Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[AshvinP]

Thanks Ashvin, for yet again a thorough reply.
I see from what emerges as your expressed reasoning that there must be an underlying solid and extensive consistency, and I hear the resonance of the intents you want to convey, such as the necessity to take very seriously our immersion in Maya. But when I try to fit my questions in the space of these various emerging pieces they don't connect, no matter how I turn them around.

For example, reading this: "Could we have ever gained the same pedagogical value if we, or someone, had not willfully engaged our living thinking with the visual illusion, but simply reasoned about the general concept of 'illusions' from afar?" the immediate objection is actually not the one you foretold. It's rather as follows:


Q: Could we have ever gained the same pedagogical value if we, or someone, had not willfully engaged our living thinking with the visual illusion, but simply reasoned about the general concept of 'illusions' from afar?


A: No, you’re right, we, or someone, couldn’t have.


Q: Could you and Cleric gain the same pedagogical value from Levin’s model, even without being part of the research team, without willfully engage in the experiment, without looking at those cells and measuring their behaviors, by simply reasoning about the general concept of levels of causality, presented to you in lecture/paper form from afar through words and graphs?


A: Well, yes, it looks like you actually could!

Federica,

I see more precisely what you were getting at now. I would state it as follows. Levin and his team doesn't get the same pedagogical value from their own models as we do because they haven't developed living thinking (which goes hand in hand with good intents and high ideals). As mentioned before, though, all of that could change quite literally in an instant if their intellect was 'tricked' so as to become self-conscious of the illusion that their models are pointing to some reality 'out there', which is a completely unwarranted abstract postulate, instead realizing it is pointing right back at their first-person, real-time thinking activity which is doing the modeling.

Now if we took people with equally developed living thinking, i.e. first-person, real-time thinking out of the blind spot, all else being equal, and asked who would get more pedagogical value, (a) the ones who only contemplated the 'afterglow' in words and graphs, or (b) the ones who also endeavored to look at the cells, measure their behaviors, and selflessly immerse themselves in the phenomenal objects of their study, then my answer would be (b). Of course, as Cleric described, most of what is done is computer simulation of the projected behaviors of cells according to the laws of dead thinking, but the point being that one always benefits from a very detailed consideration of phenomenal appearances and their dynamics, IF one's living thinking can guard against the idolatry of illusion.

Ashvin,

First, there is no need to create a diversion by bringing in Levin and his team, other-people-with-equally-developed-living-thinking-i.e.-first-person-real-time-thinking-out-of-the-blind-spot, or the delivery crew.
It’s obvious that, exactly as in your original question, in my question, I’m comparing what you and Cleric got from the model from afar, with what you and Cleric could have gotten by means of willful descent into it.


Do you see the dilemma you are faced with? Now, when we lift the diversion, you have no choice but either (1) disavow your stated principle that willful engagement in phenomena grants higher pedagogical value (could we or someone have ever gained the same pedagogical value?) or (2) conclude that Cleric has an imperfect understanding of Levin’s model because he only contemplated the afterglow.

No, I don't see the dilemma. In my view, Cleric's living understanding of the model would be even better if he had willfully descended into the precise methods used to derive the results which form the basis of the model. I suspect he would agree. Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize, and some methods may be inaccessible to the average person (which is where computer-VR tech also comes in handy), but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?

[Federica]

Federica,

I see more precisely what you were getting at now. I would state it as follows. Levin and his team doesn't get the same pedagogical value from their own models as we do because they haven't developed living thinking (which goes hand in hand with good intents and high ideals). As mentioned before, though, all of that could change quite literally in an instant if their intellect was 'tricked' so as to become self-conscious of the illusion that their models are pointing to some reality 'out there', which is a completely unwarranted abstract postulate, instead realizing it is pointing right back at their first-person, real-time thinking activity which is doing the modeling.

Now if we took people with equally developed living thinking, i.e. first-person, real-time thinking out of the blind spot, all else being equal, and asked who would get more pedagogical value, (a) the ones who only contemplated the 'afterglow' in words and graphs, or (b) the ones who also endeavored to look at the cells, measure their behaviors, and selflessly immerse themselves in the phenomenal objects of their study, then my answer would be (b). Of course, as Cleric described, most of what is done is computer simulation of the projected behaviors of cells according to the laws of dead thinking, but the point being that one always benefits from a very detailed consideration of phenomenal appearances and their dynamics, IF one's living thinking can guard against the idolatry of illusion.

Ashvin,

First, there is no need to create a diversion by bringing in Levin and his team, other-people-with-equally-developed-living-thinking-i.e.-first-person-real-time-thinking-out-of-the-blind-spot, or the delivery crew.
It’s obvious that, exactly as in your original question, in my question, I’m comparing what you and Cleric got from the model from afar, with what you and Cleric could have gotten by means of willful descent into it.


Do you see the dilemma you are faced with? Now, when we lift the diversion, you have no choice but either (1) disavow your stated principle that willful engagement in phenomena grants higher pedagogical value (could we or someone have ever gained the same pedagogical value?) or (2) conclude that Cleric has an imperfect understanding of Levin’s model because he only contemplated the afterglow.

No, I don't see the dilemma. In my view, Cleric's living understanding of the model would be even better if he had willfully descended into the precise methods used to derive the results which form the basis of the model. I suspect he would agree. Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize, and some methods may be inaccessible to the average person (which is where computer-VR tech also comes in handy), but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?

Ok, Ashvin, I don't feel it'd be appropriate for me to speculate on whether or not that understanding could have been better. I just take note you've picked (2).

"How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?"

Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?
By the way, on second thought, I think I was too quick to agree with you on your question about the white triangle image. The image is certainly useful for me, as it probably is for many others. But I doubt it could be useful for everyone.

***

By the way, thank you for the Steiner quote. I now understand there is a lawful and an unlawful Ahrimanic impulse. The first lives in the flesh of every incarnated human being. It regulates excessive attachment to earthly manifestations by infusing them with decay and death. When such impulse unlawfully seeks to reach beyond the perceptual sphere, and to invade human thinking, it makes it dead and captive to those earthly manifestations (materialist reductionism).

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

First, there is no need to create a diversion by bringing in Levin and his team, other-people-with-equally-developed-living-thinking-i.e.-first-person-real-time-thinking-out-of-the-blind-spot, or the delivery crew.
It’s obvious that, exactly as in your original question, in my question, I’m comparing what you and Cleric got from the model from afar, with what you and Cleric could have gotten by means of willful descent into it.


Do you see the dilemma you are faced with? Now, when we lift the diversion, you have no choice but either (1) disavow your stated principle that willful engagement in phenomena grants higher pedagogical value (could we or someone have ever gained the same pedagogical value?) or (2) conclude that Cleric has an imperfect understanding of Levin’s model because he only contemplated the afterglow.

No, I don't see the dilemma. In my view, Cleric's living understanding of the model would be even better if he had willfully descended into the precise methods used to derive the results which form the basis of the model. I suspect he would agree. Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize, and some methods may be inaccessible to the average person (which is where computer-VR tech also comes in handy), but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?

Ok, Ashvin, I don't feel it'd be appropriate for me to speculate on whether or not that understanding could have been better. I just take note you've picked (2).

It's interesting the way you phrased (2). It seems to imply you feel that Cleric, or whoever, already has a perfect understanding of what Levin's models are analogically pointing to. Do you see the issue with that?

"How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?"

Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could the perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?
By the way, on second thought, I think I was too quick to agree with you on your question about the white triangle image. The image is certainly useful for me, as it probably is for many others. But I doubt it could be useful for anyone.

You are creating a duality here between the outer perceptual-conceptual physiognomy and the spiritual activity which impresses it. The former is not a detour. It is the means through which the latter becomes conscious of itself and its structured constraints. There is no such thing as a spiritual perspective which directly knows itself apart from the manifestations of its structured potential. When we perceive our physical body, for ex., we become aware of the potential states of being through which our will can transform. It makes us conscious that we have degrees of freedom in our thinking-will to realize the intent of moving from the couch to the bed when we desire to sleep, but not the degrees of freedom to realize the intent of teleporting to the planet Mars. Our spiritual activity is always at the intersection of the unmanifest potential and the manifest perceptual-conceptual states. That is true even for the Gods, only their manifest states are what we call our 'unmanifest potential'.

When we say the phenomenal world is a detour, as a metaphysical conclusion, we are simply distancing our spiritual activity from it and polarizing to the mystical extreme. This is what really differentiates us from the Gods - our ability to polarize in this way and therefore live in thoughts of either material or mystical reductionism. Once our living perspective becomes aware of its own thinking participation in this process of manifesting the outer physiognomy, the latter becomes its greatest asset. It provides living feed back on the dynamics of the spiritual forces at work within the structured potential of becoming. It kindles our intuitive volume, as Cleric would say. We could also approach it like this - what is the reason for our reincarnating within the Earthly spectrum over and over again if we could accomplish the perfection of our WFT organism, and that of humanity, and the redemption of the Earth organism, simply by remaining in the higher spiritual planes? Ultimately this is a deeply moral question, a question of working through our Karmic conditioning which serves as the living foundation of our spiritual freedom.

[Cleric K]

Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could the perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?

(Ashvin posted while I was writing, practically the same idea. Here's my rendition anyway)

Federica, the bold part can be problematic. It's misleading if we imagine that we can gain access to the archetypal worlds and from there derive spiritually everything in the sensory spectrum. We should remember that there's a spectrum of reality and no part is fully reducible to the others. It is true that the archetypal beings have a much more encompassing effects (non-local) but it's not the case that from their perspective everything that happens on more local scales is fully determined. For this reason, higher cognition always develops as harmonization between the levels of being.

In that sense, without perceptual experience, it's like living in a completely theoretical ideal world, which could be anything. But the sensory, life and soul gradients are the actual structure that has to be transformed and musically attuned to higher order rhythms.

This is the process of redemption. Science with all its abstractness will have to be redeemed, spiritualized. We have a long road ahead before the dreamscape begins to become imaginatively pliable. For quite more time we'll still have to work with our hands and walk with our feet. If everything goes well, human life on Earth will transform such that the night and day cycle will be much more integrated.

Our night time should become something like a night-long meditation where we consciously expand in the higher order spaces and work creatively together with departed souls and higher beings. Everything we learn from the sensory spectrum will have to be worked upon in the higher spaces. This is similar to the way how social and political ideas are worked upon and they then steer the will in the perceptual spectrum, except that in that case we're using completely intellectual ideas, while in future we'll be consciously working on the curvatures of the higher order spaces. This will be true artistic engineering of our spacetime flow.

The daytime will be the more 'manual' aspect of life, where the elemental worlds will have to attuned to the higher flow. Needless to say, there will still be animals and human beings at all stages of development, so there'll be a lot of educational work to be done with the beings whose consciousness flows within the more elemental, fragmentary streams.

With all this in mind, everything that we have as our modern civilization should stand before us as a riddle - how will all this be transformed? It is clear that humanity can't change overnight. We can't say "All this modern technology is Ahrimanic so we have to get rid of it in order for the world to become spiritual." But if we're to do such a thing it is not at all clear how the redemption of the sensory spectrum can be achieved. If we swiftly destroy the Internet, transportation, technology and live in small communities with local ashrams where people meditate all day, sing and pray, the Earth will transform into something like a temporary restrictive space (even if very peaceful and pleasant) that one has to endure until death. Needless to say, this can't happen because even if some part of the population would accept such a path, there will always be those who still live in the ambitious mindset of dominating the Earthly realm.

We shouldn't imagine that what lies ahead of us will be easy. Personally, I have no idea how these transformations will be possible. It's so easy to be overwhelmed by pessimism when we see how hopeless everything looks. But the fact that through the cognitive tools developed by spiritual science and even those who instinctively make their way (like Levin), we also begin to see new possibilities. In any case, our present job is to develop the spiritual soul. More and more of our perceptual world has to be grasped from the proper spiritual perspective. We need to learn to read the world with our spiritual eyes. For this reason, we have to be able to find the place of every Earthly phenomenon within the spectrum of reality. We need to understand how the phenomena work, what ideas are invested in them, what desires and so on. This is the raw material that we will work with. Higher spiritual ideas will have to meet this raw material and give it more musical forms. If we seek the spiritual by turning our sight away from the raw material, by saying that there's nothing to learn there, we enter spiritual vacuum. The spiritual has to flow into the raw material and make it pliable and docile.

[Federica]

No, I don't see the dilemma. In my view, Cleric's living understanding of the model would be even better if he had willfully descended into the precise methods used to derive the results which form the basis of the model. I suspect he would agree. Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize, and some methods may be inaccessible to the average person (which is where computer-VR tech also comes in handy), but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?

Ok, Ashvin, I don't feel it'd be appropriate for me to speculate on whether or not that understanding could have been better. I just take note you've picked (2).

It's interesting the way you phrased (2). It seems to imply you feel that Cleric, or whoever, already has a perfect understanding of what Levin's models are analogically pointing to. Do you see the issue with that?

Yes, I guess I get your thought. You mean that no understanding can be perfect, because there's always an additional depth to penetrate with understanding, therefore calling it perfect would imply a petrification in time, drawing conclusions from "momentary appearances" that we certainly don't want to do. Correct?

If so, first, there are logical issues in deducting from my phrasing that I imply Cleric's understanding to be perfect. I can go into those in detail if you want.

Second, as we have seen (my past fault), it's risky to dissect vocabulary in this way. To be honest, in this case the word that first came to mind to characterize my thought was the Swedish adjective ‘bristfällig’. I looked for its English equivalent. I found ‘defective’, ‘inadequate’. I thought it wasn't fair, in the context of the argument, to push you that far into a 'negative' judgment about Cleric's understanding. So I softened the word. I hesitated between 'incomplete' and 'imperfect'. To my ear they are extremely close, probably because of Latin etymology. Perfectus means finished, completed. So chances are, when I hear the word 'perfect' I sense the meaning of 'complete' much more than 'excellent'. I would guess that for you 'excellent' sounds closer. Finally I just picked imperfect. So you see... it's a wasp nest...

I am sorry, I have to do an errand now, I will answer the other point later.

"How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?"

Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could the perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?
By the way, on second thought, I think I was too quick to agree with you on your question about the white triangle image. The image is certainly useful for me, as it probably is for many others. But I doubt it could be useful for anyone.

You are creating a duality here between the outer perceptual-conceptual physiognomy and the spiritual activity which impresses it. The former is not a detour. It is the means through which the latter becomes conscious of itself and its structured constraints. There is no such thing as a spiritual perspective which directly knows itself apart from the manifestations of its structured potential. When we perceive our physical body, for ex., we become aware of the potential states of being through which our will can transform. It makes us conscious that we have degrees of freedom in our thinking-will to realize the intent of moving from the couch to the bed when we desire to sleep, but not the degrees of freedom to realize the intent of teleporting to the planet Mars. Our spiritual activity is always at the intersection of the unmanifest potential and the manifest perceptual-conceptual states. That is true even for the Gods, only their manifest states are what we call our 'unmanifest potential'.

When we say the phenomenal world is a detour, as a metaphysical conclusion, we are simply distancing our spiritual activity from it and polarizing to the mystical extreme. This is what really differentiates us from the Gods - our ability to polarize in this way and therefore live in thoughts of either material or mystical reductionism. Once our living perspective becomes aware of its own thinking participation in this process of manifesting the outer physiognomy, the latter becomes its greatest asset. It provides living feed back on the dynamics of the spiritual forces at work within the structured potential of becoming. It kindles our intuitive volume, as Cleric would say. We could also approach it like this - what is the reason for our reincarnating within the Earthly spectrum over and over again if we could accomplish the perfection of our WFT organism, and that of humanity, and the redemption of the Earth organism, simply by remaining in the higher spiritual planes? Ultimately this is a deeply moral question, a question of working through our Karmic conditioning which serves as the living foundation of our spiritual freedom.

[Federica]

(...)

(...)

Ashvin, Cleric,

Thank you for offering these two renditions of the problem with my comment quoted here:

Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize (...) but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?

Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?

Before I respond, I want to say, I hope you don’t feel obliged to wrap all your explanations in “if we” and “when we” paper. I see why it’s useful in essays and general discussions, but in this context it starts to sound almost dystopian, with all these “we” that mean “you”. Please feel free to say “you”, when it reflects your meaning. I would not take it badly.


Ashvin, unsurprisingly, I knew you wouldn’t like the word ‘detour’, though I didn’t expect it would help me achieve in this discussion not less than the complete trinity of wrongthinking - dualistic, mystic reductionist, and even materialist reductionist. However, I think, before throwing at me the dualistic anathema, it would have been good to make some more effort trying to put my perspective in context, instead of squaring my words by the criteria of SS’s discontinuity-free principles and tenets. Incidentally said, my understanding is, discontinuity, in certain sense, is inevitable, just because Will is discontinuity, every choice of action we make is by nature a discontinuity. We break off the space of possibilities and we pick one possible materialization only, on moral grounds (once, and if, we become free from all the other stuff standing in the way, of course).


Please note, my comment is not an absolute statement I want inscribed on my epitaph. It’s a reaction to your position about this idea of descent, and that, in principle terms, descending in material experiences of any kind, is always better than not descending. I still see major moral questions in this approach, and in it’s corollary that no phenomena/behaviors/actions are morally characterized in and by themselves, only our intentions when descending in them are. “The moral threshold resides within the individual agency and his intentions-ideals, not within the phenomena themselves”.


So I am sure I am missing a lot in my understanding of the moral aspects of SS. Even the following is not well understood: “our spiritual consciousness is only possible because other streams of development have lagged behind” when put side by side with the (opposite?) statement that by developing our living thinking, we help elevate the consciousness of our family, community, nation, etc. (roughly said). I have no difficulty recognizing that I need to fill in the blanks there. But I reject the dualistic label:

There is no such thing as a spiritual perspective which directly knows itself apart from the manifestations of its structured potential.

I never stated or suggested that “such a thing” exists! You have a tendency to hyperbolize and generalize selected parts of my comments!

Does the double nature of man, by which unitary reality is split in two in the act of cognition, introduce a duality? If you say it does, then I will gladly say OK to your dualistic label. I understand livingly that perception and spirit are two sides of one reality! It’s a polarity that spirals together, not one that falls apart in dualism. That we reincarnate over and over again for a reason has not escaped me either.


“Once our living perspective becomes aware of its own thinking participation in this process of manifesting the outer physiognomy, the latter becomes its greatest asset. It provides living feedback”
Exactly! To the spiritually conscious, it provides feedback, rather than new intuitions. To this function of feedback I am adding additional layers in my comments to Cleric that follow here. I hope you will find them further clarifying of how I see things.

***

“It's misleading if we imagine that we can gain access to the archetypal worlds and from there derive spiritually everything in the sensory spectrum.”

I never said that we can do it. I am not losing sight of mutual causality, at any level of reality, or the vibrating membrane, or the bistable figure, or the countless other metaphors you have used!


“We should remember that there's a spectrum of reality and no part is fully reducible to the others. It is true that the archetypal beings have a much more encompassing effects (non-local) but it's not the case that from their perspective everything that happens on more local scales is fully determined.”

It’s once again the idea of interconnected causality. I understand this! It’s also illustrated in the form of multiple levels of “higher order spaces” in your Levin’s post.


Cleric, I would like to ask you: now that you have attained a certain level of spiritual development (I have The knowledge of the higher worlds in mind, as encompassing idea of the various phases of such a trajectory, in terms of both outer and inner stages of transformation) and found your bearings in the spiritual world, is perceptual reality teaching you anything new? I’m not asking if it gives you confirmations, but if it's still the source of new intuitions?


“With all this in mind, everything that we have as our modern civilization should stand before us as a riddle - how will all this be transformed? (...) Personally, I have no idea how these transformations will be possible.”

Please correct me if I’m wrong (which I’m saying without the least irony). If the perceptual world you are interacting with could be a driver of new, original intuitions for you, if it could give you ‘better’ understanding of reality than the one you have developed/discovered/created through the referenced tools and methods, you would have some ideas of how these transformations could unfold, wouldn’t you? You would look at “how hopeless everything looks”, you would assess the phenomena and say “I am learning fresh intuitions, from being immersed in these perceptions, from how they are evolving, and I understand that we are moving in such and such redemptive (or not) direction. I looked into phenomena, I descended into them, and I got new insights about the future as follows”.
Conversely, every time you come to us with a new illustration grounded in the perceptual sphere, be it Levin’s or one of the many others that have preceded it, every time you write a post that starts 'this has been said so many times, but let me give you yet another angle' you are not yourself surprised by what you have found out in the new rendition, correct? You intimately knew the principles already, and simply found a new material outplay, or example, that confirms your encompassing knowledge of reality, to hopefully help us get inspired and have a brain wave, correct?

Notice, this is all I stated in my comment.


I am very far from advocating to turn away from the raw material, discard all technology, and that there’s nothing to be done in the perceptual world. If I may quote what I wrote in this thread three days ago:

thinking of the Levin’s model and its mutually impinging levels of causality, that we progressively infuse with awareness, it could maybe be said that a synonym for infusing reality with awareness/becoming more conscious of it, is identifying the telos in the higher orders. When that principal direction is found in the spiritual world, the system can become unitary, the fast vibrating membrane can be understood as unitary, and that “Wise orientation towards the surrounding world” can be consequently found.

This telos I was recalling is exactly what I gather from your concluding words:

More and more of our perceptual world has to be grasped from the proper spiritual perspective. We need to learn to read the world with our spiritual eyes. For this reason, we have to be able to find the place of every Earthly phenomenon within the spectrum of reality. We need to understand how the phenomena work, what ideas are invested in them, what desires and so on. This is the raw material that we will work with. Higher spiritual ideas will have to meet this raw material and give it more musical forms. If we seek the spiritual by turning our sight away from the raw material, by saying that there's nothing to learn there, we enter spiritual vacuum. The spiritual has to flow into the raw material and make it pliable and docile.

The telos, the spiritual perspective, is the idiom, and the world is the book in which we find it expressed, spelled out. We look at the pages, and we attempt to read and grasp every sentence in the terms of the idiom. At the same time, the spelled out story we are reading gives us feedback, and confirmation that the language is alive, follows certain rules, certain expressions, and flows on certain waves. The story gives thickness to the idiom. Although as beginners we can practice and learn a lot about the language by reading the book, once the language is holistically internalized, the story won’t teach us the language. It will play out the language, it will give us feedback and angles on the language, but it will not open new chapters in our knowledge of the language. The latter, on the contrary, enables us to recognize how every sentence, paragraph, and page belongs in the narrative flow. It enables us to find and understand the place of every piece of the story.
Also, it’s near to impossible to deduct, based on the page we are reading now, what the next page in the book will tell ("I have no idea"). The past and current pages by themselves can’t help us guess what the next will tell. In this sense the spelled out story can’t teach us the future, it can’t teach us new insights. But if we have knowledge of the language, we can all impress it on the next pages and somehow make them add up in the book.

I’m not sure this metaphor is the best one, or how far it can be pushed. I still hope it can at least provide an approximation of how I understand the interplay of the sensory and spiritual planes at this moment.

[AshvinP]

(...)

(...)

Ashvin, Cleric,

Thank you for offering these two renditions of the problem with my comment quoted here:

Of course there is only so much time in life and so much willpower to expend so we must prioritize (...) but with infinite time and strength of will, our living thinking can always gain more value from penetrating into the depths of phenomenal manifestations. How could it be otherwise if all phenomenal manifestations are the outer physiognomy of the spiritual forces we are seeking to make more conscious?

Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?

Before I respond, I want to say, I hope you don’t feel obliged to wrap all your explanations in “if we” and “when we” paper. I see why it’s useful in essays and general discussions, but in this context it starts to sound almost dystopian, with all these “we” that mean “you”. Please feel free to say “you”, when it reflects your meaning. I would not take it badly.


Ashvin, unsurprisingly, I knew you wouldn’t like the word ‘detour’, though I didn’t expect it would help me achieve in this discussion not less than the complete trinity of wrongthinking - dualistic, mystic reductionist, and even materialist reductionist. However, I think, before throwing at me the dualistic anathema, it would have been good to make some more effort trying to put my perspective in context, instead of squaring my words by the criteria of SS’s discontinuity-free principles and tenets. Incidentally said, my understanding is, discontinuity, in certain sense, is inevitable, just because Will is discontinuity, every choice of action we make is by nature a discontinuity. We break off the space of possibilities and we pick one possible materialization only, on moral grounds (once, and if, we become free from all the other stuff standing in the way, of course).


Please note, my comment is not an absolute statement I want inscribed on my epitaph. It’s a reaction to your position about this idea of descent, and that, in principle terms, descending in material experiences of any kind, is always better than not descending. I still see major moral questions in this approach, and in it’s corollary that no phenomena/behaviors/actions are morally characterized in and by themselves, only our intentions when descending in them are. “The moral threshold resides within the individual agency and his intentions-ideals, not within the phenomena themselves”.


So I am sure I am missing a lot in my understanding of the moral aspects of SS. Even the following is not well understood: “our spiritual consciousness is only possible because other streams of development have lagged behind” when put side by side with the (opposite?) statement that by developing our living thinking, we help elevate the consciousness of our family, community, nation, etc. (roughly said). I have no difficulty recognizing that I need to fill in the blanks there. But I reject the dualistic label:

There is no such thing as a spiritual perspective which directly knows itself apart from the manifestations of its structured potential.

I never stated or suggested that “such a thing” exists! You have a tendency to hyperbolize and generalize selected parts of my comments!

Does the double nature of man, by which unitary reality is split in two in the act of cognition, introduce a duality? If you say it does, then I will gladly say OK to your dualistic label. I understand livingly that perception and spirit are two sides of one reality! It’s a polarity that spirals together, not one that falls apart in dualism. That we reincarnate over and over again for a reason has not escaped me either.


“Once our living perspective becomes aware of its own thinking participation in this process of manifesting the outer physiognomy, the latter becomes its greatest asset. It provides living feedback”
Exactly! To the spiritually conscious, it provides feedback, rather than new intuitions. To this function of feedback I am adding additional layers in my comments to Cleric that follow here. I hope you will find them further clarifying of how I see things.

Federica,

Generally I say "we" because of the inner disposition I have mentioned before - I work to internalize that these are not your thoughts, your habits, or your soul-tendencies, or those of the people who immerse themselves in VR and materialistic technologies, or the rapists and murderers for that matter, but they are ours as a Karmically interwoven collective of individual perspectives which comprise humanity and the Cosmic "I". Such things become more intimate and important for us as we livingly work through a science of the spirit. But since you asked, I will use the "you" more below.

The incarnational rhythm, which could also be referred to as a rhythmic descent into 'matter' and ascent into 'spirit', spiraling upwards through the DoF of our spiritual activity, occurring through several nested layers of 'convolutions' - physical, life, soul, thinking - which tend towards harmonization and integration, is what we are. This is of course not an abstract metaphysical postulate, but based on our phenomenological experience of thinking-perception (the hysteresis) and all that we can logically discern through our thinking-perception which threads us through the nested archetypal layers of the Cosmic "I".

So it's probably misleading to speak of "new" intuitions. Through our nature as nested incarnational thinking-perception rhythmic activity, we are always in process of clarifying, of bringing more expansive and intense resolution to, our existing intuition of the Whole, of which we are always a microcosmic image. This can only be clarified through the rhythmic descent-ascent spiral across all scales, as we gradually bridge the 'dark spots' i.e. discontinuities of consciousness. Yet even at the highest integrated perspective, there is still the eternal tendency towards the descent of sacrificial Love through which this entire evolutionary drama continues to unfold. What we do in our conscious thinking descents into the sensory-conceptual spectrum is a microcosmic image of that highest Impulse which eternally recurs.

I really would not throw out the duality, discontinuity, reductionism, etc. unless I was confident this is being reflected consistently in your reasoning and points, not only on this thread but others (and, again, this is truly a "we" issue, for detailed Karmic reasons which would lead us too afar from this particular discussion). It is most pronounced when reasoning through those phenomena which you had a prior antipathy for. In fact, that may be the only situation it happens right now - because otherwise you seem to grasp and internalize the idea-perception polar relation very well, as a practical reality in our phenomenal experience. I think that's generally evident from the way you summarize the dynamic, for ex. here. 

But in the question/statement of - "What could the perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?" - the unique causal lawfulness within the levels of Being is forgotten, which Cleric also commented on. Again it is the same thing as in the speech vs. writing discussion - writing was practically seen as a materialistic 'detour' which was unnecessary and unhelpful. For ex. you wrote the following metaphor. We could transpose "writing" or "written language" for "VR", and "speech" for "normal sensory spectrum", and practically arrive at your same arguments here.

Here’s a metaphor: as our intellectual thoughts are pale, flat, dry, fragmented, dead precipitations of living ideas, in the same way written language is a heavily impoverished rendition of spoken word, flattened in spatial sequence. It actually lays two steps down on the path of downward precipitation. Let me give you the step-by-step recipe for written language: take a piece of fresh living speech, then strip it of its vertical temporal backbone, strip it also of its unique musical living quality, then mold its audible continuum into a squared grid, name every little square with a symbol of your liking, in culinary jargon: to signify the squares (not very much to do with meaning, rather it's about assigning the symbols), then actually discard the speech fragments from the grid, don’t be afraid, and just serve the symbols, dish them out in linear arrangements on a platter of your choice, and there you have it! Enjoy the recipe : ) And just like nutritional value is greatly altered in heavily processed food, meaning is altered in written language, compared to speech. Writing is actually not really language anymore in the same sense speech is. It’s more like a smart, sharable workaround that provides some organized account of speech. It’s like looking at a musical score (as someone who knows how to read it) versus going to the musical performance at the theater. Would you say that there’s no essential difference between the two experiences?

Initially you responded to my post to Anthony knowing, in your words, that what you were interested in discussing about VR was "peripheral to my post". Then you wrote:

I suppose I will have to revisit the question once I have a better grasp of the reasons for my aversion to VR, which is basically the same as my aversion to drugs, and other forms of 'interference with nature'. I am currently not very good at inquiring that dispassionately, although I do see there is something deeply ingrained that requires self critique. I also see that sensory perceptions are in a sense just as dreamlike as VR, powerfully catalyzing our conscious experience, but I am not motivated to go down that road. It's an effort that remains to be undertaken.

At this point, I really feel as if most of your comments have been a means of intellectually reflecting your way out of this initial intuition of what was going on. You have let the most solid principled points of my responses fall by the wayside while selecting the most tangential ones to counter, mostly based around their phraseology. There was also sporadic falling back on the argument that we don't all necessarily need to start using VR as a spiritual practice, or that surely we don't need to engage in evil behaviors to understand them. As said before, we don't gain any value on this forum by picking apart VR technology as an isolated experience or isolated concept. None of us are in a position to evaluate whether such technology is an optimal practice for any given individual on this forum. We only gain value by trying to discern the principles of spiritual evolution through our consideration of how these phenomena fit into the holistic tapestry of the spiritual activity which manifested them, and in this case, as in most cases, the principles center around the redemption of phenomena as a whole and for the whole. It should also go without saying that we don't need to experience the final deeds of people who use technology for their selfish intentions. I don't need to go out and shoot someone with malicious intent to penetrate the phenomenon of guns with living thinking, although it will undoubtedly help if I at least see a gun, hold it in my hand, and use it at the shooting range once or twice. And if I don't want to have anything to do with the gun phenomenon, that's fine too, but then probably I should withhold specific judgments on how exactly they fit (or don't fit) into the holistic tapestry of redemptive spiritual evolution.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

When I read of the incarnational rhythm that we are, and how you describe it as a perfectly self-balancing, sublime system, I receive the impression that your words must spring from a consistent foundation, and I can follow them, but it’s true that it’s an abstract understanding. I don’t have a living experience of “that is what we are”. I have the experience of the act of cognition, of the nature of perception, etc., which makes me say that I can see through dualism, as we have discussed many times, for example with reference to BK, etc. But I don’t have this large and deep view that spans across incarnations, and convolutions, as a sense that I can directly integrate. There is indeed a point of discontinuity beyond which I can’t expand my understanding. Is this the door of duality? I don’t know. I would like to say that I trust your judgment and that there must be dualism I’m not aware of. But what improvement in living thinking would that be? I can’t do that.

Although my last couple of posts were not about VR, I understand you want to bring it back to VR, or should I say, you don't really, but I understand you want to signal that. I know I have not been able to respond to all the points you have raised, I regret it. I am slow. But I didn’t try to leave behind the most important ones. I have various drafts I couldn't finish. Also I picked up the topic for reasons that are grounded in my antipathies, I realize that (however, I didn’t reply to a post to Anthony. The post was to me, I have checked).

So, what to say, you are certainly right that I haven’t clarified for myself the origin of my antipathy, which must be creating bias and premature conclusions. I apologize for the points I left behind.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

When I read of the incarnational rhythm that we are, and how you describe it as a perfectly self-balancing, sublime system, I receive the impression that your words must spring from a consistent foundation, and I can follow them, but it’s true that it’s an abstract understanding. I don’t have a living experience of “that is what we are”. I have the experience of the act of cognition, of the nature of perception, etc., which makes me say that I can see through dualism, as we have discussed many times, for example with reference to BK, etc. But I don’t have this large and deep view that spans across incarnations, and convolutions, as a sense that I can directly integrate. There is indeed a point of discontinuity beyond which I can’t expand my understanding. Is this the door of duality? I don’t know. I would like to say that I trust your judgment and that there must be dualism I’m not aware of. But what improvement in living thinking would that be? I can’t do that.

Although my last couple of posts were not about VR, I understand you want to bring it back to VR, or should I say, you don't really, but I understand you want to signal that. I know I have not been able to respond to all the points you have raised, I regret it. I am slow. But I didn’t try to leave behind the most important ones. I have various drafts I couldn't finish. Also I picked up the topic for reasons that are grounded in my antipathies, I realize that (however, I didn’t reply to a post to Anthony. The post was to me, I have checked).

So, what to say, you are certainly right that I haven’t clarified for myself the origin of my antipathy, which must be creating bias and premature conclusions. I apologize for the points I left behind.

Federica,

There's no need to apologize. I am only interested in reaching a shared understanding, and I get a lot of value from the exchanges even if we completely disagree or speak past one another for a while. Just the act of articulating these intuitive understandings is a great exercise for me. None of it is time wasted, all of it can be time redeemed by our living thinking. It certainly shouldn't be about trusting my judgment. If anything, you can trust that I am only offering constructive criticisms when I have reasoned out the underlying principles for myself carefully, and you can use them as a pointer to do the same for yourself. Just knowing that this needs to be done is a huge leg up. And you're right, I used the VR example in a response to you, not Anthony.

I will offer just a brief comment on the incarnational rhythm for now. It's the principle that we are always reincarnating in our thoughts. Every thought-perception embeds the entire intuitive depth volume. Cleric has said before that what we know as "thoughts-perceptions" are the most 'in focus' part of this whole intuitive volume of nested Time-rhythms. That part which is normally 'out of focus' we can call the 'subconscious' (elemental Earthly rhythms) or 'supra-conscious' (archetypal Cosmic rhythms). We have the boundary of the memory of our soul-life on the inside and the boundary of colors, sounds, smells, etc. on the outside, past which all becomes darkness. In the face of this darkness, we project our normal 'in focus' thoughts into the subconscious rhythms and thereby represent them abstractly as physical quarks and atoms, life processes, the soul processes of instincts, desires, feelings, etc. We also project our thoughts into the supra-conscious rhythms and represent them abstractly as archetypal forces and principles - those of science, aesthetics, and morality. Our task now is to make these abstract representations more conscious and living, by expanding the aperture of our thought-life beyond the inner-outer boundaries, so more and more of the intuitive volume is in focus.

We can already sense how we only exist and experience by virtue of all these nested domains of activity - in the words of secular culture, we may say that we are 'products of our evolutionary past' and we are goal-directed beings, always striving towards our 'future potential'. That we are 'made of stardust', subject to the 'laws of nature', evolved from the kingdoms of nature, part of a symbiotic living ecosystem, woven into a 'collective intelligence' through modern civilization, and so forth. Yet the aesthetic and moral forces are generally ignored or flattened out completely by the mystics/theists, since the reality of multiple incarnations and the Karmic laws which weave through them are missing behind the mind-container. Nevertheless they are embedded within our evolved cultural institutions (which we often cynically denigrate). When we do our inner work and study spiritual science, always keeping in mind core principles like the superimposed TC spectrum, we will begin to discern how all these WFT forces are ever-present, working to make our current experience possible, and how that experience is constantly renewed, revitalized and reincarnated, through the thought-perception, wake-sleep, and birth-death rhythms. The latter two are the thought-will rhythm at more integrated scales. In every instance of a thought-distraction, a discontinuity of consciousness, we are reincarnating in our thought and starting fresh, as it were, towards the perfection and continuity of consciousness. As individuals and communities, we can work to prolong and enrich the life of thought at these rhythmic scales.

We are, of course, a continual work in progress and so is our living understanding. It is precisely because of our rhythmic incarnational nature that we will oscillate into periods of darkness, fogginess, confusion, misunderstanding and all the attending negative emotions. We can even learn from these periods if we intend to pay more attention to them, without letting the lower frustrated nature constantly gain the upper hand. We will never lose the capacity to doubt our understanding, because that would mean losing degrees of thinking-freedom. As is often said, prayer is an invaluable tool to maintain faith, hope, and love in the face of the inevitable obstacles. These oscillations will smooth out over time if we persist on the path with prayerful devotion and good will. The forces of reality will lawfully 'conspire' to initiate us into the Cosmic secrets when we persistently approach them with loving attention. The high ideals we freely strive towards will become greater attractor forces for our thinking consciousness than the lower conditioned and compulsive soul-forces.

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

[Cleric K]

Cleric, I would like to ask you: now that you have attained a certain level of spiritual development (I have The knowledge of the higher worlds in mind, as encompassing idea of the various phases of such a trajectory, in terms of both outer and inner stages of transformation) and found your bearings in the spiritual world, is perceptual reality teaching you anything new? I’m not asking if it gives you confirmations, but if it's still the source of new intuitions?

Hi Federica,

So basically, at the source of your reflections stands somewhat like the following: if the perceptual spectrum is the crystallization of the ideal, then how could we ever find something new there? How could the perceptual be a source of new intuitions when it is nothing but the product of intuitions?

To understand this we have to keep in mind that the two poles can never be truly separated. Our intuitive context of existence is always partial. I remind of this post. In a certain sense our perceptions can be seen as missing pieces of the puzzle that can only become complete when the corresponding ideal element flows into them.

This may sound confusing because we seem to speak of perceptions in two different ways. In one case we speak of perceptions as the crystallization of intuition. This makes it seem as if perceptions are completely determined by our spiritual activity, thus they only exemplify our intuitions, there’s nothing new we can ever find in them. As you say, they are only confirmations of our intuition. But now we added that perceptions are like negative images that speak of missing intuition from our state of existence. So it’s a contradiction, which one is it?

It’s not a contradiction when we remember that, for example, our thinking is not the absolute creator of sound phenomena (the sound of our inner voice). Here Levin’s model is a useful metaphor. We do steer linguistic space, we feel tightly responsible for the way our inner voice curves, yet we can’t really say that we create the ‘substance’ of sound or color, which we steer through. This is challenging to distinguish in the case of thinking but is more clearly grasped as an analogy when we consider normal speech, where we impress sound waves in the air through our vocal cords. We wouldn’t say that we create the air with our voice. It’s somewhat similar in thinking but it requires much more finer differentiation to observe how our thinking gestures stir the imaginative ‘substance’.

The key in all this is to remember that different levels of intuitive activity are reflected in the corresponding perceptual qualities. For example, warmth and light can indeed be seen as the direct reflection of the intuitive activity of archetypal beings. For this we need the highest forms of Intuitive cognition. But in ordinary thinking and Imagination this reflection is perceived as our soul substance, as the medium in which our steering impresses and becomes known to us.

This is the first thing: to remember that the perceptual spectrum is not at all a solved problem for us. We may look at the world and say “Well, all these buildings and objects are simply the manifestations of human thinking.” Yes, this solves part of the puzzle but we still don’t know what the inner experience of color is.

Think of the stock market, one of the most chaotic human phenomena. How many people dream of cracking the code that would allow them to predict it and know when to buy and when to sell. But the complexity arises precisely because everyone tries to do that. It reminds me of this part of Friends



With all this I’m trying to say that we need to distinguish between the things that are clear to us (our thinking) and the totality of the perceptual world which ‘encodes’ the interference of the activity of countless beings. If we keep this in mind, it won’t be surprising that the perceptual world continually leads us to new intuitions. For example, how would we arrive at the idea of a rose if we don’t stumble upon its perception? Or imagine that you have to add two very large numbers. For most people it is very difficult to do that in thinking alone. Instead we write down the numbers and begin applying the rules of addition. The perceptual elements serve as something firm for our thinking to step on. The interesting thing is that sometimes we can find new intuitions only when we investigate the perceptions. For example, the Mandelbrot set is calculated in a very simple way for every point on the number plane. We take the coordinates of every point and do the same calculation which gives us a yes/no answer. But it’s practically impossible to predict in thought how all those answers will look like if plotted side by side. It came as quite a surprise when with the early computers something like this came out from a typewriter-style printer:



The point here is that there’s continual feedback between perceptions and intuition. This is also encoded in Genesis: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good”. In a sense even the Divine beings learned something new in the process. Even though the creation proceeded from them, there was still something new when their creative impulses became perceptions. It was not known beforehand that what would be seen would be good. The reason is because the Elohim are not the sole determining factor in what they create. They still operate within a complicated archetypal space. In a sense, they themselves explore the possibilities of that space.

Please correct me if I’m wrong (which I’m saying without the least irony). If the perceptual world you are interacting with could be a driver of new, original intuitions for you, if it could give you ‘better’ understanding of reality than the one you have developed/discovered/created through the referenced tools and methods, you would have some ideas of how these transformations could unfold, wouldn’t you? You would look at “how hopeless everything looks”, you would assess the phenomena and say “I am learning fresh intuitions, from being immersed in these perceptions, from how they are evolving, and I understand that we are moving in such and such redemptive (or not) direction. I looked into phenomena, I descended into them, and I got new insights about the future as follows”.

Here we should remember that there’s something in the steering of every spiritual perspective that is not reducible to other perspectives. In other words, when we know something of the archetypal patterns of reality, this doesn’t directly translate to knowledge of how things will evolve. We know that we’ll pass through the portal of death. This is an archetypal rhythm. But this in itself doesn’t determine the full details of how our life will be lived. It is known that the Earth will make a full revolution around the Sun in a year but this doesn’t fully determine what humans will make out of world history in that time. In that sense, there are things that can be known with archetypal certainty but the playing out of the details is creatively determined down the gradient. It is our job to understand how the carrier waves of reality evolve in order to navigate them with the greatest freedom.

The conclusion is that the perceptual world is not something simple that simply follows our intuitions but reflects infinitely complex interference of activity of beings. For this reason, perceptions always invite us to seek new intuitions. We can’t say “I no longer need the perceptual world, I’ll investigate the intuitive activity itself” because this activity can’t be known in itself, in isolation. There’s always also the perceptual pole of existence (I remind that this doesn’t mean only sensory perceptions but the full spectrum of spiritual phenomena). Our intuitions work upon perceptions and organize their precipitation. This in turn leads us to new ways in which perceptions present themselves, which leads us to new intuitions and so on. There’s always this rhythmic interplay. There’s no point in which we say “OK, I found my way in the ideal world so now the perceptual pole is redundant, I can simply predict the perceptions by knowing the ideal activity.” As long as we exist as a being that has a relative perspective in reality, there’s always a perceptual mystery, simply because we can’t know the free spiritual activity of all beings simultaneously. The perceptual world encodes the interference of intents of beings. Thus there’s always something to learn from the perceptual pole because it’s only against it that we can find the intuitive intents. Thus as long as we perceive, there are also new intuitions to be found.

Conversely, every time you come to us with a new illustration grounded in the perceptual sphere, be it Levin’s or one of the many others that have preceded it, every time you write a post that starts 'this has been said so many times, but let me give you yet another angle' you are not yourself surprised by what you have found out in the new rendition, correct? You intimately knew the principles already, and simply found a new material outplay, or example, that confirms your encompassing knowledge of reality, to hopefully help us get inspired and have a brain wave, correct?

I think both are true. On one hand there’s really something which is already known but on the other, one is still surprised in the sense that every metaphor is a different inner way to experience these spiritual dynamics. In other words, one can ask: “If I have never found these metaphors, would I still know of the deeper spiritual dynamics?” The answer would be no. Of course, on some level we do know them. That’s why most spiritual teachings compare the development of deeper knowledge as a kind of remembering. One can say that these intuitions have always been merged in the intuitive background, yet they would have never come into focus if they didn’t incarnate in the metaphorical thinking gestures.

It’s worth grasping this because it is a source of great confusion when we take the abstract general truths to be enough. For example we can say “There’s existence”. This is a fact so general that it will be valid as long as we exist. Everything else can be seen as happening within the context of this fact. Yet we can never derive the infinite variety of existence from that general concept.

For this reason, every new metaphor is also a surprise. Maybe not in the sense that it turns our understanding 180 degrees but because we find new ways in which the general truths can be experienced as concrete reality.

I would say that Levin’s model has been a surprise for me. I think it provides a conceptual language that can quite easily be adopted to speak about our spiritual experience in concrete ways. This is what really is the most decisive step in our spiritual evolution – we need to find ways to think and speak of our temporal unfolding with ever greater clarity.