the soul thinks it ages and dies.

Such pain will not be extinguished by measurable time but, rather, by a series of returns to the spiritual time experienced during sleep. Though we will come to know this spiritual time at death, only by drawing from the profound calm that enables the physical, disenchanted dimension to pass over into a timeless weft, can we cognize it in our waking state.
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No illuminating moment is ever lost. Instead, it continually becomes part of a suprasensory form, which in turn cannot become a complete structure unless we work at it over time. This suprasensory form divides up our task into years, months, days, hours, and moments. This is the ultimate sense of measurable (or nonexistent) time. Actually, not a single moment of measurable time is ever lost. Each moment is connected to the next according to transcendental affinities that are themselves determined by the profound human will that surfaces within time—in thinking and in ordinary feeling.

We are what we will in the depths. But we do not will the spirit—our free being—there. Instead, we push it away, believing we are free. For this reason, the spirit—namely, the true human being's will from outside time—works within us over time. Time enables us to divide into years, months, days, hours, and moments, what we would never be able to actualize as the spirit's super-temporality on the physical Earth. This super-temporality presses forth within us as a continuity of events in successions, as well as the synthesizing power of moods and thoughts that succeed each other in time.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (pp. 40-41). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

I wanted to mention that one reason I get immense value from Cleric's illustrative posts here is because they bring a new life to that which I come across conceptually in other texts, including many on Steiner's archive. Below I am presenting excerpts from a chapter of Scaligero's book on the nature of space and time. Previously I felt the book to be extremely abstract and hard to penetrate, but now it has become more clear that the abstractness of it all resided in my inability to situate the thought-progression within my own first-person intuitive experience. That's is what Cleric's posts have assisted with beyond measure. The excerpts below are not exact correspondences to the content, and of course are not as illustrative and detailed as the post, but overall I think they track pretty well (and there is much more content in the full book). Hopefully this more philosophical-conceptual angle from Scaligero will also help situate and illuminate some of that post for others who may have had difficulty following its progression.

______________________________
Cleric wrote:
I would like to add few words about the slower and faster rhythms. Slower and faster are relative qualities and thus we always need to be aware from what position we’re forming our thoughts. Otherwise we may easily imagine that the more we encompass the higher order Cosmic rhythms, which from our human perspective seem excruciatingly slow, the more our existence becomes boringly sluggish. This of course, is not the case but at the same time it’s not that easy to show what the case is. To grasp this we need to make our way all the way to Intuitive cognition. Here’s one attempt.

To get into a position where we can address this topic we need to undress the layers of our soul life – our sensory perceptions, intellectual thinking, attraction and repulsion of feelings. If modern man is to do this in meditation, there’ll be practically nothing left from our familiar conscious life. This is a state similar to the deepest dreamless sleep. Yet if we have worked to unite with the “I am” impulse, something remains in that state – the consciousness of willful becoming through time. Without uniting with this will, we can only remember that some duration of time has been experienced but with no continuity of our self-consciousness.

This succession conditions the spirit, which, as immediate consciousness, would like to instantaneously rectify error, eliminate evil, overcome distances, and actualize love on Earth—all of which, however, require a series of movements in space and time. They require patience, namely, the emergence of that force which alone has the capacity to develop while obliged to confront its own shattering—a reflectivity that has become reality. This force is the force of waiting, the virtue of discovering itself at the point where, fragmented and atomized by the support, it is led to think of its death as life within lifeless space and lifeless time, both of which are sanctified by abstract thought and quantitative science. Such a force can defeat darkness only by experiencing and cognizing its own negated power of light.
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Aside from its quantitative measurement, the passing of time is really a human feeling. It is either the pain of the good and the beautiful that we go about losing, or the joy of the good and the beautiful that we possess (or await). But the good and the beautiful that we can draw from the past, from the passing of time, or from our anticipation of the future, are essentially the good and the beautiful that we can elevate from measurable time to the height of pure ideas. In so doing, we transport ourselves (if ever so briefly) into true time.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 46). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

Let’s try to approach this through a mathematical example. We see a triangular form. It impresses as perception and evokes certain intuition – that of ‘triangle’. Then we can turn away from the perceptions and summon a memory image of the triangle. Now we’re doing elementary geometry, our geometric intuition is being expressed into a thought-image of our own making. Here we already have something analogous to Imaginative cognition. The difference is that we’re expressing intuition that is frozen. It is as a fixed standing wave in an ideal world. Mathematical intuition is timeless. It consists of timeless relations. They have temporal character only insofar as we need to serialize these relations in thoughts. For example, when we think of the natural numbers, they are not subject to time. We need time to count through them but their relations are something timeless. Two is always between one and three – this is an eternal relation. This has nothing to do with Platonism. There’s no need to fantasize mathematical intuition as some exotic metaphysical realm. It is a simple fact of experience – when we move through mathematical ideas we simply experience their timeless relations in the meaning of our thoughts. Because of this frozen nature of mathematical intuition, when we’re thinking math we’re always alone. It is as if we walk through a frosty kingdom and any movement that we sense can only be our own, reflected in the ice crystals. The difference with Imagination in the wider sense is that in the latter we no longer feel alone. The reflections in our imaginative pictures are not only of our own movement but also of a kingdom teeming with life. It is as if we’re expressing in images intuitive life that continually changes underneath us on its own accord.

This is possible because imagined time is woven out of time itself. Therefore, philosophers who still knew how to think have affirmed that time does not exist by existing, and that it exists by not existing. By limiting themselves to a speculative vision conditioned by the very limit that they had come to see, these philosophers translated into concepts the perceived non-determinability of time as well as the manifesting of its continuity. They were able to accomplish this without entering the secret of time.
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The secret of time is essentially the secret of that thinking which thinks time, renders our memory of the past current and projects the future before itself. Such thinking condenses time by becoming activated in the depths and discovering itself as pure movement.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 47). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

The next step is to turn attention to what we’re doing when we think the mathematical thought-images. For example, if we take the triangle, we can try to visualize it as if we trace its edges with our ray of imagination, as if it is the tip of a pencil. When we become familiar with this activity we can try to disregard the imaginative element and focus entirely on the experience of how we will our thinking gestures. It’s no longer about how our thinking gestures are perceived in imagination but how it feels to be the active force that propels them. This gives us a hint about Inspirative cognition, where we live not in images of the living kingdom but in the interference of thinking gestures that impresses in the images.

Finally, we need to relinquish even our thinking gesticulation and remain in the pure intuitive meaning of the triangle. This is exceedingly difficult to do without practice but in the end, the idea of triangle becomes the intuitive form of our “I”. We always live in such intuitions. They are present all the time as our intuitive background, as the meaningful context which gives us the feeling that our reality ‘makes sense’ and that we have a certain sense of orientation within it. To reach Intuitive cognition is to live entirely within this intuitive context, which is identical to our sense of what we are as a spiritual being. So when we think ‘triangle’, this is normally convoluted in several layers of inner life – the perception, the image, the thinking gesture – yet our sense of being is actually identical with the intuition of a triangle that we currently think.

When we live in Intuitive cognition, we are not focused on images, there’s no movement of thoughts, no pushes and pulls of sympathies and antipathies, but only the intuitive awareness of our being’s becoming. Someone may imagine that what is thus described is identical to the mystic’s pure awareness but there’s one great difference – the latter lacks the awareness of being one with the intuitive intent that metamorphoses the state. Without this, such a state is felt to border on the absolute nothingness, where all existence sinks into oblivion. Only through the union with the “I am” force, we can exist in that nothingness because through that force the intuition of our existence is being continually recreated as a fiery phoenix.

This more intense thinking does not draw from spatial-temporal determinations, which it must continually connect and overcome; rather, it draws from its inner force, which is free of determinations. This inner force can overcome spatial-temporal determinations through its independence of them. Thought must acquire this independence—which is not freely given to it—regardless of its independence in the incorporeal world from which it springs. Only the bodily support (or nature) freely gives itself to thought, which in turn draws abstract time and abstract space from it. By conceiving them as entities separate and apart from it, or in opposition to it, thought never experiences abstract time and space. Instead, it loses them.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 47). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

This continual becoming not only metamorphoses our intuitive sense of being but it does so in a way that feels as a process in time. As it has been spoken many times, this is connected with the mystery of memory. Memory not as some data storage mechanism but as growing intuition (Gestalt) which integrates within itself the intuitions of the previous states.

In this state of Intuitive cognition we live in a purely spiritual state. Remember: perceptions, thought gestures, sympathies and antipathies have all been relinquished. We find ourselves in a realm of pure intuitive existence, as if we live in a mathematical realm metamorphosing through the lawful relations of different states of intuition, where these intuitions are identical with our sense of being. In our ordinary life our intuitive context holds the implicit meaning of “I’m a person living on Earth, doing this, going there, having such and such interests” and so on. This is what gives us our sense of being. In Intuitive cognition all the layers of our soul life are stripped and we feel as pure being identical with the intuitive content of its awareness, metamorphosing through different states of being. Yet these metamorphoses are lawful. Allegorically speaking, if our sense of being within this mathematical intuitive realm is “1” it can transform into “2” and only then to “3”. Of course, this sounds impossibly abstract – how can a number be felt as a sense of being? With our abstract thinking habits it is indeed impossible so let’s try to approach this more gradually.

Let’s ignore for a while what the exact intuitive content of a given state of being is. The general situation is that we can think of our being as existing in pure time. The metamorphoses of our intuitive states in a purely mathematical (spiritual) existence, is really all there is. We can look upon these states as moments of existence. Here we come to a fundamental secret. As said, we not only metamorphose through these intuitive states but they also integrate the previous. Otherwise we would simply go through eternal momentary change without any intuition of existing through time. So if we move through states “1”, “2”, “3” and so on, we would never feel as a being having continuity through time. But if we go through something like “1”, “1+2”, “1+2+3” then every state contains the intuition of the previous and we feel as we have gone through them, they are now embedded in our present intuition as memory. These moments of existence (not necessarily only past) that we feel to have integrated within our present, are what archetypally corresponds to space. There’s no space in the traditional sense in the mathematical world. Space-like is our intuition of the moments of existence that we can grasp simultaneously. This is true even for our ordinary life. We can grasp time as simultaneous space-like images – photos from our life, the time axis of a graph, a calendar on the wall and so on. Yet we’re also continually metamorphosing, we feel there are moments of existence that haven’t yet integrated as space.

This more intense thinking does not draw from spatial-temporal determinations, which it must continually connect and overcome; rather, it draws from its inner force, which is free of determinations. This inner force can overcome spatial-temporal determinations through its independence of them. Thought must acquire this independence—which is not freely given to it—regardless of its independence in the incorporeal world from which it springs. Only the bodily support (or nature) freely gives itself to thought, which in turn draws abstract time and abstract space from it. By conceiving them as entities separate and apart from it, or in opposition to it, thought never experiences abstract time and space. Instead, it loses them.

Meanwhile, true space and true time do not exist separate and apart from thought. They are the fabric out of which the soul clothes itself in order to make its appearance in the world. The soul does not see this fabric simply because it fails to perceive itself. It thinks it sees by virtue of the physical eyes, whereas it itself has the power to see by means of our bodily eyes. Therefore, thought assumes that the time and space within it come to meet it from outside, for it sees them outside as a spectral projection of that which it does not know how to gather as an essence; it sees them as a measurable spectrality. This spectral projection is the unseen movement of thought that penetrates the earthly realm after submitting to its conditions.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 47). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

Temporal existence can be pictured as broken symmetry of the eternal state.



It is as if moments of existence are delaminated from eternity (represented by the background fractal) and form new kinds of unities that can be experienced as temporal integration of intuition. They may start as some distinct unity but gradually and rhythmically evolve towards states where they integrate more and more moments of existence, thus they evolve towards the eternal. Now these evolving states are like relative perspectives within eternity, different worldlines that all converge at infinity. Even though we speak of these states abstractly, they can’t be observed from some third-person vantage point but only through that of a first-person intuitive perspective.

Here we don’t have any space in our Earthly sense. It’s all a purely spiritual existence, a world of mathematical intuition. Time cannot be measured by anything perceptual either. Of all the forms of cognition, only the Intuitive is possible. All that is known is the integrative intuition of being within complicated ideal relations. These relations are not external but entirely within the intuitive lawfulness of the metamorphoses. For example, if we metamorphose from intuitive sense of being “1” towards “2”, an activity of another being is not something that presses from the outside but something that is found to be active in the intuitive topology, for example, an intermediate state “1.5” interjects on our way to “2”, as if suggested by another spiritual being. It is difficult for our ordinary conscious habits but we should try to conceive that we don’t look at that environment, we don’t have hands to touch it, we don’t think about it, we don’t have desires for it. All we have is our intuitive sense of being, which transforms, in the same way our ordinary intuitive state transforms as we count from “1” to “2”. Our intuition of a spiritual (mathematical) environment is present only as far as we have intuitive orientation within the states possible in that environment and how other willed intents modulate it. Time is not some external force that drags us along but the collectively shaped ideal landscape through which our state of being integrates.

Our integrating intuition of moments of existence (not only past but also potential future), begins to form the mentioned archetypal sense of space. Just like the moments of the clock above exist at different scales, so here these moments are grasped at different temporal scales, we might say – different ‘frequencies’. This makes our archetypal sense of space to feel as a kind of spectrum. Different ‘bands’ of this spectrum encompass different kinds of relations between moments of existence (that can belong to other beings). Even at this stage we can already distinguish that these form the archetypal beginnings of what we call on a quite different level, color, sound, smell, taste and so on. Of course, at that stage there’s nothing to be seen, nothing to be touched or smelled. These qualities are only the archetypal space-like reflections of purely ideal relations of beings. It is as if in our evolving state, a space-like image of time is being integrated.

True time never passes; it is itself the passing that manifests as the symbol of an entity graspable only by means of the sensory signs that fix its flow. But, in reality, this entity is lost wherever we believe its flow to be fixed. Time is what we can continually feel being lost or never seized. Not only is it impossible to contemplate time as one would a place somewhere in space, but also it cannot be fixed like space, whose reality is to be outside time—for objects know neither a “before” nor an “after.” Meanwhile, the unreality of space lies in its value as sensory space, for objects know neither an “in front of” nor a “behind,” neither a right nor a left. Time is the space that we never penetrate yet unknowingly yearn. It is space perceivable as a suprasensory weft. Such time, however, is immeasurable.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 44). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

Another eon of existence commences with another act of delamination. The previous eon is one of purely ideal existence. There’s no life, no nutrition, no personal life of desires. It’s a mirror of  intuitive ideal existence. Now this new delamination further differentiates our intuitive life. In certain sense, everything that has been going on before, continues also now but through this differentiation a kind of indirection is introduced. Previously, our space-like aspect was a perfect mirror of time, while now our metamorphoses through time are one degree removed from that mirror, so to speak. It is almost as if there’s a certain leeway between our space-like mirror and our present intuitive activity, much like a double pendulum becomes more difficult to control.
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What we really have to intuitively grasp here is that in the previous eon the space-like spectrum simply reflects ideal relations of moments of existence. Now these reflections become more opaque, so to speak, more inert. In a very simplified analogy, imagine how we can jump in our mathematical thinking from one number to any other, for example, we can go from “2” to “7”. Now imagine that for whatever reason our thinking becomes constrained and we’re now capable of changing our number state only by moving forward by three of moving backward by two. Then to get to “7” we can go forward in threes: 2 -> 5 -> 8 -> 11 and then backward in twos: 11 -> 9 -> 7. This is a very elementary analogy but it can help us gain some intuition of the way the perceptual spectrum becomes more elusive and we can work upon it only in more constrained ways.

What was thus described can be understood as the beginning of archetypal life. This is the archetypal nature of growth and reproduction. We should feel how this more convoluted form of existence provides us with the possibility to experience new intuitive configurations, even though at the expense of greater constraints of our spiritual activity. If we grasp this polar relation, we’ll have intuition of the most important key for understanding the nature of our present human stage. The whole secret lies in the way spiritual activity is differentiated from its environment and enters more convoluted relations with it. It can no longer morph the images as immediate reflections of ideal becoming but the images rigidify, they are now reflections of the activity of certain spiritual beings. If we want to partake in the transformations of these images, it can only be done in harmony with the beings that reflect in them, thus there is a certain lawfulness that we need to abide by.

Why would the intuitive spirit constrain itself in such a way? Why renounce the possibility to exist in a purely spiritual existence, as if in a mathematical realm where we metamorphose through ideal states? Because these more limited states allow the spiritual world to be objectified. The spirit can explore an infinite variety of worlds that can be experienced from within their constraints. Each such delamination results into a more convoluted form of existence and corresponding new forms of consciousness. From our present perspective, the form of consciousness which allows us to experience the spirit weaving in the life forces, is known as Inspirative cognition.

Measurable time is lost time. Philosophers who take its punctual becoming into consideration declare such time to exist by not existing and not to exist by existing. In its abstractness, it is measurable time whose existence lies precisely in its relation to a given moment—a moment that exists only as a sentiment aroused by the thinking bound to measurability. It is time projected onto a past that we re-evoke or onto a future that we imagine, whose each and every determination is nevertheless fixed in relation to other moments for the sake of its necessary passing. Such moments can themselves be determined as signs of what we never possess: each moment being the cancellation of all the others.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 45). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

A third eon consists in yet another delamination where spiritual activity becomes further differentiated from both the space-like spectrum and the life forces. This leads to even more convoluted relations between the layers (think of a triple pendulum). Now a kind of inner soul life begins to form within these layers. The whole spiritual environment impresses itself as images in these layers and our intuitive activity lives in them as within inner representations of the spiritual world. The space-like world of color, sound and so on, is to a much lesser degree seen as the intuition of integrated moments of existence but become more like the inner soul dashboard within which indirectly the ideal processes are represented. In the previous two eons existence is still spread out in the environment, the intuitive state doesn’t feel as an enclosed being. Now this inner vision leads to ensouled existence. At this point the idea of physical world is not yet possible. A being at that level of consciousness is intuitively aware that it exists as a spiritual being, yet cognizes its environment as far as it forms intuitions about the images impressed in the soul substance. The being doesn’t mistake these impressions for realities in themselves but uses them to indirectly form intuition of its ideal environment. From our human perspective this stage can be investigated through Imaginative consciousness.

Finally we arrive at a fourth eon, where through another delamination, thought-images are lifted from the soul substance and intuitive activity recognizes itself in their movements. As we can see, every delamination leads to growing complexity (as if we add more segments to the pendulum). The original space-like spectrum becomes more and more complicated and as a result it cannot be transformed that easily. If we picture the time hierarchy of moments in the highly spiritual states as a cascade of cogwheels, then in the more convoluted states these moments become more and more difficult to harmonize. It is as if spiritual ‘bureaucracy’ emerges where every transformation of the state has to pass through tedious adjustments on all levels that aim to support the overall holism of the spectrum. All in all, this decoheres the more fluidic ways in which intuitive activity can reflect itself in the environment and instead, all activity has to painstakingly go through the complicated constraints that have rigidified at all levels.



If we grasp this, then we’ll have a true understanding of the nature of the physical world and why the ancients called it Maya. Our state is and has always been one of spiritual existence. It is only that through the increased convolutions of spiritual activity, a highly complex ‘bureaucracy’ decoheres. If there is to be continuity of consciousness, the progression of states can only go in a certain way. This doesn’t mean that the rigid ‘bureaucracy’ revealed in the sensory spectrum is an illusion. All sensory phenomena reflect the real convoluted relations of ideal beings, that increasingly constrain one another. Biological life manifests as the ‘mechanization’ of more spiritual states begin as they decohere in the increasing complexity. It is a means to preserve the hierarchical gradient of being within these complicated relations that constantly threaten to dissolve into chaos.

Continuity is really the secret cancellation of each moment carried out in the depths by our inner life. Because this inner life fails to perceive itself, it lives in moments that are continually lost and not in the continuity that it unconsciously actualizes within itself through the passing of such moments. Felt or thought about, time is real only insofar as it goes unperceived. We unknowingly actualize time within ourselves precisely to the degree that we refrain from fixing it. In so doing, we continually lose time and, yet, give it meaning exclusively for what it is with respect to its measurability. Because we are oblivious to the continuity that can be realized through our disengagement from measurable moments of time, we inevitably lose time. We are unaware of becoming free because we do not know how time truly helps us by flowing unseen.

For this reason, we conceive infinite time as an abstract eternity, imagined as a succession of time extending indefinitely—an eternal time awaited and lost. It is punctually lost, for never is a moment of it consciously freed from its transitory state. As a result, we are always in anticipation of the following moment. Meanwhile, time does not pass. A fleeing instant is nonexistent simply because it cannot be determined. Never has an instant fled for never has one truly been perceived.
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The spirit that fails to penetrate earthliness, by perceiving it in opposition to itself, experiences its spatial-temporality. This earthliness, kept in its alterity by the spirit, comes to meet us. It is clothed in space and time, which we are incapable of gathering within ourselves as a fabric of light. Such a specter is the weft of lost light that we can discover by contemplating the world, provided we gather those forces that stream in us during contemplation. It is the world's spatial-temporal light—a light identical to the light by which the soul clothes itself in order to become articulated in corporeality and thereby connect itself to the world.

Each specter is a light temporarily lost—a light that simultaneously dies out and rises again in the earth's colors. The dying out of the light enables the human eye to see. We behold the world and think we see light. In reality, we see mere objects clothed in the dying light. The dying out of the light fragments the light into colors, which is the light's refraction. The light that we fail to perceive in its suprasensory unity—or illuminating power—is the light that we know as fallen, divided and reflected. Only the practitioner can see light in its wholeness, invisibly bursting forth before becoming fragmented and refracted, before being transformed into electromagnetic, thermal or particle radiations.
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Within color (as within the form of those entities that we behold) lies the hope that matter will again become light—the light that it is in the depths; moreover, there lies the hope that matter will reawaken as the light of ideas, as the warmth of life within the human soul. This is the Earth's secret. It is the secret of the light's rebirth insofar as it rises up as the fabric of thought, within thought, by ceasing to die out into the specter of space, or into the specter of time. We can reascend from the specter to the light.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 49). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.