Cleric wrote:What's interesting is that even our thinking trains are of the same nature. This we can notice when in meditation we investigate the nature of our distractions. Just like falling asleep, we're never clearly conscious of being distracted. We say "I used to concentrate on that thought but now I awakened to the fact that there has been an interruption and I have switched to thinking of something else". So in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts.
So when we transition from light to dark periods, not only at death or when falling asleep, but throughout our day of buzzing thoughts, where we switch to thinking about many different things without being aware of how exactly the switch took place, our thought-life is dying out and reincarnating, resulting in a discontinuity of consciousness. That is basically what underlies the phenomenon we know as "distraction" or "forgetfulness". These are discontinuities of consciousness which come from the continual rejection of thought-forms by Cosmic intuition. (as an aside, we should consider whether this means we have thoughts which reincarnate, or rather, we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts). As Cleric said, the fact that this is always happening becomes more clear to us even in the early stages of concentration and meditation. The most varied distractions creep into our efforts and we are suddenly on another thought-path from the one we first set out on, without any clear sense of how exactly we got there. In normal sensory consciousness, the intellect will often rationalize a backstory for this discontinuity after the fact, but this is more difficult for it to do in meditation.
In a sense, through focused thinking meditation, we first aim to resist the premature abortion of our thoughts by decoupling them from fragmented sense-impressions and tying them to the underlying fluid imaginations which can give them life. Thereby they live long enough for us to enter into the living thinking flow which produces them. But just as we can't expect to go from a 80-year lifespan to physical immortality in one fell swoop, we can't expect our thought-life to become immortal with these initial efforts. In fact, we should expect that most of them will be continually aborted as they are rejected by Cosmic intuition due to their imperfections. We should be clear that this isn't an arbitrary rejection by the higher worlds to keep us from becoming Divine, with continuity of consciousness - if we take it in this way, it can only lead to subconscious resentment. That resentment can only lead to a negative feedback of less and less interest in the Divine images which surround us in the Earthly kingdoms and in our human brothers and sisters.
As an analogy, consider the following:
Steiner wrote:Natural science to-day, following the impulse of Darwin, has drawn — from observation of the world of the senses alone — an important conclusion; natural science speaks of the principle of the so-called “struggle for existence.” Who is not ready to see this struggle for existence all around him as long as he takes cognizance only of what the external world of the senses affords? Why, we meet with it at every turn. Think of the innumerable eggs laid by the creatures of the sea, how many are destroyed and perish, and how few actually grow up and become new creatures. There you have, apparently, a fearful struggle for existence. One could well begin to lament over it if one listened only to the world of the senses, and say: of the millions and billions of eggs so many, so very many, go under in the struggle for existence and so few survive. But this is only one side of a thought, my dear friends. Take hold now of the same thought at another end! In order to bring your thinking on in a certain direction, let me ask you to grasp the same thought at another point. You can also lament in a similar way over the struggle for existence in another connection. You can cast your eyes over a field of corn where so-and-so many ears are standing, each holding so-and-so many grains of corn, and you can ask the question: How many of these grains of corn are lost in some way or other and never fulfil their true purpose; and how few of them are planted again in the earth that they may become new plants of the same kind as the old ones? We can thus look over a field of corn that is promising a rich and plenteous harvest and say to ourselves: How much of all that sprouting life will perish without having attained its goal! Only a very few grains will be buried in the earth for new plants of the same kind to arise. Here again we have an instance, only in a rather different sphere from that of the sea-creatures, where also only a very few come to fulfilment.
But now let me ask you what would become of the human beings, who must eat something, if every single grain of corn were buried again in the earth? Let us suppose that it were possible — theoretically we can suppose anything — for such an abundant growth to take place that every single grain of corn could come up again; but we must also think of what would happen to the beings who have to find their nourishment from corn. Here we come to a strange pass; a belief that might appear justified when we look at the world of the senses is shaken. When we look at a field of corn in respect of its own physical existence we might seem quite justified in concluding that every single grain should grow into a whole plant. And yet the standpoint is perhaps false. Perhaps in the whole connection of things in the world we are not thinking correctly when we ascribe to each single grain of corn this aim and object, namely to grow into a whole plant. Perhaps there is nothing to justify us in saying that the grains of corn which serve other beings for food have somehow failed in their cosmic aim. Perhaps there is nothing that compels us to say that the eggs of the creatures of the sea have failed in their aim when they have not grown into fishes. It is in reality no more than human prejudice to suppose that every single seed ought to become again the same being. For we can only measure the tasks of the individual beings when we turn our eyes to the whole.
It is really more than a mere analogy (as we commonly use that word), because our 'thought-eggs' rely on the same reproductive life force as the biological eggs. It's interesting to consider that the pituitary gland in the brain, which links sense-based neurological functions (thinking) to metabolic functions of lower glands (will), is a functional image of the maternal womb which performs the same balancing task in the developing fetus. In our more unified primordial past, the life force was split into these two distinct functions. The pituitary does for our thinking-life what the womb does for new biological life. It is no coincidence that we speak of 'carnal knowledge', 'reproducing an image', 'giving birth to new ideas', 'fertilizing our thoughts', etc.
Klocek wrote:The pituitary gland, the master gland in the body, sits in the center of tremendous activities in which substances and processes pertaining to the integrity of the organism must constantly be exchanged and balanced. The continual balancing between the polarities of nerve and blood, sensation and response, awake consciousness and deep sleep, rest and activity, and assimilation and excretion are functional analogs of the activity of the womb. In the womb neurology meets the blood stream, tissues are differentiated, substances assimilated and excreted, and organs in the fetus respond to sensations in the mother. In no other place in the body does a more heightened balancing of forces occur than in the womb and the pituitary gland.
So our aborted thought-forms serve a critical purpose in the Cosmic spiritual economy. Nothing is wasted. We shouldn't feel ashamed or frustrated that our thoughts are aborted by distractions which keep us from grasping the holistic intuition, but become more conscious of how we are contributing to the Cosmos. When we remain unconscious of this dynamic, the thoughts are aborted independent of our will, outside of our control. Then we remain unsatisfied and unfree. But when we voluntarily take hold of it and sacrifice our thought-forms to the spiritual worlds (remember the law of 'shrinking') , then we are purifying the will and receiving back inspiration. (we can also make a sacrificial offering in prayer every night at sleep as our ego-consciousness returns to the spiritual worlds). For imagination, we sacrifice our normal sense-based thoughts to focus on a unitary image and let its thought-content fill our inner space. For inspiration, we then sacrifice that imaginative content and let the pure thinking-gestures underlying them flow in. An even more potent sacrifice must then take place for intuition. It's the same sacrificial principle throughout - the same red thread running through the cognitive depth structure.
If we grasp this principle in a living way - one that is concrete to first-person thought experience - then we realize that our sacrifice is not actually giving something up which would have remained in our possession otherwise - most of the thought-forms will be aborted regardless. Our sense-based intellect only gives us the illusion, the Maya, that we remain in continuous possession of our thoughts. Sacrifice is becoming more conscious and creatively responsible for how the thought-eggs are distributed, how the thought-seeds are rhythmically planted back into the spiritual soil as offerings or given as food for other beings. The very same thing which was once seen as a frustrating tragedy then becomes the path to creative evolution of consciousness. It is realizing we were never in possession of our thought-forms to begin with, just as we are not in possession of our physical body or the ongoing natural processes which constellate that body (every 7 years all our physical cells are replaced from the environment, and eventually we give it back permanently). We are only 'leasing' them from the spiritual worlds for eternal, selfless aims. Thought-sacrifice is confronting our nested dark periods, discontinuities, and deaths with courage, composure and dignity, and, in turn, reincarnating new thinking-life with greater conscious degrees of freedom.