Thought-Sacrifice as Higher Consciousness

[Cleric K]

In the context of Federica's post, I was imagining an exercise in which we start drawing a triangle starting from the apex or the base, but we slow down the tip of our spiritual activity until we stop maybe halfway through one of the sides. So now we are maintaining the image of the half-line or perhaps just the point where we stopped. Either way, my follow up question is, do you think there is any additional value gained from concentrating-maintaing the full static triangle image? Or, in the case of 'I think the words', the image of the sentence which we have drawn out into the static thought-sound? My reasoning was that this engenders more strength of subtle spiritual activity which is maintaining the image, in comparison to if we were to simply begin by concentrating on a static point. We have a 'deeper' standing wave, waterfall, etc. which is reflecting our temporally dynamic imaginative flow that sustains it. Perhaps it doesn't really make a difference. What do you think?

Yes, exactly the bolded part. Remember what Steiner explains, for example, about the rose cross meditation. If you just show a picture of it to someone and say: "Here, concentrate on this", it's unlikely that any results will be achieved. RS says that the symbol only has power if we have gone through the process of building it ourselves. Not only its visual aspect but also the feeling. The power of the rose cross is that our living and purified spiritual nature (symbolized by the rose) is grafted upon the the dark cross of our lower self. When we livingly imagine these things, certain currents are set in motion in our soul, even if we perceive nothing. Yet, after the symbol is built we need to hold it quietly in concentration. We no longer move it, morph it and so on but we live in spiritual activity that sustains it through time. Then after we begin to gain consciousness of this temporal flow, we can once again discover the forces that we have stirred while building the image but now from their subtler side, as deeper forces that curve our soul life.

If we simply begin to concentrate on a point, one God knows in what configuration our soul forces are. Remember that in our age, intellectual forces are relatively independent of deeper soul and moral life. One can be a quite clever hacker even if they breed pure hatred to humanity. Such a person won't have any problem to concentrate on a point but even if they manage to grasp the temporal flow of spiritual activity, they would have to awaken to their grotesque soul forms.

There are so many things to be mentioned here. Our mobile ordinary imagination should be developed, for example by doing the growing plant exercise. Here we have a completely sensory imagination, we imagine a plant, as we would see it with our eyes. There's (seemingly) nothing occult in this. Yet by consciously imagining the plant unfolding leaf by leaf, we engage our spiritual activity in certain ways. We should be clear why we do this.

The actual spiritual forces that act as the life forces of the growing plant, are not being thought by spiritual beings in the way we imagine the developing plant. A spiritual being doesn't stand to the side and use its imagination like some form of telekinesis, in order to instill life force in the plant form 'over there'. The activity of these beings is in itself the archetypal time-curvature of growth and reproduction. Yet things are such that when we imagine the growing plant, unless we imagine it in a purely mechanical way (this has something in common with the quote about the danger of the cinematograph), we set in motion certain forces. It's not so much the geometrical form of imagination but that we unknowingly take part in such an expansion from a seed, flowering, forming fruit and finally reaching a seed again. There's something archetypal in this progression. The imagined plant is only a scaffold, helping wheels, through which we set in motion these deeper archetypal movements. When later in meditation we attain to these subtler movements of the spirit, it becomes possible that grasp our ordinary imagination of the plant as something that exists in musical relations with the finer forces. The two are in different octaves, so to speak, but yet they are musically related. And the important thing is that if we have never engaged with these ordinary exercises of our purely sensory imagination, there would be no gesture to remember even if pass right through the archetypal force. Seen in this way, our ordinary imagination creates a vocabulary of gestures which are used to translate the subtler worlds to our ordinary cognition. This is important to note. In our Earthly eon, our thinking "I" is our natural cognitive habitat. We only grasp the higher worlds as far as they can be translated to the language of our "I", that is, we need to be able to think with our normal cognition about the higher worlds.

This is important to understand. It is true that our present consciousness already spans the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Yet, as we have discussed many times, our Earthly state is like an aliased, mineralized version of the full spectrum. The thinking gesture of imagining a plant growing and unfolding leaf by leaf is unique to our Earthly state. An Angel can't see a plant in this way. The form of the plant that we perceive is only possible as a result of the highly convoluted interaction of the plant life forces, the forces of light, the forces of our sensory organs and brain organization. This is a unique experience in itself. Yet by following the sensory unfolding of that plant we already lead ourselves into resonance with the more subtle forces. It is important to keep in mind that these subtler forces don't 'look like' a growing plant as we can see it from the side. But we can recognize these forces to be active in the plant.

I'm stressing on this in order to avoid the expectation that in the world of Inspiration we find the spiritual gestures of higher beings as thinking in concepts and imagining plants from the side. Such human gestures indeed belong to that world but they are like Moiré patterns over the subtler world of spiritual activity. As said, our thinking gestures and imagination, even as lofty as a growing plant, are still very crude and chubby in comparison to the subtler flow. They are like grunts of cavemen in comparison to the creative flow of higher beings.

For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration. Our grunting intellectual being is left meditating, while our subtler spiritual being begins to find its existence. We can indeed feel our physical being and our intellectual self as a kind of environment around us. In certain sense we feel as distinct beings. It's like the intellectual self says "OK, I'll hold perfectly still, so that you can climb on my back and see further." It is actually quite important that we always keep that physical phantom in sight. It must keep its concentration. Then at certain points we can actually perceive how the thinking of this being receives as inspiration certain thinking gestures, which are already at the grunting level. In this act our split-selves unite, the subtler gestures have been translated to the level of our normal cognition. Without this, in our normal state we simply can't remember the experiences in the subtler spectrum. They key however, is that there's this rhythmic process, where we concentrate the intellectual self, make it into a meditating statue in order for our finer cognitive forces to awaken, which are able to behold how our ordinary self continues to concentrate. This is difficult to describe but it's almost like a finer level of intuition awakens which is fully aware and can be subtly active yet without disrupting the concentration of our ordinary physical self. Then this subtler self flows itself into the intellectual and becomes an imaginative gesture. Of course, here I describe this as two independent processes while most of the time it happens as a more or less continuous stream, but the fact remains that our intellectual self must sacrifice itself in concentration (the black cross) in order to give firm support for subtler spiritual activity (which is as if grafted from the higher worlds onto the rootstock of our physical being).

[Cleric K]

I would like to add some details about the seeming paradox of individual spiritual perspective that lacks personal life. I understand very well how this could be confusing because I’ve struggled with it too. Alas, there’s no simple way to explain it with few concepts. Not that it is something complicated but we need proper perspective. Here’s what I mean.

In general, we live our life as soul spheres that have some dreams, hopes, desires, fears and so on. Through perceptions we feel that we participate in an encompassing world and we try to find our way through it. Our thinking is mainly engaged with how to realize our desires within the constraints of the perceptual world. For example, we may want to have a boat and our thinking is engaged in seeking ways to make that happen.

Now simply calling this kind of existence illusionary, doesn’t help us to understand the nature of the spiritual world. Actually, it makes it even more impossible to understand because we practically deny any spiritual reality. To move further than this personal existence, we have to observe that through our presence in the world, we contribute something to its structure. It’s not a matter of thinking big of ourselves. Even the simplest man has his footprint in the world. Look around. How many of the objects around you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t touched them? Even if minimal, we have some impact on the physical structure of the world. But we also have impact on the other kingdoms, especially our close fellow human beings. For good or worse, our presence in the world makes a difference in at least a few other human beings. Their own inner soul life wouldn’t be what it is if we didn’t exist. I repeat – it’s not about thinking of positive impact, as if our presence in the world makes it a better place. It might be quite the opposite in fact. It’s just to recognize that our cumulative spiritual activity throughout our life leaves some impact in the world’s totality.

The thing is that as a whole we’re barely conscious of this impact. Many people today live entirely in the senses and all impact is an indirect consequence of their pursuit of certain goals and desires.

Now to gain some intuition of the spiritual world we have to imagine that our senses and desires are stripped away, our mental images are stripped away and now we receive our sense of individual being entirely from the intuition of this impact that we have on the world’s spiritual organism.

In our sensory spectrum the effects of our activity are so stretched in a hysteresis-like process that by the time we perceive the effect we can no longer recognize the causes. We carelessly throw garbage on the ground. In our waking consciousness we don’t even register this. Yet in the spiritual world this spiritual gesture is a part of our being. It remains there as something that breaks the harmony, just like a thorn in our foot breaks our well-being. Not so much the isolated event itself but the whole configuration of our being that allows for the event. These effects reverberate in a very complicated way and it is practically impossible to recognize that certain things that happen to us in life are reverberations of these holistic processes.

In this way we can already see where the difficulty lies in understanding the nature of the spiritual world. It’s not that we have no suitable concepts but that if we’re to gain true intuition about it, we have to expand our view on our Earthly life. We can’t understand the spiritual world as something in-itself. One says “I just want to take a glimpse of the spiritual world.” But this world doesn’t exist as some self-contained entity that we can gaze upon from the side. To see the spiritual world is to see how our existence is weaved out of it and this is possible only if we’re willing to see our life in a much much wider context than it is generally the case. We have a self in the spiritual world only if we’re willing to recognize our being in the contributions – good or bad – to the intuitive fabric of the Cosmos. If we’re not ready to take responsibility for our contributions, there’s nothing in the spiritual world in which our spirit can recognize its activity. In that realm we’re not what we perceive, what we like and dislike, what our philosophy about the world is. Instead, we’re only that which we continually radiate and contribute to the Cosmic symphony. We have to create ourselves anew at every instant, so to speak, just like a singer in a choir has to continually radiate their voice.

I’ll just add one more analogy. If we return to our mathematical metaphor, we can say that in the spiritual world we’re an active force that doesn’t think mental images but its activity directly reverberates and impacts the symphony of the intuitive fabric of the world.

Remember that this fabric is the interference of meaningful voices (not to be understood in a purely auditory sense). As said, just because we live in forms of intuition, doesn’t mean that the world is dark. Imagine you’re listening to somebody speaking. He’s speaking so interestingly that you are listening enchantedly, your intuition is fully inspired by the words. Now imagine that the person begins to slur their speech or your hearing goes bad. Then you begin to notice the sound of the words. Note this – while you’ve been listening enchantedly, it was of no significance that you’re actually listening to words. You’ve been flowing entirely in the intuitive meaning of the words. The sounds of the words have been just an implicit detail.

It can be said that the situation is similar in the spiritual realm. The meaning of our metamorphosing intuitive forms is so rich and complete that light, sound and so on are completely implicit in it. They exist only as potential, we don’t need to look at them to make the meaning any more clear.

Now only when we begin to have trouble understanding the speech of the person we begin to notice the sounds of the words. Now instead of the intuitions of the story, we begin to experience intuition of the sort “What’s that word supposed to mean?” Please, feel the difference. Until a moment ago we lived in shared meaning. Now we live in meaning that has become personal to us. We no longer grasp the flow of ideas of the person but ask what their incomprehensible words mean to us. Now it feels that the person’s ideas are somewhere out there, while we have to build our own personal interpretation of them (which hopefully will converge with the true meaning at some point).

We can imagine something similar for the spiritual world if the meaningful speech of intuitive vibrations for whatever reason begins to become incomprehensible. Now what has become incomprehensible becomes imaginative perception. In a certain sense the sound and color were implicit in the meaning, yet now the meaning dims down and we remain flowing with images. We understand that this is still the speech of beings but it now sounds to us like incomprehensible sound and color.

The critical thing is that against these new perceptions we can now experience completely new intuitions, which would never have occurred in the unified state. Now these intuitions already bear the mark of personal life. The intuitions are no longer the meaning that the beings reverberate through the Cosmos but about what the incomprehensible perceptions mean to us. This is the important point that corresponds to the twisting of the knot. We lose universal meaning. Our field of spiritual hearing narrows. Now the world presents itself in images of that which has been waves of intuition. Our current intuition against these images is still part of the intuitive fabric, but it now mirrors the forms of the incomprehensible sounds of the speech (which, I repeat, has to be taken to correspond to the full imaginative spectrum).

As a further step we can imagine that the inner soul life in flowing images itself begins to decohere and we begin to see the images as composed of elements, we begin to analyze them. Against these elements we begin to find new unique forms of intuition (concepts), which again could never have been known in the unified state. In the broadest sense, the analyzed elements of the Imaginative world are grasped as nouns while their temporal transformations are grasped as verbs. Thus the world of Imagination decomposes into space (nouns) and time (verbs).

This shouldn’t be taken as the actual way in which our human evolution has proceeded. There are many things that have to be stated differently. Yet it’s still an usable way to gain some intuition about the relations into which the different stages of being exist.

[AshvinP]

This is important to understand. It is true that our present consciousness already spans the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Yet, as we have discussed many times, our Earthly state is like an aliased, mineralized version of the full spectrum. The thinking gesture of imagining a plant growing and unfolding leaf by leaf is unique to our Earthly state. An Angel can't see a plant in this way. The form of the plant that we perceive is only possible as a result of the highly convoluted interaction of the plant life forces, the forces of light, the forces of our sensory organs and brain organization. This is a unique experience in itself. Yet by following the sensory unfolding of that plant we already lead ourselves into resonance with the more subtle forces. It is important to keep in mind that these subtler forces don't 'look like' a growing plant as we can see it from the side. But we can recognize these forces to be active in the plant.

Thank you!

It is remarkable how every single image-concept embeds the Cosmic forces working through the temporal depth structure which impress into those ideal processes, which we then perceive as decohered spatio-temporal forms through ordinary cognition. Remarkable yet also intimidating, for those who would shirk from taking ever-greater responsibility for how those forces are expressed within and through them, which is most of us by default. To know how our spiritual activity impresses itself into the shared soul landscape cannot mean anything other than becoming more responsible for the footprints we leave, and conversely, our willingness to take responsibility feeds back into greater living knowledge. I was writing this as I saw a new post from Cleric, so I have added some references to the new concepts he presented.

It reminds me of something which flashed as an insight recently. It is nothing new but became more fleshed out for me. We could say, as a general principle, that all the forms of nature, culture, and the individual soul exist as 'tethers' or 'umbilical cords' to the spiritual world. As long as we remain unconscious of our living relations with the archetypal Cosmos, of our eternal soul-spirit nature, we rely on these tethers to nourish our inner life during our incarnations. This is basically a restatement of the liminal spaces principle. When we become livingly conscious of the ideal forces who think the archetypal processes we currently perceive as forms, then the latter involve back to higher spiritual stages of existence, i.e. they are reintegrated into our inner Be-ing. It's hard to imagine this happening because we are at the very beginning stages of the metamorphic process. But, at the individual level, we can just look to the TC spectrum and the examples Cleric has given, such as our breathing rhythm going from external 'law of nature' to something which comes under our conscious control through meditation. 

Right now we are at the stage where most of the work is done at the scale of individual souls and small communities. We work on involving the forms of our personalized soul life - horizontal intellectual thoughts, emotions, passions, habits, interests, temperament, etc - back to the transpersonal Cosmos which then returns to us the imaginations, inspirations, intuitions responsible for their manifestation. That is what we have been discussing on this thread. Yet even with this work, we still remain within the sphere of attractor forces at the higher nested scales of nation, race, gender, species. Just because we have liberated our soul nature from certain instinctive habits through the work doesn't mean entire cultural institutions will involve. There are still attractor forces for the national souls and collective human soul which on balance maintain their existence. The higher ideal is then for the individual and community spiritual work to impress its influences through the broader population, which can occur through the interwoven soul connections as Cleric described in the last post. It can grow as a seed which flowers into freely harmonized intentions towards the high ideals at the more macro scales.

For instance, there is the cultural form of the 'meat consumption industry'. This form retains a manifest physical existence as long as a significant percentage of the meat eating population remains unconscious of the animal group souls to which they are instinctively tethered. As we remain unconscious of these forces, our longing for reuniting our soul with our animal brothers and sisters can only manifest through such cultural forms, and these become increasingly pathological and parasitic ways of maintaining the connection . It's not really a question of what we feel is 'good' or 'evil' from the Earthly perspective. We are speaking of all individual, cultural, and natural forms as we currently know them. As crazy as it seems to thinking which is fixed in relations of the past, even the institution of marriage and dual-sex reproduction will eventually involve as the masculine and feminine poles of each individual seek their reunion. Indeed we can already see how cultural trends are pushing in this direction for things like meat eating and marriage/reproduction (among many others), but in a mostly unconscious, and therefore pathological, way.

The main point here is to see how this bigger picture (yet highly detailed) framework can help us make sense of historical, current, and future developments at all the concentric individual, cultural, natural, and even Cosmic scales. It can give us a wider vocabulary of gestures which our Intuitive spirit can use to know and express itself in the language of our current intellectual cognition. The more we contemplate these things deeply, the more we are at least showing an active interest in knowing and becoming more responsible for what we contribute to the Cosmic organism, and therefore who we are in the Spirit worlds. The less willing we are to sacrifice the outer forms and thereby know the forces which impress them, the more our living experience remains fragmented within our atomistic soul spheres and only finds the shared spiritual through increasingly grotesque beliefs and theories.

[Federica]

I would like to add some details about the seeming paradox of individual spiritual perspective that lacks personal life. I understand very well how this could be confusing because I’ve struggled with it too. Alas, there’s no simple way to explain it with few concepts. Not that it is something complicated but we need proper perspective. Here’s what I mean.

In general, we live our life as soul spheres that have some dreams, hopes, desires, fears and so on. Through perceptions we feel that we participate in an encompassing world and we try to find our way through it. Our thinking is mainly engaged with how to realize our desires within the constraints of the perceptual world. For example, we may want to have a boat and our thinking is engaged in seeking ways to make that happen.

Now simply calling this kind of existence illusionary, doesn’t help us to understand the nature of the spiritual world. Actually, it makes it even more impossible to understand because we practically deny any spiritual reality. To move further than this personal existence, we have to observe that through our presence in the world, we contribute something to its structure. It’s not a matter of thinking big of ourselves. Even the simplest man has his footprint in the world. Look around. How many of the objects around you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t touched them? Even if minimal, we have some impact on the physical structure of the world. But we also have impact on the other kingdoms, especially our close fellow human beings. For good or worse, our presence in the world makes a difference in at least a few other human beings. Their own inner soul life wouldn’t be what it is if we didn’t exist. I repeat – it’s not about thinking of positive impact, as if our presence in the world makes it a better place. It might be quite the opposite in fact. It’s just to recognize that our cumulative spiritual activity throughout our life leaves some impact in the world’s totality.

The thing is that as a whole we’re barely conscious of this impact. Many people today live entirely in the senses and all impact is an indirect consequence of their pursuit of certain goals and desires.

Now to gain some intuition of the spiritual world we have to imagine that our senses and desires are stripped away, our mental images are stripped away and now we receive our sense of individual being entirely from the intuition of this impact that we have on the world’s spiritual organism.

In our sensory spectrum the effects of our activity are so stretched in a hysteresis-like process that by the time we perceive the effect we can no longer recognize the causes. We carelessly throw garbage on the ground. In our waking consciousness we don’t even register this. Yet in the spiritual world this spiritual gesture is a part of our being. It remains there as something that breaks the harmony, just like a thorn in our foot breaks our well-being. Not so much the isolated event itself but the whole configuration of our being that allows for the event. These effects reverberate in a very complicated way and it is practically impossible to recognize that certain things that happen to us in life are reverberations of these holistic processes.

In this way we can already see where the difficulty lies in understanding the nature of the spiritual world. It’s not that we have no suitable concepts but that if we’re to gain true intuition about it, we have to expand our view on our Earthly life. We can’t understand the spiritual world as something in-itself. One says “I just want to take a glimpse of the spiritual world.” But this world doesn’t exist as some self-contained entity that we can gaze upon from the side. To see the spiritual world is to see how our existence is weaved out of it and this is possible only if we’re willing to see our life in a much much wider context than it is generally the case. We have a self in the spiritual world only if we’re willing to recognize our being in the contributions – good or bad – to the intuitive fabric of the Cosmos. If we’re not ready to take responsibility for our contributions, there’s nothing in the spiritual world in which our spirit can recognize its activity. In that realm we’re not what we perceive, what we like and dislike, what our philosophy about the world is. Instead, we’re only that which we continually radiate and contribute to the Cosmic symphony. We have to create ourselves anew at every instant, so to speak, just like a singer in a choir has to continually radiate their voice.

I’ll just add one more analogy. If we return to our mathematical metaphor, we can say that in the spiritual world we’re an active force that doesn’t think mental images but its activity directly reverberates and impacts the symphony of the intuitive fabric of the world.

Remember that this fabric is the interference of meaningful voices (not to be understood in a purely auditory sense). As said, just because we live in forms of intuition, doesn’t mean that the world is dark. Imagine you’re listening to somebody speaking. He’s speaking so interestingly that you are listening enchantedly, your intuition is fully inspired by the words. Now imagine that the person begins to slur their speech or your hearing goes bad. Then you begin to notice the sound of the words. Note this – while you’ve been listening enchantedly, it was of no significance that you’re actually listening to words. You’ve been flowing entirely in the intuitive meaning of the words. The sounds of the words have been just an implicit detail.

It can be said that the situation is similar in the spiritual realm. The meaning of our metamorphosing intuitive forms is so rich and complete that light, sound and so on are completely implicit in it. They exist only as potential, we don’t need to look at them to make the meaning any more clear.

Now only when we begin to have trouble understanding the speech of the person we begin to notice the sounds of the words. Now instead of the intuitions of the story, we begin to experience intuition of the sort “What’s that word supposed to mean?” Please, feel the difference. Until a moment ago we lived in shared meaning. Now we live in meaning that has become personal to us. We no longer grasp the flow of ideas of the person but ask what their incomprehensible words mean to us. Now it feels that the person’s ideas are somewhere out there, while we have to build our own personal interpretation of them (which hopefully will converge with the true meaning at some point).

We can imagine something similar for the spiritual world if the meaningful speech of intuitive vibrations for whatever reason begins to become incomprehensible. Now what has become incomprehensible becomes imaginative perception. In a certain sense the sound and color were implicit in the meaning, yet now the meaning dims down and we remain flowing with images. We understand that this is still the speech of beings but it now sounds to us like incomprehensible sound and color.

The critical thing is that against these new perceptions we can now experience completely new intuitions, which would never have occurred in the unified state. Now these intuitions already bear the mark of personal life. The intuitions are no longer the meaning that the beings reverberate through the Cosmos but about what the incomprehensible perceptions mean to us. This is the important point that corresponds to the twisting of the knot. We lose universal meaning. Our field of spiritual hearing narrows. Now the world presents itself in images of that which has been waves of intuition. Our current intuition against these images is still part of the intuitive fabric, but it now mirrors the forms of the incomprehensible sounds of the speech (which, I repeat, has to be taken to correspond to the full imaginative spectrum).

As a further step we can imagine that the inner soul life in flowing images itself begins to decohere and we begin to see the images as composed of elements, we begin to analyze them. Against these elements we begin to find new unique forms of intuition (concepts), which again could never have been known in the unified state. In the broadest sense, the analyzed elements of the Imaginative world are grasped as nouns while their temporal transformations are grasped as verbs. Thus the world of Imagination decomposes into space (nouns) and time (verbs).

This shouldn’t be taken as the actual way in which our human evolution has proceeded. There are many things that have to be stated differently. Yet it’s still an usable way to gain some intuition about the relations into which the different stages of being exist.

The mathematicians' metaphor was already a perfectly lean and luminous description that also reads like a lovely bedtime story. It would be joyful if mathematicians, and others, could work in teams as described. I wish it could happen sometimes on this Earth, and I hope it has already! I am onboard with the illustration, and clear on the meaning of individual spiritual perspective - ”The way our solution-being develops is only one of infinitely many possible” - and what it is not.

This latest addition puts it in a larger perspective, I am following. I notice the points of contact with Knowledge of the higher worlds, but here it feels like the possibilities of conveying shared meaning to the question through word combinations have been exhausted. Words could not have been made deliver more or better than that, as it were.

We have a self in the spiritual world only if we’re willing to recognize our being in the contributions – good or bad – to the intuitive fabric of the Cosmos. If we’re not ready to take responsibility for our contributions, there’s nothing in the spiritual world in which our spirit can recognize its activity. In that realm we’re not what we perceive, what we like and dislike, what our philosophy about the world is. Instead, we’re only that which we continually radiate and contribute to the Cosmic symphony. We have to create ourselves anew at every instant, so to speak, just like a singer in a choir has to continually radiate their voice.

…and like the waterfall. That person who is speaking so interestingly is you, Cleric - thank you!